Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 21
XXI.
CONVERSATIONS BY THE WAY WITH A COLONEL.
I.
ITURBIDE was the subject of confab between the colonel and myself as we jogged along the way; and this led naturally up to Maximilian. My companion had served under Escobedo in the campaign in which Maximilian was overthrown, and had witnessed his execution at the tragic Cerro de las Campanas.
"He died like a true soldier," said the colonel. "He was not afraid; though he deserved his fate, and I would not have had it otherwise."
It seems to be the general verdict that this ill-starred ruler was not without the physical fortitude which is esteemed a part of the heritage of princes. But he was better fitted for many other things than the task of fastening a monarchy upon belligerent Mexico. I drew the conversation, when an opening appeared, to the present novel relations of Mexico with our own country.
"Had I the authority," said the colonel, frankly, "I would never have granted the railroad charters which are making this great bustle. I fear the aggressions of the Americans. The conservative Mexican policy is to grant you such privileges only when they are balanced by others to Europeans. This was the consistent policy of Juarez and Lerdo. It was Porfirio Diaz, during his presidency, who first broke it down and brought this invasion upon us." ` "We, on the contrary, incline to make it one of his merits," I said—"a proof of his superior enlightenment. He stepped over the boundaries of narrow prejudice and jealousy, and allowed a beginning to be made of developing the country by those who were ready to do it, without waiting farther for those who would not."
"His enemies say he was bought," rejoined the colonel, who had evidently no great love for Porfirio. "He has not been wholly above corruption in his time. He made fabulous sums out of the liquidation of the military arrears, for instance. He paid a million dollars for his magnificent hacienda in the state of Oaxaca. Where did that come from? There is a great weakness among us for official corruption. There are too many examples of it. A defaulting person in a high place is rarely punished. When I see a case of that kind treated with severity I shall begin to conceive new hopes."
"But," I argued, "the Americans certainly have no other designs than that of commercial profit. They do not want your country. What Americans have anything to gain by taking it? Who would put his hand in "his pocket to pay the expenses of a war of annexation? We look out for ourselves as individuals, and we fail to see where the profit comes in. We are large enough now to gratify our own vanity on that score. Love of glory and territorial aggrandizement is not one of our national traits. Spoliation might rather be feared at the hands of some ambitious prince, if you had any such for a neighbor, who could turn it to personal account."
"You will not annex us with bayonets," he returned; "you will annex us with dollars. I feel it; I know it. Your great commercial enterprises will insensibly get hold of the vitals of our country, and the rest will follow. Perhaps there may be disturbances, and your government called in to protect the property of investors. There will naturally be sympathy for them at home, and they will move heaven and earth rather than lose. A thousand times better that our country were not developed at all than at such a price."
As I still insisted upon the unreasonableness of this notion, the colonel continued: "Even granting that you are sincere in what you say of the wishes of your people, I feel that it is the manifest destiny of Mexico to be taken by the United States. In former times the Latin races ruled the world, but in this and the coming ages the Saxon race will do it. You are a strong, commercial people, and commerce is the breath of the nostrils of modern civilization. Look at what you have done in California since it ceased to be a Spanish province. I have been at San Francisco—a great, splendid city; I looked upon it with amazement. 'This was once Mexican,' I said to myself. 'Ah, what a different genius from that of Mexico!' Yes, you will get us. It will be the amelioration of many abuses, and our greater prosperity, without doubt; but I hope I shall never live to see the day. As a patriot, as a soldier, I would give my life fifty times over rather than consent to it."
"But, since you concede such benefits as probable," I ventured to say, "what is this patriotism upon which you so strongly insist? We do not want you, and have no designs upon you, but—purely for the sake of argument, and talking as enlightened persons—is it not rather fantastic? Is a boundary-line such an object in itself? May not a good deal that has stood for patriotism in the past be a mere provincial narrowness? Supposing that Mexico, or Canada, without force, but in its own judgment of what was for the good of its people, should desire to become a part of the Union, maintaining its organization in ` states and its local self-government as now, and merely sending delegates to Washington to represent it in national affairs, would you, as a Mexican citizen, feel bound to resist, as if it were the consummation of something scandalous and recreant? Is not the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest advantage, the object of a rational being? Is there any virtue in an essential Mexicanism, Americanism, or Anglicism, that it should be preserved at all hazards?
And, having asked many such-like questions, I endeavored, farther, to explain a view that we may be all approaching a great cosmopolitan period, when we shall be members of a republic of nations, and foreigners, as such, shall nowhere any longer be either dreaded or despised.
"That is all very well," said the colonel, stubbornly, "since the advantage is to fall on your side; but I tell you I would give my heart's blood rather than see it."
As to the value of his prognostication I have no opinion; but this seriousness of conviction about the plans of the Americans from such a source was full of interest. It is held by the bulk of the Mexican people, and it means trouble ahead for the enterprises, since it must increase with their very success.
"Has any party ever been heard of, with you, in favor of annexation?" I went on to ask.
"There is no such party," he replied. "There are none who could favor it — unless, singularly enough, it might be the Church party. Protestant country though you are, with you they could enjoy a greater freedom than here. Since their suppression under the War of the Reform there can be no convents, religious orders, nor monastic schools; but in the United States, I understand, they could have as many as they wished." The colonel was rather fond, as stated, of dwelling upon the soldier's point of view. One day, when he had been writing, as he said, to his mother, he declared, in a gloomy mood, not without its pathos: "That is the only tie that binds me to life. At forty-four, as you see me, I have passed through many disappointments and chagrins. I have little pleasure in the present and no great hopes for the future. Well, that is a proper state of mind for the soldier.
"The soldier," he went on to say, "should be one who either sets little value upon life, and looks to death as a release, or one having a supreme sense of honor, of pride in his profession, and duty to his government. He makes a contract, as it were, with authority. He is well paid and highly considered; in return, he must be ready to spill his blood whenever his employer demands it."
II.
The display of childish selfishness on my companion's part to which I have adverted consisted in getting up one morning and riding off on my horse, without saying
so much as "By your leave." He had cast eyes on it as we went along, judged it to be on the whole preferable to his mule, and in this direct way took possession. The matter was adjusted, but not till it had assumed at one time an almost international aspect. It was in the
coolness resulting from this incident that I rode on alone and first saw Iguala.
The expedition had stopped, after its usual day's march, before sunset, at the tropical hamlet of Platanillo. I was anxious, however, to pass the night instead in the notable city named. The twilight shuts down very rapidly here, and from the estimates of casual informants I ` had miscalculated the distance. " Adelantito, señor, they said, after the inaccurate way of such informants "Just a little way ahead;" "Acá bajito, no mas"—"Right down here; a mere trifle, that is all." I had a distant glimpse or two of it from the pass, while the sun glowed like a beacon-fire on the crests of vast mountains encompassing its little valley. A small lake sparkled in its vicinity, and plantations of cane near it showed a brighter green. Of the town itself, which might have been a mammoth hacienda, only a dome and a few white spots appeared out of the midst of a quadrangle of foliage marked off on all sides to an even line. Then night came on, a dark and cloudy one, though without rain. My horse slipped with me on the steep over rolling stones. It was no longer safe to ride after that, and I led him most of the way, picking out the path in the dark. The view had been very deceptive, and we had many miles to go.
Lonely gulches, brooks, and bits of wood were passed. Cows had gone to sleep in upland pastures, and one occasionally loomed up, a mysterious shape, in the path and took herself out of the way. The rays of a clouded moon gleamed now and then on a white patch of the lake, but the city seemed to have vanished out of existence. At last, however, a dim light in a dome, then a barking of dogs, and audible human voices. All this time there had been neither house nor hut. It was after nine o'clock. I came close up to one of the formal lines of trees, opened a gate in it, and was in the midst of Iguala.
I do not know whether the place has quite advantages enough to offset so much discomfort. What there is to be seen could easily have been taken in the next day on the march. There is no other vestige of Iturbide yielded to inquiry than the house in which the Plan of Iguala is
OUR CAVALCADE AT IGUALA.
But Iguala is charming. A row of clean, white colonnades, made up of square pillars of masonry, supporting red-tiled roofs, extends around a central plaza. The windows of the better residences are closed, not with glass, but projecting wooden gratings of turned posts, painted green. The market, a little paved plaza, opening from the other, consists of a series of double colonnades, light, commodious, and very attractive. The church, of a noble, massive form, made gay by an azure belfry and clock, stands in a grassy enclosure surrounded by posts and chains. Across the way is the zocalo, with brick benches, deep, grateful shade of tamarindos, as large as elms, and arbors draped with sweet-peas in blossom. Such a park, such a church, and such a market could be conscientiously recommended as worthy of any populace in the world. The heads of palm-trees star the heavier, Northern-looking foliage. Grass sprouts plentifully between the cobble-stones, and gives a rural air. A band played in the zocalo in the evening, though there was but a small scattering of persons to hear it.
As I was making a sketch of the zocalo from a portal some very well-dressed young men and a professor came out. It proved that this house was a school, and a pleasant one it seemed.
"Amigo"—friend they said, in a rather patronizing tone, "what is your interest in this place? What is your picturing designed for?"
Three days farther on is Chilpancingo, to which also complimentary terms—in a lesser measure than Iguala— may be applied. It is the capital of this rugged Guerrero, a state named after the patriot general, who was once, like our own Marcos and Vincente Lopez, a muleteer. It contains an ornate Government-house, a zocalo with a music-stand; and we met here a colonel of the detachment of cavalry guarding the country, gotten up in such dapper civilian riding-dress as if for a promenade in Central Park. Population—but populations are hard to get at in Mexico. I should say, at random, for either place, about three thousand people.
At Chilpancingo you see the place in which the original Declaration of Independence of Mexico was proclaimed, in 1813. It had to be fought for many a long year till the day of Itunrbide. This is merely a white house with a tablet, and not of farther interest. It was a wild and problematic cause, truly, when remote Chilpancingo was resorted to by the first constituent Congress, assembled by Padre Morelos, to throw off the yoke of Spain.
But how has all this been done? These little bits of ornate civilization are like enchanted places which we happen upon in penetrating the fastnesses of the mountains. Perhaps we had better take out at once some such commission as that of the Adelantado of the Seven Cities; and yet greater discoveries may await us, never before heard of by man. Each lies in its miniature valley, smiling and fertile, with wagon-roads for a little space around; but their inhabitants can hardly be conceived as going over the wild trail to supply themselves with the fashions and comforts they possess.
Candid judges from without would pronounce it impassable, and think it a practical joke that they were asked to consider it a road. We crossed and recrossed swift, small streams, the water reaching to the animals' shoulders. The colonel had a way of dangling his military boots on such occasions in the water, to let me see how excellently they were made; but one night, I observed, he could not get them off, and the next morning he could not get them on. All of one day we traversed the cañada, or gorge, of Cholitla, over a sandy bed of which the flood had not yet taken possession; another day, the Cañada del Zopilote. Our old friend of the North, the ailanthus, was common where other natural features were dreariest, and often filled the air insufferably with its odor. The three rivers crossing our way were swollen indeed, as had been predicted. When we came down to the wide Mescala it was opaque with red soil, and tearing past at twenty miles an hour. We were transported across it in a flat skiff guided by an oar. There was no plank to aid in the embarking of the horses, and one of them fell into such a panic as caused a terrific combat of well-nigh half an hour. He was finally thrown on board, more dead than alive, with lassoed legs.
"Ah, what a soul you have!" (Ah, que alma tienes!) cried Marcos fervently to his animal, which had well-nigh kicked us all into the river; and losing all policy in his rage, he begged to borrow my revolver, that he might despatch such a brute, of the ownership of which he was ashamed.
The Papagallo River succeeding, we crossed in a dugout, and the animals swam. I asked the colonel, in my simplicity, if this were not more or less like war, meaning the manner of travel, our foraging, half open-air way of sleeping, and the like. He smiled in disdain, and gave me a sketch of his campaigns in the day of the French usurpation. The rightful government had had at one time so little foothold in the country that it was called the Government of Paso del Norte, from the farthest ` town on the northern frontier, to which it was driven. Eating and sleeping seem hardly to have been the custom it all till, by an unremitting guerilla warfare, the tide was turned.
When we came to "the Cajones," however, he admitted that this was a little like war. We slipped and slid all one day down the Cajones—natural, or rather most woefully unnatural, steps in the solid rock, in the midst of a dark forest. The perpendiculars are three and four feet at a time, and often there are mud-holes at the bottom; and besides, there are vines that aim to take you under the chin. The sagacious steadiness of the pack-mules, picking their steps unaided in the most critical situations, was wonderful to see.
We met peons, in white cotton, coming up with barrels of ardent spirits on their shoulders, and we came to a full stop to allow the passage of jingling mule-trains of goods. The water ran in the path with us, courteously sharing its right of way. At one place it increased and converged from every side, and the wood was full of its murmurs, as if another universal deluge were coming to overwhelm us. It was full, also, of patches of pale- green light upon moss-covered stones, and limpid pools, and delicate ferns, like snow crystals turned vegetable. Now and then some white cascade stood out of the sermi-obscurity like a beckoning Undine.
Among vegetable growths on the way was the gum-copal, not unlike our white birch. There was a tree, the cuahuete —if I may trust the pronunciation of Marcos-smooth, bronze-colored, and often of a repulsive red, as if full of blood. We saw a good many charming red-and-yellow flowers on a high bush, like butterflies alighted, and once or twice a sprig of heliotrope and a calla-lily. The amape, found in the villages, and somewhat like the chestnut, was the finest shade-tree. There was a notable absence throughout the journey of what we are accustomed to deem the essentially tropical features. Very often one might have been riding in the woods of Connecticut. There was not even a rank luxuriance of growth, just as there were no serpents nor the swarms of pestiferous insects (other than a few gnats) to have been expected. We saw once a couple of coyote wolves trotting demurely along, and, again, a large iguana, a harmless reptile, one of which I also noted later, gliding around an old bronze gun at the fort of Acapulco.
Birds I hardly recollect at all, except a white heron or two, charmingly reflected in an upland pool one early morning, and the tecuses, a kind of black-bird. Vincente pelted at these latter with small stones, by way of trying his aim. The organ-cactus, however, should be exempted from the complaint of a want of tropicality. It abounds thickly about the gorges and on the mountain slopes. Rising twenty-five feet and more in height, the plants are like seven-branched candlesticks of the Mosaic law, or spears of the gods hurled down and yet quivering in the earth. The fan-palm, too, must be excepted. It crops out on the bleak hill-sides as common as mullein-stalks with us. I can never respect it, in the conservatories, again. To see it thus was a kind of shock : it was like seeing some exotic belle of society masquerading as a kitchen wench. For one day before reaching the coast we had the cocoa-nut palms. Nobody in the hamlets would get the fruit down for us except on a wholesale order, for munificent prices, which brought the cost above what it is in New York. There was often a shortage of the other fruits and commodities, as sugar, in the same way, in or near the very places where they grew.
Toward the concluding stages of the march we fell in with another travelling-companion, an officer in the Customs service. When he learned that the colonel was going to the frontier, with a view, among other things, suppress the extensive smuggling carried on there, said, "You had better make your little $20,000 or $30,000 by protecting it. That will be much less trouble. The smugglers will buy up your soldiers, anyway; it amounts to the same thing."
I must not represent that the colonel was always of an oppressively serious carriage. On the contrary, he developed a vein of humor, the more amusing from the simple good-faith of those at whose expense it was generally exercised.
"Do you charge no more than this to persons of our consideration, my good woman?" he said to a peasant, whose bill was modest, though but in keeping with the primitive nature of the accommodations. "It is a species of affront, as one might say. Do you comprehend that I am a colonel in the army, and this gentleman a learned traveller, noting down the manners and customs of foreign lands? When strangers of our position come this way again understand that double what you have demanded is the least that you should take."
The woman, abashed, received double her fee, and replied that she would bear the lesson in mind for the benefit of future comers.
Again, meeting three honest-faced Indian maids, with pitchers on their heads, going to the spring, he said, "Good-day, Maria" and turning to me, in an aside, "Not that I know, from Adam, whether one of them is Maria or not."
He praised glaringly, to her face, as of exceeding comeliness, a servant-maid who wore gold ear-rings and necklace, and was, perhaps, not of more than average dumpiness and plainness. She waited on us at table at Tierra Colorada. The colonel desired to know her name.
"Victoria."
"Well are you named Victoria!" he cried, in simulated enthusiasm. "Que cara simpática!" ("What a sympathetic face!") he repeated at intervals.
Meekly, and with no suspicion of raillery, she replied, each time, "Mil gracias (A thousand thanks"), señor."
"Give thanks rather to Heaven, which made you so, and not us, who do but recognize it," rejoined the colonel, piously.
At La Venta de Peregrino the night was hot, and it still rained all day. A garden of bananas twenty feet tall grew next to the basket-like house of canes where we stopped. We hung up our wet garments and properties on the poles of the thatched porch, or pavilion, till it resembled one of those very numerous national establishments, the empeños, or pawn-shops. Dogs, cats, donkeys, horses, pigs and fowls—"shooed" out, when they became too familiar, with an emphatic Ooch-t!—gathered under the same shelter, as if it had been Noah's ark. We supped on pepper-sauce, tough chicken, frijoles, tortillas, cream-cheese, and, coffee without milk, spread out upon a mat in the ground. The propietor in person—a man in embroidered shirt and cotton drawers, whose talk was not of the wisest sort—held pitch-pine splints to light the feast.
"Now, how does it happen, hombre," inquired the colonel, as if in a speculative way, "that a person of your fine appearance; a statesman, as one might say, who goes to Dos Arroyos to see who is going to be elected mayor" (the man had been there that day, as he told us), "with a fine house like this—how does it happen, I say, that you have not a table of any sort to serve two travellers a supper upon?"
"Pos bien," said the illiterate host, both pleased and flustered, scratching his head. "Tables? Yes, tables, now, be sure. All that you say is very true, but there is a great scarcity of carpenters in this part of the country. Si, escasen muncho (Yes, they are mighty scarce), I can tell you."
III.
Two days after this we came down to Acapulco. It is a town for the most part of straggling huts, with a straggling thirty-five hundred of people. It has no vestiges of its antiquity but an old Spanish fort, after the order of Morro Castle, dismantled by Maximilian's French on their abandonment of the place.
Near the fort lay a couple of rusted rails in position on a bit of washed-out embankment, the beginning of a rail-road inaugurated here with a flourish on the 5th of May, 1881. Having passed over the line, one would judge that it might be much more than dread of American aggressions which would prevent its speedy completion.
There was no small pleasure in discovering at last, like another Balboa, the Pacific Ocean, in boarding the fine steamer of the Pacific Mail Company, the City of Grenada, which had come her long jaunt from Panama northward, and re-establishing connection with the outer world.
With this, too, began an acquaintance with the western ports of Mexico. One of the semi-monthly steamers, rightly chosen, each month puts into them all. An idea of the country can thus be got which would not be possible otherwise without much greater fatigue and expense, but it is not at all as favorable as that presented by the interior. Neither of the three lower ports is of great size. Acapulco has the most complete and charming harbor. Manzanillo is a small strip of a place, on the beach, built of wood, with quite an American look. The volcano of Colima appears inland, with a light cloud of smoke above it.
THE BELLS OF SAN BLAS.
San Blas is larger, but still hardly more than an extensive thatched village. On the bluff beside it exist the ruins of an ancient, substantial San Blas, shaken to pieces by an earthquake. Some old bronze bells from its church have been brought down and set up on some rude wooden trestles, on the ground in front of the poor chapel, without a belfry, which now fills the ecclesiastical needs of the place. This arrangement is sometimes referred to satirically as la torre de San Blas-the steeple of San Blas. My slight sketch of these bells, made on a fly-leaf my note-book in the first instance, came to have an importance far beyond its own merits. I have the gratification of knowing that it proved to be the source of nothing less than the last inspiration of Longfellow. The great and good poet died on the 24th of March, 1882. In his portfolio was found his final work, "The Bells of San Blas," dated March 15, which afterward appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. His memorandum-book contained a reference, as a suggestion for a poem, to the number and page of Harper's Magazine of the same month, in which the sketch was published.
At Mazatlan we are in a bustling harbor, and a well and handsomely built little city, with improvements and shops of the better sort, which other countries than Mexico might be satisfied with. It seems surprising, until we comprehend the extensive back country which is tributary to it, how a city of but fourteen thousand people can be justified in maintaining so elaborate a stock of goods.
We steam finally across the Gulf of California and up the coast of that peninsula which seems one of the remotest points of the globe. The days are-calm and blue; the bold outlines of the shores offer constant novelty. An arbitrary line is passed : we have lost Mexico, but gained California the richest and most marvellous of her provinces.
It is remarkable now to recall that, upon the accession of the Emperor Iturbide, Mexico boasted of being, with the exception of Russia and China, the most extensive empire in the world.