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WILLIAM MAXWELL WOOD, USN
Fleet Surgeon, Pacific Squadron, 1846

This officer voluntarily undertook the perilous risk to enter Mexico and cross that country to learn the condition of affairs, and at Guadalajara first, and afterwards at the City of Mexico, learned that war had actually commenced between the two countries; and but for the daring courage of this gallant officer, whose skill and adroitness in sending the information to Commodore John Drake Sloat, USN, at Mazatlan, California would have been lost to the American Union; and instead of being one of the United States, would not be a British province.

In a letter dated from New York on 20 March 1855, Commodore Sloat writes:  "The information you furnished me at Mazatlan from Guadalajara, (at risk of your life), was the only reliable information I received of that event and which induced me to proceed immediately to California, and upon my own responsibility to take possession of that country, which I did on the 7th of July, 1846."

In his account of the intelligence he learned at the City of Mexico, Dr. Wood writes: "All this information I again sent to the Commanding Officer of the Pacific Squadron, signing my letter by an easily understood hieroglyphic, and sending it through the Mexican mail under cover to the subject of a neutral power."

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