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Federalist Wars: Final Phase

hidden at Laredo.[22]  The movement toward the Río Grande was not unexpected in Mexico, for as early as June a report was afloat at Matamoros that the Federalists were expected to be on the river some time in July.[23]

Among those serving under Jordan were Captain John T. Price and Ewen Cameron. In the excitement attending the preparations to move against Laredo, Cameron's horse was lost at the camp on the Nueces, but was later found in possession of a Mexican. Cameron seized the horse and a heated argument developed. Hearing the altercation, Canales intervened, ordering Cameron to surrender the horse to the Mexican. Drawing his pistol, Cameron refused to deliver up the horse, declaring in broad Scotch that he would shoot the first man who should lay hands on his property. Whereupon, for disobedience of orders, Canales ordered Cameron tried by a court-martial presided over by Captain Thomas Pratt as judge advocate. The court acquitted Cameron, and ordered the horse restored to him.[24]  Canales never forgot this incident.

About the middle of July, Jordan and López began their march for Laredo, and by the late evening of the 24th they were within thirty miles of the place. A forced night march brought them to the town, where their scouts met them and reported the enemy forces, mostly in the town on the east side of the river, as numbering 140 to 150 men under, as López reported later, "the vile prostituted Captain Rodríquez, alias Chicharron." By leaving the road and taking to the chaparral, Jordan's men succeeded in eluding the Mexican sentinels placed on the road in anticipation of the Federalist advance. About one half mile from Laredo the Texans hid their horses in a corral, and silently entered the town on foot, secreting themselves in some weeds and bushes along the banks of the river, within a hundred yards or less of the public square.[25]  An hour later it began to dawn, and an elderly woman, making



22. José María J. Carbajal to M. B. Lamar, Galveston, July 27, 1840, in Lamar Papers, III, 424-425.

23. D. W. Smith to John Forsyth, Matamoros, June 30, 1840, in Consular Dispatches, Matamoros, 1840-1848, ms., microfilm.

24. Yoakum, History of Texas, II, 377; Maude Wallis Traylor, "Those Men of the Mier Expedition," in Frontier Times, XVI (1938-1939), 307.

25. "Information derived from Anson G. Neal," in Lamar Papers, VI, 106; Luis López to Lic. A. Canales, Conventional Army, 1st Section of Operations, Laredo, July 26, 1840 (translated by George Fisher), in Telegraph and Texas Register, Aug. 26, 1840, being López's report of the Laredo campaign.

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AFTER SAN JACINTO: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841
Joseph Milton Nance, 1963