f being a sensible man,
and to imply a disposition to impose upon his common sense. And of this
class of topics, or pretences, I have never heard of any thing, and I
cannot conceive of any thing, more ridiculous in itself, more absurd,
and more affrontive to all sober judgment, than the cry that we are
getting indemnity by the acquisition of New Mexico and California. I
hold they are not worth a dollar; and we pay for them vast sums of
money! We have expended, as everybody knows, large treasures in the
prosecution of the war; and now what is to constitute this indemnity?
What do gentlemen mean by it? Let us see a little how this stands. We
get a country; we get, in the first instance, a cession, or an
acknowledgment of boundary, (I care not which way you state it,) of the
country between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. What this country is
appears from a publication made by a gentleman in the other house.[6] He
speaks of the country in the following manner:--

"The country from the Nueces to the valley of the Rio Grande is
poor, sterile, sandy, and barren, with not a single tree of any
size or value on our whole route. The only tree which we saw was
the musquit-tree, and very few of these. The musquit is a small
tree, resembling an old and decayed peach-tree. The whole country
may be truly called a perfect waste, uninhabited and uninhabitable.
There is not a drop of running water between the two rivers, except
in the two small streams of San Salvador and Santa Gertrudis, and
these only contain water in the rainy season. Neither of them had
running water when we passed them. The _chaparral_ commences within
forty or fifty miles of the Rio Grande. This is poor, rocky, and
sandy; covered with prickly-pear, thistles, and almost every
sticking thing, constituting a thick and perfectly impenetrable
undergrowth. For any useful or agricultural purpose, the country is
not worth a _sous_.

"So far as we were able to form any opinion of this desert upon the
other routes which had been travelled, its character, everywhere
between the two rivers, is pretty much the same. We learned that
the route pursued by General Taylor, south of ours, was through a
country similar to that through which we passed; as also was that
travelled by General Wool from San Antonio to Presidio on the Rio
Grande. From what we both saw and heard, the