The world’s first war to be thoroughly and graphically treated in the daily newspapers was, not the Crimean War in which William H. Russell won his fame, but the Mexican War. It was George Wilkins Kendall, a Yankee from New Hampshire who had helped found the New Orleans _Picayune_ nine years earlier, who made the chief individual reputation as a correspondent. Campaigning first with Gen. Zachary Taylor on the Rio Grande, and then joining Winfield Scott on the latter’s dangerous and triumphant march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, always in the thick of the fighting, once wounded, organizing a wonderfully effective combination of courier and steamboat service, Kendall gave the _Picayune_ by far the best current history of a war that journalism in any land had seen. The New Orleans _Delta_, the Baltimore _Sun_, the New York _Herald_, and, at a slight remove, the _Evening Post_, followed the fighting with admirable enterprise.
News of the war came to the East through two main channels. The greater part of it was brought from the border (i. e., from Brownsville or Matamoras) or from Vera Cruz to New Orleans or Pensacola, and thence overland northward; a smaller part came in on the long Santa Fé trail to St. Louis. Thus on Christmas Day, 1846, Col. Doniphan, at the head of a force of confident Missourians, defeated a Mexican detachment in the little skirmish of Brazitos, near El Paso. A company of traders from Santa Fé brought the news into Independence, Missouri, on Feb. 15, and the local news-writer there wrote a dispatch which was printed in the St. Louis _Republic_ on the 26th. The _Evening Post_ copied it on March 8, long after most of Doniphan’s seven wounded men had forgotten their injuries. El Paso had been captured from the Mexicans on Dec. 27, and the fact was known in New York on March 10.
The delay in obtaining the news of Buena Vista gave rise to disheartening rumors. The battle which made “Old Rough and Ready” a national idol and the next President of the United States was fought on Feb. 23, 1847, and for a month thereafter the gloomiest reports appeared in the press. After the middle of March Washington and New York were confused and alarmed by vague dispatches from the Southwest; on March 21 President Polk received a detailed account of Taylor’s perilous position, menaced by a force three times as large as his own, and New York heard of it immediately afterward. On the evening of the twenty-second the messages to Washington had “Taylor completely cut off by an overwhelming force of the enemy,” but no word of fighting. The _Evening Post_ of March 30 carried its first news of a definite disaster. It republished from the New Orleans _Delta_ a dispatch, brought by ship, stating “that Gen. Taylor was attacked at Agua Nueva and fell back, in good order, to the vicinity of Saltillo; here he was again attacked by Santa Anna, and a sharp engagement ensued in which Gen. Taylor was victorious, continuing his retreat in good order. Gen. Taylor fell back to Monterey, where he arrived in safety.” Read between the lines, this meant a humiliating defeat. Every one was prepared to credit it, and it was partly corroborated by more meager news carried in the New Orleans _Bulletin_.