the Federal army and "protector of the States of Sonora and Sinaloa." In order to give his movement some financial support, Urrea seized the customs receipts at Mazatlán in Sinaloa on September 30, 1838, amounting to an estimated $100,000.

Meanwhile it looked as if the revolt might spread; so the principal officers of the Army of the North (Filisola, Ampudia, Canalizo, Rafael Vasquez, Rómulo de la Vega, Adrián Woll, Manuel Savariego, Francisco G. Pavón, Nicolás Condelle, and Pedro de la Garza and fifteen others) appealed to their subordinates and fellow-countrymen to remain patient and firm in their loyalty to the government which, they claimed, was well aware of the sufferings they had endured from "the cruel depredations of the ferocious hordes of barbarians and the vicious gangs of rapacious volunteers from Texas." The supreme government, they promised, would soon provide the resources necessary to arm and maintain the presidial companies and to mount the cavalry units, now largely afoot, for the promotion of the peace and welfare of the frontier through the extermination of the "bloodthirsty barbarians" and the "bandits and pirates calling themselves Texan volunteers."[9]  The appeal, however, seems to have fallen on deaf ears, for the frontier peoples had seen too many such promises in the past left largely unfulfilled. The flame of revolt continued to spread in Sinaloa, Durango, and Jalisco, and discontent smouldered in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila. General Valentín Canalizo, a close friend of Santa Anna's, was named by Filisola to command the second division of the Army of the North, and thus, on April 3, 1838, became second in command of that army with orders to put down the Federalist uprising.[10]  Urrea's initial successes in Sonora and Sinaloa ended in disaster in October 1838, and the movement was quickly suppressed in Jalisco, the principal early stronghold of the liberal movement, and in Durango, Oaxaca, and Chiapas where revolutionary disturbances had erupted.

The discontent in the north persisted, however, and suddenly on October 7, 1838, a fresh insurrection broke out at Tampico under the