WALKER THE FILIBUSTER, AND THE INVASION OF NICARAGUA.
On the 15th of October, 1853, a small and daring band of reckless
adventurers sailed from San Francisco, on an enterprise seemingly madder
and wilder than that which Cortez had undertaken more than three centuries
before. The purpose of this handful of men--filibusters they were called,
as lawless in their way as the buccaneers of old--was the conquest of
Northwest Mexico; possibly in the end of all Mexico and Central America.
No one knows what wild vagaries filled the mind of William Walker, their
leader, "the gray-eyed man of destiny," as his admirers called him.
Landing at La Paz, in the southwestern corner of the Gulf of California,
with his few companions, he captured a number of hamlets and then
grandiloquently proclaimed Lower California an independent state and
himself its president. His next proclamation "annexed" to his territory
the large Mexican state of Sonora, on the mainland opposite the California
Gulf, and for a brief period he posed among the sparse inhabitants as a
ruler.
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