because most of them were Irish Catholics—and in the remoter pages of American history as the turncoat Saint Patrick Battalion. The unit’s numbers grew as U.S. desertions continued, and they were formed into an artillery company under command of a Mexican captain, though Lieutenant Jack Riley was the executive officer and their true leader. In their first action against their former comrades, a week before the American declaration of war, the San Patricios bombarded Fort Texas and in the process killed one Major Jacob Brown, in whose honor the fort was renamed and Brownsville would be christened.
Everywhere they went this legion of foreigners pledged to Mexico’s defense was honored by people of every social class. The Patricios were surprised to find that not all Mexicans were brownskinned, though the great mass of them were, being either Indian or, more likely, mestizo, the burgeoning Spanish-Indian caste that had over the past two centuries come to comprise the majority of the population. But the ruling native class, the peak of the social pyramid, was the Creole—the Spanish descendents whose Caucasian blood remained free of Indian taint. They were a courtly society, educated, formal of speech and manner, given to religious ostentation and devoted to European tradition. They were also passionate about their honor, both family and personal, and vehement in redressing injury to it.
In the course of their deployments over the following year, the San Patricios marched through sierra ranges of jagged peaks and thick timber, through deep canyons misted blue with the spray of booming rivers. They traversed broad plains of green and yellow grasses rippling in the wind like a restless sea. They crossed pale deserts flat as tables extending to the burning horizons and shimmering in the heat. They heard the roar of cougars in the mountain nights, their evenings in open country quivered with wolf howls and the high crying of coyotes. In Tampico they were granted two days of liberty and sported on the beach a few miles from town. Samuel Thomas had known only the cold cobalt water of the sharp-shelved North Atlantic coast and he reveled in the warm green clarity of the gulf shallows. They swam, lazed on the sand, got sunburned. They cut coconuts off the trees and hacked open the husks and punched holes in the eyes of the brown nut with their bayonets to get to the cool sweet milk, the most delectable drink Samuel Thomas had ever put tongue to. Where but in heaven might a man get milk from the trees? He relished the spicy native cooking and acquired a taste for the coppery sting of tequila and the smoky burn of mescal. He delighted in the skiffle music of the villages and learned a variety of rustic dances. He had an affinity for the Spanish language and gained swift fluency with it, a great advantage with the camp women who traveled with the army and cooked for it and tended its wounds. Most of these women were young and given to playful laughter and mischievous banter. Any camp woman could share herself with whomever she wished but also had the right to refuse anyone, and a man who tried to take her against her will risked a maiming from his comrades.
The Patricios were a formidable force, dealing heavy casualties in their every engagement and stoking ever higher the vengeful wrath of the Yankees—or “gringos,” as the Americans were now known in Mexico, a newly- coined pejorative that would long outlast the war. But as the fighting progressed, the turncoats began to understand that Mexico could not win and that their own future was headed toward an ultimate choice of dying in battle or at the end of an American rope. Their desperation made them the more intrepid. General Lopez de Santa Ana, the supreme commander of the Mexican army, would later say that if he’d had but five hundred more men of the Patricios’ mettle he could have won the war.
The Saint Patricks fought at Monterrey, at Saltillo, at Buena Vista, at Cerro Gordo. And then, in the war’s decisive and bloodiest battle, on an infernal August afternoon at a place called Churubusco, at the very gates of Mexico City, they were done for. Some managed to escape but two-thirds of them were killed in that fight and the rest taken prisoner, many of them with severe wounds. Samuel Thomas’s left hand was mutilated by shrapnel, his hipbone pierced by a bayonet. He would never again be able to sit a horse, and the thumb and remaining two fingers of his ruined hand would never come unclawed.
Seventy Saint Patricks stood trial for desertion. They were made to wear their unwashed and bloodied Mexican uniforms in court, exuding a reek that intensified the hateful grimaces in the room and seemed in keeping with the odiousness of their crime. Every man of them was convicted and sentenced to hang.
In his judicial review, however, General Winfield Scott pardoned five of the condemned outright on different legal bases, and he spared fifteen others on the ground that they had deserted prior to the declaration of war and so were exempt from the death penalty. Those fifteen—including Samuel Thomas, Jack Riley, and John Little—were sentenced instead to fifty lashes on the bare back and the “D” brand of the deserter burned into their right cheek. Because Lucas Malone’s desertion had erroneously been recorded as occurring six weeks after it actually did, and because the court would give no credence to his comrades’ attestations that he had deserted with them before the declaration of war, he remained among the condemned. “Aint it the shits?” Malone said. “I keep my skin through all the fightin and get done in by some jackass of a clerk.”
Samuel Thomas was among those who received their punishment in front of hundreds of witnessing American soldiers in the main plaza of San Angel, a village on the outskirt of the capital. In the center of the plaza stood a newly erected gallows consisting of a single long crossbeam from which dangled sixteen noosed ropes—the others of the condemned would be executed over the next three days. Set in a row under the crossbeam were eight small mule-drawn carts, and in each one stood a pair of San Patricios with their hands bound behind them. The carts faced a line of trees along one side of the plaza where the men to be flogged were stripped bare to the waist and each one tied to a tree trunk. The officer in charge kept loud count as the whippings were laid on. Samuel Thomas locked his jaws to keep from crying out but he passed out on the thirty-ninth lash. After the fiftieth, he was revived with a pail of water so he would be conscious for his branding. Two men held his head fast while another applied the glowing iron directly below his eye and he smelled his own searing flesh and bone and screamed in violation of his vow that he would not. It went even worse for Riley, who was the most hated of the deserters for being their leader. His brand was applied upside down, purportedly by accident, and so, to the loud approval of the spectating troops, the officer in charge ordered that it be burned correctly into his other cheek. Riley had managed to hold silent the first time but could not stifle himself the second, and his screams roused a great and happy chorus of derision.
Then the hangings. White hoods were drawn over the heads of the condemned and the nooses snugged round their necks. At an officer’s signal, the muleteers’ whips cracked and the carts rumbled out from under the crossbeam and the plaza rang with cheers. A fortunate few of the gibbeted died instantly of snapped necks but most of them, including Lucas Malone, strangled to death, choking with awful sounds as their hysterical feet sought purchase on the empty air and their trousers darkened with piss and shit. The flogged and branded were then made to dig the hanged men’s graves and bury them, Samuel Thomas scooping at the earth with a trowel in his one good hand.
With the fall of Mexico City, the war was over in every sense but officially. It was another five months before the signing in early 1848 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which compact Mexico ceded to the United States an enormous portion of land that extended the American border to the Pacific coast. But it was still another month before the treaty was accepted by the American Senate, and then another two and a half months before it was ratified by Mexico. And all that while, the captive Saint Patricks labored daily with picks and shovels in a garbage pit a quarter-mile wide at the edge of the city, a monstrous crater writhing with rats and swarming with flies and aflutter with great flocks of carrion birds. Into this pit were emptied daily wagonloads of every sort of refuse and organic rot, including carcasses of animals large and small, the discard of miscarriages and abortions. The fetor made their eyes water and stung their throats even through the bandanas they wore over nose and mouth, and every man of them had bloodshot eyes and a chronic cough.
They were at first incarcerated in the Acordada Penitentiary, near the center of the capital, and every morning before going to the pit they unloaded dead bodies from the municipal wagons that each dawn collected them off the streets and alleyways, as many of them victims of murder as of exposure and malnutrition and alcohol poisoning and disease and total exhaustion of the will to live. These dead were displayed on the prison’s front steps all day and night for anyone to claim. Those still there the next morning were then removed to make room for the new day’s corpses and were taken for burial in the potter’s field adjoining the garbage pit.
After two of the Patricios escaped from the city penitentiary—both breakouts abetted by visitors—the prisoners were moved to the nearby fortress of Chapultepec castle and visiting privileges were curtailed. One of the escapees had been a diminutive man named Duhan, who dressed himself in smuggled women’s clothing and then simply walked out with the female visitors when they departed. The other to escape was John Little, who had
