The Queen of the Savannah: A Story of the Mexican War

  CHAPTER I.

  THE ADVENTURERS.

  The daring revolt of the Cure Hidalgo opened against the Spanishgovernment that era of sanguinary struggles and obstinate contestswhich, thirteen years later, on February 24, 1821 was fated to endin the proclamation of Independence by Iturbide at Iguala. Thisproclamation compelled the Viceroy, Apodaca, to abdicate, and theSpaniards finally to abandon these magnificent countries which they hadruled with a hand of iron for more than three centuries. But duringthese thirteen years what blood had been shed, what crimes committed!All Mexico was covered with ruins. The unburied corpses became the preyof wild beasts; towns taken by storm burned like lighthouses, and theflames were extinguished in the blood of their massacred inhabitants.

  The Mexicans, badly armed and disciplined, learning through their verydefeats the art of beating their conquerors, struggled with the energyof despair; incessantly defeated by the old Spanish bands, but neverdiscouraged, deriving strength from their weakness and their firmdesire to be free, they ever stood upright before their implacablefoes, who might kill them, but were powerless to subjugate them.

  In no country of the New World did the Spaniards offer so long anddesperate a resistance to revolution as in Mexico, for Spain was awarethat once this inexhaustible source of wealth was lost, her influenceand prestige in the Old World would be utterly destroyed. Hence ithappened that the Spaniards quitted Mexico as they entered it, on ruinsand piles of corpses. And their power, inaugurated by Hernando Cortesby the light of arson, and amid the cries of the victims, slipped inthe blood of millions of murdered Indians, and was stifled by theirbodies. It was a hideous government, the offspring of violence andtreachery, and, after three centuries, violence and treachery overthrewit. It was a grand and sublime lesson which Providence gave the despotsthrough the inflexible logic of history, and yet despots have everrefused to understand it.

  We shall resume our narrative on September 20, 1820, between five andsix in the afternoon, at a period when the struggle having been atlength equalized between the two parties, was growing more lively anddecisive. The scene is still laid in the same part of the viceroyaltyof New Spain in which the prologue was enacted, that is to say, theProvince of Coahuila; owing to its remoteness from the centre, and itssituation on the Indian border, this province had suffered less thanthe others, though the traces of war could be seen at each step.

  The rich and numerous haciendas which formerly studded the landscapewere nearly all devastated, the fields were uncultivated and deserted,and the country offered an aspect of gloomy desolation painful tocontemplate. The revolution, violently compressed by the Spaniards,was smouldering beneath the ashes; a hollow fermentation was visible onthe surface, and the Indian guerillas who had not ceased their partizanwarfare, were beginning to combine and organize, in order to deal theCastilian colossus a decisive blow. The insurrection of the Spanishliberals, by creating fresh embarrassments for the mother country,restored Mexico, not its courage, for that had never faltered duringthe long struggle, but the hope of success; on both sides preparationswere being made in the dark, and the explosion could not long bedelayed.