Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE FRENCH INTERVENTION Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together—and the vultures. The weakness and anarchy of the late Spanish colonies marked them out as a tempting prey for armed adventurers. Squatters came to the territory north of the Rio Grande, Texas, and then, not without reasonable grounds of provocation on the part of corrupt and brutal Mexican officials, tore it away. The slave power in the United States saw an opening for the extension of slavery in Northern Mexico. By the end of 1849 the Republic had been deprived by force of, or had sold, all its belongings beyond its present northern frontier. Small adventurers nibbled, or tried to nibble, bits of Central American or Mexican land. The Englishman who knows of the Cacique of Poyais only from Thackeray may be excused for believing that he was an invention of the novelist. But Gregor Macgregor was a flesh and blood reality who has his column in the " Dictionary of National Biography." He tried to conquer and to found a State. The mining camps of California bred imitators of the Cacique in some numbers. There was Walker, known in rhetorical phrase as the Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny. Quite a small world of filibusters made inroads, launched companies, and commonly ended before a firing party. Their doings are recorded in Mr. H. H. Bancroft's " History of the Northern Mexican States,"Vol. II., with copious references to authorities. It is a point not to be overlooked that the French among the miscellaneous swarms of fortune hunters in California cast their eyes on the province of Sonora, at the northwestern end of the Mexican frontier. Schemes for founding a French colony in Sonora were evolved and advertised. Napoleon III. himself did more than play with them. The object was to work t...