Barracks, in California, and met him the last time when he was chief of
staff to the Khedive of Egypt at Grand Cairo, on the Nile.

Pesquiera, the governor of Sonora, held the state in quasi-independence
of Mexico, and drove the surveying party under Stone out of Mexico by
force of arms.

The funds for the location and survey of the Iturbide Grant had been
furnished by French bankers in San Francisco, and obtained by them
through their correspondent in Paris. A large portion of the money had
been contributed by the entourage of the Second Empire under Napoleon,
as the French were desirous of getting a foothold in Mexico. The
expulsion of Stone's locating and surveying party was considered an
affront to France, as the survey and location were undertaken under a
valid grant of land made by the Mexican government, and the French were
not satisfied to lose the many millions of francs they had invested in
the enterprise. The influence of the shareholders in the Iturbide land
location finally caused the intervention of the French government.

It will be remembered that the first intervention was a joint occupation
of Vera Cruz by French, English and Spanish; but the English and Spanish
soon withdrew, and left the French to pull their own chestnut out of
the fire.

The time was not ripe for the French intervention in Mexico until we
were in the midst of the Civil War, when Napoleon seized the opportunity
to set up Maximilian of Austria, as Emperor of Mexico, protected by
French forces under Bazaine.

No doubt but Napoleon and the officials of the Second Empire sympathized
with the government of the Confederate States, and would have given them
substantial aid if they had dared; but the Russian Czar sent a fleet to
New York as a warning,--and the French had had enough of Russians on
their track.

It was expressly stipulated in France, upon the founding of the
Maximilian Empire, that the obligations given for funds to carry on the
survey and location of the Iturbide Grant should be inscribed and
recognized as a public debt of the Empire, and such will be found a
matter of record and history. Many Frenchmen, no doubt, keep them as
companion souvenirs to the obligations of the Panama Canal. The Grant
has never been located, and the Mexican government yet owes the heirs,
in equity, the original million dollars.

The French, under Maximilian, occupied Mexico up to the American
boundary line, and many Mexicans took refuge i