Chapter 4 considers the war’s early 1846 campaigns in Northern Mexico and demonstrates why regulars in Mexico developed a strikingly different approach to enemy women than in Florida. They would no longer be hunters and captors but rescuers who redeemed Mexican women from Indigenous captivity. Mexican women became the perfect subjects for US military protection because rescue demonstrated the superiority of US soldiers to Mexican men who failed to safeguard their women. This racialized dynamic allowed the army to criminalize both the Native and Mexican men who resisted military occupation. As a result, the US Army emerged from Northern Mexico with two distinct approaches for future conflicts that distinguished between lawful enemies (uniformed, conventional combatants) who deserved good treatment from unlawful enemies, especially guerrillas and Indigenous raiding parties, whom the army labeled criminals. These dual approaches, premised in part on the need to rescue Mexican women, legitimized a vision of continental expansion and forged the tools that the US would use in punitive “Indian Wars” for the rest of the century.