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Updated: May 25, 2025
Sometimes long, unmortared stone fences divided the landscape, more often mile after unobstructed mile of slightly undulating brown plain, tinted here and there by maguey, rolled by us into the north. A special train of soldiers, with a carload of arms and munitions, passed on the way to head off the latest revolted "general."
Such is the century plant in botanical language, the Agava Americana. The juice of the maguey, in its unfermented state, is called honey-water. It is gathered from the central basin by cutting off a side-leaf and cutting out the heart, just before the sprouting of the hampe, for whose sustenance this juice is destined.
But here was no forest, no thicket of young firs aromatic and springy, nothing but the harsher vegetation of a hard land where agaves, the maguey of Mexico, and their kin thrive, where the cactus is the characteristic growth. He'd be in luck to find some small pines or even the dry-looking sparse cedars of the locality.
While they put together their bulky masses of porphyry and granite with the nicest art, they were incapable of mortising their timbers, and, in their ignorance of iron, knew no better way of holding the beams together that tying them with thongs of maguey.
We have measured specimens of the well developed plant, the leaves of which were eight feet in length, a foot in width, and eight inches in thickness. When the maguey is about seven or eight years old it is at its best for the production of the desired liquor, and is tapped for the milk-like sap, of which it yields from two quarts to a gallon daily for three or four months.
To prevent scurvy we used the juice of the maguey plant, called pulque, and to obtain a supply of this anti-scorbutic I was often detailed to march the company out about forty miles, cut the plant, load up two or three wagons with the stalks, and carry them to camp.
Soon after the battle commenced, Scott sent Pierce's and Shields's brigades by the left, through the fields, to attack the enemy in the rear. On the causeway, opposed to them, were planted Santa Anna's reserves four thousand foot and three thousand horse in a measure protected by a dense growth of maguey. Shields advanced intrepidly with his force of sixteen hundred.
To keep off the wolves and condors my companion made use of a very simple expedient, which I believe is often used in the North among your prairie trappers here. Several bladders were taken from the vicunas and inflated. They were then tied upon poles of maguey, and set upright over the carcasses, so as to dangle and dance about in the wind.
It seems to be a gift of Nature to the desert, so that even there man may find something on which to subsist. Guapo with his knife had soon cleared off several large pieces of the maguey, and these, fried along with the vicuna meat, enabled the party to make a supper sufficiently palatable.
On the coast it is what they call palm wine, and rum from sugar-cane; on the table-land, it is pulque, from the maguey plant, their delight and their curse.
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