Page:Memoir of a tour to northern Mexico.djvu/3

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Instead of the many apologies generally offered to the public by an author who has the hardihood to present them what, in spite of all prefaces, it will either accept or refuse, I take the liberty to explain at once to the reader with what intention I undertook my excursion, and under what circumstances I pursued it; and he will accordingly be enabed to perceive if the records of such a journey may suit his own taste or not.

In the spring of 1846, I left St Louis, Missouri, with the intention of making a tour through Northern Mexico and Upper California and of returning in the fall of the next year. The principal object of my expedition was scientific. I desired to examine the geography, natural history, and statistics of that country, by taking directions on the road with the compass, and by determining the principal points by astronomical observations. I made a rich collection of quite new and undescribed plants. I examined the character of the rocks, to gain insight into the geological formations of the whole country. I visited as many mines as possible, and analyzed some of the ores. I made barometrical observations, to ascertain the elevations above the sea. I kept meteorological tables, to draw general results from them for the climate, its salubrity and fitness for agriculture, and took memoranda in relation to the people–their number, industry, manners, previous history, &c. The intention, in short, for which I started, was to gain information of a country that was but little known. All that I can, therefore, offer the public in the following pages is, what I have sought myself–a collection of matters of fact, related not in the exciting description of an historical novel, but in the plain narrative form of a journal, through which the incidents and adventures of the trip are but occasionally interwoven.

How far I have succeeded in it, the reader must judge for himself at the end of the work; though I am myself free to confess, that, for various reasons, the result of my expedition has by far not satisfied the expectations I entertained of it at the beginning.

After having outfitted myself for the trip by private means, and being already on the road, the war between the United States and Mexico broke out, very untimely for my purposes, and deranged my plans considerably. By the arbitrary government of the State of Chihuahua, as the reader will perceive in the course of my narrative, I was detained for six months in a very passive situation; and after the arrival of the American troops in Chihuahua, seeing the impracticability of continuing my journey as far as intended, I accepted a situation in the medical department of the army, and returned with it, by way of Monterey, to the States. My connexion with the army enabled me to become acquainted with the principal events of that campaign; but not having been an eye-witness to all of them, I consider my historical allusions only as a contribution to a future history of the campaign; a task that will soon be accomplished by a more competent friend of mine in St. Louis, a late officer in Colonel Doniphan’s regiment.