orps
was organized as an independent command and was named "La Falange
Americana." At this time the enemy held the route to the Caribbean, and
Walker's first orders were to dislodge him.

Accordingly, a week after landing with his fifty-seven Americans and one
hundred and fifty native troops, Walker sailed in the _Vesta_ for Brito,
from which port he marched upon Rivas, a city of eleven thousand people
and garrisoned by some twelve hundred of the enemy.

The first fight ended in a complete and disastrous fiasco. The native
troops ran away, and the Americans surrounded by six hundred of the
Legitimists' soldiers, after defending themselves for three hours behind
some adobe huts, charged the enemy and escaped into the jungle. Their
loss was heavy, and among the killed were the two men upon whom Walker
chiefly depended: Kewen and Crocker. The Legitimists placed the bodies
of the dead and wounded who were still living on a pile of logs and
burned them. After a painful night march, Walker, the next day, reached
San Juan on the coast, and, finding a Costa Rican schooner in port,
seized it for his use. At this moment, although Walker's men were
defeated, bleeding, and in open flight, two "gringos" picked up on
the beach of San Juan, "the Texan Harry McLeod and the Irishman Peter
Burns," asked to be permitted to join him.

"It was encouraging," Walker writes, "for the soldiers to find that
some besides themselves did not regard their fortunes as altogether
desperate, and small as was this addition to their number it gave
increased moral as well as material strength to the command."

Sometimes in reading history it would appear as though for success the
first requisite must be an utter lack of humor, and inability to look
upon what one is attempting except with absolute seriousness. With forty
men Walker was planning to conquer and rule Nicaragua, a country with a
population of two hundred and fifty thousand souls and as large as the
combined area of Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire,
and Connecticut. And yet, even seven years later, he records without
a smile that two beach-combers gave his army "moral and material
strength." And it is most characteristic of the man that at the
moment he was rejoicing over this addition to his forces, to maintain
discipline two Americans who had set fire to the houses of the enemy
he ordered to be shot. A weaker man would have repudiated the two
Americans, who, in fact, we