Part 9 (1/2)

The unfinished sentence was grimly prophetic

Unknown to his attendants at the hospital, a the papers in his despatch-box he had secreted his service revolver On theof the 11th of February, 1897, he asked for this box, and on some pretext sent the nurse fro to his bedside, they found the pain-driven body at peace, and the tired eyes dark forever

In the article in the _Century_ on the battle of the Yalu, he had said:

”Chief a Ju Chang, a gallant soldier and true gentleainst odds, almost his last official act was to stipulate for the lives of his officers and rateful country would prove less merciful than his honorable foe Bitter, indeed, must have been the reflections of the old, wounded hero, in that ive him rest”

And bitter indeedwounded Aht he had earned to serve it, and as driven out to give his best years and his life for a strange people under a strange flag

GENERAL WILLIAM WALKER,

THE KING OF THE FILIBUSTERS

IT is safe to say that to eneration the na To them, as a name, ”William Walker” awakens no pride of race or country It certainly does not suggest poetry and adventure To obtain a place in even this group of Soldiers of Fortune, Williauished of all American Soldiers of Fortune, the one who but for his own country results, had to wait his turn behind adventurers of other lands and boy officers of his own And yet had this , accomplished what he adventured, he would on this continent have solved the problem of slavery, have established an empire in Mexico and in Central Aht us into ith all of Europe That is all he would have acco the ”Forty-niners” William Walker was one of the ures

Jack Oakhurst, gae-coach driver, were his contemporaries Bret Harte was one of his keenest aduised under aname, Walker is the hero When, later, Walker came to New York City, in his honor Broadway fros and arches ”It was roses, roses all the way” The house-tops rocked and swayed

In New Orleans, where in a box at the opera he made his first appearance, for ten minutes the performance came to a pause, while the audience stood to salute hio, and there are ua,” and who are still active in the public life of San Francisco and New York

Walker was born in 1824, in Nashville, Tenn He was the oldest son of a Scotch banker, a ious mind, and interested in a business which certainly is removed, as far as possible, from the profession of arms Indeed, few reat generals are born, not trained

Everything in Walker's birth, fa a member of one of the ”learned” professions It was the wish of his father that he should be a minister of the Presbyterian Church, and as a child he was trained with that end in view He hi at the University of Tennessee, at Edinburgh he followed a course of lectures, and for two years travelled in Europe, visiting hly equipped himself to practise as a physician, after a brief return to his native city, and as short a stay in Philadelphia, he took down his shi+ngle forever, and proceeded to New Orleans to study law In two years he was admitted to the bar of Louisiana But because clients were few, or because the red tape of the law chafed his spirit, within a year, as already he had abandoned the Church and Medicine, he abandoned his law practice and became an editorial writer on the New Orleans _Crescent_ A year later the restlessness which had rebelled against the grave professions led hiold fields of California, and San Francisco There, in 1852, at the age of only twenty-eight, as editor of the San Francisco _Herald_, Walker began his real life which so soon was to end in both disaster and glory

Up to his twenty-eighth year, except in his restlessness, nothing in his life foreshadoas to follow Nothing pointed to him as a man for whom thousands of other ive up their lives

Negatively, by abandoning three separate callings, and init plain that a professional career did not appeal to hiht on his character; but actively he never had given any hint that under the thoughtful brow of the young doctor and lawyer there was aschereat oceans

Walker's first adventure was undoubtedly inspired by and in imitation of one which at the tiht to a disastrous end This was the De Boulbon expedition into Mexico The Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon was a young French nobleman and Soldier of Fortune, a _chasseur d'Afrique_, a duellist, journalist, dreaold Baron Harden-Hickey, as born in San Francisco a few years after Boulbon at the age of thirty was shot in Mexico, also was inspired to dreaentlee ideas In the rapid growth of California he saw a threat to Mexico and proposed to that government, as a ”buffer” state between the two republics, to form a French colony in the Mexican State of Sonora Sonora is that part of Mexico which directly joins on the south with our State of Arizona The President of Mexico gave Boulbon permission to attempt this, and in 1852 he landed at Guaymas in the Gulf of California with two hundred and sixty well-armed Frenchn soil was his contract with the President under which his ”e in the ”Restauradora”

mines from the attacks of Apache Indians from our own Arizona But there is evidence that back of Boulbon was the French Govern, in his small hat later was attempted by Maximilian, backed by a French army corps and Louis Napoleon, to establish in Mexico an empire under French protection For both the filibuster and the eainst a church wall

In 1852, two years before Boulbon's death, which was the finale to his second filibustering expedition into Sonora, he wrote to a friend in Paris: ”Europeans are disturbed by the growth of the United States And rightly so Unless she be dismembered; unless a powerful rival be built up beside her (_ie_, France in Mexico), Ah her coraphical position upon two oceans, the inevitable mistress of the world In ten years Europe dare not fire a shot without her permission As I write fifty Ao perhaps to victory _Voila les Etats-Unis_”

These fifty Americans who, in the eyes of Boulbon, threatened the peace of Europe, were led by the ex-doctor, ex-lawyer, ex-editor, Williaht years_ Walker had attempted but had failed to obtain froranted De Boulbon He accordingly sailed without it, announcing that, whether the Mexican Government asked him to do so or not, he would see that the women and children on the border of Mexico and Arizona were protected from massacre by the Indians It will be remembered that when Dr Jameson raided the Transvaal he also went to protect ”women and children” from massacre by the Boers Walker's explanation of his expedition, in his oords, is as follows He writes in the third person: ”What Walker saw and heard satisfied hiain a position on the Sonora frontier and protect the families on the border from the Indians, and such an act would be one of humanity whether or not sanctioned by the Mexican Government The condition of the upper part of Sonora was at that tiht years later, in 1860], a disgrace to the civilization of the continentand the people of the United States were more ies Northern Sonora was in fact, more under the dominion of the Apaches than under the laws of Mexico, and the contributions of the Indians were collected with greater regularity and certainty than the dues of the tax-gatherers The state of this region furnished the best defence for any A to settle there without the fores would certainly have followed the establishht be justified by the plea that any social organization, no matter how secured, is preferable to that in which individuals and faes”

While at the tier of massacre from the Boers were as many as there are snakes in Ireland, at the tier from the Indians, who as enereatly to be feared as he had described them