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Federalist Wars: Final Phase

Secondly, because they reprobate your conduct, in the strongest terms, for uniting yourself with those Texian infidels. And thirdly, and lastly, because we can never forget the robberies, murders, and outrages which they have perpetrated on the persons of the best and most respectable citizens of our towns; so that even your own followers disapprove your conduct, except the few who surround you.[158]

Menaced by a superior Centralist force and deprived of the opportunity of finding another asylum in Texas by the treatment of his Texan allies at Saltillo, Canales sought to extricate himself from an unpleasant situation. From his camp at Los Olmitos, on the left bank of the Río Bravo, he wrote General Reyes on October 31 expressing fear of vengeance from the Americans after the way they had been betrayed at Saltillo and indicating his willingness to abandon the Republic of the Río Grande if given time "to arrange all matters" in regard to the surrender.[159]  In response to Canales' appeal, General Reyes dispatched to Canales' camp late in the evening of the same day, Lieutenant Colonel José M. Carrasco, a cousin of Canales and a friend of Jesús Cárdenas, to call upon the Federalist leaders to surrender, to offer in return forgiveness for past actions, and to grant them a truce for eight days.[160]  In reporting upon his conference with Canales and Cárdenas, Carrasco informed Arista:

They have confided in me their misfortunes, and the well known causes which forced them to recruit adventurers; but they have shown me clearly by written documents, and I have read in their hearts that they have never been traitors. They recruited soldiers in Texas, an enemy's country, that was their crime, but neither the Texian flag nor officers of that Government


158. Rafael de Lira to Seignor Licentiate Don Antonio Canales, Mier, Oct. 12 [1840], in Austin City Gazette, Dec. 2, 1840; Telegraph and Texas Register, Dec. 16, 1840. For Carrasco's part in effecting the reconciliation, see Austin City Gazette, Dec. 30, 1840.

159. Telegraph and Texas Register, Jan. 31, 1841; Antonio Canales to Isidro Reyes, Los Olmitos, Oct. 31, 1840, in Gaceta del Gobierno (Ciudad Victoria), Nov. 14, 1840, and El Ancla, Nov. 9, 1840.

160. The terms of the Armistice which are dated November 1, as well as much of the correspondence concerning its drafting and transmittal, are printed in El Ancla, Nov. 16, 1840; Telegraph and Texas Register, Jan. 13, 1841; and in a six-page double column supplement to El Seminario del Gobierno de Nuevo León, no. 88, del Jueves 4 de Noviembre de 1840, which is headed: "Paz de la frontera de los Departamentos de Coahuila y Tamaulipas, y feliz union de los mejicanos para combatir a los usurpadores de Téjas," and published at Monterey, 1840.

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