Battle of La Ebonal: The End of the First Cortina War

On September twenty-eighth, eighteen fifty-nine, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina rode into Brownsville at the head of about seventy-five armed men. He had watched a deputy sheriff club a Mexican American worker who had once worked for Cortina's family, and he had intervened, shooting the deputy and then liberating prisoners from the town jail. Before he left, he executed four Anglos he considered enemies of the Mexican community. Texas had a border war on its hands.

Cortina, born into a landowning family on both sides of the Rio Grande, had watched the American annexation of Texas and the Mexican War strip his community of land, dignity, and legal standing. He called himself a defender of his people. Anglo Texans called him a bandit. The truth was more complicated: Cortina was a guerrilla commander with genuine popular support on both sides of the river, a charismatic figure who issued proclamations about justice and ran an effective border insurgency simultaneously.

Over the following months, Cortina's forces skirmished repeatedly with Texas Rangers and United States Army units along the lower Rio Grande. Major Samuel Heintzelman was dispatched with regular infantry and artillery to end what newspapers were calling the Cortina War. The decisive engagement came on December twenty seventh, eighteen fifty-nine, at Rio Grande City, Texas. Heintzelman's troops attacked Cortina's camp with artillery and cavalry, routing the Cortinistas in a fight that lasted only a few hours. Cortina's forces suffered roughly sixty killed, along with the loss of their equipment, while American losses were comparatively light.

Cortina retreated into Mexico but was never truly finished. He returned repeatedly to raid into Texas through the eighteen sixties, holding a commission as a general in the Mexican Army while simultaneously orchestrating cross-border cattle theft that would inflame the Rio Grande frontier for another two decades. The Battle of La Ebonal closed the first phase of his wars but not his legend.