Page:A campaign in Mexico.djvu/30

22, who were sent up the day before with eight men, to guard the commissary stores. We arrived at this place, Camp Belknap, fourteen miles below Matamoros, in the night, and remained on duty in the rain and mud with no shelter for twenty-six hours. When the regiment arrived, we exchanged the duty of sentinels for that of pack horses. We carried our baggage and camp equipage, nearly a mile through a swamp, into the chaparel situated on a slight elevation or ridge. It is universally admitted that a chaparel cannot be described. I shall therefore attempt it no further than to give some of the outlines of its character.

"At a short distance it is indeed beautiful, resembling a well cultivated young orchard. Upon a near approach we find the largest trees do not exceed in size the peach or plum tree. These are very crooked and ill-shaped, with pinnate leaves somewhat resembling the locust. They are called musquite trees, and are scattered about at irregular distances. The intervals are filled up with a kind of barren-looking under-growth, which meets the branches of the former. Prongs of this bush, with sharp steel-colored thorns, shoot out in all directions, commencing just above the surface of the ground. The rest of the chaparel is composed of all kinds of weeds, thickly interwoven with briars, and interspersed with large plats of prickly pear and other varieties of the cactus family.

"I am conscious I have not done this subject justice. My powers of description are inadequate, and in order to have a full and clear conception of a chaparel, you must see and feel it too. Two days occupied in clearing it away, preparing for an encampment, will give any one a clear idea of its character. The expression so common with us,

is almost true without exception. Even the frogs and grasshoppers are in possession of the last mentioned appendages.

"Our encampment is beautifully situated upon a grassy ridge, bounded in front by the Rio Grande, opposite Barita, and in the rear by a vast plain bedecked with little salt lakes. Now if you think this a romantic spot, or that there is poetry connected with our situation, you need only imagine us trudging through a swamp, lugging our mouldy crackers and fat bacon, (for we are truly living on the fat of the land,) to become convinced that this is not a visionary abode, but stern reality. I have yet encountered but little