On the afternoon of 20 March 1856 Costa Rican troops under General José Joaquín Mora attacked a column of filibusters sent from Nicaragua by the American adventurer William Walker. The invaders were camped at the Hacienda Santa Rosa in Guanacaste, in the far northwest of Costa Rica. By Mora's own report the bayonet attack lasted fourteen minutes, and the survivors fled back across the border. In Costa Rica the fight is remembered as the first victory of the Campaña Nacional of 1856 to 1857, the war against Walker.
Walker's Nicaragua and Costa Rica's answer
Walker had landed in Nicaragua in June 1855 with a few dozen men, joined one side in the country's civil war and ended up in command of its army. The Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, the Costa Rican museum devoted to the campaign, describes the war against him as the country's true war of independence. On 1 March 1856 President Juan Rafael Mora Porras called Costa Ricans to arms, after Congress had authorized war, and the expeditionary army began its march north from San José on 4 March under the president's brother, General José Joaquín Mora.1
Walker meant to strike first. In his own memoir, The War in Nicaragua (1860), he writes that he sent Colonel Louis Schlessinger into Guanacaste with a new battalion that included one company made up entirely of Germans and another entirely of Frenchmen. Walker's aim, by his own account, was to fight on enemy territory and to cover the transit route across Nicaragua used by travelers bound for California.2
Surprise at the hacienda
Schlessinger's men reached the hacienda and settled into its main house and stone-walled corrals. Costa Rican accounts, including the Juan Santamaría museum, put their arrival on 19 March; Walker's memoir has them arriving late on the 20th, which does not fit the official Costa Rican date of the battle. Walker admits that the column was badly led and that the men were lounging around the camp when the alarm was raised.3
According to Mora's plan, summarized by Costa Rica's National Library, Colonel Lorenzo Salazar with 280 men attacked the front and flanks of the house, Captain Mateo Marín's two small cannon fired on it, Captain José María Gutiérrez with 200 men took the hill behind it, and a battalion from Guanacaste stood in reserve. The filibusters were driven from the corrals into the house. Gutiérrez led his men into the house and was killed, and the house was stormed. Walker writes that within five minutes his whole command, its colonel at its head, was in disorderly retreat. Mora reported that from the first shot to the moment his troops formed up again, fourteen minutes passed.4
How many fought, how many fell
The numbers depend on who counts. Walker gives Schlessinger about 240 men and the Costa Rican advance guard about 500. The Costa Rican government's Boletín Oficial announced the defeat of four hundred filibusters, and the National Library's guide also credits Schlessinger with 400 men.5
Mora's report, as cited by the National Library, lists 19 Costa Rican dead, 4 officers and 15 soldiers, and 26 dead filibusters. A Juan Santamaría museum leaflet gives about 6 officers and 20 soldiers lost on the Costa Rican side and 46 men on the other. Prisoners taken at Santa Rosa were tried by court martial and shot, a fact Walker records with bitterness.6
After Santa Rosa
The victory carried the war into Nicaragua. On 11 April 1856 Mora's army fought Walker at Rivas, and the war went on until Walker surrendered on 1 May 1857, with the armies of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras by then also in the field against him. The house at Santa Rosa is a national monument. It burned in 2001 and was rebuilt, and today it is a museum inside Santa Rosa National Park, part of the Área de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage site.7
