Chap. VI. REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN SONORA. 515 
forced a contribution of 12,000 dollars from its inhabitants. 
Subsequently, when I was staying in California, this fellow 
was named in the public papers as the leader of a robber 
band, which spread itself from the gold mines to the valley 
of Santa Cruz in Upper Sonora, and later still I saw the 
following notice in a Californian paper : — " Many will re- 
member M. Staudt, of San Francisco, who went two years 
since to Sonora, and who on his journey back to California 
was robbed and murdered by his two travelling companions. 
Major Emory, of the Boundary Commission, met with the 
latter on the road from El Paso to Chihuahua, where they 
sold him two of Staudt's mules. The one is a Dane or a 
North German, a desperado of the first class, and known 
under the name of Dutch Charley ; the other is a Texan, 
called Ned Hines." This was the name of the man whom 
we received in our camp on the Gila. 
After the unsuccessful expedition of Walker the Ame- 
rican, and of Count Raousset de Boulbon, the Frenchman, 
the State of Sonora continued to be the scene of action, 
and the object of numerous adventurers of every descrip- 
tion, who attached themselves to the leaders of the dif- 
ferent native parties. I have already mentioned a circum- 
stance illustrative of this state of things. Goldseekers, 
and men engaged in wild speculations in mines and land, 
immigrants into the territory lately ceded to the United 
States by Mexico — all these, including highwaymen and 
criminals escaped from California,- — men of every shade 
of character from the best to the worst, appeared to hold 
themselves in readiness for an outbreak, by which the State 
of Sonora and the peninsula of California would be sepa- 
rated from Mexico. Casual remarks which reached me 
from different people in widely different places, and lastly, 
from fugitives who had reached California from Sonora, 
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