in a small but fertile valley, surrounded by cane, corn, and rice fields. We left Zapotlanejo on the morning of Oct. 27th, to ride thirty-two miles to Tepotitlan, a town of from five to eight thousand people. Our roads had been bad enough in all conscience before, but they grew worse and worse as we advanced, and the night rains grew heavier. This day's travel was the hardest we had yet experienced.
Nine miles beyond Zapotlanejo we crossed the Bridge of Calderon, a stone structure, spanning a deep but narrow arroyo. It was here that the Padre Hidalgo, the Washington of Mexico, with eighty thousand men, all Indians, armed with bows and arrows, and a few wooden cannon which burst at the first fire, attacked the Spaniards, in January 1811. The Spaniards were not a tenth as strong, numerically, but they were well armed, and all the desperate valor and enthusiasm of the Indians went for naught. The poor fellows rushed up to the Spanish cannons and pushed their hats into them to prevent their going off. So little did they know of the use and power of artillery. They were mowed down by thousands, and broke and fled at last in utter rout, leaving Hidalgo to make his way to Chihuahua, where he was betrayed into the hands of his enemies, sent to Guanajuato, tried, condemned, and executed.
The soil in this vicinity is a dark red earth, which resembles that of the gold belt of the Sierra Nevada, and is tenacious to the last degree when wet up by the rains, and worked into brick material by the wheels of vehicles. We passed during this day, a poor little village at which the butcher Rojas captured eighty men—all the able-bodied male population of the vi-
