There is, perhaps, something about the writing process I discovered whilst penning my Guide— something I failed to share with you earlier. There is a necessity without which any writer is stranded:

I needed a villain.

At the time, this concern was largely literary.

Little over half a century ago, the poet Byron declared, "I want a hero: an uncommon want!" He was right: that is an uncommon want. Most would prefer a villain.

Surely, there were the Injuns, but plenty of them traded and guided and comported themselves in a manner most beneficial to an emigrant. Distinguishing between good ones and bad ones would have been all but impossible on paper for the purposes of publishing for a Dear Reading Public, so I simply related my own set of anecdotes: some negative, others positive, most cautiously neutral.

The imperial Mexican government certainly provided its own marvelously corrupt set of targets:

An armed escort of about fifteen soldiers is furnished by the government, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting travelers; yet this escort is always, composed of the most reckless, and efficient robbers of the whole land. These soldiers always travel with the stage, on horseback, for which service they are not only paid by the government, but also by the passengers; yet their innate ungratefulness, treachery and cowardice, are fully displayed, upon the approach of the robbers, when they, at once, flee for their own security, and leave the passengers, to the mercy of a horde of inhuman banditti.

But you see, Dear Reader, most of my audience had never seen a Mexican—would not have known one if he walked right up to the front gate of the family farm. The above simply would not do.

On my lecture tours, I soon discovered there was a villain more familiar to the politics of this antebellum decade that sought any distraction at all from the slavery question:

The greatest dangers, to which foreigners are exposed, in traveling by this route, are those of being insulted or murdered, for a non-observance of the interminable, and extremely annoying religious ceremonies, with which they are everywhere surrounded.

Ah, yes, with the Potato Famine raging and Teutonic radicals polluting our fair shores, who could possibly object to maligning the Catholic Church? Surely, it's as American a tradition as the Fourth of July!

This played well enough with my Lyceum audience—what passed as Frontier Reformers of the early career Abe Lincoln bent, you'll recall. So in my book, I enlarged upon the subject:

A short time since, a countryman of ours, was inhumanly, butchered in the city of Mexico, although he was kneeling, in conformity to the, above superstitious practice. Being a shoe-maker, he was in his shop, engaged at his business, when, he was informed by a Mexican that the "Holy Ghost" was passing, and understanding, that, he was desired to do reverence to the "man in black," he arose, and knelt upon his seat; but he was informed, by the Mexican, that he must come entirely out of his room, and kneel in the street. As he did not, immediately, comply with this request, but remained kneeling in his room, the Mexican rushed upon him, stabbed him to the heart, and laid him at his feet, a lifeless corpse,

GASP!

an unoffending victim of barbarous superstition, and tyrannical priestcraft.