Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/504

488 Meantime, a French steamer, the Francia, and an English freight-steamer plying between New Orleans, Tobasco, Tampico, Vera Cruz, Havana and Liverpool, "promiscuous," as it were, arrived; and with three steamers in port at once, Vera Cruz presented an appearance of liveliness quite unusual.

I swore at Guadalajara that I would never attend another bull-fight, and I meant it. But I did not say I would not attend a bear-fight. One Sunday, the walls of the City of Vera Cruz were placarded with posters announcing a grand fight to come off at the  Plaza de Toros, between the celebrated California grizzly bear Sampson—the same I believe which chawed up and mortally injured "Grizzly Adams,"—and a "valiente toro" at 4½ o'clock In the pictures on the posters Sampson had a little the worst of the fight, but I did not believe that the artist was fully acquainted with his subject, and in company with other Californians backed our piasano, the bear, for the fight, against all odds.

The old fellow was about one hundred years old, more or less, and had lost in other fights, and by age, nearly every sign of a tooth; nevertheless, he was a healthy specimen of the grizzly, weighing about one thousand pounds, and able to entertain any bull ever raised in Spanish America.

The bull selected was one of the vicious, long-horned, black, Spanish brutes, not very large, but active, and when he was brought in by the vacqueros, in the morning, made it very lively for all the horses and loose boys and things in the neighborhood.

At the appointed time some two thousand or twenty-five hundred people, of all ages, sizes, colors and sexes