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Updated: June 3, 2025
While their descendants went no further than grandchildren the colony had done very well; but now great-grandchildren had begun to arrive, and they would soon have to divide, and form a settlement up in the woods across the river, or upon some patch of ground at the bottom of one of the barrancas.
In Congress, Representative Gibson of Tennessee introduced a bill appropriating twenty million dollars “for the maintenance of national honour and defence.” Representative Bromwell, of Ohio, introduced a similar resolution, appropriating a like amount of money “to place the naval strength of the country upon a proper footing for immediate hostilities with any foreign power.” On the same day orders were issued to the commandant at Fort Barrancas, Florida, directing him to send men to man the guns at Santa Rosa Island, opposite Pensacola.
I beg to report, also, that the British occupy the defensive works of the town, including Fort Barrancas, from the flagstaffs of which float both the British and the Spanish ensigns, as if the two were allies in this war. I am unable to report as yet what the strength of the British force here is.
Then there were the barrancas, the arid stretches where the sage-brush and the cactus grew. Snaky octilla dotted the space; the crabbed yucca had not lost its ugliness. Ferguson looked upon the world with unseeing eyes. He had lived here long and the country had not changed. It would never change. Nothing ever changed here but the people. But he himself had not changed.
A blinding flash of lightning illuminated miles of the surrounding country, showing Hollis the naked peaks of ridges and hills around him; gullies, draws, barrancas, the levels, lava beds, fantastic rock shapes mocking his ignorance of the country. He saw them all for an instant and then they were gone and darkness blacker than before succeeded.
Suddenly a rope would snake forward past half a dozen broncos and drop about the neck of an animal near the heart of the herd. The twisting, dodging cowpony would surrender instantly and submit to being cut out from the band. Saddles were slapped on in a hurry and the riders were again on their way. Through the mesquite they rode, slackening speed for neither gullies nor barrancas.
Sometimes the fort itself was scuttled by the buccaneers; once, at least, at Fort Barrancas, it suffered loot at terrible, riotous, drunken hands, when a Spanish officer's daughter who was captured for ransom succeeded in plunging into the sea within sight of her watching father.
On the 3d of November he left Mobile and three days later was demanding the surrender of Pensacola. The next morning he carried the town by storm, waited another day until the British had evacuated and blown up Fort Barrancas, six miles below the city, and then returned to Mobile.
All nature was on a gigantic scale the mountains of an enormous height, the face of the country seamed and split by barrancas or ravines, hundreds, ay, thousands of feet deep, and filled with the most abundant and varied vegetation. The sky, too, was of the deep glowing blue of the tropics, the sort of blue which seems varnished or clouded with gold.
A bright red sun came up as the train swung round to the eastward, hugging the flanks of Malinche, and rumbled away across a sandy, very dry, but fertile country, broken by huge barrancas or washouts, and often with maguey hedges. Most of my day was given up to Mr. come to think of it, I did not even get his name.
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