It was early spring of 1867, while the sound of musket fire and the smell of gun smoke filled the air, that the undefeated Confederate General Jo Shelby was called upon by the Habsburg emperor Maximilian to fight one last battle.
"General," said the Emperor, "Would it be possible to muster your men to defend the city, to fight for the Empire?"
The General silently shook his head. It had been two years since his Iron Brigade had crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico and offered its services to the Emperor, and in that time their numbers had steadily dwindled. Some had returned to the South, while others had traveled further abroad, and more still lay dead outside - the victims of Mexico's harsh lawlessness.
The Confederate settlement of Carlota, named for the Emperor's wife, had been burned to the ground by the forces of Benito Juarez, the same forces that now threatened to lay siege to the Mexican capital.
"Very well then," said the Emperor, "then you may go."
Maximilian removed a golden eagle badge from his robe, the Order of Guadalupe, and pinned it onto General Shelby's jacket. The men said their goodbyes and parted for the last time.
The walls of Mexico City would be breached on June 12th of 1867, and Emperor Maximilian would be executed in the nearby city of Querétaro on June 19th.
In the short time before the fall of the Mexican Empire that year, the Mexico City mint had continued to operate, producing 1,238,000 silver pesos in 1867 even as the walls shook under the bombardment of cannon fire.
Nobody quite knows what happened to the treasure of Imperial Mexico in those last brutal days. Some say it was plundered by Bonito Juarez and his band of merry men, while others believe it was secreted away to the American south by escaping Confederate sympathizers, or brought to Europe by Habsburg loyalists. Whatever the case may be, every now and then, a piece of the treasure surfaces, and the face of Maximilian and the crest of his short lived Mexican Empire shines still to this day...
