Mexico had fallen. The hectic, iniquitous war was at an end. Vera Cruz and Popocatepetl had become names of new meaning. The capital city itself had surrendered.
To-day, the United States, in the person of its armies’ commander, was to receive formal notification of the fall of the last native stronghold.
And Scott had turned the war-drama’s last scene into a pageant.
To the strains of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” the local army’s best regiment was going through wondrous evolutions before coming to a halt opposite the dais. The local Mexican authorities, their speeches ready, stood waiting to step forward to the dais and deliver them.
Among the dais’s civilian occupants, a Congressman and a foreign chargé d’affaires were to follow with suitable addresses. And General Scott himself was to reply with a few well-chosen remarks; his military secretary having done the choosing.
Altogether, it was an affair worthy of full-page accounts in all the administration newspapers throughout the United States, and for a paragraph or two in history.
(That neither the newspapers nor history made much if anything of it was wholly due to a dusty man in fatigue uniform who was just then riding a very tired horse toward the plaza.)
Mexico had fallen.
More than a decade earlier the gringo pioneers in Texas had clashed with the Mexican lords of the soil. And, after many a bloody conflict, red with mediæval barbarity, they had seized Texas from Mexico and made a republic of it.
Later the Lone Star republic had been annexed to the United States. Mexico had protested. Then our government had declared that Texas not only belonged to the United States, but that its southern boundary was the Rio Grande, instead of the Nueces River.