Page:Notes of the Mexican war 1846-47-48.djvu/126

120 According to Gen. Scott's report, our army and navy had fired over three thousand ten-inch shells, two hundred howitzer shells, over one thousand Paixhan shot, and twenty-five hundred round shot, weighing in all about half a million of pounds. Nearly every house in the city was more or less damaged from our cannon. Some houses were totally ruined; a part of the Mexican batteries were dismounted; and several heavy breaches made in the walls surrounding the city. This was the result of seventeen days of war.

At 10 o'clock,, March 29th, the Mexicans surrendered the city of Vera Cruz and the strong Castle of San Juan de Ulloa, with all their stores, artillery, ammunition, and other munitions of war, and left for their respective homes on parole of honor. After which the flag of the United States was soon hoisted over the walls of Vera Cruz and the Castle of San Juan de Ulloa, and is now waving triumphantly in the breeze. We captured over four hundred cannons, over three thousand round shot and shells, and six thousand muskets.

After the surrender, Gen. Scott made immediate preparations to march his main army farther into the interior of Mexico, on account of the unhealthiness of Vera Cruz and its vicinity, there being already a great number of our soldiers sick in the hospital, unfit for any duty. On the 8th of April Gen. David E. Twiggs' division, composed of about three thousand regular soldiers, with a light field battery and part of Col. Harney's dragoons, started on their march towards the halls or capital of Mexico. Our division (Gen. Robert Patterson's) followed the next day, and for four days marched over a sandy and clayey but well shaded road, but through a poor, miserable, desolated and deserted country, producing nothing but prickly pear, long stretches of plate cactus, which grows from eight to twelve feet high, and chaparral in abundance. In fact, it looks as if the country was too poor to raise any kind of grain or vegetables.

The Mexican rancheros and padrones, fellows who live in miserable jacals or mud-plastered hovels, by their appearance live in a condition of filth and poverty. Many have no abrigam (sheltering place). They are mostly the descendants of the old Mexicans or Chichimeca. Their houses, or mud-plastered jacals (as we call them) were mostly deserted, in fear of us Yankees.

We arrived at our present encampment, Plan del Rio (or River of the Plain), on the 12th inst., much exhausted and fatigued from marching and heat from the hot sun. Here we find our distinguished and bosom friend, Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, with about 15,000 troops, strongly fortified and entrenched, with heavy batteries, contesting and disputing our march toward the capital of Mexico.