Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/305

276 days they shook hands with General Worth’s brave men, then some twenty miles beyond Saltillo and 110 or perhaps 120 from Parr-as.

"An entire failure," was Taylor’s comment on Wool’s expedition, and in a sense his judgment appeared to be correct. But this was Polk’s fault. Where there is nothing to do, nothing can be done.25 Before laying out the campaign the government should have seen What it had now seen—that Saltillo was the key of Chihuahua, and that a properly equipped expedition could not reach the latter city Without passing rather close to the former. But in reality Wool accomplished a great dealt He showed how a real soldier, without fear and without political yearnings, could lead an expedition through an enemy’s country. Nine hundred miles this army marched. Swift rivers were quickly crossed, ravines filled, hills cut down, mountains climbed. Provisions never failed. No wreckage marked the router Not a drop of blood was shed; not a shot fired. Wool made enemies only among those who were under obligations to be friends, and made friends among those who were under obligations to he enemies. And out of a crude, heterogeneous mass be forged a keen, tough, highly tempered blade, that was to prove its value soon in a terrible crisis.

The other lateral expedition moved against the city of Tampico. This place, the principal town in the state of Tamaulipas, and after Vera Cruz the chief port of Mexico on the Gulf coast, was physically remarkable. Land and water are perhaps nowhere more freakishly intermingled. But for practical purposes one may describe it adequately as on a low ridge—with the immense lagoon of Carpintero on the one hand and the deep, wide, heavy, greenish-brown Pánuco on the other—a little more than five miles from the Gulf, as the river