To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination by Robert W. Johannsen

Author:Robert W. Johannsen [Johannsen, Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780195049817
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-08-26T04:12:01+00:00

The novelette writers experienced the war vicariously, through the published accounts of travelers, soldiers, and newspaper correspondents and their own fertile imaginations. There were others, however, who fought in Mexico, knew the war at firsthand, and used that knowledge for later excursions into fiction-writing. Their works, blending fiction with autobiography, assumed an authenticity which the novelettes lacked. One of the best known was the Irish-born adventurer Thomas Mayne Reid, who emigrated to the United States in 1840.

Reid’s first two years in America were spent on the frontier, where he encountered “buffaloes, grizzly bears, and Indians on the warpath.” In 1842 he began his literary career, first in Pittsburgh, then in Philadelphia, where he formed a close friendship with Edgar Allan Poe. His poems and prose sketches were published in such popular magazines as Graham’s, Godey’s, and the Spirit of the Times. In the summer of 1846, he was in Newport, Rhode Island, reporting the social season for the New York Herald.

When the New York Regiment was formed later in 1846 he joined it as a second lieutenant. He took part in the landing at Vera Cruz, chased guerrillas during the siege of that city, missed Cerro Gordo, and fought with his regiment at Churubusco. Reid’s greatest claim to fame was in the assault on Chapultepec. A member of the storming party, the “forlorn hope,” he led the final effort to place scaling ladders on the castle walls until a Mexican bullet in his thigh stopped his progress. He was cited for heroism in the battle reports, and the story of his daring circulated through the army. Back in the United States after the war he tried unsuccessfully to raise troops to aid German and Hungarian revolutionaries, finally returning to England in 1849.34

As a correspondent for the Spirit of the Times, Reid published his “Sketches by a Skirmisher” (using the pseudonym Ecolier)—eyewitness accounts of the battles at Vera Cruz, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, Chapultepec, and Mexico City. Some were written with such flair (his encounters with guerrillas and girls, for example) that they moved beyond reality into romance. Writing from the sand hills surrounding Vera Cruz during the bombardment, Reid described his situation:

If you suppose that we write on an elegant desk, with gold pen, and superfine post, you are just off the track. But thus: Half buried in soft sand—our left elbow “dug” in so as to form a support—for a desk we are using a huge old book, stolen (we fear) from a Mexican Ranche. What? Holy mother! “La vida de la Santa Maria.”… I scribble in the midst of sweets and bitters, of heaven and hell, and to vary the monotony around, am obliged at intervals to drop my pencil, throw myself Hat on the sand, to escape being chucked off by the fragments of a shell, or “cock” my ear at the whistling of a grenade, in order to get clear of its course.

His sketches later served as the basis for a series of fictionalized tales (each subtitled “A Sketch of the Late Campaign”) published in Graham’s Magazine.

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