People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [97]
He happened to be staring at a man on horseback nearby when he saw a shot rip off the pommel of the saddle, tear through the man’s body, and burst out with a crimson gush on the other side. Pieces of bone or metal tore into the horse’s hip, split the lip and tongue and knocked teeth out of a second horse, and broke the jaw of a third.
Lieutenant Grant, with the 4th Regiment, “saw a ball crash into ranks nearby, tear a musket from one soldier’s grasp and rip off the man’s head, then dissect the face of a captain he knew.” When the battle was over, five hundred Mexicans were dead or wounded. There were perhaps fifty American casualties. Weems describes the aftermath: “Night blanketed weary men who fell asleep where they dropped on the trampled prairie grass, while around them other prostrate men from both armies screamed and groaned in agony from wounds. By the eerie light of torches ‘the surgeon’s saw was going the livelong night.’”
Away from the battlefield, in the army camps, the romance of the recruiting posters was quickly forgotten. A young artillery officer wrote about the men camped at Corpus Christi in the summer of 1845, even before the war began:
It . . . becomes our painful task to allude to the sickness, suffering and death, from criminal negligence. Two-thirds of the tents furnished the army on taking the field were worn out and rotten . . . provided for campaigning in a country almost deluged three months in the year. . . . During the whole of November and December, either the rains were pouring down with violence, or the furious “northers” were showering the frail tentpoles, and rending the rotten canvas. For days and weeks every article in hundreds of tents was thoroughly soaked. During those terrible months, the sufferings of the sick in the crowded hospital tents were horrible beyond conception. . . .
The 2nd Regiment of Mississippi Rifles, moving into New Orleans, was stricken by cold and sickness. The regimental surgeon reported: “Six months after our regiment had entered the service we had sustained a loss of 167 by death, and 134 by discharges.” The regiment was packed into the holds of transports, eight hundred men into three ships. The surgeon continued:
The dark cloud of disease still hovered over us. The holds of the ships . . . were soon crowded with the sick. The effluvia was intolerable. . . . The sea became rough. . . . Through the long dark night the rolling ship would dash the sick man from side to side bruising his flesh upon the rough corners of his berth. The wild screams of the delirious, the lamentations of the sick, and the melancholy groans of the dying, kept up one continual scene of confusion. . . . Four weeks we were confined to the loathsome ships and before we had landed at the Brasos, we consigned twenty-eight of our men to the dark waves.
Meanwhile, by land and by sea, Anglo-American forces were moving into California. A young naval officer, after the long voyage around the southern cape of South America, and up the coast to Monterey in California, wrote in his diary:
Asia . . . will be brought to our very doors. Population will flow into the fertile regions of California. The resources of the entire country . . . will be developed. . . . The public lands lying along the route [of railroads] will be changed from deserts into gardens, and a large population will be settled. . . .
It was a separate war that went on in California, where Anglo-Americans raided Spanish settlements, stole horses, and declared California separated from Mexico—the “Bear Flag Republic.” Indians lived there, and naval officer Revere gathered the Indian chiefs and spoke to them (as he later recalled):
I have called you together to have a talk with you. The country you inhabit no longer belongs to Mexico, but to a mighty nation whose territory extends from the great ocean you have all seen or heard of, to another great ocean thousands of miles toward the rising sun. . . . I am an officer of that great country, and to get here, have traversed both of those great oceans in a ship of war