(MEXICO--MANUSCRIPTS.) Charlotte Biggs. An American woman's letter describing ten difficult years of life in Mexico. Autograph Letter Signed to an unidentified friend. 8 pages, 9½ x 7½ inches, on 3 folding sheets; minor wear and foxing. Oquawka, IL, 14 February 1860 Charlotte Ordway Biggs (1807-1889) grew up in Maine and married a textile mechanic. In 1833, her husband was hired to go to Mexico City to set up and operate a boatload of cotton machinery. This very long letter, written to a long-lost childhood friend, is basically an autobiography of hardship and tragedy.
She describes arrival in Veracruz during a plague: "They kept us several days in quarantine nearly roasting us alive and then suffered us to go ashore into the midst of the black vomit.
Political upheaval: "Santa Anna had just come to power. Every city in the union was in a state of revolt. Mexico was filled with his troops, all the principal streets barocaded and canon planted in every direction."
Unemployment: "The company that brought us out had become bankrupt and we could not get a dollar from them . . . surrounded by a strange race of people, could not speak their language nor make ourselves understood, and destitute of the means of support." They stayed for a year in the American consul's hacienda, living on his charity.
Next came embezzlement by a business partner, after the cotton machinery was finally put to use, when they "took in a third partner who proved a perfect swindler. He cheated them out of nearly all they had made."
Then her husband's illness after running a cotton gin on Mexico's Pacific Coast: "He took very sick with the coast fever which came near ending his career. When he left home he weighed 160 lbs and when he returned he weighed but 96."
The Biggs family by now included 8 children, and they sought "the bennifit of an English education which we could not do thare amogst a set of Catholicks whare no other religion is tolerated." After saving $6,000 in ten years, they returned to America, hoping to buy a farm. However, her husband became distracted on their journey by the offer of an old grist mill in Illinois, on which he spent all their savings. The mill soon washed out in a freshet, and after it was rebuilt, their eldest son was killed in the mill machinery. Mr. Biggs was so distraught that he died just 4 weeks later, leaving Charlotte with no income and 7 children to raise. She eked out a meager existence running a boarding house in Oquawka, IL, with other deaths and hardships along the way. She concludes: "When I was born, my destiny was marked out. I was poor then, and shall remain so to the end of the chapter."