Minor cavalry skirmish along General Taylor's advance route toward Monterrey in northern Mexico during 1846. American cavalry encountered light Mexican lancer resistance near China as Taylor's army moved deeper into Mexican territory toward the major siege operations.
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.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.