For men who had grown up in the green river valleys and fertile farmland of Missouri, the scorched landscape of southern Texas had all the charm of a den of rattlesnakes—desolate, arid, and hot beyond belief, it was festering with desperadoes. They trailed after the battalion like wolves hoping to pick off strays from a cattle herd, waiting for a moment’s inattention. Despite some grousing from the men, Shelby determined that the only way to frustrate the outlaws, since he could not waste time chasing them down, was to maintain the same pattern of watches and patrols that had kept them alive for four years of roaming cavalry excursions and semi-guerrilla warfare.
On the second night out of San Antonio, D. A. Williams was returning with ten men from a provisions foray to rejoin the regiment. With him were seven mules laden with grain purchased from a nearby ranch. Williams sent one of his men, George Cruzen, ahead on point. Alone on the rutted path, under a blazing full moon, Cruzen heard a stallion whinny. The noise came from a dry streambed in an arroyo that the road crossed—a defile perfectly designed for an ambush. Cruzen dismounted and led his horse back a hundred paces, tying him loosely to a chaparral bush. Dropping down to the streambed, he crept forward until he saw, around a bend, about thirty armed men waiting silently. Cruzen returned cautiously to his horse and walked it back toward Williams.
Williams pondered what to do. The ambushers were situated between him and Shelby. He could not retreat, and if he tried to go around them, he would probably be discovered and attacked. He might send Cruzen to get Shelby to attack from the other side of the arroyo, but that would take too long. So he did what he had seen Shelby do so often during the war: He attacked, leading his small band back to the dry gulch where the outlaws waited, and creeping up on them silently. His men were spotted at the last moment. Both sides opened fire. Within minutes the outlaws were dead, as were five of Williams’s men.
What is remarkable about this episode is that only weeks earlier most of the antagonists had been on the same side, fighting against the Yankees. The ferocity and brutality of the encounter is all the more stark for the quickness with which it, like the dead men, is dispatched by John Edwards, whose account this is. Subsequent encounters south of the border with Indians, Mexican bandits, and followers of Benito Juárez would follow the same pattern: explosive action, no quarter given, and a heap of bodies on whom no sympathy or tears are wasted. In this instance, the result was worth the cost—there were no further attacks on the Missourians by renegade Texans.
Shelby’s response the following day1 to another challenge, this one from a pursuing federal detachment, was just as intransigent. He was aware, in a general way, that the Union was pouring troops into Texas—more than thirty thousand men, the size of Kirby Smith’s army at its largest during the war. They were led by General Philip Sheridan, after Grant and Sherman the Union’s most popular and most capable cavalry officer—it was Sheridan who had neutralized the Confederate cavalry superiority in the eastern theater, killing Jeb Stuart in the process. Grant ordered Sheridan to establish order in Texas and to secure the border from Confederate forces like Shelby’s that refused to surrender and tried to cross into Mexico. Sheridan gave that assignment to General Frederick Steele, who brought a special zeal to the task: Shelby’s success the previous year in preventing him from linking up with General Banks had resulted in the Union’s failure to conquer Texas and had blighted Steele’s promising career. By May 31, 1865, Steele had reached Brownsville, and on June 20 he was a hundred miles up the Rio Grande, in Roma. His goal was to reach Eagle Pass, another two hundred miles to the northwest, and seal the border.
The morning after the fight with the renegade Texans, two scouts who had been covering the rear of Shelby’s column confirmed his anticipation of federal pursuit: A cavalry brigade, including a six-gun artillery battery, was about seventeen miles behind them. Shelby sent for Jim Moreland, a poised and articulate young officer. He handed Moreland a note to give to the Union brigade commander: “My scouts inform me that you have about three thousand men, and that you are looking for me. I have only one thousand men, and yet I should like to make your acquaintance. I will probably march from my present camp about ten miles further today, halting on the high road between San Antonio and Eagle Pass. Should you desire to pay me a visit, you will find me at home until day after tomorrow.”
The Union commander, a Colonel Johnson, received Moreland “with all the courtesy of a wartime adversary,” and the young officer delivered Shelby’s insouciant challenge—“at home,” indeed—with appropriate punctilio. Johnson appeared ready to accept it; by nightfall he was camped just five miles from Shelby. He had an overwhelming advantage in numbers and artillery—Shelby’s boast of a thousand men was hugely exaggerated, and he had long since dumped all but two of the field pieces he had found earlier as too cumbersome to haul around. But despite a few feints the following morning, Johnson held his fire and did not pursue the Confederates as they re-formed their column and continued their march. The war had been over for more than three weeks now, and Shelby assumed that Johnson was unwilling to shed his men’s blood in order to stop a former enemy from leaving the country. There is no record of General Steele’s reaction to his lost opportunity to exact revenge for his forced retreat from Camden the previous year.
General Kirby Smith may have applauded Shelby’s defiant response to Colonel Johnson, understanding that he could hardly have done otherwise—the pace of Shelby’s journey southward was dictated by his slow supply wagons and the two field pieces. But either because he was alarmed at the proximity of Union troops, or simply impatient, Kirby Smith announced that he planned to go ahead with three of his friends to Eagle Pass and risk the trip to Mexico City alone. Shelby sent Maurice Langhorne with half a dozen men to escort the party to the border. When they parted at the Rio Grande, Langhorne told Shelby afterward, Kirby Smith said that if all his men had been up to the standard set by Shelby’s, he would not now be going into exile. The unforgiving John Edwards, when he heard this story, said that if Kirby Smith himself had been up to Shelby’s standard, all of their fates might have been vastly different.
The former commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department,2 the austere and dignified ruler of “Kirby-Smithdom,” was then ferried across the river into Mexico. Aboard a mule, he wore baggy flannel trousers and a calico shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a silk bandanna tied around his neck “a la Texas,” he recalled later. He carried a revolver in his belt and a shotgun across his saddle. Everything else he had left behind, he wrote to his wife, “except a clear conscience and a sense of having done my duty.” With “a light purse but a heavy heart” he entered the scorching desert of an alien nation. As he did so, he was surprised by a “feeling of lightness and joy” at being no longer the commander but just “plain Kirby Smith relieved from all cares and responsible only for my own acts.”
Shelby had both more and less freedom3 of action than did Kirby Smith. As the elected leader of his men, he could be confident that they would follow his commands on the field, as they had when they waited obediently for Johnson’s charge. But decisions beyond the tactical—such as to whom they would offer their services in Mexico, or even if they would stay together as a unit—were up to the men. Those decisions had yet to be made as they reached the dusty Texas town of Eagle Pass, on about June 29, 1865. Shelby wasted no time in displaying the Confederate flag that he had been presented two years earlier by the ladies of a small Arkansas town: “Let it ever be on the crest of battle,” John Edwards had said then. Now it flew over the battalion as it formed a menacing line along the bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. Shelby placed his howitzers so that their shells could easily land three hundred yards away in the middle of the Mexican town of Piedras Negras, named after the black shale that lined the river.
Shelby thus presented his visiting card to General Andreas Viesca, governor of the state of Coahuila. More than two thousand Mexican soldiers were stationed near Piedras Negras. If Viesca chose to deny him entry into Mexico, Shelby would have to fight his way across or return to face Sheridan’s army. He sent a man under a flag of truce across the river to request a meeting. Viesca agreed, and the two men sat down that afternoon in the town square under the watchful eyes of Shelby’s artillerists.
Viesca and Shelby each carried the burden of his country’s history and character. Viesca was bilingual in English and Spanish, polished, and opaque, more politician than soldier; Shelby was, according to Edwards, “blunt, abrupt, a little haughty and suspicious.” Though Viesca had the power to stop Shelby from entering Mexico, Shelby could reduce the adobe huts of Piedras Negras to rubble from the safety of Eagle Pass. As a man on the run from the United States, he need not feel bound by its rules against violating international borders. Viesca, however, knew that Benito Juárez, hoping for continued support from Washington, would certainly forbid any incursion by Mexican forces into Texas, even to silence Confederate guns.
Shelby’s threat was an effective way to make the point that he was a force to be reckoned with, but it may have been unnecessary. As a highly placed Juárez official, Viesca was probably aware of Preston Blair’s plan for a united Confederate-Union force that would evict the French from Mexico, and of Juárez’s approval of that idea in principle. The Confederacy was no more, but the French were still very much a presence in Mexico. Viesca could have had no doubt that Shelby was dangerous but must have hoped that he could persuade him to side with Juárez rather than Maximilian.
For Viesca, as for many Americans, it was clear that Benito Juárez was Mexico’s only hope for freedom from French oppression—an oppression that was particularly galling because Mexico had only recently, after three centuries of Spanish rule, won its independence by force. That proud year was 1821, about the time of Viesca’s birth. By 1835, Mexico had become nearly as large as the United States in territory, claiming a third of today’s contiguous forty-eight states—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California among them. But the country’s population was small and impoverished: About seven million mestizos and Indians were ruled by a tiny minority claiming Spanish blood. These privileged few were the rich landowners, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, and a military claque so corrupt that it fielded nearly as many officers as ordinary soldiers. Opposing this cabal were various reformers, idealistic but disorganized and given to quarreling among themselves, who championed the cause of the illiterate peasants.
Beset for decades by violent internecine strife, the Mexicans were incapable of governing the vast regions of the north. In Texas, particularly, they ruled in name only—in 1836, when Texas declared its independence, there were ten Americans (about thirty-five thousand) for every Mexican living in the state. The rest of what would become the American Southwest and California were also soon peopled by Americans eager for land and convinced of their “manifest destiny” to create a nation that would sweep from sea to shining sea.
In 1846, war between Mexico and the United States erupted over Texas and California. An American expeditionary force quickly defeated the Mexican army; the result was the forced sale by Mexico to the United States of half its territory, two-thirds the size of the immense Louisiana Purchase of 1803. (The emotions roused both in the United States and in Mexico by this reordering of two huge nations are still hot today; a 2008 ad in Mexico for Absolut vodka that featured a map of the United States and Mexico as they looked before the war of 1846 delighted the Mexicans as much as it outraged American conservatives.)
Washington paid the Mexicans the equivalent of $300 million in today’s currency for their northern territories, a generous act by the standards of international conquest. But the money was quickly stolen or squandered. The Mexican government then sold high-yield bonds on the international market to stay afloat and by 1860 was mired in debt to England, France, and Spain. Benito Juárez became president in 1858; in 1861, after winning reelection, he declared a moratorium on interest payments to the bondholders, who threatened to collect the debts by force, if necessary. England soon backed away from that idea, as did Spain, nearing the last stages of its own collapse. But Napoléon III saw an opportunity for France to re-create and even to expand its once-grand overseas empire, this time in Latin America. In January 1862 he landed about 2,500 troops at Veracruz. It would take the French many thousands more men and a year and a half of fighting before the Mexican army backing Juárez was defeated.
Juárez escaped to the northern state of Chihuahua—and then eventually, for a time, to New York City. Thousands of his men, now called Juaristas, Liberals, or republicans, remained to fight a war of attrition against the invaders, many of them as loosely organized guerrillas. They controlled vast areas of the countryside, leaving the cities to the French. In 1864, Maximilian, younger brother of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef, was named emperor of Mexico. But the power behind the throne was the French army, including a large detachment of international troops belonging to the French foreign legion.
Official Washington policy as well as President Lincoln’s personal sympathies had long favored Juárez over both his Conservative opponents in Mexico and his imperialist creditors abroad. Now that the Civil War had ended, Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward, who had been retained by President Andrew Johnson, was able to devote more attention to getting rid of the French. The last thing he wanted to see was huge numbers of Americans, former Confederates especially, heading into Mexico and propping up the European interlopers.
All of which meant that Shelby had strong reasons for wanting to accept the proposal Viescas now made him. It was an attractive offer: Shelby was to remain in Piedras Negras for two or three months, drawing other Americans to serve under him against Maximilian. Shelby assured Viesca that he could recruit twenty thousand men within that period. He would then march two hundred miles due south to the French stronghold at Monterrey, manned by about two thousand foreign legionnaires and Zouaves, and attack and defeat them. His reward would be military control of Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo Leon—all of northeast Mexico, including two hundred miles of the Gulf Coast down to Tampico, ensuring virtually complete control of shipping between the United States and eastern Mexico.
In return, Shelby would have to swear his allegiance, and that of his men, to Juárez. Shelby told Viesca he would reply to his proposition the following day; first he had to meet with his men and secure their agreement.
The last time Shelby had received such an intriguing offer was from Frank Blair, just as the Civil War was beginning in May 1861. Partly as a result of having turned down the chance to become a Union officer, he was now being given a chance to begin his life again, at thirty-five. John Edwards speculated that visions of conquest danced before his old friend’s eyes: “After he once got a foothold in the country,” Shelby would rule not just these desolate eastern provinces but could perhaps move west to capture the fabled gold mines of Sonora, and eventually—why not?—all of Mexico. The French had taken it with fewer men than Shelby would be able to raise.
These dreams were probably better suited to the romantic Edwards than to Shelby, who was more hardheaded. But Shelby did do his best to persuade his battalion that Viesca’s offer was one that they should all think seriously about accepting: “If you are all of my mind, boys, and will take your chances along with me, it is Juarez and the Republic from this time on until we die here, one by one, or win a kingdom. We have the nucleus of a fine army—cannon, muskets, ammunition, some good prospects for recruits.”
But the boys were emphatically not “all of his mind.” Though Shelby was less prejudiced than most of his class, he was surrounded by others who cherished a white, midwestern, Anglo-Saxon contempt for blacks, Mexicans, and all those other dark-hued people whom Tennyson had called “lesser breeds without the law.” How, they asked him, could they trust Viesca, or any Mexican, to keep his word? Why should they side with Juárez, who had supported Abe Lincoln and been supported in turn by the Union? Who did they have more in common with—the French, who had fought side by side with their ancestors against the British, or a bunch of greasers no better than niggers? And even if they did throw in with Juárez, how likely was it that they could raise more men, with Sheridan closing down the border?
In the end, it was Shelby’s admired Virginia Military Institute comrade Ben Elliott, four times wounded during the war, who summed up the feelings of the rest: “General, if you order it, we will follow you into the Pacific Ocean. But we are all Imperialists, and would prefer service under Maximilian.”
Shelby was stunned by the almost unanimous opposition to Viesca’s offer. He tried to make the men see sense, arguing that President Andrew Johnson would surely direct General Grant to expel the French by force if they did not soon commit to leaving Mexico under their own steam. If the Missourians now took up arms for the French, they would be enlisting for another lost cause, this one more hopeless than the Confederacy had ever been—and this time not fighting on and for their own sacred soil but a thousand miles from home.
But when the men stood firm, Shelby said their decision would be his, too. They would march directly to Monterrey to tell the French of their willingness to serve the emperor Maximilian: “Let no man repine. You have chosen the Empire. Your fate shall be my fate, and your fortune my fortune.” He promised to inform Viesca of their unanimous decision the following day.
But to Edwards, as they returned to their tent, he said: “Poor, proud fellows. They would rather starve under the Empire than feast in a Republic.” They would all be lucky to escape death by famine if not “by fusillade” against a wall.
In the meantime, still thinking ahead like a good cavalry officer, Shelby devised a way to avoid such a disaster. He would take his men all the way across Mexico to the Pacific coast city of Mazatlán, about four hundred miles southwest of Monterrey. There the Juarist forces were weaker than elsewhere and would pose less of a threat to his men. If Maximilian sent him word in Mazatlán accepting his offer of military assistance, he could raise more volunteers from among the thousands of ex-Confederate soldiers who were already fleeing westward. If Maximilian said no thanks, Shelby and his men could easily return to the United States by way of Arizona or California without having to face the kind of strong federal troop presence that lurked north of the Rio Grande.
The next morning, July 1, 1865,4 Shelby gathered his senior officers in the shallows of the Rio Grande to bury the flag. Edwards recalled the flag’s origins in Arkansas and how it had “gleamed grandly through the smoke and sorrow” of scores of battles. Now, faded and torn, “it was displayed once more to its followers before the swift waves of the Rio Grande closed over it forever.” Alonzo Slayback, described by Edwards as a “beau sabreur,” tried afterward to catch the moment in poetry, in a requiem that ended:
They buried then that flag and plume in the
River’s rushing tide,
Ere that gallant few
Of the tried and true
Had been scattered far and wide.
And that group of Missouri’s valiant throng,
Who had fought for the weak against the strong—
Who had charged and bled
Where Shelby led,
Were the last who held above the wave
The glorious flag of the vanquished brave,
No more to rise from its watery grave!
By noon, Shelby had his men, horses, mules, wagons, and artillery across the river and encamped just outside Piedras Negras. After telling Elliott and Slayback to come for him with guns at the ready if he was not back within an hour, he left to give Viesca the bad news—that his men preferred to fight on the side of the French, and he was bound to join them despite his own preference for Juárez. Viesca simply shrugged and said Shelby was free to do as he chose; he could do nothing to hinder him. The French were doomed if they tried to stay, and Shelby was a fool to join them.
But if he did insist on going to Monterrey, Viesca said, Shelby should be aware that there were only two routes to follow. One was a good road, but it was controlled by Juaristas far more aggressive than Viesca was. The other route was less a road than a path, winding through the low and high deserts before it led to a difficult series of mountain passes. It was infested with bandidos and Apaches, so dangerous that the Juaristas and the French alike stayed clear of it. In neither case could the Americans be bogged down with a wagon train and artillery. Would Shelby sell him the supplies and munitions he did not need?
Shelby sent a man back5 to tell Slayback and Elliott he would be delayed and settled in for an afternoon of haggling with Viesca over money and terms of sale. Luckily for Shelby, Piedras Negras was not a poor town, for all its bedraggled appearance. There was a new customs house built to handle the wartime cotton and arms trade that until a few months ago had been collecting more than $50,000 a month in duties. The town abounded in cantinas and shops of every description, whose owners could be pressed by the authorities to contribute to a worthy cause. The upshot was that Shelby sold Viesca everything his men could not carry themselves and on pack animals: the artillery pieces, the extra Enfield rifles and ammunition, the superfluous exotic food and wine that they had found in Texas, and the wagons and mules. It all went for $16,000 in silver and the promise, never fulfilled, of an equivalent sum in Juarist scrip. Most of the money was deposited for safekeeping overnight in the customs house, but some of it was divided immediately among the men. One of them, Thomas Westlake, recalled being handed sixty silver dollars; though he never knew how much the artillery sold for, he was always “satisfied that General Shelby saw to it that all were delt fairly with.”
The merchants from whom Viesca had extorted the money got some of it back that afternoon as the men relaxed in the cantinas and flirted with the señoritas. As the tension from months and years of constant fighting relaxed, so did the discipline that had held the men together. Their coherence as a unit had already begun to fray. Though they still numbered about three hundred men, scores of these were refugees and deserters who had attached themselves to Shelby for their own convenience.
Three of the men who had only recently joined the expedition were a rough-looking lot even by the standards of the Iron Brigade. They claimed to have fought under Lee in Virginia but otherwise offered little information about their backgrounds or why they wanted to go to Mexico. Edwards noted that the strangers seemed to have a high degree of curiosity about the dozen fine horses Shelby had purchased from a ranch near San Antonio. Most of the horses bore several brands, including some indicating Mexican ownership, but that was not uncommon. Shelby had the bills of sale in his saddlebag and could prove the horses were legally acquired. He was determined, he told his men both in Texas and Mexico, to stay within the law, and to prove to any legal authority who questioned them that they had paid for whatever they needed.
Ike Berry was the newest proud owner of one of these animals, which were all confined to a makeshift corral under an acacia tree just off the central square. A farmer from central Missouri, Berry was the biggest man in the battalion, well over six feet tall and weighing about 240 pounds. He needed a big horse like the sixteen-hand roan on which he now sat casually, with one leg crooked around the saddle horn, smoking a pipe and combing the horse’s mane. Eight or ten other men were grooming their horses nearby.
None noticed the three men supposedly from Lee’s army, or the squad of armed Mexican soldiers behind them, until one of the Americans walked up and put his hand on Berry’s horse’s bridle. “This is my horse,” the man claimed. Pointing to an old brand that had been partially obscured by a more recent one, he said that all the horses were stolen, and the Mexican army was here to help him get his property back.
Berry peered quizzically at the stranger and said he must be mistaken. No, said the other, he was not mistaken: “Dismount!”
In a flash, Berry drew his saber from its scabbard and brought it down on the arm that clutched the bridle, severing it near the shoulder. The man fell backward, blood spurting from his stump. The two friends of the injured man and the Mexicans fanned out as Berry and his comrades drew their revolvers and crouched behind their horses. One of them darted through the back fence of the corral to find Shelby, who was enjoying a beer with a young Englishman at a nearby cantina. Shelby shouted for his bugler, Martin Kritzer, to sound the rally as he raced down the street to the corral. D. A. Williams led a dozen men to scatter the Mexican guards around the artillery and wagons they had just been sold, and Maurice Langhorne dashed to the customs house to secure the battalion’s silver. A third group headed for the river to seize the boats there. Still others raged through the town, certain that they had all been betrayed. By the time the shooting stopped, more than a dozen members of the Mexican squad that had backed up the three Americans were dead; of those three, the only survivor was the man who had lost his arm. None of Shelby’s men was injured.
Governor Viesca hastened to the scene to mollify a furious Shelby, who pointed to his howitzers and threatened to shell the Mexican army barracks if he was attacked in force. He showed Viesca his bills of sale for the horses and demanded an apology for the insulting charge that his men were thieves. Viesca acquiesced, promising to restrain his men and to pay the rest of the money owed to Shelby for the supplies and munitions when the Americans left in the morning.
At dawn, while Piedras Negras still slept, guns were traded for money and the remnants of the Iron Brigade set out for Monterrey. They chose the more difficult route described by Viesca, hoping to avoid further encounters with the Juaristas on the main road and confident that they were more than a match for the Apaches who claimed the land as their own.