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Lowell Tuttle
History I had forgotten. Besides Cinco de Mayo, there was 7th of Mayo...
‘Forgotten war’ to be remembered with ceremony at South Texas site
Joe Holley / Contributor
The prairie of Palo Alto was naturally suited for the first battle of the Mexican War. The coastal lowland was surrounded by tree-covered rises that inspired its Spanish name, “Tall Timber.”
Joe Holley
NATIVE T E X A N
Joe Holley / Contributor
At Palo Alto, U.S. Gen. Zachary Taylor sent 2,300 men into battle against a force of 3,200 led by Gen. Mariano Arista.
BROWNSVILLE — Most of us recall history-class renditions of Lexington and Concord, engagements that sparked a revolution. We know the Battle of New Orleans and, nearly a half century later, Gettysburg, Shiloh and Bull Run. Every Texan, of course, knows the Alamo and San Jacinto.
I’m assuming that many fewer Americans, including Texans, are familiar with the Battle of Palo Alto, the first major engagement in one of the most significant wars in North American history. It happened on a cord-grass-covered prairie just a few miles north of this historic city near the mouth of the Rio Grande. Palo Alto is one of three battlefield sites in the Brownsville area, along with Resaca de la Palma in a suburban neighborhood and Fort Texas (later Fort Brown) in downtown. The site of a skirmish called Rancho de Carricitos lies 28 miles upriver.
Sunday is the 176th anniversary of the U.S.-Mexican War. The date will go unnoticed, for the most part, even though the U.S. victory in the two-year struggle added more than half a million acres of land to the American West and Southwest. When the two nations signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on Feb. 2, 1848, ending the war, the United States more than doubled in size, adding California, Nevada and Utah, most of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. With the U.S. annexation of Texas finally settled, Mexico’s loss included roughly half of its national territory. Despite its significance, the U.S.-Mexican War remains America’s “forgotten war.”
“I went to high school a couple of hundred yards from Fort Brown, and we had no clue,” Daniel Ibarra told me on a recent weekday morning, referring to the original Fort Texas, an earthen-works barricade hastily thrown up at the start of the war. The genial Brownsville native is the chief of interpretation at the Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park, the only federally protected site in the nation that seeks to interpret the war.
Historian Michael Scott Van Wagenen, author of Remembering the Forgotten War, offers a plausible theory about why the war has settled into history’s shadow. “Many historians,” he writes, “believe that the U.S.-Mexican War has slipped from the memory of many Americans because it highlighted their nation’s aggression and was then eclipsed by the bloodier Civil War.”
The U.S.-Mexican War will be commemorated on Saturday, the 7th, at the Palo Alto site. Ibarra is expecting a sizeable crowd for the first public event since pandemic restrictions were lifted. At other times, the handsome headquarters building and museum, with paved walkways across the battle site and interpretive panels explaining where clashes occurred, gets relatively few visitors.
“We get mostly winter Texans,” Ibarra told me, “along with day trippers from the Valley, Corpus Christi.”
Palo Alto works regularly on cooperative projects with Mexican counterparts in Saltillo and Monterrey. “We’re trying to be impartial,” Ibarra said. “We want to tell the story in a way that leaves interpretation up to the visitor.”
Ibarra is aware that the war remains a sensitive subject, particularly on the Mexican side of the river. He knows two brothers, one living in Brownsville, the other in Matamoros, who do not see each other unless the Brownsville brother crosses the river. “I will not go to Brownsville,” the Mexican brother reminds him, “because that’s where IT started.”
In 1846, Palo Alto was on the southern edge of the so-called Nueces Strip, territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande that both nations claimed. When the U.S. annexed Texas the year before, Mexico insisted the southern boundary of the state was the Nueces; the administration of President James K. Polk maintained it was the Rio Grande. The failure of a U.S. diplomatic mission to resolve the border issue and negotiate the purchase of the Mexican province of Alta California prompted the president to order the U.S. Army into the disputed territory.
In March 1846, Gen. Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” led his troops to the northern bank of the Rio Grande, directly across from Matamoros. Quickly constructing the earthen barriers they christened Fort Texas, his men aimed a cannon at the town across the river. Mexican forces under Gen. Mariano Arista surged across, surprising a company of American dragoons at a small ranch named Carracitos. Eleven U.S. soldiers died in the skirmish, their deaths providing Polk the provocation he needed. Mexico had “shed American blood upon the American soil,” the president said. War was on.
An obscure congressman from Illinois, a young man named Lincoln, was part of a sizeable anti-war contingent, in Congress and beyond. The future president accused Polk of essentially taunting the Mexicans into war. Other opponents charged that the war was part of a thinly veiled Southern conspiracy to spread slavery across North America.
After feints and posturing on both sides for about a month, Arista ordered Mexican batteries to fire on Fort Texas before leading the main body of his army across the river to stop the Americans from resupplying through the Gulf of Mexico. The adversaries met in full force at Palo Alto. Outnumbered 2,300 to 3,200, Taylor surprised the Mexican force with an innovative “flying artillery” tactic. Perfected by Major Samuel Ringgold, the flying artillery consisted of small mobile cannon that could be fired and then quickly redeployed, pulled by a team of horses where they were most needed. By late afternoon, Arista had to withdraw.
The two armies met again the next day at a dry riverbed named Resaca de la Palma, with the Americans driving the Mexicans back across the Rio Grande. Arista moved his troops inland toward Monterrey. Taylor’s army, supplemented by volunteer regiments of rowdy Texas Rangers, followed. Early in 1847, U.S. forces led by Gen. Winfield Scott invaded Mexico City. By September, they had occupied the city. The war ended four months later.
Leaving the battlefield where it all began, I drove into town and took a quick look at Resaca de la Palma, basically a pleasant city park, and then headed downtown in search of Fort Texas. Near the Brownsville campus of UT-Rio Grande Valley, the Border Wall cuts through downtown; what’s left of the fort is south of the wall, although still on this side of the river. Turning down a gravel road below a levee, I came upon a desert-tan Humvee. A young Hispanic soldier in neatly starched desert camouflage sat cross-legged atop the vehicle, binoculars trained southward, a blue water jug at his knee.
I asked him whether he knew where the Fort Texas historical marker was. Smiling, he apologized for not knowing. A member of the Texas National Guard from Goliad, it was his first day on duty as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. He wasn’t familiar with the Mexican War or Fort Texas, he said.
I followed the gravel road another 100 yards or so, into an overgrown jungle of green bordering the now-defunct Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course. Curling vines were reclaiming an abandoned clubhouse. Two historical markers — one designating the original Fort Brown site, the other describing the siege of the fort — stood beside a portion of vine-covered earthen wall about three feet high, all that’s left of the old fort. It was quiet, almost eerie in this no-man’s land between two nations. I tried to imagine the thunder of cannon, the clash of bayonets, the anguished cries of wounded and dying men.
Headed back to town, I stopped and talked to the friendly, young Guardsman, reporting what I had discovered. He stood atop his Humvee, hands on knees like a shortstop anticipating a ground ball as he leaned down toward me. He was so high off the ground, we had to shout to make ourselves heard.
Glancing back as I drove away, I saw he had resumed his cross-legged position, binoculars trained toward a stand of trees across the old golf course. From the look of things, you might think the U.S.-Mexican War had never ended.
The Battle of Palo Alto National Historic Park will commemorate the anniversary of the battle on Saturday, May 7, from 10 a.m. until noon. The program will feature interactions with living historians, stories about the Battle of Palo Alto and the U.S.-Mexican War and live weapons demonstrations. For information, go to https://www.nps.gov/paal/index.htm. djholley10@gmail.com twitter.com/holleynews
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