The Battle of San Francisco, also known as the Battle of Dolores, was a major battle in the Tarapacá Campaign of the War of the Pacific, fought on November 19, 1879, in the Peruvian department of Tarapacá. A Chilean army under Colonel Emilio Sotomayor had moved via Dolores rail road deep into the desert and was encamped at San Francisco Saltpeter Office, about 30 kilometers south east of the port of Pisagua. Allied forces under General Juan Buendía launched an attack on Sotomayor's army.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
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