# Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 15

XV.
A BANQUET, AND A TRAGEDY, AT CUAUTLA-MORELOS.
I.
When I saw Amecameca again it was to pass it on board a gala train going down to celebrate the completion of the Morelos railway to Cuautla, in Tierra Caliente. The Morelos railway is a native Mexican work. It was built under the auspices of Delfin Sanchez, a son-in-law of President Juarez, was rushed forward with great expedition, in order to secure valuable premiums, added to the regular subsidy by Government, and there was much defective work in its construction. It is laid to the narrow gauge, and projected ultimately to reach Acapulco, but this latter need hardly be looked for in any predicable time. At present it reaches about seventy-five miles—to Cuautla- Morelos, capital of the state of Morelos.
All official and distinguished Mexico was aboard that day—the President, the justices of the Supreme Court, generals, senators, littérateurs, and, greatest of all, Porfirio Diaz. "Porfirio" wore a felt hat with a tall top, and his manner with his friends was easy and unpretentious. Had the accident of a week later happened that day instead, the Republic of Mexico would have needed to be reconstructed from the bottom upward.
A locomotive exploradora, a look-out engine, went on ahead of us to see that all was safe. Every little place had its music and firing of crackers, and the local detach​
IN TIERRA CALIENTE.
​ment of Rurales reined up at the station. At Amecameca there were as many as fifty of the latter, with drawn swords, all on white horses, which the firing made plunge with great spirit. At Ozumba was a battalion of mounted riflemen, under command of a handsome young officer in an eye-glass, who might have come fresh from the military school of Saint Cyr. The Indian populations, who could never have seen the locomotive before, maintained nevertheless, as their way is, a certain stoicism. There were no wild manifestations of surprise, no shouts; they even fired off their crackers with a serious air.
The line is a congeries of curves without end, to overcome the three-quarters of a mile grade perpendicular from Amecameca to Cuautla. Cuautla has seven thousand people. For the ten years, up to this time, there had not been even diligence communication with it, and the railway was an event indeed. The enterprise was carried through chiefly by the exertions of a Señor Mendoza Cortina, who has great sugar estates in the neighborhood. The streets were decorated with triumphal arches, and borders of tall banana-plants. They were shabby, and the place more squalid than is the rule in the temperate climates above. The Indians had an apathetic look. Few young and interesting faces were seen among them, but an extraordinary number of hags. I found in use some very pretty pottery, which I was told was made at Cuernavaca, forty miles away. Simple bits of stone and shell were impasted in the common earthenware with an effect like that of old Roman mosaic. There was a distinctly Indian Christ in the parish church. In the plaza in front stands a great tree, somehow connected with a noche triste of the patriot Morelos. Like Cortez at Mexico, he was forced to retreat one night in 1812, after a gallant resistance of sixty-two days to a siege by the Spaniards. ​
II.
The extremely civilized company pouring down to this shabby little place had a grand banquet in an old convent now adapted to the uses of a railway station, and plentiful speech-making afterward. There were a number of merry young journalists of the party, and they comported themselves as merry young journalists are apt to. They rapped on the table and called "otro!" "otro!"—another!—with pretended enthusiasm, even after the dullest speeches. It seemed typical of something curiously illogical in the Mexican mind that in festoons about the banqueting hall were set impartially the names of the presidents and other great men of the past, from Iturbide down to Manuel Gonzales. Iturbide adjoined Bravo and Guerrero, by whom he was shot as a usurper and enemy of the public peace; and Lerdo Portirio Diaz, by whom he was ousted as traitor and tyrant. In the same way these personages, alternately one another's Caesars and Brutuses, are honored impartially in the series of portraits in the long gallery of the National Palace.
There was naturally prominent here the portrait of the Padre Morelos, with the usual handkerchief around his head, and bold air of bandit chief. It is curious that priests should have taken such a share in the early insurrection. They recall those warrior ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages, who used to put on quite as often the secular as the spiritual armor. Probably the oppressions of the Spaniards were often too intolerable even for ecclesiastical endurance. Morelos, strangely enough, when the revolt broke out, was curate under Hidalgo at Valladolid, in Michoacan, and followed him to the field. He came, ​in his turn, to be generalissimo of the Mexican forces, and to have the name of Valladolid changed to Morelia in his honor. He had undoubtedly the military gift. His defence of Cuantla is considered one of the most glorious deeds of Mexican history. It was the third in trio of priests, Matamoros, his intimate and lieutenant, who broke the siege with a hundred horse and aided his retreat when it finally became necessary.
Matamoros in due course was taken and shot, at Valladolid, by no other than Iturbide, the future liberator. Iturbide, then in the Spanish forces, "had signalized himself," to quote our history again, "by his repeated victories over the insurgents, and the excessive cruelty of which he made use on frequent occasions." He routed Matamoros at Puruapan, took him prisoner, and put him to death, as has been said. To repay this, Morelos butchered two hundred Spanish prisoners in cold blood. So the strife of incarnate cruelty went on. Morelos himself was made prisoner by an act of treachery, and shot, after the customary fate of Mexican leaders, at San Cristobal Ecatapec, at four o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st of December, 1815.
Iturbide's account, in his minutes, of the insurgent chiefs whom he was so active in exterminating is very far from flattering. And here they are all apotheosized together. Verily it seems as if some high court of inquiry and review should be constituted for apportioning out a little the relative merits and defects of the past. The Mexican national anthem, a stirring and martial air, invokes among other things the sacred memory of Iturbide. But if Iturbide really deserved to be shot on setting foot on shore after his banishment, it seems much as if Americans should invoke the sacred name of Benedict Arnold. Arnold, too, rendered excellent services to his country. ​Nobody was a braver or better soldier than he before he attempted to betray it to the British.
Well, I suppose the Mexicans understand it, but I don't. Are they content with such a mixed ideal of good? Can a person have been such a patriot at one time that no subsequent crimes can weigh against him? One very simple lesson from it all would seem to be a less impatience with the ruling powers, on the one hand, and much less haste with powder and shot, on the other.
III.
I stayed a couple of days at Cuautla, to visit the sugar haciendas. The sugar product is large, and the district one of the most convenient sources of supply for central Mexico. A week afterward the newly inaugurated road was the scene of an accident unequalled, I think, in the annals of railway horrors. Five hundred lives were lost, in a little barranca, an insecure bridge over which had been washed out by the rain. A regiment in garrison at Cuautla was ordered to Mexico, and started in a train of open "flat" cars, there not having been passenger cars sufficient for the purpose. On other flat cars was a freight of barrels of aguardiente. The start was made in the afternoon. There was delay on the track. The shower came on, the night fell, and the men, pelted by the storm, without protection, broke open the aguardiente, and drank their fill. Some say that the engineer reported the road unsafe, but was forced by an exasperated officer to go on with a pistol at his head. They came to the broken bridge, and the train went through. The soldiers who were not mangled and incapacitated outright—drunk, and crazed with excitement stabbed—and shot one another. The barrels of aguardiente burst and took fire; the car- ​tridges in the belts exploded; the swollen torrent claimed its own; and the fury of a tropical storm, in a night as black as Erebus, beat down upon the writhing mass of horror.
It was at this price that the extra subventions for speedy completion of the work were earned. A white-washing report was made afterward, I believe, but the Government caused the road to be put in order before it was again opened; and the case may serve as a needed lesson to all railway builders in Mexico.