The Training Ground by Martin Dugard

Morning mess was from 6:30 to 7:30, after which construction began. Known as “fatigue” work, daily manual labor with a shovel or pickax was a constant part of a soldier’s routine (officers did not share in fatigue work), even in times of peace.
    Under more normal circumstances, the morning would also include sick call, general assembly, and drill, before an hour break for lunch at noon. This would then be followed by a second fatigue call. At 6:00 p.m. would come dress parade and an evening roll call, followed by dinner. The drummer’s tattoo at 9:00 would be the invitation to one final roll call, then taps and lights out. But the urgency to build Fort Brown meant that almost all drill and assembly was dispensed with. Days and nights were a continuum of reveille, mess, fatigue call, taps, and sentry duty.
    Construction proceeded at a feverish pace. A thousand men at a time dug into the earth and heaved their shovels of dirt into the great piles that slowly took on the shape of Mansfield’s design. There were days when thunderstorms turned the soil into a muddy quagmire, and others when heat and ungodly Texas humidity made the dawn-to-dusk work schedule seem punitive. Yet construction never stopped, not for any reason.
    Taylor delayed all travel to Port Isabel for supplies until the fortress was complete, fearing that he lacked the manpower to split his forces in order to simultaneously defend a supply train and his tenuous position on the Rio Grande. In the meantime, cavalry patrols rode out in search of Mexican scouts or some other such sign that the enemy was planning to cross the Rio Grande upriver and mount a surprise attack. American scouts heard rumors from local residents that six hundred Mexican dragoons had crossed on March 29. Whether they were in Texas, had returned to Mexico, or had actually crossed at all was anyone’s guess. That dangerously large body of horsemen was never found.
    Tensions escalated after Mexican patrols captured, and then returned, two American scouts. On April 10, Quartermaster Trueman Cross ventured out of the camp for an ill-advised solitary horseback ride through the countryside and never came back. The aging veteran of the War of 1812 had been sick, and many thought he might have fallen off his horse. But rumors of a less accidental demise gained credence when one of the patrols sent to find his body was ambushed and an American officer, Lieutenant Theodoric H. Porter, was killed. Porter was a popular man, the son of a naval commodore and seemingly destined for a greatness all his own. (Back in Corpus Christi, he had been the actor who objected to performing opposite Grant in
The Moor of Venice.
) No one knew for certain whether bandits or a Mexican army patrol had killed him, but the young lieutenant’s murder was a cause for shock and quiet fury. Many soldiers were incensed that an infantry officer had volunteered to do a chore more suited to cavalry and snobbily acted as if he had it coming. Others saw Porter’s death as an omen of things to come. Convinced that there was no way Taylor’s puny force could defeat the Mexicans, these overnight cowards swam the Rio Grande in the dead of night to desert. Many were Irish Catholic immigrants who sympathized with the Mexicans because of their shared faith and felt themselves religiously persecuted in the predominantly Protestant U.S. Army. American sentries had standing orders to shoot all deserters on sight — but only while the deserters were still in the river. If the deserters reached the other side, they were safe; shooting them once they’d reached Mexican lines would be an act of war.
    On April 11, Major General Pedro de Ampudia paraded into Matamoros with a two-hundred-man escort of light cavalry. Ampudia was a Cuban-born Spaniard with a pronounced paunch, deep circles under his eyes, and a long, white goatee that contrasted sharply with the black hair atop his head. He was respected if not beloved. Ampudia had crushed a