Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, 1831-1839, part 2 — Text and Context

A Trader's Grievances: Justice and Impositions

Gregg devotes considerable space to the administration of justice in New Mexico, describing it as corrupt and biased against Americans. He recounts specific outrages: an American physician attacked, the consul and others subjected to violence, and arbitrary impositions such as the contribucion de guerra. The alcaldes' system, he claims, allows petty officials to exploit foreigners. His tone is indignant, but the evidence is anecdotal—he does not name victims or provide dates, leaving the reader to weigh his partisan perspective. The chapter headings alone signal a catalog of grievances: "Outrage upon an American Physician," "Violence suffered by the American Consul." Gregg's legal observations are intertwined with a trader's frustration at unpredictable costs and insecure property.

Mining, Scoria, and Daily Bread

In Chihuahua, Gregg pauses to describe the mining district's physical remains: "little mountains of scoria" in the city's suburbs, which poor laborers break apart to extract enough silver for subsistence. He notes that experts believe reworking this scoria could be profitable, but the practice continues as a hand-to-mouth enterprise. The passage is typical of Gregg's method—he moves from a general statement about mining operations to a specific, vivid detail of urban poverty. He also mentions a rough mint in Chihuahua, though most bullion is coined farther south. These observations are not merely descriptive; they imply an economic critique: the region's mineral wealth does not translate into local prosperity or efficient institutions.

Festivals and Exclusion: The Iturbide Celebration

Gregg describes a grand fête in Chihuahua in 1839, celebrating both Emperor Iturbide's birthday and his entry into Mexico City. He notes the irony of Iturbide's trajectory—from royalist officer to republican champion to executed emperor—and remarks that he is now honored as "the Father of the Republic," a title Gregg finds "absurd" to "republicans of the Jefferson school." The ball, however, excluded Americans except for a few Mexicanized residents, who had to pay twenty-five dollars for tickets. Gregg uses this episode to illustrate the lack of social intercourse between foreigners and natives, contrasting it with the hospitality Americans show to Mexican visitors. The exclusion is felt more keenly because Chihuahua has no cafés or reading rooms—only gambling houses and cockpits as public resorts.

Voice and Structure: Gregg's Rhetorical Habits

Gregg's prose is direct and opinionated, often shifting from neutral description to sharp judgment within a single paragraph. He uses Spanish terms (contribucion de guerra, ¡Ojalá!) to signal local color, but his frame of reference remains American. His sentences are long and packed with facts, yet he occasionally inserts a wry aside—as when he calls Iturbide's canonization "absurd" to Jeffersonian republicans. The structure of the chapters follows a topical rather than chronological order: each chapter groups related grievances or observations. This organizational choice suggests Gregg intended his work as a systematic account of Mexican society, not merely a travel diary. The excerpts show a writer who values concrete evidence—scoria heaps, ticket prices, exclamations—over abstract generalization.

Readers approaching this volume should note that Gregg writes as a participant-observer with a clear commercial and national bias. His judgments are often harsh, but they are grounded in specific incidents and material details that reward close attention. The text is best read not as an objective survey but as a document of cross-cultural encounter, where every observation—from the price of a ball ticket to the composition of scoria—carries the weight of a trader's lived experience.

Reading Gregg’s careful distances from Mexican society, I remembered standing on a prairie windbreak myself, feeling the same ache of not belonging. Pathfinding on Plain and Prairie Stirring Scenes of Life in the Canadian North-west — A Closer Reading stirred that quiet loneliness again—the way vast land makes you an observer, never quite a part of what you watch.