Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Cortinas had won prestige at little cost. Now, he fired a salute each morning from the captured cannon to wake the town. He intercepted the mail, and held an American named Campbell prisoner to read it to him. But although his men were now raiding throughout the country, Cortinas acted with enormous restraint. Nobody was killed, and even the perused mail was returned, resealed. On one occasion, his men took beeves belonging to a professed friend, James Browne. Cortinas returned most of these, and penned Browne a due bill for the few he butchered.
Then, the war took a new turn. A company of Rangers under Captain W. G. Tobin of San Antonio arrived in the valley. Webb wrote that Tobin and his men were a sorry lot. The Brownsville historian Davenport went further: that Tobin had one good man, but that he unfortunately fell off a carriage and broke his neck on arrival.
These men again were the street sweepings that so often were the first to join an expedition to the Rio Grande. With good leadership, they might have been effective; they did not have it. Their first official act in Brownsville was to storm the jail and lynch a captured sixty-five-year-old Cortinista, Tomás Cabrera; Heintzelman hinted at this, but Ford stated it bluntly, in his later report.
In retaliation, Cortinas ambushed a squad of Tobin's Rangers on the Palo Alto and killed three men. Tobin then led the reorganized Brownsville Tigers and his own troops against Santa Rita, where Cortinas openly waited. Mifflin Kenedy now led the Brownsville contingent, which had acquired another 24-pound howitzer. The results of this expedition are better not examined, but Tobin's Rangers did prove to be superior artillerists, because in the general rout they did bring the cannon back. Tobin fell back on Brownsville on November 25, 1859, and U.S. Army reports state simply that his decision to run was wise—his Rangers were so demoralized they would have been slaughtered had they stood.
Now, as Heintzelman wrote, Cortinas was a great man. He had defeated the gringos twice; he made Mexicans wonder how the gringos had ever got to the Rio Bravo in the first place. Over his camp he now hoisted the flag of the Mexican Republic, the red, white, and green. When he crossed over into Mexico, great throngs assembled and cheered him, bugles blew and music thundered; he rode his horse into the city squares like a conquering hero. He was the champion of his people, who would right all wrongs. In Matamoros there was open discussion of rolling the border back to the Nueces; some ardent spirits held out for the Sabine.
Cortinas does not seem to have entertained any such dreams. He issued inflammatory proclamations, calling upon Mexicans to fight for their rights against the American bloodsuckers and vampires, but nothing in his proclamations indicated a plan for a separate Mexican state, or a reversion to Mexico. He flew the Mexican flag, but this was to attract recruits from south of the river. Cortinas expressed great confidence in Sam Houston, the Texas governor-elect; he said Houston would see that Texas Mexicans were protected. Cortinas did not know that Houston was seriously planning the establishment of a protectorate over Mexico itself at this time. Probably, Cortinas had no plan at all; he had accidentally started a small revolution, and being a daring gambler, he rode with it to see where destiny might take him.
His uprising, however, had already failed, because the Texas Mexicans did not flock to his standard. Significantly, his own family did not support him. His mother and brothers remained loyal to the state, and none of the great families joined Cortinas. The vast majority of the humbler class remained inert. Beyond all question, the great majority of Cortinas's fighting men crossed the Rio Bravo from Mexico. If the Tobin Rangers were mostly border scum, a similar breed in Mexico smelled plunder. Santos Cadena brought forty thieves from Nuevo León. Sixty escaped convicts from Victoria in Tamaulipas showed their patriotism by joining Cortinas and plundering gringos. The charge of banditry was true, and it clung; but as most Texas histories deliberately ignore, there was more to the Cortinas uprising than that.
Finally, on December 5, 1859, Major S. P. Heintzelman arrived on the Rio Grande with 165 U.S. Army troops. Heintzelman immediately led his force, combined with Tobin's Rangers, on a sweep toward Cortinas. The Rangers showed a great reluctance to fight, but Heintzelman met Cortinas at a place called the Ebonal, and forced the rebel to retreat with a loss of eight men.
Meanwhile, a short time before, Governor Runnels of Texas received reports that all south Texas, to the Nueces, was aflame with a Mexican war. Runnels found Rip Ford walking the streets of Austin and seized him by the arm. "Ford, you must go!" Runnels exclaimed. Ford left the next day, with a commission as major in command of all state forces on the border.
Ford rode out of Austin with only eight men, some six-shooters, a bag of grub, and not a dollar in public money. The treasury was bare. But on the way south he recruited certain men he knew he could rely upon, found wagons, and even secured a little money. He finished the five-hundred-mile trip at the head of fifty-three hard men. In such ways did the captains of the Rangers operate; it was a rough and ready force.
Ford arrived at Brownsville in time to hear the firing at the Ebonal but not to join the battle. Heintzelman and Ford immediately began a joint campaign, and Cortinas retreated west along the Rio Grande. The Mexican did not fight, but continually stayed ahead of the advancing Rangers and U.S. regulars. In the retreat there was much looting and burning of settlements and ranches by the Mexicans. The Neale ranch was destroyed, and the customs house and post office at Edinburg plundered. Smoke hung over the lower valley as the Mexicans burned or wrecked the American settlements in their path.
By the end of December, Cortinas had retreated upriver to Rio Grande City, then a small village. Ford and Heintzelman closed rapidly on him, and here Cortinas chose to fight. Ford and the Rangers rode down on his camp; the Cortinas army opened fire with its two cannon and attempted a set battle.
The Mexicans advanced against the Rangers with flags and bugle calls, but the Texan fire was deadly. Dozens of
vaqueros
were knocked out of the saddle.
Ford charged the Mexican line, and the fight broke up into the swirling, galloping melee in which Texan marksmanship with the pistol was so effective. In this kind of fight, Mexican
vaqueros
, like Comanche braves, were outclassed; they were not so well armed, nor could they handle six-shooters with the serious deadliness of Texans when they were. The three-hundred-man Cortinista army fled, leaving sixty dead behind. Ford suffered sixteen wounded.
Heintzelman's report to the U.S. Adjutant General was brief: "Major Ford led the advance, and took both his [Cortinas's] guns, ammunition wagons, and baggage. He lost everything." Although the Major's report did not specifically state, the regulars never made contact.
Cortinas and his bodyguard dashed for safety south of the Rio Grande. This ended the real rebellion, but the sanctuary of the border gave Cortinas the opportunity to continue his banditry. The long, open border, stretching from Eagle Pass to the Gulf of Mexico had already become a serious problem for Texas. The Mexican government, through most of the century, was caught up in civil war, too weak to enforce order in its northern states. Nor could the Mexicans effectively stop Indian raids, despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Bands of Kickapoos, Lipans, and Seminoles, allied with half-castes along the border, had found refuge south of the Rio Grande near Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass. These Indians caused serious depredations north of Laredo, and as far east as Nueces County (Corpus Christi) and Rio Grande City. Further, since the Mexican side of the border passed from the control of one petty
caudillo
to another, different regions were controlled by different warlords, in competition with each other. Mexican border commanders in the three major ports of entry—Mier, Camargo, and Matamoros—tried to lure American commerce away from each other through reductions in tariffs and bribes, and sometimes American merchants got caught up in their wars. As early as 1849, parties of Texas state troops had crossed the border to recover American merchandise seized by Mexican soldiers. This merchandise may have been smuggled in the first place. Rangers on temporary service were in constant, if rather inglorious action, along the river in the 1850s.
The case of J. H. Callahan's company of Rangers was not untypical. Callahan was supposed to operate in the area near San Antonio, but in pursuit of a band of Lipan Apache horse raiders he ranged all the way from Bandera to Eagle Pass, on the border. Callahan's men were unpaid, and not supplied by the state. They fell in with some adventurers under a man named Henry. In October 1855, a combined group of Rangers and adventurers pursued the Indians across the border, on what was more a filibustering expedition than genuine hot pursuit. This force fought a brief skirmish with a band of Mexicans and Indians, then seized the Mexican town of Piedras Negras, ostensibly as a hostage for delivery of the hostile Indians by Mexican army forces. However, the town was looted, and the local Mexican military, their pride stung, preferred to march against the Tejanos rather than help them round up Indians. Callahan set fire to Piedras Negras and retreated into Texas. He was dismissed for this act, but it was indicative of the general lawlessness, disorder, distrust, and hatred that prevailed on both sides of the river.
The governments of each republic, Mexico and the United States, abetted the disorder by not providing adequate forces for policing. But if Mexico was guilty of failing to do anything about deliberate depredations from its side, the state of Texas, especially during the 1850s, out of haphazard military policy and the usual bankruptcy, enlisted and dismissed a series of extremely dubious and damaging so-called Rangers in its service. The quality of these irregulars was entirely dependent upon the quality of their leadership, and of the captains of this era, such as Robinson, Neill, Carmack, Connor, Callahan, Frost, and Tobin, the record shows much bad and little good. Robinson, Neill, and Carmack did nothing on the Indian frontier. Frost spent more time feuding with Indian Agent Neighbors than hunting hostiles; Callahan and Connor were dismissed, the last by Rip Ford. Only when Runnels made Ford Senior Captain, later Major, did matters improve, and then Ford was still handicapped by holdovers like Tobin on the Rio Grande.
Cheno Cortinas set up a headquarters in Mexico in January 1860. He was able to do so because the local authorities were too weak to control him; further, few Mexicans believed that a man who was fighting Texas could be really bad. A crisis came on February 4, 1860, when a detachment of Ford's Rangers stopped a Cortinista band trying to move some plunder across the river. In the fight, one Ranger was fatally shot.
It was known that Cortinas had fortified a bend in the river some thirty-five miles above Brownsville and would attempt to capture the King-Kenedy steamboat
Ranchero
from the Mexican side. The
Ranchero
was carrying valuable cargo, including $60,000 in specie. Ford, Tobin, U.S. Army Lieutenant Loomis Langdon, who commanded the small army detachment aboard
Ranchero
, and Captain George Stoneman of the U.S. Cavalry, all gathered on the Texas side across from Cortinas's camp at La Bolsa.
When Langdon queried Ford if he intended to follow Ranger custom and cross into Mexico, Ford said, "Certainly, sir." Here again was a typical situation. No effective action could be taken against Cortinas without crossing the Rio Grande. It was difficult for the federal forces, who more often than not were spoiling to do so, to invade Mexico without approval from Washington; no matter how bad things were on the border, Washington was wary of international incidents. Washington, naturally enough from the national viewpoint, was usually willing to sacrifice a few Texas cows in lieu of starting a war, or even lacerating the touchy Mexican pride. The Texas troops regarded this not only as colossal cowardice but a mistaken policy. History does record that strong action, more often than not, produced results on the border, because American diplomacy never secured the return of a single bandit, horse, or cow. History does not record quite so clearly, but does indicate, that Rangers and U.S. Army units were often able to arrive at a tacit understanding. The Texans would ride into Mexico; the Army would remain at the river's edge, but provide enormous moral support.
Ford crossed the Rio Grande via the
Ranchero
with thirty-five of his own men, and about ten of Tobin's warriors. Immediately, he became engaged with Cortinas's emplaced troops, while Lieutenant Langdon, aboard
Ranchero
, supported him by fire from the steamboat's two small cannon. In this fire-fight, several of the Rangers became demoralized, and one raced back to the river. Ford, pistol in hand, loudly announced that the next man who tried to race would have to outrun a Texas bullet. As one Texas historian described the scene, he "restored morale."
Ford then flanked Cortinas's breastworks and led a six-shooter charge. The watching Americans on the
Ranchero
could hear the "Texan yell" shrill and clear above the other screams and shooting. This high-pitched battle-cry, which the Texas Rangers had already made famous, probably was adopted in response to the Indian war whoop and Mexican
grito
. It was soon to be transmitted to history as the "Rebel yell." Southerners who had served in Mexico in 1846–48, and later along the Rio Grande, picked it up.
Cortinas commanded at least two hundred men, perhaps four hundred, of which sixty were mounted. He himself fought bravely, but was utterly unable to contain his army when the screaming Texans burst into the Mexican perimeter. His cavalry fled. Cortinas emptied his own revolver, then spurred away. A Texas bullet struck his heavy Mexican saddle. Another clipped his hair, and one smashed his belt. But much to Ford's disgust—Ford had detailed three men to pick him off—the Mexican leader escaped. Ford had one man killed and four wounded. The Mexicans, as nearly as could be told, suffered about thirty dead and forty injured.