Tag: Richard Smith Elliott

BOOK REVIEW: The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott

BOOK REVIEW: The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott

In a recent post, I mentioned Lt. Richard Smith Elliott, who was with General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West during the August 1846 invasion of New Mexico. Elliott was also a reporter. He started writing for the St. Louis Reveille before he left Missouri in June 1846 and continued sending articles to them until June 1847, when his enlistment ended.

In 1997, 150 years later, historians Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons compiled Elliott’s reports from Santa Fe and the sketches he wrote afterward and published them in The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott. The result is an intriguing account of events in New Mexico during this period.

The pieces the lieutenant sent East were often written and published as letters. Reading them can feel like you’ve been given access to someone’s diary. Much of his reportage sounds like that of any soldier anywhere. He includes lists of men who’ve died from measles and other diseases as well as bullets, reports on the weather, complaints about quartermaster supplies, and grumbling about the attitude, expertise, and morals of both his fellow and superior officers.

When Elliott turns to New Mexico specifically, his letters reflect the prejudices of his time. There are the usual disapproving descriptions of the local priest and of businesswoman and monte dealer Gertrudes Barceló, as well as commentary on the adobe housing and lack of glass windows.

However, I find the lieutenant most engaging when he describes his interactions with the locals. Among other vignettes, there’s a delightful description of a stroll with a couple señoritas. The women turn what the lieutenant thought was to be a social outing into a shopping trip, loading him and his male companions with chickens, onions, and other goods to haul back home for them.  

So the book is an interesting view of Santa Fe from the perspective of an American Army officer in 1846/47. Elliott was unwell a good part of the time and often displays an invalid’s irritableness. His illness kept him from participating in campaigns against the Navajo, expeditions to California and Mexico, as well as the suppression of the Taos Revolt in early 1847. By the time his enlistment was up, he was in a hurry to get home. The written record  he left behind reminds us that not every Anglo who arrived in New Mexico in the 1800s fell in love with the place or found it profitable to stay.

I recommend The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott to any student of New Mexico history, especially of the early portion of the American occupation. It’s a useful and fascinating look at the attitudes that I suspect the majority of Anglos brought with them to the land of enchantment.

Reporter Soldiers in the Mexican American War

Reporter Soldiers in the Mexican American War

According to Britannica.com, the practice of placing journalists with a military unit and permitting them to accompany troops into combat zones started in the U.S. during the Iraq War.

While  assigning career journalists to specific units may have originated during the 2003-2011 conflict, the concept was almost 150 years old by that point. It had begun with the 1846 Mexican American War.  

One of the embedded reporters was Lt. Richard Smith Elliott, who served as a correspondent for the St. Louis Reveille from June 1846 to June 1847. Elliott was posted with General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West. His reports to the paper provided news of the military conquest and subsequent activities, including first-hand accounts of the news of the Taos revolt.

Elliott’s pen name was John Brown. He had some newspaper experience, as he’d worked as a publisher and printer at small papers in Kentucky and Pennsylvania before giving it up to become a lawyer.  But they say newspaper ink gets in your blood, and when the U.S. decided to invade Mexico and Elliott joined up, he also volunteered to report on subsequent events for the Reveille. He began work the day he left St. Louis with the Laclede Rangers, writing about their presentation swords and grand send off.

During the following year, Elliott wrote around seventy items for the paper.  Other soldiers wrote for the Reveille, too, but Elliott’s work was the most voluminous.

Farther south, the practice of embedded reporters was also incorporated into the American military activity. One of the embedded correspondents was New Orleans Picayune publisher George Wilkins Kendall, who had been in Mexico in 1841-1842 as part of the ill-fated Santa Fe Texas Expedition. He’d written a scathing three-volume bestseller about his experiences and was apparently anxious to participate in what he saw as payback for his imprisonment.

George Wilkins Kendall, Source: Kendall of the Picayune, F. Copeland

However, Kendall did not participate in the war directly. As what one biographer calls “the first modern war correspondent,” Kendall instead chose to observe from a distance. He set up a systematic program to aggregate the news in his portable “Picayune office” that followed General Zachary Taylor through northern Mexico and General Winfield Scott from Tampico to Mexico City. His employees gathered news, sold subscriptions, and did other business for the paper while Kendall ran the operation and sent editorials back to New Orleans complaining about the slowness of the mail.  

So there were different ways one could experience and report on the Mexican American War. All of them embedded in one way or another and each providing yet another way for newspaper readers back home to get a sense of what was happening “on the ground.”

 Whether this helped or hindered the war effort is anyone’s guess, but it certainly must have been a boon to newspaper circulation.

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Source: Fayette Copeland, Kendall of the Picayune; Marc L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; http://www.britannica.com/topic/embedded-journalism, accessed 1/27/25