The Indian Chief by Gustave Aimard

The election over, all, in appearance, returned to the old routine, or at least seemed to re-assume its normal condition. Still it was not so. The Count de Lhorailles, in dying, had borne with him the hopes of the adventurers, whom he had only kept together through his resolute and enterprising character. With his fall, matters began to change, and difficulties spring up.

The Mexican authorities, in whom the indomitable will of the count had alone inspired an apparent kindness toward the colonists, whom they had never liked to see establish themselves on the territory of the Republic, no longer apprehending the vengeance of the man they had learned to fear while learning to know him, very gently and craftily inaugurated a system of minor annoyances, which was already beginning to render the position of the French difficult, and would soon cause it to be intolerable, unless the latter employed an energetic remedy for this state of things, which grew hourly worse. On the other hand, though the colony was so remote from the seaboard, rumours of what was going on in the rest of the world reached it at intervals. Emigrants in troops passed through Guetzalli: all were proceeding to California, for that was the promised land at the moment.