Incidents of General Lawton's Second Advance on San Isidro - photos from the Spanish American War

Incidents of General Lawton's
Second Advance on San Isidro
Photographs by William Dinwiddie, Special Correspondent for "Harper's Weekly"
Harper's, Dec. 23, 1899


A halt in the muddy road between Arayat and Cibiao	General Lawton at Arayat	Cavalry horses being ferried across the Rio Grande at Arayat

A specimen of road between Arayat and Cibiao
over which our troops marched in a pouring rain
during the advance on San Isidro

....The telegraph line below Arayat was cut during the day, and this seriously interfered with military business. The break was discovered to be nicely mended with a bit of cord, which prevented contact with the opposing ends of wire, but deceived all but the sharpest eyes of the signal men. At seven o'clock the same night the wire suddenly went down again, and Captain Cunningham of the Signal Corps, with only a detachment of eight cavalrymen, started out to make the lonely ride over an unguarded country to find the trouble. He met with no opposition, and found the wire two miles out broken, with ends banging down. The Alcalde of Arayat was called into the general's headquarters, and told to send out messengers immediately to inform his people that if the wire were tampered with again the nearest house to the break would be burned, and any man found interfering with the telegraph system would be hanged, not shot. There has been no trouble since.

Early on the morning of the 19th General Young pushed out of Cabiao--to which point he had advanced during the preceding day--toward San Isidro. It was his intention to take San Isidro before nightfall. The Twenty-fourth Infantry were moving up toward Cabiao, and were but a few miles in the rear.

The engagement which took place at San Fernando, a small village two miles south of San Isidro, was slight, being merely with General Pio del Pilar's rear-guard. The poor rear-guard of the enemy always suffers, and between ten and fifteen were left dead- upon the field. The Macabebes again did some wonderful sprinting, and when gathered together once more they had some fifty prisoners in their clutches and a few insurgent rifles. They were exceedingly disappointed that we should release the whole bunch of Filipinos.

One of the incidents of the second entrance into San Isidro was the finding of six Spanish prisoners, who had hidden themselves away in odd corners, and rushed out to meet the advancing skirmish-line, swinging their lists, and yelling with delight. Three of them afterwards asked permission to join the army, saying that for fifteen months they had been abused and beaten, and while they wanted to go home to Spain, they preferred to stay a little while until they wiped out some old scores. They had received five cents a day, or two and one-half cents in our money, to buy food and clothing. It was necessary for them to beg to live. They were at the beck and call of every Tagalog officer, and when they did not execute commands with sufficient rapidity they were knocked down and beaten. They had seen the American prisoners, and were confined at one time in the next cell to Lieutenant Gillmore's men, who, they said, were treated well spasmodically--at all times were American prisoners treated better than the Spanish.

On this same day General Lawton and his staff left Arayat, with the intention of pushing through to San Isidro by nightfall. He had a portion of a mounted troop of the Fourth Cavalry, which had remained behind as an escort. Captain Taylor's full battery of six guns, which had come in the evening before, preceded him. The rain was falling Heavily at intervals, and the sunken road to the ferry was deep in slippery, clayey mud. Some idea of the horrors of attempting an advance with artillery and wagons over this country during the rainy season was gained in the next few hours. Without the untiring assistance of Lieutenant Oakes's small command of engineers, who built bridges, filled miserable slimy mud-holes six feet deep, and deflected the road through open fields when the main highway was utterly impassable, the forward move could hardly have been made. As it was, the artillery was often dragged through sloughs where the water all but covered the guns, and many a good cavalryman was unseated from his floundering, falling horse. The infantrymen were plodding along, now slinging the caking mud from their weighted shoes, now plunging waist-deep in marsh or scaling along slippery paths, perhaps only to fall headlong into muddy waters and dive desperately for a lost rifle.

General Lawton left the road to follow the stream and direct the movements of the launch, as it meant much that food and supplies be rushed up to the advanced troops. He did not arrive in Cabiao until evening. Late that night General Lawton, after having been without food for thirty-six hours, except a single calve from the new concentrated emergency ration, walked into his new headquarters at San Isidro. He had spent the day in Herculean efforts to get supplies to the troops in that town who, he knew, would be without anything to eat next morning; but it was disheartening work, for the launch Oeste stuck fast at every bend in the river. After nightfall, a mile above Cabiao, and yet five miles from his destination by the windings of the river, he went ashore, and not finding his orderlies or horses, proceeded to tramp the four miles into San Isidro through village after village. It was rather risky for a man of his rank-who is marked by his great height, distinguishing gray hair, mustaches, clothes, and the dead-white helmet--to move over a country densely populated, with only two six-shooters in the party; for he personally never carries a weapon.

The 21st of the month was passed in tremendous efforts to get up supplies. A wagon train was started out of Cabiao at daylight, after a night's work in loading the wagons, and came into San Isidro in time to give the men their breakfast at 8 A.M. Major Howard, the chief quartermaster, had been for almost three days literally without sleep, and filings generally began to look as if the troops must live on the country, go hungry, or withdraw. No one ever knew Lawton to withdraw, however. General Otis was telegraphed for one hundred more bull-carts; he was asked for all the light-draught launches he could possibly spare from Manila, and in the mean time the tired crews of the little steamers warped their boats off bar after bar with cables, or ploughed holes through the smaller mud banks.

On October 22, Major Howard took the Oceania down to Arayat, and from there started to slowly struggle up stream against the swift current, with two great cascos of supplies. It should be remembered that this boat was unarmored. She had one Nordenfeldt five-barrel rapid-fire gun on her, which constantly jammed, and which the insurgents had learned was ineffective when they had fired upon her several times in the lower courses of the river. There were two as intrepid white men in charge of her as ever fired a gun--Sergeant Harris in command, and Engineer O'Neil, who had been one of Young's scouts. The rest of the crew, five in number, were Filipinos. With Major Howard was his civilian clerk, Chamberlain, and two civilian blacksmiths, who were going up to report to the cavalry regiment. The cascos were furnished with a guard of twenty armed soldiers, but, unfortunately enough, they were all beneath the heavy bowed mats which cover this class of boat--invisible, and useless in the event of an attack.

The boat whistled as she rounded the great bend at the mouth of the Rio Chico, which stretches off toward Tarlac, as a warning to the Oeste, less than a quarter of a mile above. Major Howard sat in a chair at the bow of the boat; Chamberlain sat near him, but toward the right, and slightly screened by the awning from the high river-bank on the left, only seventy-five yards away, and was talking to one of the blacksmiths.

There was a blinding volley from the nodding grass on shore. Four men in the boat fell--Major Howard, shot through the great artery hear the heart; Chamberlain, through the shoulder and arm; the blacksmith, through the back and abdomen; and the pilot, in the forearm. Every man in sight at the time had been hit.

Major Howard staggered to his feet, ghostly white and gasping. He moved toward Chamberlain, who lay paralyzed by shock on the deck, but who screamed in excitement, "Oh, major, are you shot?" The major's only answer, as lie fell to the silent forever, was "For God's sake, keep her going, whatever you do!"

The Filipino pilot dived into the hold. Sergeant Harris rushed for the quick-firing gun, grabbing another Filipino on the way and placing him at the wheel. He fired one volley from the gun ; then it jammed. He took off the feed-cases, pulled the empty cartridges with a hand-ejector, reloaded it by hand, and fired two volleys through the canvas awning above him, as that was the only way he could elevate sufficiently to reach the ambushed enemy. The second steersman was shot through the back, and a third one was forced to the wheel by the sergeant; then the wheel itself was shattered by a bullet; but still the launch forged ahead, and the brave sergeant fired two parting volleys at three hundred yards.

O'Neil, as soon as he got his frightened Filipino firemen and assistants in the engine-room straightened out, bolted on deck, grabbed a rifle, and standing exposed on the stern of the boat, fired shot after shot where the grass was lit up with the flashes of guns.

The gallantry of these two men was of such a remarkable nature as to place them well within the category of heroes.

As they rounded the bend of the river, and came in sight of the Oeste, the latter opened tip with her revolving-cannon in the general direction of the firing. Lieutenant Simmons had been afraid to fire earlier for fear he might strike the Oceania.

Tile guard on the cascos clambered out, one by one, through a hole, like rats in a trap, before the firing entirely ceased, and answered the fire from the bank.

The enemy had made a clever move, strictly within the limits of civilized warfare; they had attempted to capture an armed launch and their antagonists' subsistence supplies, which they would have poled up the Rio Chico to a point near Tarlac. They failed, but they killed one of the best quartermasters in the army.