The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 17

Roughly speaking, the central plain comprising the above five provinces is bounded as follows: On the north by mountains and Lingayen Gulf, on the east by a coast range of mountains separating it from the Pacific Ocean, on the west by a similar range separating it from the China Sea, and on the south by Manila Bay and mountains. The Rio Grande de Pampanga flows obliquely across it in a southwesterly direction into Manila Bay, and near its western edge runs the railroad from Manila to Dagupan on Lingayen gulf. Dagupan is 120 miles from Manila. This plain, held by a well-equipped insurgent army backed by the moral support of the whole population, became the theatre of war as soon as the volunteers of 1899 began to arrive at Manila, the insurgent capital being then at Tarlac, a place about two-thirds of the way up the railroad from Manila to Dagupan.

Of course the first essential thing to do was to break the backbone of the insurgent army, and scatter it, and the next thing to do was to capture Aguinaldo, the head and front of the whole business, the incarnation of the aspirations of the Filipino people. The operations to this end commenced in October, and involved three movements of three separate forces:

(1) A column under General Lawton, proceeding up the Rio Grande and along the northeastern borders of the plain, and bending around westward along its northern boundary toward the gulf of Lingayen, garrisoning the towns en route, and occupying the mountain pa.s.ses on the northeast which give exit over the divide into the great valleys beyond.

(2) An expedition under General Wheaton, some 2500 in all, proceeding by transports to the gulf of Lingayen, the chief port of which, Dagupan, was the northern terminus of the railroad; the objective being to land on the sh.o.r.e of that gulf at the northwest corner of the plain, occupy the great coast road which runs from that point to the northern extremity of the island, and also to proceed eastward and effect a junction with the Lawton column.

(3) A third column under General MacArthur, proceeding up the railroad to the capture of Tarlac, the third insurgent capital, and thence still up the railroad to its end at Dagupan, driving the enemy's forces before it toward the line held by the first two columns.

On October 12th, General Lawton moved up the Rio Grande from a place called Aryat, a few miles up stream from where the railroad crosses the river at Calumpit, driving the insurgents before him to the northward and westward. His command was made up mainly from the 3d Cavalry and the 22d Infantry, together with several hundred scouts, American and Maccabebee. On the 20th San Isidro was again captured. That was the place Lawton had evacuated in May previous. Arriving in the Islands with Colonel E. E. Hardin's regiment, the 29th U. S. Volunteer Infantry, on November 3, 1899, the writer was immediately detailed to the Maccabebee scouts, to take the place of Lieutenant Boutelle, of the regular artillery, a young West Pointer from Oregon, who had been killed a day or two previous, and reported to Major C. G. Starr, General Lawton's Adjutant-General in the field (whom he had known at Santiago de Cuba the previous year) at San Isidro on or about November 8th. Major Starr said: "We took this town last spring," stating how much our loss had been in so doing, "but, partly as a result of the Schurman Commission parleying with the insurgents General Otis had us fall back. We have just had to take it again." General Lawton garrisoned San Isidro this time once for all, and pressed on north, capturing the successive towns en route. Meantime, General Young's cavalry, and the Maccabebee scouts under Major Batson, a lieutenant of the regular army, and a medal-of-honor graduate of the Santiago campaign, were operating to the west of the general line of advance, striking insurgent detachments wherever found and driving them toward the line of the railroad. By November 13th, Lawton's advance had turned to the westward, according to the concerted plan of campaign above described, garrisoning, as fast as they were taken, such of the towns of the country over which he swept as there were troops to spare for. We knew that Aguinaldo had been at Tarlac when the advance began, and every officer and enlisted man of the command was on the qui vive to catch him. By November 18th, General Lawton's forces held a line of posts extending up the eastern side of the plain, and curving around across the northern end to within a few miles of the gulf of Lingayen.

On November 6th, General Wheaton set sail from Manila for Lingayen Gulf, with 2500 men of the 13th Regular and 33d Volunteer Infantry, and a platoon of the 6th Artillery, convoyed by the s.h.i.+ps of the navy, and next day the expedition was successfully landed at San Fabian, "with effective a.s.sistance from the naval convoy against spirited resistance," says Secretary of War Root, in his annual report for 1899. The navy's a.s.sistance on that occasion was indeed "effective," but such pa.s.sing mention hardly covers the case. In the first place, they selected the landing point, their patrols being already familiar with the coasts. As soon as the transports were sighted, about eleven o'clock on the morning of November 7th, Commander Knox, the senior officer present, who commanded the Princeton, and Commander Moore, of the Helena, went out to meet and confer with General Wheaton. This done, the landing was effected under protection of the navy's guns. Besides the naval vessels above named, there were also present the Bennington under Commander Arnold, the Manila under Lieutenant-Commander Nazro, and two captured Spanish gun-boats small enough to get close in sh.o.r.e, the Callao, and the Samar. The troops were disembarked in two columns of small boats towed by launches. Lieutenant-Commander Tappan in charge of the Callao, and Ensign Mustin, commanding the Samar, were especially commended in the despatches of Admiral Watson, commander-in-chief of the Asiatic squadron. Both bombarded the insurgent trenches at close range during the landing, and Mustin actually steamed in between the insurgents and the head of the column of troop-boats, so as to intercept and receive the brunt of their fire himself, and, selecting a point about seventy-five yards from the enemy's trenches whence he could effectually pepper them, ran his s.h.i.+p aground so she would stick, and commenced rapid firing at point blank range, driving the enemy from his trenches, and enabling Colonel Hare of the 33d, and those who followed, to land without being subjected to further fire while on the water. [260]

On the 11th of November, Colonel Hare with the 33d Volunteer Infantry and one Gatling gun under Captain Charles R. Howland of the 28th Volunteer Infantry, a lieutenant of the regular army, and a member of General Wheaton's staff, proceeded southeastward to San Jacinto, and attacked and routed some 1200 to 1600 intrenched insurgents, Major John A. Logan being among our killed. The enemy left eighty-one dead in the trenches, and suffered a total loss estimated at three hundred. While s.p.a.ce does not permit dwelling on the details of engagements, it may be remarked here, once for all, that the 33d Volunteer Infantry, Colonel Luther R. Hare commanding, made more reputation than any other of the twenty-five regiments of the volunteer army of 1899, except, possibly, Colonel J. Franklin Bell's regiment, the 36th. This is no reflection on the rest. These two were lucky enough to have more opportunities. In meeting his opportunities, however, Colonel Hare, like Colonel Bell, proved himself a superb soldier; his field-officers, especially Major March, [261] were particularly indefatigable; and his men were mostly Texans, accustomed to handling a rifle with effect. s.p.a.ce also forbids following Captain Howland and his Gatling gun into the engagement of November 11th, but from the uniformity with which General Wheaton's official reports commend his young aide's bravery and efficiency on numerous occasions in 1899-1900, it may be safely a.s.sumed that those qualities were behind that Gatling gun at San Jacinto. There was a vicious rumor started after the San Jacinto fight and given wide circulation in the United States, that Major Logan was shot in the back by his own men. I saw a major surgeon a few days later who had been an eye-witness to his death. He said an insurgent sharpshooter shot Major Logan from a tree, and that the said sharpshooter was promptly thereafter dropped from his perch full of 33d Infantry bullets. Says General Wheaton's despatch of November 12th: "Major Logan fell while gallantly leading his battalion." [262]

On November 5th, General MacArthur, with a strong column, composed mainly of the 9th, 17th, and 36th Regiments of Infantry, two troops of the 4th Cavalry, two platoons of the 1st Artillery, and a detachment of scouts, advanced up the railroad from Angeles, in execution of his part of the programme. [263] Angeles is some distance up the railroad from Calumpit, where the railroad crosses the Rio Grande. [264]

General MacArthur's column encountered and overwhelmed the enemy at every point, entering Tarlac on November 12th, and effecting a junction with General Wheaton at Dagupan, the northern terminus of the Manila-Dagupan Railroad, 120 miles from Manila, on November 20th.

After General Lawton had finished his part of the round-up, he had a final conference with General Young on November 18th at Pozorubio, which is near the northeastern border of the plain, bade him good-bye, and soon afterward went south to dispose of a body of insurgents who were giving trouble near Manila. It was in this last expedition that he lost his life at San Mateo about twelve miles out of Manila on December 19, 1899.

The first of the two purposes of the great Wheaton-Lawton-MacArthur northern advance, viz., the dispersion of the insurgent army of northern Luzon had been duly accomplished. The other purpose had failed of realization. Aguinaldo had not been captured. He escaped through our lines.

Such is in brief the story of the destruction of the Aguinaldo government in 1899 by General Otis, or rather by Mr. Root. But the trouble about it was that it would not stay destroyed. It "played possum" for a while, the honorable President retiring to permanent headquarters in the mountains "with his government concealed about his person," as Senator Lodge put it later in a summary of the case for the Administration, before the Senate, in the spring of 1900. If the distinguished and accomplished senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, in adding at that time to the gaiety of nations, had had access to a certain diary kept by one of Aguinaldo's personal staff throughout that period, subsequently submitted, in 1902, to the Senate Committee of that year, he could have swelled the innocuous merriment with such cheery entries as "Here we tightened our belts and went to bed on the ground"--the time alluded to being midnight after a hard day's march without food, the place, some chilly mountain top up which the "Honorable Presidente" and party had that day been guided by the ever-present and ever-willing paisano (fellow countryman) of the immediate neighborhood--whatever the neighborhood--to facilitate them in eluding General Young's hard riding cavalry and scouts. The writer has no quarrel with Senator Lodge's witticism above quoted, having derived on reading it, in full measure, the suggestive amus.e.m.e.nt it was intended to afford. It is true that about all then left of the "Honorable Presidente's" government, for the nonce, was in fact concealed about his person. It was of a nature easily portable. It needed neither bull trains, pack ponies, nor coolies to carry it. It consisted solely of the loyal support of the whole people, who looked to him as the incarnation of their aspirations. Said General MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902 concerning Aguinaldo: "He was the incarnation of the feelings of the Filipinos." "Senator Culberson: 'And represented the Filipino people?' General MacArthur: 'I think so; yes'." [265] We of the 8th Army Corps did not know what a complete structure the Philippine republic of 1898-9 was until, having shot it to pieces, we had abundant leisure to examine the ruins. To admit, in the same breath, partic.i.p.ation in that war and profound regret that it ever had occurred, is not an incriminating admission. In this case as in any other where you have done another a wrong, by thras.h.i.+ng him or otherwise, under a mistake of fact, the first step toward righting the wrong is to frankly acknowledge it. As soon as Aguinaldo's flight and wanderings terminated in the finding of permanent headquarters, he began sending messages to his various generals all over Luzon and the other islands, and wherever those orders were not intercepted they were delivered and loyally obeyed. This kept up until General Funston captured him in 1901. One traitor among all those teeming millions might have betrayed his whereabouts, but none appeared. The obstinate character and long continuance of the warfare in northern Luzon after the great round-up which terminated with the final junction of the Lawton, Wheaton, and MacArthur columns near Dagupan, as elsewhere later throughout the archipelago, was at first very surprising to our generals. It had been supposed that to disperse the insurgent army would end the insurrection. As events turned out, it only made the resistance more effective. So long as the insurgents kept together in large bodies they could not hide. And as they were poor marksmen, while the men behind our guns, like most other young Americans, knew something about shooting, the ratio of their casualties to ours was about 16 to 1. [266] When General MacArthur began his advance on Tarlac, General Lawton his great march up the valley of the Rio Grande, and General Wheaton his closing in from Dagupan, Aguinaldo with his cabinet, generals, and headquarters troops abandoned Tarlac, their capital, and went up the railroad to Bayambang. Here they held a council of war, which General MacArthur describes in his report for 1900 (from information obtained later on) as follows:

At a council of war held at Bayambang, Pangasinan, about November 12, 1899, which was attended by General Aguinaldo and many of the Filipino military leaders, a resolution was adopted to the effect that the insurgent forces were incapable of further resistance in the field, and as a consequence it was decided to disband the army, the generals and the men to return to their own provinces, with a view to organizing the people for general resistance by means of guerrilla warfare. [267]

This had been the plan from the beginning, the council of war simply determining that the time to put the plan into effect had arrived. Accordingly, the uniformed insurgent battalions and regiments broke up into small bands which maintained a most persistent guerrilla warfare for years thereafter. During those years they seldom wore uniforms, disappearing and hiding their guns when hotly pursued, and reappearing as non-combatant peasants interrupted in agricultural pursuits, with invariable protestations of friends.h.i.+p. Hence all such came to be known as amigos (friends), and the word amigo, or friend, became a bitter by-word, meaning to all American soldiers throughout the archipelago an enemy falsely claiming to be a friend. And every Filipino was an "amigo."

Still, the volunteers had arrived in time to enable Mr. Root to make a very nice showing to Congress, and through it to the people, in his annual report to the President for 1899, dated November 29th. This report is full of cheerful chirps from General Otis to the effect that the resistance was practically ended, and the substance of the information it conveyed duly found its way into the President's message of December of that year and through it to the general public. One of the Otis despatches said: "Claim to government by insurgents can be made no longer." [268] This message went on to state that nothing was now left but "banditti," and that the people are all friendly to our troops. Thus misled, Mr. Root repeated to the President and through him to Congress and the country the following nonsense:

It is gratifying to know that as our troops got away from the immediate vicinity of Manila they found the natives of the country exceedingly friendly * * *. This was doubtless due in some measure to the fact that the Pampangos, who inhabit the provinces of Pampanga and Tarlac, and the Pangasinanes, who inhabit Pangasinan, as well as the other more northerly tribes, are unfriendly to the Tagalogs, and had simply submitted to the military domination of that tribe, from which they were glad to be relieved.

In characterizing this as nonsense no disrespect is intended to Mr. Root. He did not know any better. He was relying on General Otis. But it is sorely difficult to convey in written words what utter nonsense those expressions about "the Pampangos" and "the Pangasinanes" are to any one who was in that northern advance in the fall of 1899. Imagine a British cabinet minister making a report to Parliament in 1776 couched in the following words, to wit:

The Ma.s.sachusetts-ites, who inhabit Ma.s.sachusetts, and the Virginia-ites who inhabit Virginia, as well as most of the other inhabitants are unfriendly to the New York-ites, and have simply submitted to the military domination of the last named,

and you have a faint idea of the accuracy of Mr. Root's report. It is quite true that the Tagalos were the prime movers in the insurrection against us, as they had been in all previous insurrections against Spain. But the "Tagalo tribe" was no more alone among the Filipino people in their wishes and views than the "unterrified" Tammany tribe who inhabit the wilds of Manhattan Island, at the mouth of the Hudson River, are alone in their views among our people.

On page 70 of this report, Secretary Root reproduces a telegram from General Otis dated November 18, 1899, stating that on the road from San Nicolas to San Manuel, a day or so previous, General Lawton was "cordially received by the inhabitants." He announces in the same telegram the drowning of Captain Luna, a volunteer officer from New Mexico, who was one of General Lawton's aides, and had been a captain in Colonel Roosevelt's regiment of Rough Riders before Santiago. The writer happens to have been on that ride with General Lawton from San Nicolas to San Manuel, and was within a dozen feet of Captain Luna when the angry current of the Agno River caught him and his pony in its grip and swept both out of sight forever, along with divers troopers of the 4th Cavalry, horses and riders writhing to their death in one awful, tangled, struggling ma.s.s. He can never forget the magnificent dash back into the wide, ugly, swollen stream made by Captain Edward L. King of General Lawton's staff, as he spurred his horse in, followed by several troopers who had responded to his call for mounted volunteers to accompany him in an effort to save the lives of the men who went down. Their generous work proved futile. But it was inspired partly by common dread of what they knew would happen to any half-drowned soldier who might be washed ash.o.r.e far away from the column and captured. If an army was ever "in enemy's country" it was then and there. When we reached San Manuel that night, Captains King and Sewall, the two surviving personal aides of General Lawton's staff, and the writer, stopped, along with the general, in a little nipa shack on the roadside. General Lawton, was in an upper room busy with couriers and the like, but downstairs King, Sewall, and myself set to work to buscar [269] something to eat. I got hold of an hombre (literally, a man; colloquially a native peasant man), who went to work with apparent alacrity, and managed to provide three ravenously hungry young men with a good meal of chicken, eggs, and rice. After supper, being new in the country, the writer remarked to the general on the alacrity of the hombre. I had brought out from the United States the notions there current about the nature of the resistance. General Lawton said, with a humorous twinkle in those fine eyes of his: "Humph! If you expected to be killed the next minute if you didn't find a chicken, you'd probably find one too." It is true that in the course of the campaign General Young sent a telegram to General Otis at Manila characterizing his reception at the hands of the natives as friendly. This was prompted by our column being met as it would come into a town by the town band. It did not take long to see through this, and other like hypocrisy entirely justifiable in war, though such tactics deceived us for a little while at first into thinking the people were genuine amigos (friends). General Otis, not being near the scene, remained under our original brief illusion. Let us return, however, from Mr. Root's "patient and unconsenting millions dominated by the Tagalo tribe," of 1899, to the facts, and follow the course of events succeeding Lawton's junction with Wheaton and MacArthur and his farewell to Young.

General Young, with his cavalry, and the Maccabebee scouts, continued in pursuit of Aguinaldo through the pa.s.ses of the mountains, the latter having managed to run the gauntlet of our lines successfully by a very close shave. How narrowly he escaped is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that after a fight we had at the Aringay River on November 19th, in which Major Batson was wounded while gallantly directing the crossing of the river, we remained that night in the town of Aringay, and at the very time we were "hustling for chow" in Aringay, Aguinaldo was in the village of Naguilian an hour or so distant, as was authoritatively ascertained long afterward from a captured diary of one of his staff officers. [270]

General Young proceeded up the coast road, in hot haste, taking one town, San Fernando de Union, after a brief engagement led by the general in person--imagine a brigadier-general leading a charge at the head of thirty-seven men!--but Aguinaldo had turned off to the right and taken to the mountains. General Lawton wired General Otis about that time, in effect, in announcing Aguinaldo's escape through our lines and his own tireless brigade-commander's bold dash in pursuit of him with an inadequate force of cavalry hampered by lack of horseshoes and nails for the same, "If Young does not catch Aguinaldo, he will at least make him very unhappy." The Young column garrisoned the towns along the route over which it went, occupying all the western part of Northern Luzon, hereafter described, and also later on rescued Lieutenant Gilmore of the navy, Mr. Albert Sonnichsen, previously an enlisted man and since a writer of some note, and other American prisoners who had been in the hands of the insurgents for many months. General Young finally made his headquarters at Vigan, in the province of Ilocos Sur, a fine town in a fine country. The Ilocanos are called "the Yankees of the Philippines," on account of their energy and industry. Vigan is on the China sea coast of Luzon (the west coast), about one hundred miles up the old Spanish coast road, or "King's Highway" (Camino Real), from Lingayen Gulf (where the hundred-and-twenty mile railroad from Manila to Dagupan ends) and about eighty miles from the extreme northern end of the island of Luzon. [271]

As subsequent policies and their effect on one's att.i.tude toward a great historic panorama do not interfere in the least with a proper appreciation of the bravery and efficiency of the army of one's country, it is with much regret that this narrative cannot properly chronicle in detail what the War Department reports record of the stirring deeds of General Young, and the officers and men of his command, Colonels Hare and Howze, Captains Chase and Dodd, and the rest, [272] performed during the long course of the work now under consideration. One incident, however, is appropriate in this connection, not only to a collection of genre pictures of the war itself, but also to a place among the lights and shadows of the general picture of the American occupation. On December 2, 1899, Major March of the 33d Infantry had his famous fight at Tila pa.s.s, in which young Gregorio del Pilar, one of the ablest and bravest of the insurgent generals, was killed. The locality mentioned is a wild pa.s.s in the mountains of the west coast of Luzon, that overlook the China Sea, some 4500 feet above sea level. It was strongly fortified, and was believed by the insurgents to be impregnable. The trail winds up the mountains in a sharp zigzag, and was commanded by stone barricades loop-holed for infantry fire. The advance of our people was checked at first by a heavy fire from these barricades. The approach being precipitous, it looked for a while as if the position would indeed be impregnable, and the idea of taking it by a frontal attack was abandoned. But a hill to the left front of the barricade was seized by some of our sharpshooters--those Texans of the 33d were indeed sharpshooters--and after that, under cover of their fire, our troops managed to get in a fire simultaneously both on the flank and rear of the occupants of the barricades, climbing the precipitous slope up the mountain side by means of twigs and the like, and finally killing some fifty-two of the enemy, General Pilar among the number. After the fight was over, Lieutenant Quinlan, heretofore mentioned, moved by certain indignities in the nature of looting perpetrated upon the remains of General Pilar, buried them with such military honors as could be hastily provided, after first taking from a pocket of the dead general's uniform a souvenir in the shape of an unfinished poem written in Spanish by him the night before, addressed to his sweetheart; and, the burial finished, the American officer placed on the rude headstone left to mark the spot this generous inscription:

General Gregorio Pilar, killed at the battle of Tila Pa.s.s, December 2d, 1899, commanding Aguinaldo's rear-guard. An officer and a gentleman. (Signed) D. P. Quinlan, 2d Lieutenant, 11th Cavalry.

The brief incident over, Quinlan hurried on, rejoined the column, and resumed the work of Benevolent a.s.similation and the war against Home Rule with all the dauntless ardor of his impetuous Irish nature. Whatever the ultimate a.n.a.lysis of the ethics of this scene--Quinlan at the grave of Pilar--clearly the Second Lieutenant Quinlan of 1899 would hardly have agreed with the vice-presidential candidate of 1900, Colonel Roosevelt, that granting self-government to the Filipinos would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief.

The territory occupied and finally "pacified" by General Young, with the effective a.s.sistance of the officers heretofore mentioned, and many other good men and true, was ultimately organized into a military district, which was called the First District of the Department of Northern Luzon. As territory was fought over, occupied, and finally reduced to submission, that territory would be organized into a military district by the commanding general or colonel of the invading column, under the direction of the division commander. The military "Division of the Philippines," which was succeeded by the Civil Government of the Philippines under Governor Taft in 1901, of course covered all the territory ceded by the Treaty of Paris. It was divided into four "Departments," the Department of Northern Luzon, the Department of Southern Luzon, the Department of the Visayas, [273]

and the Department of Mindanao and Jolo. General Young commanded the First District of the Department of Northern Luzon--which included the three west coast provinces north of Lingayen Gulf, and the three adjacent mountain provinces--from the time he led his brigade into that region in pursuit of Aguinaldo until shortly before Governor Taft's inauguration in the summer of 1901. Many were the combats, great and small, of General Young's brigade, in compa.s.sing the task of crus.h.i.+ng the resistance in that part of Luzon into which he led the first American troops in the winter of 1899-1900. The resistance was obstinate, desperate, and long drawn out, but when he finally reported the territory under his command "pacified," it was pacified.

A soldier's task had been performed in a soldierly manner. The work had been done thoroughly. General Young gave the Ilocano country a lesson it never forgot, before politics had time to interfere. We have never had any trouble in that region from that day to this.

Before the army of occupation had had time to do in southern Luzon what General Young did in northern Luzon and thereby secure like permanent results in that region, a "peace-at-any-price" policy was inaugurated to meet the exigencies of Mr. McKinley's campaign for the Presidency in 1900. Our last martyred President clung all through that campaign to his original a.s.sumption that Benevolent a.s.similation would work, and that the single burning need of the hour was to make clear to the Filipinos what our intentions were--as if powder and lead did not spell denial of independence plain enough, as if that were not the sole issue, and as if that issue had not been submitted, with deadly finality, to the stern arbitrament of war. However, neither Lord Roberts in India, nor Lord Kitchener in Egypt ever more effectively convinced the people of those countries that his flag must be respected as an emblem of sovereignty, than General Young did the Ilocanos. Take the month of April, 1900 for instance. Several days after the expiration of said month (on May 5th) General Otis was relieved and went home. During the month of April, General Young killed five hundred insurgents in his district. [274] But this did not prevent General Otis, arriving as he did in the United States in the month of June, when the national political conventions meet, from "repeating the same old story about the insurrection going to pieces" [275]--only, not "going" now, but "gone." Nor did it, and like sputterings of insurrection all over the place, prevent Judge Taft--the "Mark Tapley of this Philippine business" as he humorously told the Senate Committee of 1902 he had been called--from cabling home, during the presidential campaign of 1900, a series of superlatively optimistic bulletins, [276] based on the testimony of Filipinos who had abandoned the cause of their country as soon as patriotism meant personal peril, all such testimony being eagerly accepted, as testimony of the kind one wants and needs badly usually is, in total disregard of information directly to the contrary furnished by General MacArthur and other distinguished soldiers who had been then on the ground for two years.

The area and population of the territory occupied by General Young, the "First District of the Department of Northern Luzon," was, according to the Census of 1903, as follows:

Province Area (sq. m.) [277] Population [278]

Ilocos Norte 1,330 178,995 Ilocos Sur 471 187,411 Union 634 137,839 Abra 1,171 51,860 Lepanto-Bontoc [279] 2,005 72,750 Benguet 822 22,745 ----- ------- 6,433 651,600

As this narrative purposes so to present the geography of the Philippine Islands as to facilitate an easy remembrance of the essentials only of the governmental problem there presented, we will hereafter speak of the First District as containing, roughly, 6500 square miles, and 650,000 people. Whenever, if ever, a Philippine republic is set up, these six provinces are very likely, for geographical and other reasons, to become one of the original states comprising that republic, just as the states of Mexico are made up of groups of provinces. [280]

The rest of the story of the northern campaign of 1899-1900 immediately following Aguinaldo's escape into the mountains through General Young's and General Lawton's lines, being a necessary part of the American occupation of the Philippines, may also serve as a text for further acquainting the reader with the geography of Luzon. War is the best possible teacher of geography, and it may be well to communicate in broken doses, as we received them, the lessons on the subject which the 8th Army Corps learned in 1899 and the subsequent years so thoroughly that we could all p.r.o.nounce with astonis.h.i.+ng glibness, the most unp.r.o.nounceable names imaginable.

When the great Wheaton-Lawton-MacArthur "Round-up" reached the mountains on the northeast of the great central plain, in the latter part of November 1899, Captain Joseph B. Batchelor, with one battalion of the 24th (negro) Infantry, and some scouts under Lieutenant Castner, a very intrepid and tireless officer, boldly cut loose from the column of which he was a part, and, pressing on over the Caranglan pa.s.s, overran the province of Nueva Vizcaya, which is part of the watershed of north central Luzon, proceeding from Bayombong, the capital of Nueva Vizcaya, down the valley of the Magat River, by the same route Messrs. Wilc.o.x and Sargent of the navy had made their pleasant junket in the fall of 1898 as described in Chapter VI (ante). Following this route Captain Batchelor finally came into Isabela province, where the Magat empties into the Cagayan River, reaching Iligan, the capital of Isabela, ninety miles northeast of Bayombong, about December 8th. From Iligan Batchelor went on, promptly overcoming all resistance offered, down the great Cagayan valley, some 110 miles due north, to the sea at Aparri, the northernmost town of Luzon and of the archipelago, where he met two vessels of our navy, the Newark and the Helena, under Captain McCalla, and found, to his inexpressible (but partially and rather fervently expressed) chagrin, that the insurgents who had fled before him, and also the garrison at Aparri, had already surrendered to the navy. The territory thus covered by Batchelor's bold, brilliant, and memorable march over two hundred miles of hostile country from the mountains of central Luzon down the Cagayan valley to the northern end of the island, at Aparri, [281] consisted of the three provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, and Nueva Vizcaya. The area and population of these three, according to the census tables of 1903, are as follows:

Province Area (sq. m.) [282] Population [283]

Cagayan 5,052 156,239 Isabela 5,018 76,431 Nueva Vizcaya 1,950 62,541 ------ ------- Total 12,020 295,211

The troops of Captain Batchelor's command were later on relieved by the 16th Infantry, commanded by Colonel Hood, under whom the above group of three provinces finally became the "Second District of the Department of Northern Luzon." As part of the plan to provide the reader with a fair general idea of Luzon conveniently portable in memory, he is requested to note, at this point, that hereinafter the Cagayan valley, with its three provinces, [284] will be alluded to as a district containing 12,000 square miles and 300,000 people. As was remarked concerning the original military district commanded by General Young, to wit, the First District, so of Colonel Hood's district, the Second--that is to say, as the Ilocano country may some day become the state of Ilocos, so, for like geographical and other governmental reasons, the three provinces of the Cagayan valley may some day become the state of Cagayan in the possible Philippine republic of the future.

Having now followed the "far-flung battle line" of the volunteers of '99 and their comrades in arms, the regulars, from Manila northward across the rice paddies of central Luzon and over the mountains to the northern extremity of the island, let us return to the central plain, for reasons which will be stated in so doing. Between the China Sea and the coast range which forms the western boundary of the central plain of Luzon, there is a long strip of territory--a west wing of the plain, as it were--about 125 miles long, with an average width of not more than twenty miles, stretching from Manila Bay to Lingayen Gulf. This is divided, for governmental purposes into two provinces, Bataan on the south, whose southern extremity lay on Admiral Dewey's port side as he entered Manila Bay the night before the naval battle of May 1, 1898, and Zambales on the north. The area and population of this territory are as follows:

Province Area (sq. m.) Population

Bataan 537 46,787 Zambales 2,125 104,549 ----- ------- 2,662 151,336

Also, between the Pacific Ocean and the coast range which forms the eastern boundary of the plain is a longer, narrower, and very spa.r.s.ely populated strip, or east wing, divided also into two provinces, Principe on the north and Infanta on the south, each supposed to contain about fifteen thousand people. Principe and Infanta are wholly unimportant, except that, to avoid confusion, we must account for all the provinces visible on the maps of Luzon. These two provinces never gave any trouble and no one ever bothered about them. [285]

In the mountains of Zambales and Bataan, however, as in most of the other provinces of the archipelago, the struggle was long kept up, just as the Boers kept up their war for independence against Great Britain about the same time, by guerrilla warfare.