A PLOT AGAINST THE WRITER'S LIFE--MORE ABOUT TEXAS.
In July, 1864, being in trade at B----m, and having been for two years
doing a commission, receiving, and forwarding business, besides buying
and selling on his own account, the writer called one day at the
Collector's office, in the court-house, to pay the quarter's two and a
half per cent. taxes on sales. The Collector being absent, he inquired
of a squad of men at one of the front doors of the court-house--among
whom was his Honor District Judge S----d--if they had seen the
Collector. Just then a man came hurriedly pressing through the squad,
and approaching us asked if our name was N----. We had no sooner said
yes, than he struck us over the mouth, cutting both lips nearly through
on the teeth, accompanying the blow with the denunciatory charge: "You
d--d scoundrel and thief, you have stolen $23 from my wife."
In quick succession six or eight more blows followed the first, when,
bringing into requisition the little knowledge of the "gloves" obtained
in boyhood, we succeeded in warding them off. His poor success as a
pugilist drove him to the use of an office chair, whose blows were
received with another. Then he changed to hurling the chair at us with
all vengeance, which we received as before, until both chairs were
demolished. By this time we were in the court-house yard, when our
personal friend, Deputy-sheriff Hardin, came to the rescue, caught Mr.
T----d, our assailant, under his powerful right arm, and held him as in
a vise. By this time our assailant's brother appeared on the field, and
ordered the Sheriff to release his brother, saying: "It is all right
to whip the d--d Yankee." "No, Sir," replied the officer, "if you want
to hurt Mr. N. you must hurt me." He released him on a promise to keep
the peace. Meanwhile, we saw a dozen men circled around us, armed with
revolvers. We could see the devil in each eye. We then began to suspect
a plot. But what could the charge mean? The explanation had come to us.
We remembered the clerk had said some lady had brought to the store a
lot of dress goods, and requested their sale for her account at certain
prices. That he had sold them for the gross amount of $230, taking out
the usual ten per cent. commission of $23, and paid her the balance. We
made a statement of the facts to the circle of desperadoes, and then
retired to our house.
The next day, from a couple of friends, leading men in times of peace,
but nowhere in such times, we learned what the plot was. The low class
hated our presence in their midst, and business success, and in their
bitterness would drive us from the country or kill us. The $23 matter
was to be used as a pretext for the attack, hoping thereby to provoke
retaliation as a further excuse for shooting us down, and in case of
failure his confederates were to reinforce him.
They seemed to calculate pretty safely that a dozen of them, at least,
could dispatch _one_ unarmed Yankee. A calculation very different from
that which they boasted at the opening of the war, that "one Southern
man could whip just one dozen Yankees." Yes, our assailant swore
vehemently that "he preferred fighting Yankees at home rather than in
the field." We replied, "very likely, if unarmed."
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.
In a few weeks the writer's family came to him in Matamoras; five
hundred miles they came alone, with a lady traveling companion, through
a wilderness country, camping out fourteen nights, the Spanish Coyotas
making night hideous with their Scottish bagpipe combination of
screeching, howling sounds. The country covered much of the way with
Mesquite and Cactus "Chaparral." Very little water, except in puddles
by the wayside. Our youngest child, eighteen months old, sickened
from the water, and nearly died at Matamoras. The overdone condition
of Mrs. N., from personal exposure, mental anxiety and fear, she has
never fully recovered from. We are vain enough to think that few women
could have shown equal heroism under similar experience, and lived
through it. Doubtless the experience of previous years in the Methodist
Itinerancy had prepared her for such emergencies. We know not, indeed,
what we can endure until put to the test.
Only two weeks before making this journey, the family had been flooded
out in San Antonio by the sudden rise in the San Antonio River,
eighteen feet in two hours. They barely escaped with their lives,
losing nearly everything in the line, of household goods--carpets, five
feather beds, mattresses, a lot of elegant parlor books, and among them
an elegant gold-clasp family Bible, containing the family record, worth
thirty dollars and otherwise valuable as a gift of former years. The
flood was caused by a sudden discharge of an immense water-spout from
the heavens, a few miles above the city in the San Antonio Valley. The
water-spout had come from the Gulf, a hundred and fifty miles or more,
and discharged itself in the valley, throwing the river over its banks.
The writer was in Mexico at the time.