he State of Chihuahua, while the remainder and greater
part of the forces, under Colonel Sterling Price, were to garrison Santa
Fe after its capture.

There is a pretty fiction told of the breaking out of the war between
Mexico and the United States. Early in the spring of 1846, before it was
known or even conjectured that a state of war would be declared to exist
between this government and Mexico, a caravan of twenty-nine traders, on
their way from Independence to Santa Fe, beheld, just after a storm
and a little before sunset, a perfectly distinct image of the Bird of
Liberty, the American eagle, on the disc of the sun. When they saw it
they simultaneously and almost involuntarily exclaimed that in less than
twelve months the Eagle of Liberty would spread his broad plumes over
the plains of the West, and that the flag of our country would wave over
the cities of New Mexico and Chihuahua. The student of the classics
will remember that just before the assassination of Julius Caesar,
both Brutus and Cassius, while in their places in the Roman Senate,
saw chariots of fire in the sky. One story is as true, probably, as the
other, though separated by centuries of time.

The Army of the West, under General Stephen W. Kearney, consisted of two
batteries of artillery, commanded by Major Clark; three squadrons of
the First United States Dragoons, commanded by Major Sumner; the First
Regiment of Missouri Cavalry, commanded by Colonel Doniphan, and two
companies of infantry, commanded by Captain Aubrey. This force marched
in detached columns from Fort Leavenworth, and on the 1st of August,
1846, concentrated in camp on the Santa Fe Trail, nine miles below
Bent's Fort.

Accompanying the expedition was a party of the United States
topographical engineers, under command of Lieutenant W. H. Emory.[25] In
writing of this expedition, so far as its march relates to the Old
Santa Fe Trail, I shall quote freely from Emory's report and Doniphan's
historian.[26]

The practicability of marching a large army over the waste,
uncultivated, uninhabited prairie regions of the West was universally
regarded as problematical, but the expedition proved completely
successful. Provisions were conveyed in wagons, and beef-cattle driven
along for the use of the men. These animals subsisted entirely by
grazing. To secure them from straying off at night, they were driven
into corrals formed of the wagons, or tethered to an iron picket-pin
driven into