This previously unpublished diary records the intuitive reflections of an educated man who served as a military administrator in northern Mexico during the Mexican War.
Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis, engineer, lawyer and graduate of West Point, arrived in Mexico in July of 1846 as commander of the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment to find a volatile and chaotic situation in occupied towns along the Rio Grande. American civilians of the lowest sort--men and women--mingled with Mexican townspeople, robbing, murdering, and raping. Neither civil nor military law made provisions for governing...

"This was the very life I had been desirous of leading. To mix with the Mexican rancheros and see more of their manner of living.
"When the news came that a treaty of peace had actually been signed with Mexico we joyfully turned our face homewards that is towards the sea coast, taking with us the heavy guns which had been an object of so much care and solicitude in the past."
Often thought of as the inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday was first and foremost a soldier. Graduated from West Point in 1842 (where his record characterizes him as "correct in his deportment, social and...