Autograph Letter Signed. 3pp. To her family’s French agent, Honore Rousseau, in Paris, to be forwarded to her brother, Dominique (“Domingo”) Sescosse, probably at their home in Ustaritz, just north of the French-Spanish border. Written in Spanish, which has been partially translated.
Written the day the “good news” reached Mexico that the US Congress had signed the peace treaty ending the Mexican-American War – glad tidings for the Escosse family which maintained both their ancestral home in the Basque country of France and another in Mexico north of Mexico City. The writer recounts the confusing military events that ended the War:
American troops conquered Chihuahua, despite the cease-fire that was supposed to precede diplomatic negotiations, and in the final battle of Santa Cruz de Rosales, near the capital, the Mexican Army was “crushed, with the loss of all the Artillery” and the commander taken prisoner – before the Americans learned that hostilities had officially ended.
Much of the letter concerns how the expected boost to post-war foreign commerce would benefit the Sescoose clan, their investments including a thriving silver mine, with one curious parenthetical remark that a Priest had been jailed, accused of poisoning another Priest with arsenic.