Resaca de la Palma: Taylor's Rout and the War's First Days
Near Brownsville, Texas
The Battle of Resaca de la Palma was fought on May ninth, eighteen forty-six, less than twenty-four hours after Palo Alto, and it ended the Mexican army's last organized resistance north of the Rio Grande. General Zachary Taylor's American force of about seventeen hundred men pushed south toward Matamoros through a tangled landscape of chaparral and dry streambeds, the resacas, ancient oxbow channels of the Rio Grande that cut across the flat coastal plain.
General Mariano Arista had withdrawn from Palo Alto the previous evening and positioned his force of roughly four thousand men in one of these resacas, a sunken channel that crossed the road between Matamoros and Point Isabel. The natural fortification gave his artillery a commanding field of fire and turned the brushy ravine into a defensive line. On paper, it was a strong position.
What broke it was a charge. Captain Charles May led a squadron of American dragoons directly down the road at a gallop, overrunning the Mexican artillery position and capturing General Romulo Diaz de la Vega before the Mexican infantry could respond. The American attack unraveled Arista's line, and within hours his army was in full retreat across the Rio Grande. Mexican casualties were severe: one hundred fifty-four killed, two hundred five wounded, and one hundred fifty-six captured or missing from an army that had held numerical superiority.
For the United States, the back-to-back victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma lifted the siege of Fort Texas, secured the lower Rio Grande, and opened the road to the invasion of Mexico. They also made Zachary Taylor a national hero. His nickname Old Rough and Ready spread across the country. Two years later, riding that fame, he was elected president of the United States. The battlefield at Resaca de la Palma lies within the Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park, a few miles from Brownsville.
