This previously unpublished diary records the intuitive reflections of an educated man who served as a military administrator in northern Mexico during the Mexican War.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...