Books: Bootleg Imperialist

(2 of 2)

His first serious mistake was to acquire the services of a notorious swindler named Parker H. French, whom he sent to San Francisco to recruit more men, to dicker with Vanderbilt's agents for a loan. When Walker should have executed French, he executed instead an innocent hostage. Native support almost completely vanished when he followed this up by shooting a popular enemy leader. But a worse mistake, even worse than sending French to Washington as Nicaraguan minister, was to revoke the Vanderbilt concession in favor of that hard-fisted financier's double-crossing colleagues, to whom Vanderbilt wrote: "I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you." After Vanderbilt had made good his promise. Walker still pig-headedly refused to talk business, thereby cutting off his one important source of outside help. His last and biggest mistake was to elect himself President of Nicaragua. He now faced the armies of all his Central American neighbor countries, brought U. S. and British battleships hurrying to blockade his ports against new recruits. A match for his Central American enemies, even when his man power had dropped to a few hundred, he did not try to fight off the U. S. naval commander who demanded his surrender. The U. S. public gave him a big ovation, then dropped him when he turned viciously on the U. S. Navy as the source of his defeat.

Still undaunted, Walker tried to go back to Nicaragua, was arrested as he landed. His last try was an expedition to the Bay Islands, off Honduras. Meeting bad luck from the start, cornered finally by a landing party from a British battleship, Walker threw away his chance to get back to the U. S. when he proclaimed himself the leading citizen of Nicaragua. Protesting to the "civilized world" on the injustice done him by the British, "the gray-eyed man of destiny" spent the six days before he faced a firing squad in meditation and prayer.