Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/412

396 Diego Bear with 250 men, who coming upon a small party of insurgents near Dolores on the 22d of March, killed a number and dispersed the rest. On that same side of the sierra the independents with three guns assaulted the hacienda of Villela on the 7th of April, but were repulsed with the loss of the guns. Colonel Nuñez and Major Molleda perished in the action, and Colonel Gutierrez was taken prisoner and subsequently shot by order of Colonel Tovar, comandante at San Luis Potosí. Father Zimarripa was also captured; he had once before been taken in Aculco and pardoned; now he was retained in irons pending orders from the viceroy. About this time, owing to the defeat of the royalist Bengóa on the 16th of February, three leagues from Rio Verde, this place was at the mercy of the insurgents, who, according to the official reports, plundered it, and also the rancho Jabalí. Tovar despatched Captain Sanz with a force on the 23d of February, who recovered the town and the artillery the insurgents had possessed themselves of, but could not overtake the assailants. The latter were, however, defeated and dispersed by Arredondo, who pursued the governor of Sierra Gorda—as Colonel Felipe Landaverde was called, being represented to have been an honorable man—so hotly that to escape he threw himself down a precipice, abandoning his arms and horse.