The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964 Page: 147
672 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
and Stripes flying over captured Vicksburg. He could not restrain
his admiration for plantations, and wrote in the summer of 1864:
"O I love southern scenery."
As one might expect, Infantryman McIntyre had little taste
for the over-glorified cavalry, who were, in his opinion, "mere
vampyres hanging on the infantry-doing but little fighting but
first in the Spoils." At the same time, the Union cavalry was
superior to that of the Confederates. And the Federal infantry
in the West was the best lot of fighting men in the war.
The last section of the book, covering the regiment's activities
along the Rio Grande, will appeal especially to Texans. The 19th
Iowa arrived in Brownsville in November, 1863, and what McIn-
tyre saw in its streets convinced him that this was indeed a "mean"
and "backward" land. "I am sick of the sights," he wrote on
December 4, 1863, the "hairless mexican dogs, bare breasted
women, naked children, dirty orange women sitting on the
ground with their fruit spread out before them-tired of the wide
baskets of dirty looking sugar plumbs-tired of the sameness there
is here day after day. ... " Yet, the country around the town
fascinated him: the savanna of chaparral, the giant cactus, the
moving clouds of dust, the abandoned Catholic missions, and the
strange natives, who had "a mixture of three or four distinct
nations" and had "the Superstition, shrewdness, avarice, cow-
ardice, and [a] love for display-peculiarities of the distinct races
they represent."
The rest of the diary is mainly concerned with military events:
the struggle between the French and the Mexicans across the
border and the numerous skirmishes with a Rebel cavalry column
under John S. "Rip" Ford. In the end, the enemy riders drove
the Federals out of Brownsville and back to Brazos Island; not
long after, McIntyre's regiment boarded a steamer and sailed for
New Orleans. The diary ends abruptly when his outfit, on board
the Josephine, "rounded from the port of N O with orders to
report to Gen Asboth at Pensacola."
On the whole, the editor deserves praise for a job well done.
Her copious notes, while at times pedantic and irrelevant, do
corroborate McIntyre's account with other sources and illuminate
facts or incidents that he only touched upon. The University of147
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964, periodical, 1964; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101197/m1/169/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.