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One among them has suffered very much; it is the "Government-house," celebrated for one of the most cowardly massacres ever committed by a nation of barbarians, and which I shall here relate. After some skirmishes betwixt the Comanches and the Texians, in which the former had always had the advantage, the latter thought it advisable to propose a treaty of alliance.
Till 1834, no white man lived in that district, and the Indians resorted to it only during the shooting season, always on foot and invariably provided with half-a-dozen of canoes on each side of the stream for their own use or for the benefit of travellers. The Texians are not so provident nor so hospitable.
He has recently published an account of the campaign; and his narrative, highly characteristic and circumstantial, derives a peculiar interest from his details of the defeats suffered by the Texians, before they could succeed in shaking off the Mexican yoke.
The expedition to Santa Fe, by which the Texians broke the peace, occurred in the autumn of 1841; the Mexican army entered Texas in the spring of 1842, sweeping every thing before them, from St. Antonio di Bejar to the Colorado; but the Texians had sent emissaries to Yucatan, to induce that province to declare its independence.
A Mexican gentleman, indignant at such a cowardly deed, in the name of outraged nature and humanity, laid the cause before a jury of Texians. The doctor was acquitted by the Texian jury, upon the ground that the laws were not made for the benefit of the Comanches. The consequences may be told in a few words. One day Dr Cobbet was found in an adjoining field stabbed to the heart and scalped.
Louis trappers, that strangers, long established among the Shoshones of the Pacific Ocean, were now residing among the Comanches, Smith had ordered his emissaries among the Pawnees to endeavour to meet us, and concert together as to what measures could be taken so as to secure a general league, defensive and offensive, against the Americans and the Texians, and which was to extend from the Mississippi to the western seas.
The Cherokees, with a population of twenty-four thousand individuals; the Creeks, with twenty thousand, and the Choctaws, with fifteen, as soon as they reached their new country, applied themselves to agriculture, and as they possessed wealth, slaves, and cattle, their cotton plantations soon became the finest west from the Mississippi, and latterly all the cotton grown by the Americans and the Texians, within one hundred miles from the Indian settlements, has been brought up to their mills and presses, to be cleaned and put into bales, before it was shipped to New Orleans.
"A virtuous man," they say, "has the ear of the Manitou, he can tell him the sufferings of Indian nature, and ask him to soothe them." The road betwixt Chihuahua and Santa Fe is almost entirely deserted, so much are the Apaches dreaded; yet they are not hated by the Mexicans half as much as the Texians or the Americans.
Mr Ehrenberg escaped from all his perils in time to share the rejoicings of the Texians at the final evacuation of the country by the Mexican army.
Texians were deprived of their arms and conducted to a small village, called Anton Chico, till orders should have been received as to their future disposition, from General Armigo, governor of the province. It is not to be supposed that in a small village of about one hundred government shepherds, several hundred famished men could be supplied with all the necessaries and superfluities of life.
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