Kearny was outnumbered. He knew that he could not win and so ordered his men to take cover on a small hill. On the night of December 8, Carson, a naval lieutenant, Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and an Indian scout left Kearny to bring reinforcements from San Diego, away. Carson and the lieutenant removed their shoes because they made too much noise and walked barefoot through the desert. Carson wrote in his "Memoirs", "Finally got through, but had the misfortune to lose our shoes. Had to travel over a country covered with prickly pear and rocks, barefoot."