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Rh of Mexican support. By taking bribes for letting merchandise pass up to the interior and sometimes even guarding it, they violated the laws on which their existence rested. Mostly they were brave only where they felt safe. When laden with booty they would scatter to their homes, no matter how important the business in hand. Rivalries and even hostilities between parties operating in the same district arose. Cooperation could seldom be reckoned upon, and hardly any would face the climate far above Jalapa. Soon learning that it was more wholesome to waylay Mexicans than Americans, they plundered their fellow-countrymen without ceremony; and they would rob even old women or young children of their needful clothing. Sheafs of complaints against them piled up in the state and national archives. People organized to fight them, and sometimes appealed to the Americans against the very men who were to have been their champions. "The Mexicans have sown to the storm, they are now reaping the whirlwind," said an American officer.

In the states of Puebla, Mexico and Oaxaca also guerillas were organized, and in Puebla all these parties could find an opportunity. General Rea, a pupil of Morelos and the Mexican revolution, had the discredit of the chief command, though Bravo, who stood at the summit of the social scale, was mainly responsible for their iniquities, since during his brief term as comandante general of Puebla he issued a great number of patents to unfit leaders. What Rea did particularly in this regard was to combine individuals and small groups, and place them under some kind of supervision. He loved to answer critics by saying that his guerillas were in the field because honorable men were not; and that, had not the government condoned their crimes, they would have served the Americans as counter-guerillas. After a time his officers adopted a set of rules which aimed to regulate operations, but even this measure seems to have accomplished little. The guerillas robbed the people, seized funds belonging to the state, and pillaged even churches. Some gangs were large enough to attack haciendas. One party called themselves the "Lancers of the Poisoned Spear."

Soon after Scott left Puebla for Mexico early in August, 1847, these banditti and every individual ruffian of that vicinity