The friends advised us to leave the place, as they feared secret assassination. We took their advice, and left for San Antonio, one hundred and sixty-five miles west, where we took our family in a few weeks, and spent the winter of 1864-5. On the first day of March, 1865, the writer took an ambulance stage—a sort of private irregular affair—for Matamoras, having for company, beside the driver, a lady and two children, going to her husband there, and placed under our care. The driver had never been through on the route before. We got along quite well the first three or four days, having a change of mules each day. But one afternoon we took the wrong road, and brought up ten o'clock at night, lost in the middle of, so to speak, a shoreless prairie. The mules exhausted, the driver turned them out to graze for the night, with forty feet of stake rope between each pair.
The lady and her children were settled for the night in the stage, and the driver and ourself took the accustomed ground bed. At break of day the writer awoke, and raised his head to look for the grazing mulos, but could not see nor hear them. Suspecting they might have taken leave of absence, the driver was instantly awakened, and he followed the rope trail in the road we had come the night before, a half a mile back, and then it suddenly changed to the right oblique, and was lost in the trackless prairie grass. The sun was two hours high, and it was Sunday morning. It felt like Sunday all round. No sign of civilized life in view on that ocean prairie. Here and there could be seen, forty and eighty rods off, the hungry Spanish wolf seated in quiet watchfulness, and patiently longing for a human meal. Our provision box was nearly empty; the children were crying for water, and we had none, and could not tell when we would have any. Nine o'clock came, and no driver nor mules yet. He had gone northward, and the writer struck out toward the rising sun in search of the missing animals. We had gone about a mile, and saw a mile or two further in the distance two men on horseback, driving a large herd of cattle and horses. We followed them as rapidly as our pedestrian qualities would permit, and when on an elevation, within possible hailing distance, say half a mile, we raised an Indian whoop, and imagined ourselves considerable of an Indian in the whooping line just then, as there was a strange feeling of life and death about it. We succeeded in making them hear, got their attention, and by waving a white signal, succeeded in drawing them to us. They were Mexicanos, not able to understand a word of English. Fortunately we could make them understand the situation, in their own language, the Spanish. We gave them two Spanish dollars to go and hunt the mules. They were gone an hour and returned, handing back our money, saying the umbra had the mules. We took but one dollar, giving them the other for their honesty. "Adios, Senor," and off they rode. Just then we saw the driver coming with the mules, two miles off. At first they looked like one immense animal about forty feet high, mounted by a man twenty feet more. This illusive effect was produced by the prairie mirage. About noon the mules were in harness again and moving.
At four in the afternoon we reached water at a Mexican Ranche. The children were nearly famished from thirst, as they had been twenty-four hours without water. And here we struck the lost road again, twenty-eight miles from Rio Grande City, on the Rio Grande, called Ringgold Barracks during the Mexican war with the United States, named for Major Ringgold, who was killed there.
We passed down the river on the Texas side with a fresh team, crossing it by ferry, at Edinburg, and then we took the stage on the Mexican side, one hundred and fifty miles to Matamoras. We made that distance on the finest road we ever saw, in just twelve hours. The next stage that came through was captured, and robbed by the cut-throat Cortinas, who is dignified in the military world with the title of General. The splendid stage line was thereby compelled to haul off, to the great annoyance and detriment of the traveling public.
We will here record a tragic incident to illustrate the savage character of this half-breed semi-barbarian Cortinas. But it is quite enough to mantle with patriotic shame the American cheek, to know that a high Federal officer was particeps criminis in the foul play.
Don Manuel G. Rejon was a Spanish gentleman, of fine personal appearance, in whose veins ran the pure Castilian tide, an eminent lawyer, and a member of the Mexican Congress. In April, 1864, owing to the political disturbances which occurred in the States of Nueva Leon and Coahuila, he fled to Brownsville, Texas, and thought himself secure under the protection of the United States flag.
Jose M. Iglesias, one of President Juarez's Ministers, was at this time in Matamoras, and solicited the extradition of Rejon. General F. J. H., commanding the Federal forces on the lower Rio Grande, turned him over to the Mexican authorities.
The surrender of a political refugee like Rejon, that he might be put to death by his enemies, never occurred before in the United States. The famous, or rather infamous, Cortinas was then Governor of the State of Tamaulipas, and in obedience to the arrogant orders of Minister Iglesias, caused him to be shot. A father's prayers, a woe-stricken wife's tears, and the piteous wailings of his children, did not avail to save the unfortunate Rejon.
General H., after having surrendered Rejon, applied for the extradition of a certain Confederate agent, who resided at Monterey; but his wishes were not gratified by the Mexican authorities. We believe the name of the agent was J. A. Quintero.
The surrender of the fated Rejon was a gross outrage upon the principles of civilized warfare, and was done with the moral foreknowledge of the bloody fate that awaited him. The act was as if surrendered to the tender mercies of Indians! And though General H. might have been actuated by a desire to secure the surrender of the Confederate agent Quintero, yet this furnishes no palliation for the unprecedented action. The act remains a blistering stigma upon the General, as it should; and is an unvarnished disgrace to the United States service—inexcusable, inhuman, and savagely mean; showing that even a Federal General, in one instance at least, could hob-a-nob in cut-throatism with the infamous Cortinas. In our view, it was a high-handed stroke of arrogance, unauthorized by military precedent or necessity, and should have resulted in cashiering General H., and dismissing him from the service in disgrace.