What happened to the Garza papers?

By Robert Mendoza

On December 30, 1891 near Randado, Texas, 3rd Cavalry trooper Allen Walker attacked three Garzistas and seized a pair of saddlebags. The contents were documents detailing Catarino Garza’s troop strengths and deployments, accounts of income and supplies, and blank officer commissions. Private Walker* was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for "capturing papers vital to the interests of the United States." He and his commander Captain John Bourke were celebrated in Harper’s Weekly.
The Cavalry took notes from the captured Garza papers and then turned them over to the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville. This federal court sat in judgment of the South Texans charged with aiding Garza in violation of U.S. neutrality laws. Garza’s father-in-law, Alejandro Gonzales, U.S. Marshal Paul Fricke, Sheriff John Buckley, Collector of Customs F. D. Jodon, Webb County Treasurer A. M. Bruni, and others took their turns on the docket. Next, the Garza documents were delivered to Mexican prosecutors who eventually deposited them in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Relations in Mexico City.
Fifty years later, historian Gabriel Saldivar spotted the Garza papers while browsing through a pile of books in Mexico City’s Lagunilla Market. He purchased the documents for a few pesos, and in 1943 presented their contents at a congress of historians. In the same year, Saldivar’s presentation was published as a book titled Documentos de la Rebelion de Catarino Garza. Saldivar returned the originals to the Foreign Relations archive.
In 1983, in the course of researching a Catarino Garza biography, Celso Guajardo traveled to Mexico City to consult the saddlebag documents at the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The archivist regrettably informed Guajardo that the documents had vanished.

*NOTE: Allen Walker attained notoriety again in 1929 when he was indicted for the 1922 murder of Mexican General Lucio Blanco in Laredo, Texas. Blanco, like Garza, was planning an invasion of Mexico. The grand jury alleged that Walker had been paid by Mexican authorities to kill Blanco. Walker, by then a former deputy U.S. marshal, was never tried. Several years earlier, he had fled custody on a bootlegging charge. He, like Garza, never returned to Texas, but died an exile near Cerralvo, Nuevo Leon.