Boys' Book of Border Battles (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 Excerpt: ...Samuel Ringgold's Third Artillery battery of four twelve-pounder howitzers and Captain James Duncan's Second Artillery light field battery; there were two long eighteen-pounders in charge of First Lieutenant William Hunter Churchill of the Third Artillery; there were four companies of the Second Dragoons, three companies each of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Artillery, serving as infantry, except the battery men; there were the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Infantry. The wagons were drawn by oxen; so were the Churchill eighteen-pounders. The regiments had been cut down by illness and lack of recruits. The United States had not prepared for war. Some of the infantry companies contained only sixteen men. In all, the column numbered two thousand, two hundred and eighty-eight. This afternoon it marched only five or six miles and bivouacked for the night "beside a pond where the mosquitoes and rattlesnakes were so plenty that we could not sleep." It was reported that the Mexicans had abandoned their position in the way; perhaps there would be no fight, after all. But the guns of Matamoros were booming, Fort Mansfield was now and then replying; Old Zach moved on carefully as well as hopefully. Fight or not, he intended to get through. This noon of April 8, twelve miles out of Point Isabel the advance dragoons came scurrying back. The enemy had been sighted again--he was in battle array on the plain of Palo Alto or Tall Timber, scarcely two miles before. "Now we'll have it, boys " was the word from man to man. In a few minutes more the column burst out of the thorny thickets that enclosed the route; arrived at a water hole and at the same time saw the Mexicans. There they were, on ahead to the south, extending across the road in a front...