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Troop L formed the advance guard, and we had skirmishers out ahead of us and to both the right and left. The skirmishers ahead of us were about 250 yards from the main body of our men, and it was one of these advanced skirmishers who discovered the Spaniards. Thomas E. Isbell, a Cherokee from Vinita, I. T., was the one to make the discovery of the Spanish force.
He fired the first shot in that battle and dropped a Spaniard. Isbell was wounded seven times and then managed to walk back to the field hospital, two and a half or three miles away, to get his wounds dressed. As soon as we learned that the Spanish were in advance of us we deployed the men six feet apart, advancing into the firing line.
This was the first shot from our troop, and the Spaniard fell dead. Isbell himself was shot seven times that day, but managed to walk back to our field hospital, which was fully four miles in the rear. "It has been said that we were ambushed, but this is not so.
As I passed by a couple of tall, lank, Oklahoma cow-punchers, I heard one say, "Well, some of the boys got it in the neck!" to which the other answered with the grim plains proverb of the South: "Many a good horse dies." Thomas Isbell, a half-breed Cherokee in the squad under Hamilton Fish, was among the first to shoot and be shot at. He was wounded no less than seven times.
On the way we met some of the men of the Twenty-second Infantry, who told us we were close to the enemy, as they had heard them at work during the night. Captain Capron, with six men, had gone on ahead of us and had come across the body of a dead Cuban. Ten or fifteen minutes later Private Isbell saw a Spaniard in the brush ahead of him and fired.
This principle was also decided by the Court of Appeals in Kentucky; case of Rankin vs. Lydia, 2 Marshall's Reps. 407; see also, Wilson vs. Isbell, 5 Call's Reps. 425, Spotts vs. Gillespie, 6 Randolph's Reps. 566. The State vs. Lasselle, 1 Blackford's Reps. 60, Marie Louise vs. Mariot, 8 La. Reps. 475.
Slowly the state of things improved, and in 1829 in the yearly report to the Mexican government, it was stated that there were eleven primary schools in the province with three hundred and thirty-nine boys and girls. One of the best of these schools was that of Don Ignacio Coronel of Los Angeles. In 1846 the first American school was opened at Santa Clara by Mrs. Oliver Mann Isbell.
It is difficult for me to withstand the temptation to tell what has befallen some of my men since the regiment disbanded; how McGinty, after spending some weeks in Roosevelt Hospital in New York with an attack of fever, determined to call upon his captain, Woodbury Kane, when he got out, and procuring a horse rode until he found Kane's house, when he hitched the horse to a lamp-post and strolled in; how Cherokee Bill married a wife in Hoboken, and as that pleasant city ultimately proved an uncongenial field for his activities, how I had to send both himself and his wife out to the Territory; how Happy Jack, haunted by visions of the social methods obtaining in the best saloons of Arizona, applied for the position of "bouncer out" at the Executive Chamber when I was elected Governor, and how I got him a job at railroading instead, and finally had to ship him back to his own Territory also; how a valued friend from a cow ranch in the remote West accepted a pressing invitation to spend a few days at the home of another ex-trooper, a New Yorker of fastidious instincts, and arrived with an umbrella as his only baggage; how poor Holderman and Pollock both died and were buried with military honors, all of Pollock's tribesmen coming to the burial; how Tom Isbell joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and how, on the other hand, George Rowland scornfully refused to remain in the East at all, writing to a gallant young New Yorker who had been his bunkie: "Well, old boy, I am glad I didn't go home with you for them people to look at, because I ain't a Buffalo or a rhinoceros or a giraffe, and I don't like to be stared at, and you know we didn't do no hard fighting down there.
The Spaniards had some machine guns ahead of us, and our men received the full force of this fire. There was also firing from the right and the left. We were at this time upon the knoll of a hill, the Spaniards being about us at lower elevations. Before Isbell discovered the Spaniards a blockhouse had been seen, and we knew what was ahead of us.
This principle was also decided by the Court of Appeals in Kentucky; case of Rankin vs. Lydia, 2 Marshall's Reps. 407; see also, Wilson vs. Isbell, 5 Call's Reps. 425, Spotts vs. Gillespie, 6 Randolph's Reps. 566. The State vs. Lasselle, 1 Blackford's Reps. 60, Marie Louise vs. Mariot, 8 La. Reps. 475.
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