Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Dumbest Colonizer in History

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Robert is joined by Miles Gray to discuss William Walker, the American who tried to conquer Central America.FOOTNOTES: Mercenary Hero William Walker Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates [1916]  William Walker's Wars: How One Man's Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras The Texas Press William Walker in Nicaragua  William Walker’s Dark Destiny Costa Rica in 1856: Defeating William Walker While Creating a National Identity. Agents of Empire The Grey Eyed Man of Destiny Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much. How are you doing, Miles? Great. I mean, I don't know when this comes out, but we saw each other recently. That was a pleasant experience we had. That was nice. You came up to Portland.

Yes. They wouldn't let us play with knives on the stage because they were cowards, but otherwise nice people. They don't respect the laws of the state. Yeah, exactly. Bladed weapons are not, they're tools over there. They're wildly unregulated and it's beautiful. Now, Miles. Yes?

When Sophie asked you to guest on this week's episode, you had a simple request, which was, don't make it horribly bleak and depressing so that I want to die, more or less. Yes, exactly. Not at your exact words, but your sentiment. Yeah, is that this was, how bleak is this one going to be? Because, you know, these shows, these episodes I've done a few now, they kind of fall into a couple of different buckets. Some are like, so out of this world, what the fuck is reality kind of thing, where you're just, you're gobsmacked because of that.

Other times, you're gobsmacked or laughing because sometimes it's fun. Other times, you so brilliantly bring the focus of the show in to talk about evil people, that I found myself in a place where jokes do not exist. And the only, only response I could have is, oh my God, that's so fucked up. For like three hours. You're going to like this one. This is, obviously, it's a story about a terrible person. Right, right.

Thousands of people die. But it's a story of a monster that gets his comeuppance in the end. Oh, wow. That sounds injustice. Yeah, this one should be fun. And it's not, you know, it's not mass child rape, like we sometimes get into on this show. So that's nice too. Yeah, I felt like even the like prevailing sentiment from listeners was like, damn,

I think that was one of the darkest episodes ever. Yeah, yeah. As it should be, it was very dark. So today, Miles, have you ever heard of a fella named William Walker? I mean, that sounds like a very common name where I'm trying to rack my brain being like, I'm pretty sure I do know a William Walker. To put it shortly, Walker is an example of one of my favorite kind of history stories, because he's a guy who is incredibly well known by millions and millions of people around the world,

very close to the United States, in fact. If you go to Nicaragua, if you go to Costa Rica, if you go to Mexico's Baja Coast or Sonora, Walker is a very prominent historical figure. And even though he's an American, he's almost completely unknown in the United States today. I'm going to guess most Americans have not known his name. And the reason he's well known in Baja, in Nicaragua, in Costa Rica is that he almost single-handedly tried to conquer all of those places. What?

Yeah. When? Recently? Yeah, in like the 1850s, like not all that long ago. Wow. When you really think about it. Yeah. Okay, look at him.

Yeah, he was like a one-man colonialism. That's like, it's weird. The term makes me shudder, but also I dig the dedication. If you're like, I'm going to do this whole colonialism thing just with me. Colonialism is usually the very bleakest stories. And there's a lot of, I mean, obviously, Walker was a horrible person who did horrible things that impacted huge numbers of people's lives. But there's also one of the things that's kind of, I guess, makes this a little more

of an upbeat story is that this is one of those cases of colonialism that was completely unsupported by the government of this guy's country. And so he gets his comeuppance in the end. It's not one of those tales where he exploited these people and got away with it forever and his great-great-grandkids are still rich today. Right. And now they have a whole line of hotels that we constantly patronize. Is he one of ours?

The whole American? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, there was no other country in the world this guy could have come from. Well, I thought maybe like... Yeah, because I guess even an English guy would be like, I think we've had our time. I don't need to be a one-man wrecking crew. Yeah.

You know, the English weren't really good at being one-man wrecking crews. They were more, you know, that slow Nazi shit. This is a very American story of a guy who just like looked at several foreign countries and he was like, I bet I could take that. That's the trillion American attitude, looking at a map like, huh? Yeah. What about this one? Nicolette?

It's gonna be mine. Who? Rob Wee? Who? Costa. Yeah. All right. Costa doing business with me.

All right. You were the right call for guest. Oh, boy. All right, let's get into it. William Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee on May 8th, 1824. He was the first of six children of James S. Walker and Mary Norville Walker. His family was not like super rich, but they were probably like the wealthiest family or among the wealthiest family in their frontier community.

Okay. His father was a Scottish immigrant from Glasgow who'd moved to the United States at age 22 and started a general merchandise store with his uncle in 1820. Soon the business was successful enough that James and his uncle partnered with three other men to build a riverfront warehouse and buy a fleet of steamboats. Now, Nashville was a big old shipping hub at the time and as the nation expanded westward, the walkers made a small fortune facilitating the movement of tobacco, corn, and cotton across the country.

Since this was the early 1800s, all these products came from the deep south and the walkers business relied heavily on slavery. So the family fortune such as it is is absolutely built off the backs. You know what I'm trying to say here. Yeah. No one. I'll let you slide with that one. After a few years, James sold out and got into the business of selling commercial insurance,

which oddly enough sounds like maybe even more exploited than what he was doing before. I'm sure it's not. That's just my opinion of the insurance industry. So James' wife, Mary, was the sister of his two former business partners. Now, since his records from 1830, when William Walker was six, indicate that his family owned no slaves, which was odd for a family at their level of wealth and Nashville at that time. By the time William was 14, this had changed and the Walker family owned four enslaved black human beings, two men and two women.

So he absolutely comes from a slave holding background, grows up with us. Religion was also a big part of the Walker family life. His mother's family were prominent within the Baptist community and his father was a member of the disciples of Christ. The Walkers were described as being strong and stern and they were also extremely political. William's mother was a good friend of Sarah Polk, the wife of future President James K. Polk. While William was a child, James was named Speaker of the House and then the Governor

of Tennessee. Since Polk was a Democrat and Democrats were at the time, the party of even more white supremacy than the Republicans, you can assume for yourself what kind of politics William imbibed as a child. Really wholesome stuff, I'm sure. Oh, my gosh, a lot of people would like to move back to those days and that's all we'll leave it at. You're talking about John Kelly.

I'm talking about, yeah, Stephen Miller, a whole lot of... Well, John Kelly was at least gracious enough, showed his grasp of history to actually refer to basically the antebellum South without fully saying that or like, I think we know what you mean. Yeah, we're aware. Back when people used to respect each other, okay, yeah. You mean white people. Yeah, right.

And I guess we had what we would call back then, indentured independent contractors. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't know, there's no good joke to make about that. No, there isn't. Yeah. I did the only good one and it wasn't even that good. We're just going to breeze right on past that. So William was recalled by a family friend at the period as very intelligent and as refined

in his feelings as a girl. I used to go often to see his mother and always found him entertaining her in some way. William was devoted to his mother. His father was kind of a giant asshole, very, very strict and stern. His mother was kind of more someone he could like deal with and get comfort from. But she was also very ill throughout his childhood and he often spent his mornings in her room reading to her while she struggled to start the day. William grew into a child as contemporaries described later as cold, quiet, studious,

painfully modest, slight, effeminate, almost insignificant in appearance. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. Effeminate. Yeah. You could tell what they're trying to say there. Yeah.

And I can also just see like the, if we're looking at a biopic of this guy, we're starting to see the foundations of when he goes, oh yeah, you know what I'm going to do then? I'll show you fucking. You call me effeminate. Oh, okay. Watch me fucking be a one-minute wrecking crew. Yeah. Oh no.

That is really the story here. Right. Yeah. He was small, thin and not very masculine at a time when that was something a boy would pay dearly for. The only physical feature that stood out about him were his eyes, which were a unique shade of gray that people throughout his life would notice. Everybody would comment it on this guy's eyes.

He's just sort of one of those people who everyone's like, that dude's eyes are fucking something's up there. Right. It's never the ones you're like, oh my God, you have such beautiful eyes. It's always like, yo, did you see the fucking guy's eyes? You see that dude's eyes? What the fuck was going on? I think he's going to conquer Nicaragua.

Yeah. It's like he looks like he's transitioning into some kind of zombie or wraith. Yeah. Yes. Now, possibly due to his mother's sickness, Williams' classmates found him to be grave and seemingly always afflicted by sorrow, which if you're a kid growing up in like the 1830s, I guess sorrow is really the only reasonable way to approach life. Yeah.

I don't think he was horrified by the injustices of his time. No. I think that was just like, we started, that word was just used to describe what we call emo kids now. Yeah. He definitely, absolutely would have been, yeah. And with his, I'm sure if he wasn't like super masculine, he would have got the little fringe haircut, had like one black fingernail and been crying to like dashboard confessional

lyrics too. Yeah. Absolutely. He just may have been in the wrong time, you know? This kid would have been a huge dash head. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

His hopes are so high that your kiss might kill him. You just revealed something about yourself there. That's the one dashboard song I know and I just think the lyrics are so great. I know, right? Cut to my full sleeve tattoo of dashboard album covers. So yeah, William was like quiet and kind of sad, but he was not unfriendly and one classmate later noted, quote, none in school was more ready to oblige his fellow student or extra help with a difficult lesson.

So he's a really smart kid and he helps out his fellow classmates a lot and kind of is known for that. I heard that very cynically like, yeah, he was always down to teach someone a fucking lesson rather than like, do you need some help with your studies? Yeah. I get the legitimately helpful thing more from reading stuff that his fellows reported about him. He was a good student and developed something of a complex around his grades.

When he got an answer wrong in class, he would cry, which did not help with his perceived level of manliness. Yeah. Yeah. One friend noted, quote, I never saw him lively in my life. That is, I never heard him laugh out loud as boys do at play. Oh, shit. Yeah, you're getting some not great, right?

That's a kid should laugh. That's a bandera roja right there, red flag. Yeah. I'm pretty sure my Spanish two skills haven't failed me. The non laughing thing as a team. Yeah. As a little boy. Yeah.

It's dark. That's like some real dark shit because it's usually not to like young adulthood, you meet people who have like completely just gone into those thoughts and don't have any joy. And I don't want to be like, you know, there's a fine line between being like, it's kind of weird that this guy never laughs and like being one of those dudes who's like, why don't you smile, man? But like, it is like you hear, like everyone talks about this guy when he's a little kid. He's like, yeah, he never really like laughed or played around.

That is like, huh. Yeah. Like I'm in the moment. If I'm just taking him and like looking at it in a vacuum, my heart kind of goes out to this young, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. He's not an aspiring like at this point, he's blameless even of the slavery.

Like he's a little kid. He doesn't have any choice in that. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe he could have grown into maybe he like, he's clearly like a sensitive boy and we just really don't know enough about his actual thoughts at the time because it's fucking 1830s. Yeah. See, at least when they start doing the, this showed like a hundred years from now when

your consciousness has been uploaded to some kind of like bio algorithm, at least we'll be able to look at like the Twitter and Facebook posts of our future fascists and be like, oh, this is what they were going through at the time. Oh, no, they'll comb through my Twitter and be like, well, I mean, obviously he was going to do what he did to Nicaragua. Right. Spoiler alert for the 20 years from now when I conquer Nicaragua. Wow.

Bold. Not a colonialism thing. Just like, just love conquering. Yep. Just, just leave it at that. In 1827, when Billy was three, his grandfather Lipscomb Norvell moved to Nashville to be with the family. Lipscomb wound up having a profound impact on growing William.

See, he was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and he had fought at like most of it. He'd been at the battle of Brandywine Creek, the battle of Trenton, the battle of Monmouth. He was one of the battle-hardened survivors of the hellish winter at Valley Forge. What? Yeah. So this like, like his grandpa was like there for the fucking war. Oh my God, Trenton and Valley Forge. Yeah.

And he was like, all right, grandpa, I get it. I'm a pussy. You've eaten human flesh. We know. Yeah. Oh. Now it's starting to make sense. Your grandpa probably has, in no way can look at a sensitive child and be like, yeah,

that's going to work. No, he's probably chewing bullets for gum. Right. He's like, you done with that pewter dish? I'm going to melt him down to some musket shot. Yeah. Going to make my morning bullets. Yeah.

You're not using that tea service, are you? Yeah. Novo was present at the surrender of Charleston, which ended in defeat for the revolutionaries, and he was imprisoned for a year as a POW. So like, this dude goes through it. Right. So this is a big influence on William when he's young, his war hero grandfather. His uncles were also major influences on his future life because, you know, William's dad

was kind of like a very boring and stern businessman who doesn't really, he doesn't really identify much with. His uncles and his grandpa, he does more so. Four of his uncles either founded or worked as editors at newspapers. Three more got involved with local or national politics, and five served in the military. So in short. Wait, wait, how many, how many numbers did you say? How many fucking uncles was that?

A fuckload of uncles. I mean, he's got a... Did you say like 10 different people, basically? Yeah. Yeah. He's got like four, seven. Yeah. Like 12 uncles.

I keep forgetting though, too, we're talking about the 17th century and 18th century. The 17th century. The 19th century. You don't survive Trenton and Valley Forge and then just not fuck out a couple of basketball teams worth of kids. Yeah. Seriously. Like, yeah.

I got two starting fives plus a six man for each one. Yeah. Yeah. He just goes right from war at a pounding. Oh, that's a real, talking about real, the real baby boom coming after the fucking surviving Valley Forge. It is impressive. Yeah.

I mean, some of those are probably his mom's uncles. I don't know. Sure, sure. Like, dude, as a fuckload of uncles, most of them are, they're all in journalism, politics or the military. So he grows up surrounded by influential, powerful men who either exercise political power directly or through the press or who are in the military fighting, colonizing the United States, killing Native Americans, Mexicans.

So these are like the people who raise him. Right. They're not, they're not just like kick back and relax if someone does some shit to you type family. Yeah. It's a high achieving family. Yeah. Like they're well off, but these aren't like, they're not like inherited money, sort of

like lazy aristocrats. They're like everybody's like up and out of bed and fucking up the continent from like eight to nine, you know? Yeah. I like to wake up and fuck the country right in its face every morning. Just colonize the piss out of this, this mother. This day. Colonize the day.

That's the motto in that house. Yeah. Absolutely how this kid is raised. And it's not surprising that he grew up to be a very ambitious boy. In 1837, at age 13, he finished his primary school education and enrolled in the University of Nashville. What? And yeah, a lot of sort of like contemporary articles that you'll find talking about this

guy will make it like he was a child genius. Writing I found like deeply written biographies of this guy by historians say that this was actually not that unusual at the time. He was a little young, but it wasn't super weird. You know. Wait, so your freshman year of college is at 13? Not for everybody, but it wasn't, it wasn't weird. Oh, it's not like in the era we live in now, it's like this child baby genius is going

to college when they should be in academia for 19 years. Yeah. He had a friend who went to college at 14, like it wasn't like super bizarre. It wasn't like the norm, but it wasn't super weird. Did high school exist yet back then? Or like your primary school, you're like, yeah, you're going to learn everything you know by 14 and then look, you can be an apprentice or whatever the fuck you want to do. Yeah, that's kind of the thing.

By like 13, 14, you're starting to be an adult. Like in Germany in like the 1870s at 14, you are legally an adult. Like it's time to go. Yep. So it's not that weird that he's, you know, he's in college at 13. Lives were shorter back then, right? And education was rarer, you know? You want to get a head start on things before you die of cholera at age 23.

Or a broken leg. Yeah. Or a broken leg. Or just like a splinter from the wrong piece of wood. Yeah. Hey, I didn't have any, I didn't have the right salve to do with the infection. Oh, I got a splinter. I've loved you all.

It's been a good life. Cheerio. Glad I went to college at age nine. So yeah, college was rigorous for a 13-year-old boy, and it's hard to imagine any modern teen dealing with this level of discipline not coming out fucked up. That said, again, this was not abnormal for the time. And here's how the biography William Walker's Wars, which is a very good biography, describes his college education.

Quote, Entering students were expected to be accurately acquainted with the grammar, including prosody of the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as with English grammar, math and geography. Students admitted students pursued trigonometry, principles of constitutional and international law, philosophy, natural history and religious studies. Discipline was strict. Students attended chapel twice a day and stood for a communal prayer before each meal. Quiet hours were enforced, and activities like horse racing, dancing or going to the

theater were strictly prohibited. Oh, yeah. No, no horse racing or dancing? No, absolutely no dancing, Miles. I just love that list of the horse racing, dancing and the theater. Because every step you take as a dancer is a step you take with the devil. Oh, wow. I'm pretty sure that poster was at one of my kindergarten classroom.

Yeah, yeah, dancing is Satan's golfing. Yeah, sadly though, the image was like a people break dancing. They're like, just not that kind. I would actually argue that break dancing is the only acceptable kind of dancing. I mean, yeah, anything like cop-a-way to Jason? I'm a seven-day Adventist. If you can fuck somebody up with your dance moves, just keep on keeping on. So William grew into an extremely devout adolescent, and there was talk of him becoming a minister.

But then his interest took a turn towards politics. He joined a debating society, and eventually became its president. He proposed several debate topics during his time, including, was it politic for the French to assist the US in the American Revolution? Was it preferable, a monarchial or a Republican form of government? Has the career of Napoleon Bonaparte been a benefit or injury to the world? Wow. Some hot takes to even pose those questions, sir.

Some hot takes. You notice one of them is wondering whether it was worthwhile for France to intervene in a foreign nation like political development militarily, and the other is wondering, is this imperialist warlord, was he good for history? Yeah. I'm just asking what he's thinking about. I'm just asking. I don't really have an opinion on it.

I'm just seeing what you guys think. I mean, it's a question. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe I have one, and I'm not going to share it with you, but I just want to see how that sort of stacks up with the rest of the world. But anyway, just asking. Yeah.

I mean, I'm a big Napoleon fan. Not of his conquering, but of his fucking, huge, oh my gosh, that dude, yeah. Oh, he was landpike? Yeah. Oh my God, like fucking Mario, man. No. Oh, yeah. Uh-oh.

Here we go. Oh, yeah. So, William graduated summa cum laude on October 3rd, 1838, half a year after his 14th birthday, so college wasn't long back then either. By this time, his interest had changed yet again, and he decided to seek a medical degree. First, he spent two years as an apprentice under local physicians, then he was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1843 and headed to Paris to further his medical education in Europe.

He arrived at age 19, a doctor, but one wildly unready for the cosmopolitan realities of a progressive city like Paris. In a letter home to his parents, he noted this of his new Parisian acquaintances. Quote, most of them have mistresses, and nobody thinks them and even the worst for it. Indeed, the relations of the two sexes among all classes of society are horrible. You find many married couples between whom there exists a tacit agreement that the husband may have as many mistresses and the wife as many lovers as they choose. The poison of infidelity is found in every vein.

The effects of it may be seen in the whole body. What a striking lesson may the moralists learn here. So he's like, everybody's fucking and they're fine with it. How horrible. Right. I can't. Yeah. And the women have lovers as well.

Yeah. I want to make it clear. He's not like seeing that all of his friends are cheating on their wives and being like, that's fucked up. He's seeing like all these people are fucking other people that they're not married to, and everyone knows and is okay with it. This is awful. Yeah.

How is this, how is this city not gone asunder? Yeah. How has God not turned it into salt? Yeah. Yeah. So William was fascinated by the power and culture that radiated from old Europe, even though he didn't really gel with its libertine values. He also wasn't a fan on what he saw as its limitations on individual rights.

He left Europe after two years feeling more American than ever. He also felt less like, yeah. Yeah. Nothing like getting around different opinions to get you to double down on your bad opinions. Yeah. I mean, there's an extent to which I understand, every time I go to Europe, I realize how fundamentally an American I am, but it's not in a positive way. It's like itchy that I can't blow shit up in the middle of nowhere.

And it's like, I don't know that that's a healthy thing to do, but it's just the way it is. You're like, what do you mean you don't sell Tannerite in this hardware store? What is this communist Russia? Yeah. William also felt less like a doctor than he had upon moving there. In a letter home to his parents, he admitted that his interest in his chosen vocation had begun to fade.

Quote, it is said that no idea which enters our mind is ever entirely removed. Often we see the specter as it were of our departed notions or opinions. By experience, I know how firm is the hold of these early and long cherished ideas. With me, whilst a child and a boy, I determined on a political career. There have been times when I thought that the last vestige of such an idea had disappeared, but often it reappears to me and my waking dreams, leaving me uncertain whether it be an angel of light or an angel of darkness. Darkness buddy.

Oh boy, yeah. Darkness. Don't get the politics. Bet on black on that one if you're at the gambling table. In 1844, near the end of William's European tour, his family friend James K. Polk won the presidential election. James was an expansionist and supported the annexation of the Republic of Texas, which most people consider to be America's greatest mistake.

He also supported the United States taking over Oregon, which Great Britain also claimed at the time. Polk's victory over the Whig showed that a majority of the American people supported these expansionist colonialist values. It was in the air. In 1845, writer John O'Sullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny, the idea that God himself had decreed the United States should expand to control all of North America. It's one of those, I'm assuming we all remember this from history class.

Oh yeah, the worst fucking idea put in anyone's head. Yeah, God. What if all this was ours? What if like God said like, yeah, just take all this shit, dude, I'm on your side, dude. I'm God. Listen to me. You can remember though all those times in the Bible where Jesus stole people's houses. Oh yeah.

That was Jesus. He's like, bro, Manifest Destiny. He's left and right. Yeah, Manifest Destiny. I need your breath. My chips too, brah. Yeah. Sorry, Manifest Destiny.

Coming through. Get the fuck out. Manifest Destiny. Now, William returned to the United States shortly after Polk's victory and very soon made the decision to move to New Orleans. This was a risky proposition at the time. The city's swampy conditions and horrible water quality meant that it had a death rate twice that of other American cities.

So like moving to New Orleans is a little bit like playing Russian roulette in this period. And now to be honest, I have some friends there who just had both of their neighbors murdered. Oh my God. Yeah. It's just like, it's just like a thing. Like I'll check in on them on Facebook and it'll be like, found some bullets in my lawn today, like some shells and casings, like more gunshots last night.

I don't know. I haven't been. I also hear it's a wonderful place and I have a lot of friends who love it. Like they live there, but it's always been a little bit of a roll of the die in New Orleans. I can always count on you to be like, oh yeah, I know someone lives there and then they knew somebody who was murdered. Oh my God. How?

What happened? What happened? Well, if I'm not mistaken, in that case, it was like a murder suicide because the guy's mom had told him that she couldn't afford her health care and it was like a really dark fucking tale, man. It's fucked up. Yeah. So that's really not on New Orleans as much as America.

Yeah. Yeah. I was like, yeah, this episode's pretty light. And then you bring it to like the real, real, oh boy. We're getting off topic. Yeah. And that is, that's not on New Orleans. That's on our entire country.

No, back to the bastard. Sorry, Nola. Yeah. So, yeah, it was dangerous moving to New Orleans in this period. Luckily, William was ethnically wealthy and he was able to shack up with a classmate from his college who had a nice townhouse and an affluent part of town. So he didn't have to deal with like as much of the disease as like, you know, the tenements and stuff that I have.

In New Orleans, William officially made the shift from medicine to politics and he began to study to become a lawyer. Now in New Orleans, as in Paris, Walker was horrified by the fact that everyone wasn't an insufferable goodie to shoes. He wrote to his parents that they had no idea of the profaneness of the people of New Orleans. I just love the pro-clutching of this guy and just cut to whatever dark shit is inevitable here. Oh, somebody is saying poop.

Yeah. That's so profane. Yeah. Like it is. Like he's literally talking about curse words and he was particularly horrified by the profanity used by one of his law teachers, a man named Mott, quote, looking at him, I would suppose him almost in a capable of using an oath, but yet I hadn't been in the office long before my ears were saluted with such words that I had deemed long before consigned to Drayman

and Portos. His common use of oaths appears to be precluded by, I think he meant to say precluded, by an absurd effect of energy, not content with activity and simple power. They must have bustle and swelling words. A man wants to have the appearance of strength, although he is conscious of weakness. Oh, wow. Okay. Big cover.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's kind of like, you know, some people like when folks will like pose with guns and stuff, they'll be like, that person must have a tiny dick. He's kind of doing the same thing, but with curse words. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

The reason you use curse words is because you have a low wiener and that's it. Exactly. And that's why I will talk nice words because my peepee is also big. Now, Miles, you know whose peepee is also big? One of our sponsors? This egg's absolutely big. I know this show, baby. Listen to these big swing and dick ads.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back. Miles. Yes. In 1946, the United States went to war with Mexico. William was skeptical of this venture and called it a type of fever in a letter to a friend. He noted that, quote, for a little time the patient was far gone and a delirium of joy

and destruction. War was preached as being the noblest and sublimest of all states and conditions of men. A spectacle of delight for gods and demigods. He events to particular discuss that the people of Mexico were being treated as pagans by many of his fellow Americans and not the good Christians that they were. The war sparked a deep interest in current events in William and a growing obsession with the news that increasingly pulled him away from his nascent law career.

He passed the bar in 1847, but his young practice saw little success. He got a gig working briefly at the commercial review, a local paper. The work didn't last long, but William found journalism appealing. In early 1849, he put together $1,000 of, probably mostly, his parents' money and bought an interest in the Daily Crescent newspaper. Now, the Crescent was, at the time, a moderately liberal publication, which meant then that they accepted ads for slave markets, but didn't attack abolitionists as literal demons deserving of violent murder.

Oh, so like MSNBC. Yeah, yeah, they're the MSNBC of the time, absolutely, yeah. In 1849, New Orleans, this was a pretty progressive attitude for a rich white guy to take. Now, 1849 proved to be a pretty bad year for Walker. He'd fallen in love with a young woman, Ellen Martin, a socialite, and a deaf mute whose parents had, unusually for the time, insisted on letting their daughter live a normal life. That summer, a horrific bout of yellow fever hit New Orleans, afflicting William and forcing him to temporarily flee the city.

It reaped a more vicious toll on the Martin family, killing first Ellen's cousin and then taking hold of her. She spent several miserable weeks battling the illness until, on April 18th, it finally claimed her. Walker was devastated by this, and his friends would later claim that it marked a turning point in his life. He became cold, calculating, and increasingly violent. His coverage in the Daily Crescent turned, over and over, to confrontational, attacking

his fellow journalists for, among other things, reporting on corruption within a local bank. Walker's angle seemed to be that. By reporting on this, journalists were damaging public confidence in the bag, and revealing personal details about the lives of several bankers. This new Walker was also more inclined to support colonialist ventures. In late 1840s, Narisco Lopez, a Spanish general and a former governor of Trinidad, Cuba, began agitating for the island to rebel against Spanish control and join the United States. Lopez did not do this for reasons of Cuban self-determination.

He was worried that the island would be taken by a slave uprising, like the one that had liberated Haiti, and he wanted the military backing of the United States to protect he and his fellow property owners. Spain had ended slavery in most of its domains in 1811, and so Lopez and his fellow people owners were worried that they would lose their ability to own people. Lopez initially sought the help of the US government in this, but President Polk's administration was unable to start a war with Spain. He became convinced, via delusion, that the United States would step in if he could spark

an uprising on the island, and so he hatched a plan to recruit hundreds of random Americans with guns and use them as an army to invade Cuba. By 1849, he was recruiting men directly from the streets of New York City. Now, Zachary Taylor, the president who followed Polk, issued Proclamation 51 to warn Americans against participating in Lopez's scheme. He promised that they would face charges at home and would receive no aid in their endeavors. It's kind of a mark of where we are right now, that I think if the same thing happened today, the president of the United States would be completely on board.

It's so many things, even what you're saying, just mirror the positions of so many people. It's also really interesting to know that the real, I was like, when's the fork in the road moment come for this guy? And it's when he lost, it was his girlfriend or his wife? His girlfriend. His girlfriend to yellow fever, and that is like when he, this sounds like the beginnings of the end for him. What was yellow fever exactly?

I don't know, some horrible fever, kills your ass. I'm guessing it's a fever. I think it's one of those poop yourself to death fevers. Oh, God, you hate one of them. Yeah. Yeah. No good. Yeah.

I'm not a yellow fever expert though. And you never claimed to be. I think we just got that out there from the beginning. Oddly enough, I am, I don't know, I don't have a joke for that. Anyway, yeah, let's move along here. So yeah, Lopez succeeded in gathering up several hundred armed men, boats, and $80,000 in funding, which was enough money to run a war at that point in history. To avoid arrest, he and his men disguised their endeavor as a trip to California to

mind gold. This did not fool anyone and Lopez's army was broken up. He fled from New York down to New Orleans, reasoning that the lawless swamps of Louisiana would be friendlier to someone trying to raise an army to invade a sovereign state in order to further the cause of human bondage. And he was not wrong in this. William Walker, for his part, loved General Lopez and supported his efforts. He justified this by pointing out that a slave uprising in Cuba so close to Florida

might spread the contagious disease of wanting to be free to enslaved black Americans. Quote it from one of his editorials, if, for example, the great number of Negroes now being carried into Cuba should end in a second Haitian insurrection and an establishment of a Negro state on the island, it would be very injurious and dangerous for our southern partners to have such a neighbor. Of course we have the right and ought to exercise it of preventing any policy that would lead to such a disaster. Oh boy.

It's funny how disaster or freedom. These moments where class power structures are about to be disrupted and then the dominant class has to go, all right, so how are we going to fucking make sure this doesn't happen here? Yeah. How are we going to make sure this freedom thing doesn't spread? Yeah. And then like with Haiti, it's like, okay, well, we'll just punish them forever monetarily

with the banks and we'll make sure nothing will never prosper and we'll keep them like indebted to this other system for as long as possible. Yeah. And we'll keep punishing them right up until the modern era, 2020 and no one will talk about it because like we'll just assume at that point that Haiti's always been fucked up for inexplicable reasons. And then Citibank is like, oh, wait, what? What?

Oh, was that us? Back then? Oh, okay. We got to get a real Haiti episode up in here. Oh my God. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Because that really was weak.

All those slave uprisings really had people shook like in this way you're talking about or they're like, wait, we can't, we don't want people getting ideas about like liberation over here. They had so many different ways to combat it that weren't like, hey, if you stop owning people, they won't want to murder you. Right. Just a pitch. Just a pitch.

Yeah. Yeah. So Walker claimed that he supported an invasion of Cuba on humanitarian grounds, arguing that the U.S. could stop Cuba from importing new slaves. And then slavery on the island would take the mild and comparatively inoffensive form in which it exists in the southern states. Oh, fuck right off. Yeah.

It's a real piece of shit. Fuck. I just love again, same pattern, okay, this country's doing something that we don't want to give ideas to our people that might be a good thing. Therefore, we were just going to force our way in with this weird lame ass subterfuge of like, no, we care about the people. It's about the people. Yeah.

It's really about the people. It's not about like... It's humanitarian. Yeah. Not about preserving these power structures that we need to like, extort and, you know, exploit the weak. But anyway, it's fine. Yeah.

Just call it a humanitarian. Humanitarian. Humanitarian. In his constant editorials, William began to explicitly endorse the practice of filibustering or freebooting. Now, this is not a term we use today often in its original form, filibustering, like it's the Congress thing where you talk for a long time and probably have to wear a diaper. But back in the 1850s, according to the book, filibusters and financiers, filibusters were

basically people who would have been described as pioneers if they'd turned their attentions toward colonizing parts of North America already controlled by the government. Quote, if, on the other hand, they happened to direct their attention towards another nation whose sovereignty was formally recognized by their own, they were called filibusters. The term filibuster was originally one of a progrim. Bandits' use in the 50s was much resented by those to whom it was applied and as much as it was regarded as synonymous with pirate or buccaneer. And it stops meaning pirate in this period because a lot of people like filibusters,

but really it is piracy. It's just grander than normal piracy. They're just fucking around and switching labels around to make it seem different. Yeah. It's just the label. They're like, oh, God, please don't call me a buccaneer. Yeah. I prefer genocidal, I mean, filibuster.

Yeah. I like that. Frendicide. Oh, that doesn't work out. So I find that book filibusters and financiers really interesting because it was published in 1916, an age in which most white people considered colonialism to be a clear good and an age in which a lot of people still remembered the 1850s. It credits the growth of filibustering and its support by men like William Walker to the

fact that the blank map of North America was rapidly being filled in. Quote, there is a proverb current among Frenchmen to the effect that the appetite comes with eating, and in the case of the land hunger of the American people, the truth of this assertion seems well established. As soon as they set foot on American soil, the colonists from Europe were compelled to rest their lands from the savages, many of whom resisted the invaders to the death. Nature as well as the natives had to be subdued. Road and field were cleared with axe and spade.

Pioneers built their log cabins far in the wilderness and, like the advance guard of a marching army, kept always ahead of the main body of westward moving settlers. There was no arrest of this westward progress till the pioneer stood on the shores of the Pacific. In 1803, the boundary was moved from the Mississippi to the Rockies, and the next generation saw it extending from the Rockies to the sea. A whole continent had been won, but the land hunger seemed keener than ever. The appetite had increased with the eating.

And you know, it's, yeah, I think that's pretty accurate, like obviously they're kind of pro that, but it still doesn't mean it's an inaccurate assessment of what's going on. I mean, I need to, because I was just reading this study about how like when people who aren't used to the American diet come to the United States and begin eating like typical foods like, you know, people like that normal people would eat like not gourmet shit all the time. Yeah.

Like 19 pounds of bacon wrapped up in cheese and deep fried. Yeah. Just a high fat, high sugar diet. Yeah. It leads to a normal breakfast. Yeah. It leads to more eating. So like it's still like the metaphor even holds for the way in which we even consume

food in this country is also like, yeah. And then that also extends to aggressive land grabs where you get a little bit and then you get such a boner for boundary pushing. They just keep going till you get to a body of water that apparently you can't put a flag in. Yeah. It's amazing. Like the American culture is very much like if you, I don't know, somehow like magically

were to take like the collective hunger of like all past generations of human beings who struggled with like the wilderness and the seasons and the tides. And then just like lumped that into a relatively small chunk of human beings like we're just filled with this insatiable need to consume. That's almost metaphysical and it's boundaries anyway. The hunger never ends. Yeah. So we're talking about this guy Lopez trying to conquer Cuba.

He carried out a couple of different unsuccessful expeditions to Cuba. He was eventually like executed and shit. It didn't work out, but this did not dissuade Walker from breathless support for the idea of filibustering. He was in general more aggressive after the death of his girlfriend than he in all spheres of his life. In late 1849, he got into a dispute with the editor of New Orleans largest Spanish language newspaper over the arrest or kidnapping of a Cuban citizen by the Spanish government.

The dispute was based mainly on a misunderstanding by both men, but incensed by an editorial that had insulted him. William Walker found the other publications editor and beat him with his cane. So he is like, and he's never before this like a violent physically person. So this is like, he's, there's really a change going on in this dude. Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm up over maybe what the whole thing.

Yeah. I thought your time at Elyon Gonzalez for a second in the beginning, if I kidnapped Cuba National in the US. No, no, no, no, no. Completely different time. Not very similar. Very different story. But then he solves his beefs by just cane whooping somebody.

He gets really comfortable with violence after this point. And it's one of those things. It's totally plausible that like the death of a loved one could lead to that kind of change. Sure. I also wonder maybe maybe you just got hit in the fucking head at some point and that's like a part of this story that's just not reported because nobody thought it was a big deal.

Oh, right. Whenever I hear about like a personality change that leads to violence, I wonder maybe a TDI. Yeah. Maybe there's something going on with your brain. Yeah. Some CTE up in here. Oh, no. Oh, geez.

Or just, or hey, maybe you were called, you know, a feminine your whole life and old celery stick arms. And now you just have had it. And now your toxicity is now the world's problem. Yeah. Maybe this was something that was just simmering inside him, his entire childhood, and it finally blew over. And yeah, maybe the death of a loved one was a catalyst.

Who knows? Either way, he is a very aggressive man from this point forward. Right. In 1850, Walker left New Orleans in his job at the Daily Crescent for the windy city that never sleeps, San Francisco. His journey there was nightmarish by modern standards. He had to take a series of boats down to Panama. He had to hike through the mountains for days and then book passage on a steamer headed for

the West Coast. It took around five months. So it's like- How long would it have taken over land? I guess worse, probably. Oh, yeah. Because it's like, it's very much less developed, you know, at that point. Yeah.

In a lot more dangerous. I mean, where was he? Take the 10 West. Yeah. Can take that from Jacksonville all the way, well, I don't know, to Santa Monica. Yeah, the 10 at this point is a series of gunfights with bandits. And there's no carpooling. Yeah.

Now in Scottson, California, William got another job at another newspaper, the Daily Herald. He was immediately set to work waging a personal war with the entire city's justice system, which in fairness was incredibly corrupt and fucked up. Crime was rampant in San Francisco, which at that point was a nigh lawless frontier town. William viciously attacked the district judge, Levi Parsons, for his failure to adequately prosecute criminals. After a local businessman was murdered during a robbery gone wrong, William began to advocate

armed crowds of murderous vigilantes as a good solution to San Francisco's crime problem. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. He wanted armed mobs to clean up the streets. Who doesn't? Miles? Yeah.

A good old fashioned armed mob. It's so weird. I just feel like this could be a headline we're going to read in like three months from now. Yeah. It is. I mean, it is like a focus of right wing grifters right now, the fact that there's poop in the streets of San Francisco sometimes. Yeah.

It's like, buddy, I got some news about Dallas for you. Right. Hey, just get some, hire some Pinkertons and they'll clean it up. It's like, what? So here's how Walker wrote about his desire for vigilante murder squads, quote, when citizens are murdered and robbed in their houses are feloniously entered in the most populous portions of the city. Is it not time that there were some action taken to vindicate the law?

We have urged the formation of a volunteer night patrol until such a body be organized, we doubt if there can be any security. A summary example must be made of the first person detected in the commission of these crimes. Hmm. So we just, we just got to go out and shoot us one criminal and that'll scare the rest of us. Right.

Oh, it's, it's good to know that those terrible ideas, people have been having those for centuries now. Yep. Because people never learned a single thing ever. Yeah. Not once in history. Has anyone learned a single lesson? Yeah.

That is the lesson of history. That we don't learn. Yeah. We'll create order by creating more fear. I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to work. Walker was particularly furious when Judge Parsons ruled in the case of another judge who'd been accused of bribery. He felt probably accurately that the judge had just done a favor for his buddy.

Walker was further outraged when this judge, a guy named Morrison, assigned the property of a dead man to one of his colleagues, even though the deceased had family back in Boston. Walker attacked these corrupt judges with admirable ferocity, eventually provoking one of their protégés to attack Walker as a liar, a paltrune coward. This prompted William to challenge the man to a duel, which was accepted by another one of the judge's protégés. The terms were set as, revolvers fired at 10 paces. Back when there was honor.

Back when there was honor. Right. But back when we, before we just cancel people. Exactly. When we would cruelly cancel people, instead we would nobly stand 10 feet away and shoot each other with handguns. Oh my God. 10 paces, sir.

Not a stemless. William lost and received a bullet in his leg for his trouble. He kept writing though and eventually earned himself a charge for contempt of court. He was basically, he posted through it. He was fined $500, which he refused to pay. The people of San Francisco mostly seemed to back William in this, seeing his crusade against a corrupt judiciary as fundamentally just. Next, according to the book, filibusters and financiers, a mass meeting was held on the

plaza on March 9th, 1851 with several thousand citizens in attendance. Resolutions were quickly adopted, approving Walker's conduct, calling on Parsons to resign his seat and asking the local representatives in the legislature to initiate impeachment proceedings. After adjourning, the citizens marched in a body to the jail and made Walker a visit of sympathy. Habeas Corpus proceedings were next instituted before a judge of the Superior Court, who held that Parsons might institute a suit for libel, but that his punishment for the contempt

alleged in a newspaper statement was inconsistent with the freedom of the press and a violation of the Constitution. Walker was thereupon set free. He had once presented a memorial to the legislature, and the committee to which it was referred recommended on March 26th that Parsons should be impeached. A special committee was then appointed to investigate the charges, and upon its reporting insufficient grounds for impeachment, the case was ended. Had Walker possessed anything like personal magnetism, he might have made of this episode

the foundation of a successful career in California politics. He was indeed not without political ambition, but in the prime requisites of a successful politician, he was woefully lacking. So he was just unable to turn this into any kind of political career. How more could you fail upward as a white man? You're like, look, I started some shit with a judge. I got clapped. I had to take that L. Then suddenly I became like, I got a lot of sympathy.

I could have turned that into something. But then I just didn't even know how to do that. So I'm just gonna rob people. Hey, Robert. Yeah. Robert, do you know what isn't woefully lacking? Robert, this is an outbreak. I know, but I felt like the longer I was quiet, the funnier I was.

He wanted to let you sit with that one. Oh, wow. I did. What a cool man. You're so cool. And now you at home can sit with these products and services. That was shameful, Robert. I know.

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when

a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. A quick question about duels.

Were you only allowed to shoot one shot when you turned? Like it was like... No, no, no. So you could just... It's one at a time, though. All six at once? No, no. It's one at a time, though.

Like, I think you have to, like, wait for the other person to do their second shot if you miss. Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean... It's pretty cool. What are...

It's pretty cool. I'm surprised people just didn't cheat. But I'm just going to unload this whole clip when I turn and I'm going to give a fuck. Yeah. I'm sure people did cheat. Yeah. And then it would just be like... It would be a terrible...

Yeah. A dishonorable duel. Andrew Jackson cheated at a duel and killed a guy. Yeah. And it ruled. But anyway, we'll talk about that some other day. So William's time in California turned him into a powerful supporter of Manifest Destiny. You'll remember he was kind of, like, on the edge about the Mexican-American war at first,

like he's on board at this point. Over his months in San Francisco, he switched from writing about crime to authoring more and more essays about the necessity of American expansionism. He could see the writing on the wall, the old United States was filling in, and one entire massive continent was, in his view, not enough for the awesomeness that was America. He believed the U.S. needed to annex not just Cuba, but Nicaragua and probably parts of Mexico too. He also felt that the annexation of Central American states might eventually provide the

U.S. with more slave states, which would be pretty cool in his view. Yeah. There it is. There it is. Yeah. That's debated, but seems to scan. Yeah. Oh, that's debatable, whether that's what his actual intent was with all this?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about that a little later too. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I was like, what does he think you're going to do with all this land, huh? He's not the only person to believe that there was actually like a Southern, like Confederates after the Civil War who moved to, it might have been Costa Rica, I forget exactly where

to like try to start a new Confederacy in Latin or in Central America. So this is like, he's not the only guy with this basic idea. Yeah. And all they were able to do is create Cancun. Yeah. Well, actually Cabo San Lucas comes up in this quite a lot. So as Williams' career in journalism petered out in his brief career as a lawyer proved unfulfilling, his attention drifted more and more to the possibility of filibustering

himself and possibly adding new territory to the glorious United States. Perhaps he was inspired to this work by the example of his heroic grandfather. In a high achieving family full of soldiers and politicians and newspaper owners, conquering a sovereign nation was just about the only way to stand out. He found an opportunity lurking just a few hundred miles south of San Francisco in the untamed wilds of northern Mexico. At that point, the Sonora Desert and the place we now call Baja was still largely unsettled. It was occupied by numerous indigenous people, of course, but by the standards of racists

in the U.S. and Mexican government, it was essentially empty. The few villages that existed there, this is just the way people thought at the time. That's so aggressive. Yeah. And what modern racism at that time just meant, eh, nobody's there. Well, it's funny because like the big problem Mexico has is that the villages that are there have all these problems with like Apaches and Comanches raiding them. So it's like, this place is too empty for us to control, and this is a problem because

all of the people that are there want to kill us, all of the people that are there in this empty place. Yeah, there's kind of like, eh, not worth it. So the first kind of freebooters who sort of sailed in to try to deal with this problem were actually French, a guy named Charles de Pendre, and like a bunch of French San Franciscans like traveled to Guymas, which is like sort of like the big city in Sonora, a port. And they developed an agricultural settlement to like essentially try and provide a base

of people that would like allow them to like basically provide some sort of order against the Apache raiders, right? So like, that's the goal here, and it doesn't work out, Pendre is eventually murdered after getting into a loud argument with the Sonoran government. So like the Mexican government kind of wants these French people there because they're having trouble like controlling the territory and fighting off these native tribes. But at the same time, they don't really trust these people because they're like, you're trying to steal this land from us, like we're pretty sure.

So it's like, it's fraught, and there's a complicated history here that we're not going to get into enough. Right, but like both sides are stealing, so they have to be wary of the other. They're like, well, we're trying to take this land too, but we kind of need you, but I feel like you're going to steal it more, uh, what do we do? Yeah. The colonizers catch 22. Yeah.

They are both colonizers here. Um, I guess you could say Mexico's less colonizery at this point because there is at least like they've been there longer. I don't know. I'm not going to try to parse that out more. Sure. Sure. No, not at all.

Yeah. Another wave of French freebooters came next led by a French count Gaston de Rousseau Bourbon. I'm not going to pronounce that right, but fuck him. He received permission from the Mexican government to do the same thing, basically to start a settlement to try and like provide, uh, defense against the Apache. Um, but again, these would be colonists and the local government wound up at loggerheads. Uh, the count and his men eventually decided to settle their differences with the Mexican

government by marching on a nearby city and conquering it at gunpoint. Uh, they succeeded in this, uh, but were eventually beaten by like a kind of a grassroots insurgency and the survivors were chased out of Mexico in December, 1852. All this was closely observed by William Walker, who thought the whole mess sounded very exciting. He'd actually put together a plan with a couple of business partners to establish a settlement in Sonora with the goal of protecting Mexican villagers and ranchers from Apache and Comanche raiders. They'd been unable to get the Mexican government to give them permission though.

And Walker had shelved the idea until the counts efforts ended in bloody failure at the end of 1852. In June, 1853, William Walker and two business partners traveled to Guymas, Mexico with the goal of scouting out possible locations for a border settlement. They received passes from the Mexican consulate to visit the country, but they were most definitely not allowed to go there in order to plot how they could illegally build towns full of white settlers in Mexico. The captain of the port was immediately suspicious of Walker and his friends and sent this message

off to the local general, quote, your excellency will perceive that there is undoubtedly an intention to invade this portion of the Mexican territory. There's like, yeah, everyone knows what's going on here. You're like, you're not slick. It's the same thing like a timeshare pitch. It's like, yeah, yeah, you're offering me a fucking free trip. I believe that. So what are you trying to fucking steal?

Yeah. Now, the governor ordered Walker and his friends detained and they spent the next month trapped in Guymas trying to convince the governor that, no, I really guy, we're cool dudes. We're not trying to conquer part of your country. And while they waited, Walker made a bit of a name for himself around town for dressing like a maniac. He was described as wearing a huge white fur hat, whose long nap waved with the breeze despite the hundred plus degree summer heat.

Okay, bro, fucking big fur white fur hat in the Mexican summer. Oh my to do what to let people know you're a pickup artist. Hell yeah, bro. He's picking up the whole country. I'm negging the whole country, bro. I'm negging them right into my bedroom. Kind of is actually. Now, despite his best attempts at argument, the government held to the heart of the line

that William Walker was absolutely not allowed to travel further into Mexico. And so at the end of July, William and his friends left. Despite their failure, he was optimistic for he had received some very exciting news, which he related in an article published shortly thereafter, quote, apaches had visited a country house a few leagues from Guymas, murdering all the men and children and carrying the women into captivity worse than death. The Indians sent word that they would soon visit the town where water is carried on asses backs, meaning Guymas and the people of that port frightened by the message seem ready

to perceive anyone who would give them safety. So he's like psyched about this, like some apaches murder a bunch of people and he's like, fuck yeah, this is my chance. Oh boy. Yeah. The tactics are always the same, right? Yeah. Absolutely.

Wait, is there an atmosphere of fear there? I can exploit for my own gain. Fantastic. Let me hop right in. Let me roll right up in that. Oh, you guys are here for your life. Okay. How about come through with the homies who have no training?

Yeah. Absolutely. No training. But we have guns. Way more guns than we should have. Despite the fact that literally no one he had met in Mexico had wanted him there, William Walker insisted to his readers that several women in the country had begged him to repair immediately to California and bring down enough Americans to keep off the apaches.

Walker was not the least bit dissuaded by the Mexican government's refusal to work with him. He felt that the ease with which those French settlers had captured a whole town meant that a comparatively small body of Americans would surely see even greater success. Enough Americans with guns could protect local families from rampaging natives and of course secure themselves significant financial benefits. Walker wrote insistently that such an act would be one of humanity no less than of justice, whether sanctioned or not by the Mexican government.

And so William Walker returned to California intent upon the goal of invading Mexico. He wrote that his plan was to establish at as early a time as possible a military colony, not necessarily hostile to Mexico on the frontier of Sonora with a view of protecting that state from the apaches. It's like, we're not necessarily hostile. No, I mean, yeah, we have guns and we're shooting people that like don't agree with us, but like that's not the point though. We're here to protect you guys.

That's only hostile if you don't agree with us. It's pretty simple. I'm pretty sure we laid it out. You disagree with me. I shoot you. It is the geopolitical equivalent of that scene in Simpsons where Bart walks forward swinging his fists in a windmill. And if I hit you, it's not my fault.

Yeah. Exactly. You're the aggressor because you knew it was coming your way and you got in the line of fire. Now, what Walker was doing was wildly illegal. And so he had to hide his activities, but he was really bad at secrecy and almost immediately local papers started commenting on the rumors that he was going to invade Mexico. There was criticism for the idea in some papers, but at the time many Americans supported the

idea of conquering more Mexico. One of Walker's fellow Californians wrote this in an 1854 op-ed, speaking for a sizable chunk of the territory, quote, It is the fate of America ever to go. She is like the rod of Aaron that became a serpent and swallowed up the other rods. So will America conquer or annex all lands. That is her manifest destiny. Only give her time for the process to swallow up every few years of province as large as

most kingdoms of Europe is her present rate of progress. Sometimes she purchases the mighty morsel. Sometimes she forms it out of waste to territory by the natural increase of her own people. Sometimes she annexes and sometimes she conquers it. Oh boy. Waste territory. Yeah. This is the attitude common at the time.

I mean, yeah, you realize like whenever I think about this, I'm like, how are people so callous and like brazen in this time? It's like, yeah, I get it. The language you're using is just sort of, it's merely looking at it like you're, you know, out of fucking like a parking lot, swap meet. And you want to make sure you get there early enough to get the good spot. Yeah. We don't often talk about that with manifest destiny.

It was not, I won't say the majority of Americans felt this way, but in not insignificant number of Americans were like, oh no, we're supposed to take the whole fucking world or at least all of South and Central America. 100%. You're like, if I can walk there and I don't need a boat, I think it should be ours. Yeah. I don't know where that goes. Now Walker in a growing circle of comrades raised money for their venture by selling

$500 bonds at half face value for the independence loan fund of the Republic of Sonora. They promised that purchasers of these bonds would receive seven square miles of Mexico's sovereign soil once their new country was established. In conversations with his supporters, Walker did not even bother to pretend that his goal was to create a settlement for humanitarian reasons. Now he was openly raising funds to conquer Mexican territory and establish his own country. In order to avoid running a foul of the neutrality act, Walker carefully worded his sales pitch to prospective soldiers rather than outright saying, I'm recruiting mercenaries.

He would talk up all the wealth and spoils and excitement to be gained in the venture in the hopes that his target would ask if they too could join. For some reason, lost to time, Walker felt that people volunteering to invade Mexico with him was more legal than him hiring people to invade Mexico. Oh, so it wasn't. He would just have like a really cool pitch and like the whole point is like, dude, bait him in with such a dope pitch that they're going to be like, yes, I would like to join this illegal expedition.

I'm not raising an army. An army asked me if they could help me invade Mexico. That's totally different. So different, your honor. Are you kidding me? I was like, this is how it started. I'm like, yo, Brett, this place, Mexico is fucking cool. I'm going to check it out.

I don't know what you're thinking next thing you know, he's coming with like a bunch of homies out of guns, what do you want me to do? Yeah. It just sort of happened. Yeah. Wow. What a pitch though, too. And you're like, also, can you put in like five bucks on my fucking like colonizer fund

and you will get you will secure your own piece of land. This all does kind of make me want like an 1850s like version of the hangover where like they all wake up having conquered Baja, Mexico. And they're like, what happened? What happened? Yeah. Where's William? Where?

You can make a fun movie out of that. Walker hired a ship called the Arrow to carry he and his men to Sonora. And of course, both the Mexican and US governments almost instantly realized what was happening. The boat was seized while full of guns in San Francisco. Walker responded by suing the government to release his boat, arguing that it had no authority to take possession of a ship without evidence of a criminal act. He loudly denied he was planning any kind of invasion. A media storm enveloped the whole issue and Walker was once again successful in getting

the people of San Francisco on his side. While all this attention was focused on the Arrow, William Walker went and chartered another ship and filled it with guns and ammunition. A little bit after midnight on October 16th, 1854, the local police caught some of Walker's men moving supplies into the boat. They seized a bunch of ammo, prompting Walker to panic and rouse all the men he could get his hands on. 45, most of whom were drunk and rushed them aboard his new ship with whatever guns they

had on hand. The men set sail later that night, severely under man and under armed. But finally, on their way to Sonora. Oh, what a fucking disaster. Get on the boat. Get on the boat. I don't care how drunk you are. Hey, what's going on?

Hey, what's going on? There's a copster coming, man. Do you want me to get on the boat? I don't even have my musket. That's it. Cops are angry because we're trying to evade Mexico. Get on the boat. Get the fuck in the boat.

We're all fucked. Hurry, motherfucker. There'll be fucking booze on the boat. Just get on. Bring your gun. Now, Walker named the ship. Now, Walker named his small army, slightly larger than a platoon, the first independent battalion.

He declared himself colonel because it was the 1800s and everybody was a colonel. Yeah. And then shockingly, he succeeded in using his small force to conquer the town of La Paz, population 6000. This was less impressive than it sounds. There was no one to defend the town. Walker and a bunch of his men just stumbled, probably drunk into the governor's office, waving guns, and terrorized everyone there into giving them control.

As soon as the governor surrendered, William Walker ordered the Mexican flag taken down and replaced with a new flag he had designed himself, the flag of the Republic of Sonora. Looking out from his new base of operations, his ambitions expanded. No longer was he content in creating a small Republic of Sonora. La Paz had fallen so easily that he now desired to conquer the entire Baja Peninsula. Within days of capturing the town, he renamed his new country, issuing a declaration that the Republic of Lower California is hereby declared free, sovereign, and independent, and all allegiance to the Republic of Mexico is forever renounced.

Okay. Just like that, huh? Ambition, man. You got to fake it till you make it. Just like that. And also, wow, way to get slowly deceived by how easy one is. Oh, well, that was pretty easy. La Paz, huh?

Who covered this small town easily? You know what? Fuck it. You know what? Yeah, let's do the whole thing. Clearly, this is the hardest thing we'll ever have to do. Do you know what did that flag look like? I'm always curious.

It was pretty boring. Oh, okay. It wasn't like indulgent. No, I would have talked about it if it was cool. No, it wasn't. Sorry. Damn it. That's when these guys fucking disappoint me.

When there's like a real opportunity for some just straight up buffoonery. And it's like, you know, actually took flags very seriously, very minimal design. Very minimal design. It's a pretty, yeah, it's not super crazy. Walker concluded his declaration by announcing that he was now the president as well as a colonel, which is a pretty impressive series of title changes for a single week. Yeah. Yeah.

Not only am I the president. I'm the colonel of the hair club for men. President colonel. Yeah. Colonel president. Yeah. Colonel president Walker is set to work at once giving a bunch of other people fancy titles, appointing a secretary of war who was by himself 3% of the army.

Critically, he appointed a propagandist who started mailing off dispatches to the San Diego Herald in order to inform Americans about what Walker and his men had done. He's set to work at once confiscating the arms and ammunition of the citizens of La Paz, so they could not rise up against him. He attempted to fortify the city, but eventually realized that it was indefensible if the Mexican army attacked. And so he moved his forces to Cabo San Lucas, which he felt would be an easier place to draw Americans in to fight for his cause.

Wow. He moves to Cabo because he's like, this is where, if I want to get more Americans, I got to go to Cabo. This is where it's at. La Paz is so last year. Yeah. I mean, if you haven't been to Cabo, you really must. Yeah.

He makes the same decision as an insurgent general as Jimmy Buffett does as Jimmy Buffett. Come on down to Marguerite. Is he just thinking like because of location? He's like, okay. Yeah. This is an easier place to get reinforcements. Like he's relying on, he's not an idiot. He knows that like 45 men isn't enough to take all of Baja, but he hopes that like the

stories that are spreading in the news will send hundreds of Americans to join his army. And he knows that Cabo San Lucas, it's easier for people from California to get to right, right, right. They're just going straight down the coast. Yes. Oh, okay. I also, in my mind, I'm also thinking of a dude who's like starting at like a terrible vacation spot too.

And he's like, nah, you know what? We're not going to get a lot of business here. We got to go to Cabo, man. They're going to see these beaches. They're going to love it. And they'll fight my war. And they'll fight my war. So yeah, while he and his men were loading up their boat to flee the capital of their

new country for the new capital of their new country, which they would have to conquer once they got there, they ran into a passenger ship waving the Mexican flag. Walker's men boarded the ship at once and realized it held Juan Clamaco Reboleto, the new governor of La Paz. They arrested him immediately and took him prisoner along with the old governor. The Americans hold up on their boat for a few nights with their prisoners waiting in the harbor of the city they'd conquered. When a few of them landed to get firewood, they were ambushed by Mexican soldiers and

townspeople. Walker and his troops responded to the ambush by returning fire, which is fair, and also by lighting random people's houses on fire, which is not fair. They made it back to the boat and told Walker what had happened. His first reaction was to load his ship's cannons and open fire on La Paz, which was again the capital of the new country he had founded. Walker landed with 30 of his men after this and took to the fight to the enemy for 90 minutes or so.

The ambushing Mexican forces fled and Walker wrote a glowing report of their victory to be shared in the newspapers back in California. The enemy's loss was six or seven killed and several wounded. Our men did not so much as receive a wound except from cacti while pursuing the enemy through the chaperone in the rear of town. Thus ended the battle of La Paz, crowning our efforts with victory, releasing lower California from the tyrannous yoke of declining Mexico and establishing a new republic. Oh my god, man.

Yeah, he got into a gunfight over fire, would burn down a quarter of the town and then called it the Battle of La Paz. What a seat. And this goes back to fucking grandpa too, where you're like, yeah, that motherfucker, he's got a few stories and then he's having to like self-mythologize when he writes back because he's like, well, I'm never gonna do that. Yeah. So let me just really pump this story up so it sounds a lot way cooler.

Yeah. And Miles, that's where the story is gonna have to remain for the end of part one. Okay. And we're gonna talk about what happens next with William Walker and his men in part two on Thursday. Great. You got some pluggables to drop in the P zone here before we roll out. Baby, you know, I do dailies.

You want to colonize this podcast with your plugs? I want to put the flag deep into the fertile soil of behind the bastards right now. Yeah. So I want to shout out my new show for 20 day fiance that I co-host with one of your other esteemed guests, Sophia Alexandra, where like we just get high and talk about 90 day fiance. It's like, uh, Excellent. If you need a break from life, you know, that's, that's sort of like why we do it.

It's like, I'm talking, we're talking about all kinds of serious shit. I'm like, can we just talk about my favorite show, but like it faded before. That sounds great. And that's all. Well, I have no plugs to plug because I do nothing but this episode of this podcast, which is the entirety of my breadth of work. Um, so the episode is now done. No, it's not Robert.

Is it not? No. Do I do other things? You do other things. You almost worst year ever. That's disappointing. Oh, that's you. With our good friends, Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston.

I guess so. Yeah. I guess so. You can also find Robert on Twitter at I write okay. And you can find us on the Twitter Instagram at at bestards pod and we have a two public store. And to be honest, I don't know about all that, but if Sophie says so, I guess I'm not going to argue.

Oh my God. Thank you so much. That's so kind of you. Now the episode is over. Excellent. Alpha Bet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to

get it to happen. Listen to Alpha Bet Boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him.

He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your

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