Complete and unabridged, with 51 full-page plates by Frederic Remington, George Catlin and Vasily Vereshchagin. A boy carries dispatches for the American army in Mexico in 1847, through Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and the gates of the capital. William O. Stoddard had been Lincoln's assistant secretary and wrote boys' fiction from documents; the campaign here is accurate to the day. The Mexican side is given more room than in most American books of its date, and the ending is not triumphant. Fifty-one plates of painting, among them Remington and Homer, carry the campaign's look from campfire and trapper's camp to flight and the drawing of the black bean.