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The Record of Desolation and Despair: Ewing

One old American soldier has had enough of the Cuban war, and has been heard from at Poughkeepsie on his way to Buffalo. His name is William Ewing, and he is fifty-five years of age, a native of Buffalo, and his story reminds one of the romances of the crusaders.

He served in the Seventeenth United States infantry all through the civil war, and is a member of the G, A. R. Since the war he has lived in Buffalo until three years ago, when, with his wife and daughter, he went to Cuba, and invested $7,000, all the money he had, in a sugar plantation. His brother-in-law, William Hamilton, helped him work the plantation. Owing to the troubles on the Island, Ewing sent his wife and daughter to New York last October, and from there they went to Buffalo. He has not heard from them since. Ewing and his brother-in-law joined the insurgent army, and Ewing has been in twenty-one engagements, under Generals Gomez, Maceo, and Garcia. "In one of those engagements my brother-in-law was killed," said Ewing. "Being almost crazed by my reverses, and not having heard from my family, I determined to come to the United States and look them up. On the night of March 28th I made my escape from the Island, and was rowed out in a small boat three miles, when I boarded a blockade runner, landed at Atlantic City, and walked to New York. "After arriving in New York I was afraid to make myself known, and, therefore, received no assistance from the Cuban Junta. From New York I walked to Yonkers, where Grand Army comrades gave me food and paid my fare to Poughkeepsie."

Mr. Ewing, under all these circumstances, seems to have done well to have escaped from his plantation, for neither peace nor war had thrived with him in the tropics.

He is a type of an American-Cuban soldier. One hesitates to use the word Cuban as distinct from American, for Cuba is the great American island, and should be included when we speak, as Daniel Webster did, of the nation as distinct from the states, and the sum of all: "One constitution, one country, one destiny." Here is a man who fought through our war in the regular army, and when peace came resumed the labors of peace, and earned a little but adequate fortune, and concluded to go beyond the lines of the land of his birth and blood, tempted by the soil and sky of Cuba, and there invested the provision that, with industry and thrift, he had made for his old age. The war cry was heard, and he fought for liberty again, but his friends fell by his side, and he thought there was no hope left in that bloody land, and became a fugitive to find his own country, and the charity of his old comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic, helped him on the way home.

The fixed resolution of Spain to ruin herself to the bitter end to hold Cuba for her favorites, and her forced market is not in the least relaxed, but grows still sharper and more severe and deadly as the misfortunes her policy has fastened upon herself are harder to bear. The vital forces that, wisely administered, would have made her a great nation once more are dissipated in the futile struggle to enslave forever her own children. In the strife that has marked the course of the failure of fallen nations, there has been nothing more dramatic or deplorable; and, as in these evil times the beautiful Island is blasted, it would seem that the Cubans of to-day, like the natives of 400 years ago, must live in huts, sheltered by the trees, on the fruits of the forest and the natural growth of food in the generous ground, whose prodigies of production offer the last possibility of livelihood, until they pass away under the savage cruelties of misrule, like those pathetic people here enslaved and destroyed by the discoverers of the Indies.

AN ILLUSTRATIVE MASSACRE.