In all our camping experience we found the four or five days from Laredo to Matamoras the most forlorn and depressing, partly perhaps from the accumulated fatigue and exposure incident to repeated trips of a similar nature. There were not even the usual number of jeccals (huts) by the road-side to enliven the mournful scene. At long intervals two or three small collections of adobe huts, surrounding the inevitable dusty plaza, marked as many towns. On the scrubby bushes around these, thin, ragged slabs of raw beef hung, drying in the sun, presenting at a short distance much the appearance of red-flannel garments in various stages of dilapidation. The stiff raw hides used for beds were tilted against the sides of the jeccals to air, and to afford the multitudes of fleas opportunity to stretch their legs. A few frowsy women with stone matets were laboriously grinding corn for tortillas, while the lords of creation sunned themselves in the doorways, or majestically strutted before the dingy shops that surrounded the plaza. At these uninviting places we usually halted for fresh water and hot tortillas. At Mier, the chief town on the route, there was a rest of several hours. After leaving, Zell, our driver, told us that our old Delia, who was so afraid of going for goat’s milk on the first visit to the frontier, and who disappeared the morning we left Piedras Negras to return into Texas, had drifted down to Mier, and was living there.
On the narrow roads leading from one of these dirty towns to the next there was little to break the monotony save the frequent meeting of Mexican trains, generally composed of twenty large Chihuahua wagons, each drawn by twelve mules, returning from Matamoras, where they had delivered loads of cotton-bales brought from the interior of Texas. The vociferations of the gayly decked drivers and the loud cracking of whips could be heard long before they were in sight, affording us ample time to turn out of the way, among the trodden and dusty bushes on the road-side.
We knew that Maximilian was occupying the city of Mexico, and that the flag of the French army floated over the centers of Mexican civilization. The ignorant and apparently apathetic people whom we met on the Rio Grande border did not seem even to know this much; still less were they able to give us any information of the progress of the invasion. Our last custom-house transactions were with the officers of the Juarez government, who conducted their business and collected their fees in apparent blissful ignorance of national complications.
Arriving at Matamoras early in the afternoon, we drove like tired, travel-stained emigrants straight to the plaza—direct, as though we had been there a dozen times before, for the cathedral and public buildings that surrounded it were conspicuous sign-posts that indicated the spot to which all the chief streets converged. We were surprised to find the city in the hands of the French, garrisoned and picketed by an invading army! Only a short time before our arrival, Mejia, the brave Mexican-Indian general, who embraced the cause of Maximilian, and thereby forfeited his life by the side of that ill-starred prince, had, by a forced march from Monterey with an army of French and Mexican troops, surprised and captured Cortinas, who held the garrison at Matamoras.
A few miles away, on the south bank of the Rio Grande, the Mexican Government held possession; the opposite bank was under Confederate control. Here the French were exulting over the capture of the city; and across the river the Federal army occupied Brownsville—the flags of four nationalities floating almost in sight of each other, amid the
“Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.”
The first night we secured a room facing the plaza. It was found necessary for me to make a personal appeal to the proprietor of the posada adjoining it, coupled with a promise to procure other quarters the next day, before he would consent to vacate it for our temporary use. We might as well have sat up in the ambulance all night, tired as we were, so far as rest and sleep were concerned. The posada did not close its doors till a very late hour, and if the stamping of feet, clicking of glasses, odor of liquors, and hum of voices, were not commotion enough to disturb our rest, the success was rendered complete by the steady tramp and challenge of sentinels passing and repassing with military precision all night long. Glad enough were we to find, on the morrow, a small, one-story stone house of two rooms, remote from the noises and disturbances in the garrison buildings, near the grand plaza. Here we spread once more the old ambulance mattress over boxes and trunks, where we could rest our weary bones and aching heads.
Dodds was the only man I saw who walked around fearlessly night or day. He was as brave a specimen of manhood as ever lived, and, though in a foreign country, in the midst of a revolution, and wholly unacquainted with the language, he moved about as independently as if on his native heath. How we laughed one night when he walked in upon us, and, being asked if he was not afraid of the sentinels that were at every corner, replied: “No, I have the password; why! when one of them lightning-bug fellows” (alluding to the lanterns they carried) “ses to me, ‘King Beebe!’ (‘Quien vive!’) I jes ses back to him—‘Lem me go!’ (‘Amigo!’) and they let me go right on.”
In a few days I was surprised in my obscurity by an invitation from Messrs. Helld and Fromm, the leading German merchants of the city, to witness from their balcony a review, by General Mejia, of the French troops. Much as war had been the topic of thought and conversation for almost four years, and painful as had been our experience of the effects of it, I had never seen a review of troops that had been in active service.
General Mejia, short, broad-shouldered, compact, with strongly marked Indian physiognomy and unusual dark complexion, was every inch a soldier, having a bearing that was almost majestic.