AFTER 164 YEARS: A CONTINUING WHITEWASH

By Juan Montoya
Almost pushed to the background in the pomp and fiesta of Cinco de Mayo, on May 6-9 the area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande will observe the 164th anniversary of the battle in 1846 that signaled a beginning and end on many fronts.
On that fateful day, on a thorny flatland in what is now north Brownsville, the clash between the invading U.S. Army and the Mexican defenders set off a chain of events that would culminate in consequences unimagined by either the conqueror of the conquered.
Historians from across the United States and Mexico hold ceremonies at the Palo Alto Battle Site. And if past observations are give any indication of their nature, they will be void the whys and wherefores that the battle even took place.
The real story of the area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande lies just beneath the surface among the roots of the chaparral and the thorny cactus and scraggly mesquite. There, where two mass graves of the Mexican and some U.S. dead lie together amid the roots of the wetland flora, was played out a continental drama that continues to unfold.
The innocuous appearance of the flatlands belies the deep significance of the Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma battle sites to the history of the United States and Mexico. More significantly, the battle sites marked momentous events that still are carried in the minds and the lore of the local inhabitants of South Texas.
Those three days – May 6-9, 1846 – still influence this area. The army of Zachary Taylor not only defeated Mexican defenders in those battles, it also left imprints still indelible in history.
To many local mainstream historians, the history of the Rio Grande Valley started when Taylor came and later when Charles Stillman laid out the city town site now called Brownsville. To them, anything before that is prehistory – a conveniently nebulous period when nothing but wild animals and Indians roamed the countryside.
They are mistaken and serve us badly by continuing to mouth the propaganda that the settlement of this area was undertaken after 1848 by the pioneers associated with the U.S. military. In fact, the first settlement was approved by the Crown in 1781in what is now Rancho Viejo. And the settlement of Matamoros a few miles south was begun in 1749.
Large agricultural and ranching undertakings existed in the area before American and Texan impresarios and politicians turned their covetous eyes toward it.
If ever there was an area victimized by the expansionist ideology of manifest destiny, the area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was it.
Frederick Merk, a professor emeritus from Harvard, wrote that the James Knox Polk administration submitted declarations of war on Mexico to the cabinet urging an invasion of the disputed territory.
The cabinet, knowing that no good reason existed for the declaration of war against against a peaceful neighbor, rejected Polk’s calls for belligerency.
With an action that was a prototype of the invasion of Cuba in 1898 and the Gulf of Tonkin in the Vietnam years, Polk set about to create an "incident" to justify the aggression.
In Cuba, it was the blowing up of the Battleship Maine. In Vietnam, it was the so-called "attack" by the North Vietnamese patrol boats. In the case of South Texas (northern Mexico), it was a sacrificed patrol sent out under the command of Capt. Seth Thornton into Mexican-held territory near Carrizitos, about 36 miles upriver. This patrol was sent ostensibly to reconnoiter for the presence of Mexican forces and were ambushed when Thornton (against orders or following secret ones) chose to confront them. His force of 56 dragoons was decimated and he and more than 40 of his soldiers were taken prisoners.
Thus was the famous slogan "American blood has been shed on American soil" coined to incite a nation bent on expansionism to invade a peaceful neighbor. Abraham Lincoln’s lonely demand that the administration show him the exact spot of the encounter was all but drowned in the din of jingoism that erupted days after the news that the United States was invading Mexico.
Honest Abe was voted out in the next elections for this affront to the national honor.
Like Mark Twain’s agonized protests against the action, his calls for justification were ignored. Henry David Thoreau's protest against the use of his taxes to fund the war earned him a few days in the clink.
The Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma engagements were the first steps in a process that would result in more than half of the Mexican nation being transferred to U.S. hands. The subsequent rush for land dispossessed many local land grant holders. The claims against that land grab persist to this day in U.S. courts.
And military historians make over the development of "flying artillery" in those battles to glorify the actions of the military.
But just how glorious were these battles?
Historians and researchers with the National Park Service have found that the Mexican fatalities included women and adolescent boys who traveled with the Mexican army. Some of the teenagers were "drafted" by the army to inflate the ranks as the army moved north.
The force that Ulysses S. Grant – then a lieutenant – said fought valiantly defending an exposed flank and did not run from a superior U.S. force was cannon fodder. How do we know women and adolescents were in the battle? Analyses of the human bone remains found at the site bear mute witness to that fact.
In fact, the piles of the Mexican dead were left on the site unburied as a warning to others. New settlers passing the site, according to Helen Chapman, couldn’t but see the piles of bones left there. What remains were not borne away by rodents were washed far and wide by a violent rainstorm that lashed the area, located in a 100-year flood zone.
Just as the remains of those soldiers dot the countryside, so do the sentiments festering over land grants that were supposed to be respected under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico.
Those land grants cover basically all of South Texas and include the titles to lands occupied by the University of Texas, Fort Brown, and the original town site.
Extensive genealogies have been compiled to press the claims to these properties, and some have been settled. Countless families like the Ballis, Hinojosas, Falcones, Cavazos, Garzas, Zamoras, Salinas have formed an Association of Claimants.
As long as this wound continues to fester, the history of this area will be like Chapman account of the bleached bones along the road to Brownsville – a whitewash.
(This article first appeared in the Brownsville Herald.)