had just been brought to a disastrous end. This was the De
Boulbon expedition into Mexico. The Count Gaston Raoulx de
Raousset-Boulbon was a young French nobleman and Soldier of
Fortune, a _chasseur d'Afrique_, a duellist, journalist, dreamer,
who came to California to dig gold. Baron Harden-Hickey, who
was born in San Francisco a few years after Boulbon at the age of
thirty was shot in Mexico, also was inspired to dreams of conquest
by this same gentleman adventurer.

Boulbon was a young man of large ideas. In the rapid growth of
California he saw a threat to Mexico and proposed to that
government, as a "buffer" state between the two republics, to form
a French colony in the Mexican State of Sonora. Sonora is that part
of Mexico which directly joins on the south with our State of
Arizona. The President of Mexico gave Boulbon permission to
attempt this, and in 1852 he landed at Guaymas in the Gulf of
California with two hundred and sixty well-armed Frenchmen. The
ostensible excuse of Boulbon for thus invading foreign soil was his
contract with the President under which his "emigrants" were hired
to protect other foreigners working in the "Restauradora" mines
from the attacks of Apache Indians from our own Arizona. But
there is evidence that back of Boulbon was the French
Government, and that he was attempting, in his small way, what
later was attempted by Maximilian, backed by a French army corps
and Louis Napoleon, to establish in Mexico an empire under
French protection. For both the filibuster and the emperor the end
was the same; to be shot by the fusillade against a church wall.

In 1852, two years before Boulbon's death, which was the finale to
his second filibustering expedition into Sonora, he wrote to a