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Sadly the General returned to his quarters. The end was now close at hand. Reconnoissances were carefully made, and, the enemy's strength being gathered on the southern front of the city, General Scott determined to assail Chapultepec on the west.
Fulton is narrating his missionary work in China; out on the piazza my veteran neighbor, General Silas Casey, is telling the thrilling story of how he led our troops at the storming of the Heights of Chapultepec; up the steps comes dear old John G. Paton, with his patriarchal white beard, to say "good-bye," before he goes back to his mission work in the New Hebrides.
In this grove of Chapultepec, there were sculptured on the side of the hill, in the solid porphyry, likenesses of the two Montezumas, colossal in size. For some reason or other, I forget now what, one of the last Spanish viceroys thought it desirable to destroy them, and tried to blow them up with gunpowder.
Captain Zuten fell in the subsequent assault upon Chapultepec. Colonel Le Noir entered the city of Mexico with the victorious army, but on the subsequent day, being engaged in a street skirmish with the leperos, or liberated convicts, he fell mortally wounded by a copper bullet, and he was now dying by inches at his quarters near the Grand Cathedral.
General Winfield Scott, with a naval expediton, attacked Vera Cruz from the sea in March, 1847, and took up the march, 13,000 strong, to Mexico City, fighting the battles of Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec, and entered Mexico City on September 14. General James Shields, born in Tyrone, Ireland, in 1810, was in command with his brigade under Scott.
One of these contrivances, found at Chapultepec, is described as follows: “On the horizontal plane of a large, carefully-worked stone, three arrows were cut in relief, so that the shaft ends came together and made equal angles in the centre. The points were directed eastward, the two outside showing the two solstitial points, and that in the centre the equinoctial.
Twiggs was ordered to remain in front of the southern gates and divert the enemy's attention. Major Sumner with seven companies was to march at daylight and join Pillow. Chapultepec is a natural fortification, rising one hundred and fifty feet above the valley. A large building, the Military School, is on its summit, and it is bounded on the west by the Molino del Rey.
On October 18, three days before General Castelnau reached the capital, a telegram, sent from Miramar via New York by the Comte de Bombelles, brought to Chapultepec the news of the illness of Empress Charlotte. This last blow fell with crushing weight upon the suffering Emperor.
But one day the name of James Dutton blazed forth in a despatch that electrified the community. At the storming of Chapultepec, Private James Dutton, Company K, Rivermouth, had done a very valorous deed. He had crawled back to a plateau on the heights, from which the American troops had been driven, and had brought off his captain, who had been momentarily stunned by the wind of a round-shot.
We hurried on to join General Taylor, who had already, as we learned later, won the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Characters later to figure momentously in the history of the country were here to settle the title of Texas with the sword. Robert E. Lee, a lieutenant, was brevetted for bravery in the battles of Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec.
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