General Jo Shelby's March by Anthony Arthur

General Jo Shelby's March by Anthony Arthur

Author:Anthony Arthur [Arthur, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60395-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00


That journey still required traversing more than three hundred miles of desert and mountains. Limited to the northernmost border regions, the Apaches were no longer a problem. And the bandits who heard how Rodríguez had been dispatched became less inclined to attack the Americans. The Juaristas remained a threat, but they were mainly occupied with Benito Juárez’s important shift in tactics against the French—away from mere harassing raids toward direct assaults on French outposts such as the one at Matehuala, Shelby’s immediate destination.

Matehuala was a farming center of about twenty thousand people on a mile-high plateau bordered on three sides by high mountain ranges. Its Indian name meant “place of the green water,” derived from the rivers that coursed down from the snow-covered peaks. Irrigated fields of barley, wheat, and oats fanned out from the city. To the north lay alkali flats. In late summer, winds from the mountains churned up the alkali into choking clouds of white dust. Shelby was a dozen miles away from Matehaula, in the midst of one of these dust storms, when he heard a distant rumble. It sounded like thunder, but the azure sky above the white dust was cloudless. The men moved cautiously westward to a pine-covered hill above the plateau. From there they could see distant puffs of smoke, followed by the roar of cannon, but little else.

Shelby sent a scouting team ahead, four squads of fifteen men each, to approach the town from different directions. They all returned safely just before sunset. The French fort, they said, was under siege by about two thousand Juaristas. They had an artillery battery of half a dozen six-pounders and were bombarding the fort and terrorizing the town. It looked as though they were getting ready for a direct assault.

Shelby knew that the French garrison numbered about five hundred. If it fell, his own passage southward would be imperiled—and the French would in all probability be wiped out. He consulted with his men, proposing that they help themselves by helping the French. When they agreed, he marched them along the mountain ridge to within two miles of the city. After making a cold camp—no fires, not even for cooking—he sent two volunteers, Jim Cundiff and Jim Hodge, under cover of darkness into the city. They had a harrowing journey, stumbling through irrigation canals into the alleys of the city, past cantinas where Juarist soldiers drank with the locals and boasted of their coming victory over the hated French.

At midnight the two scouts persuaded the French guards at the fort not to shoot them with a few useful words provided by Thomas Reynolds: “Nous sommes des amis, des soldats américains; venir à vous aider.” The help they offered, they were able to convey to Major Henri Pierron, the young commanding officer, was in the form of a surprise joint attack on the enemy at dawn. The grateful major agreed and sent the men back with a detachment of forty cavalrymen—curaisseurs.

At dawn, as the Mexicans prepared for



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.