TODAY IN HISTORY: U.S. ARMY OCCUPIES MATAMOROS

By Juan Montoya
Ten days after the encounter between U.S. troops and the Mexican defenders at Palo Alto on May 8 and Resaca de la Palma the next day in 1846, "U.S. soldiers walked across the river 'up to their armpits' and 'as the band struck up yankee doodle' the soldiers 'raised a cheer that made the woods ring.'".

That was on May 18, and as it has been documented elsewhere, the occupation of the city by U.S. forces and its unruly (and often murderous volunteers) lasted as long as the U.S. forces under General Zachary Taylor remained in northern Mexico and until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed two years later in Mexico City February 1848.

Taylor's forces marched into Matamoros without opposition and raised the Stars and Stripes above the city. He appointed one of his officer as military governor and the resident of Matamoros had the "undecidedly unwelcome honor" of being the first in Mexico to experience military occupation.

Aside from the experience of the occupied, it was, for the most part, a wildly exciting and popular war.

The fledgling penny press hyped up the conflict as part of this nation's Manifest Destiny to wrest the territory from the slothful race and into the hands of the superior American settlers who would make it productive as God had willed.

This followed a plan laid out and put into action by U.S. President James Polk, who had ordered several forces in the military and mercenary "mountain men" to simultaneously invade and hold outposts in New Mexico and cities and ports in California.

As early as a year before, Polk had ordered Taylor to Camp Jasper in Louisiana and after the annexation of Texas in 1845, has directed his secretary of war to order him to Corpus Christi and then across the disputed Nueces Strip between that river and the Rio Grande.

His aim, historians have documented, was not to invade Mexico and engage in a war, but rather to occupy its territory and to force the Mexicans to capitulate and sell him California.

Once in northern Mexico, even some of the most ardent expansionists looked around them at the desert wastes of Chihuahua and had  a change of heart declaring that the place just wasn't worth it.

If you drive across the Sarita checkpoint about 100 miles north of Brownsville and visit the first rest stop, there is a historical marker that claims it was the spot "under this tree" where Taylor rested on the way to the Rio Grande on March 15, 1846, more than two months before his troops engaged the Mexicans and occupied Matamoros.

Now, that's 173 years ago and given the many hurricanes that have struck the area,
it is doubtful that the tree the marker refers to is one of the live oaks on either side of it. But it is a reminder that in the context of U.S. history, the movement of that army marked the beginning of a new era for South Texas and the relations between both nations.

The rest, as they say, is history.