The General and the Jaguar (12 page)

McKinney was well liked by his men and particularly valued by his employer because of his ability to speak Spanish. He was
tall and slender, and might have been handsome but for his front teeth, which one of his associates cryptically described
as “peculiar.” He was dressed like a gentleman that morning, wearing a yellow shirt and red sweater, gray trousers and matching
vest, white Stetson, boots and chaps.

McKinney decided to ride down and talk to the soldiers. A companion, Antonio Múñez, begged him not to go. If the soldiers
were Villistas, Múñez cautioned, they would undoubtedly kill them. “I told him this several times but finally he turned to
me and said, ‘Well, I’m going to talk to them; are you such a coward that you don’t want to go with me?’”

Antonio Múñez shook his head in a mixture of shame and embarrassment. The truth was, he would rather be a coward than dead,
and he watched with a fatalistic detachment as the dapper-looking McKinney loped down into the camp.

When McKinney reached the soldiers, he pulled out his papers and showed them to the highest-ranking officer present, who happened
to be Colonel Nicolás Fernández. The colonel glanced at the documents, then handed them back. As McKinney put the papers back
into his shirt pocket, Fernández demanded to know the location of the cattle and the number of cowboys on the roundup. McKinney
answered in his forthright, honest way and was startled when Fernández then refused to let him return to his men. Fernández
held out his hands in a graceful, apologetic gesture and reassured him that he would be detained for only a short while, until
the other ranch hands were rounded up.

Múñez, meanwhile, turned his horse and rode off to warn the other cowboys. He soon caught up with William Nye Corbett, Juan
Favela, and several others who were driving a herd of cattle down the river. Corbett, about twenty-seven years old, tall and
slender like his boss, wanted to join McKinney immediately. But Favela, who owned a small working ranch adjacent to the huge
Palomas spread, thought they should be more cautious. As the cowboys were debating what to do, Fernández’s men rode up the
hill toward them. Corbett trotted down to meet them with his hands up in the air. Antonio Múñez and Juan Favela kicked their
horses into a gallop and headed for the border.

At the Villista camp, a young “towheaded soldier” seemed to take great glee in the capture of Arthur McKinney and William
Corbett. He immediately rode to Villa’s headquarters and informed him that they had taken two more prisoners. Villa instructed
his orderly to bring a horse and galloped over to take a look at the two Americans. His friendship with McKinney, it seemed,
had been very superficial. He took a few sips of coffee and tossed the cup onto the ground.
Maten a los hombres!
he growled.

With the pronouncement of the death sentence, the mood in the camp became inexplicably festive. In shock—or disbelief—McKinney
took off his boots, chaps, and hat and gave them to his executioners. A noose was thrown over the branches of a cottonwood
tree and he was positioned beneath it on his horse. He laughed and joked and shook hands as the rope was pulled down around
his neck and tightened. Then a sharp, stinging slap was delivered to the horse’s rump and the animal bolted, leaving McKinney
dangling in the air. Corbett, demonstrating the same cavalier attitude, was hanged next.

While McKinney and Corbett were being killed, the Mexican cowboys who worked for the Palomas Land and Cattle Company remained
locked up in a room at the ranch house. James O’Neal, who was thirty-four years old and ranch cook, was with them. O’Neal
had drifted into Columbus in February looking for work. A restaurant owner, A. A. Keeler, had agreed to hire him for a dollar
a day plus room and board, but the day before he was to begin his new job, Arthur McKinney came in looking for a camp cook.
The restaurant owner knew O’Neal preferred ranch work and introduced him to McKinney. The two hit it off and O’Neal joined
the outfit with a starting salary of thirty dollars a month.

O’Neal may well have been the American that Maud saw murdered as the soldiers resumed their northward march. He was standing
in the middle of the road, gesticulating frantically, when the riders swarmed over him. The horsemen grabbed him by his hair
and playfully tossed him back and forth between them. When he fell to the ground, they forced their horses over his body.
The animals shied wildly and jumped sideways, for it is not in their nature to trample a human being, but the Villistas raked
their mounts with spurs. Somehow, the man managed to grab the saddle strings of one of the riders and swing up behind him.
The soldier he now sat behind was Candelario Cervantes. Cervantes motioned his troops to get out of the way, then he raised
his pistol and shot the man through the neck. The bullet exited under his right arm and he fell from the horse. Unbelievably,
he managed to get back on his feet and began to run. But the soldiers quickly overtook him and trampled him until he was dead.
Later, O’Neal’s mutilated body would be found toward the river.

In keeping with his vow not to waste one more bullet on his own countrymen, Pancho Villa did not kill any of the Mexican cowboys.
Instead, they were told of the impending attack on Columbus and ordered to accompany the column. If any of the cowboys escaped,
they were warned, everyone left behind would be killed.

T
HE COLUMN CONTINUED
its northward march, with some of the soldiers now wearing the clothes of the dead men. As the troops struck out across the
flat prairie, the wind began to rise and brown gritty clouds obscured the horizon. The sulfurous, buffeting air was almost
too much to endure and sandy tears leaked from the eyes of man and beast. The soldiers drew their hats down and their serapes
up over their faces. The little ponies plodded on: Right back leg. Right front leg. Left back leg. Left front leg. Four beats
to a walk, an immeasurable number of beats to go.

At last, the men reached a deep arroyo, where a halt was ordered. The pummeled troops slid to the ground, the wind still keening
in their ears. The ponies wrapped their tails over their exposed flanks to wait out the storm. The dust collected in their
ears and noses, between their eyelashes, and sifted down through their loosening winter hair to the tender skin where the
saddles were laid.

The Mexican troops were now close enough to see Columbus through their binoculars. Pancho Villa, Candelario Cervantes, Nicolás
Fernández, and a fourth officer named Carmen Ortiz remounted their horses and rode off in the direction of a hill where they
could better observe the town. When they returned, several of the resting soldiers overheard their excited voices. Villa apparently
had a change of heart. He pointed out that the cavalry regiment garrisoned at Columbus seemed large, and he saw no need to
sacrifice the lives of their men for such an “unimportant town.” But Cervantes maintained the army post was staffed by not
more than fifty men and that two hours of fighting should bring victory. “A heated discussion continued for about two hours,”
states an army report, which was written after the attack and based upon interviews with prisoners. “Finally Villa being pressed
for a decision, consented to attack and issued orders that the attack on Columbus, N.M. would be undertaken on the following
morning.”

It was Wednesday, March 8, 1916.

C
OLUMBUS
, N
EW
M
EXICO
, not only was an “unimportant town,” but also was exceedingly ugly. Not a single tree existed in the
small settlement, nor was there any grass to keep the parched earth from being scoured by the spring windstorms. The western-style
stores and blistered houses seemed no more substantial than a mirage. They leaned against each other, coated with dust, seemingly
ready for abandonment almost as soon as they were built. When the turmoil of spring had exhausted itself, a white, sizzling
ball appeared in the sky and poured down a heat that immobilized everything. The stunned emptiness rolled away to the four
horizons, relieved only by broken-backed cactus, brambles of mesquite and sage, and the three cone-shaped mountains northwest
of town known as the Tres Hermanas.

The town had been founded in the 1890s by Colonel Andrew O. Bailey, a one-armed Civil War veteran. Bailey wanted to name the
settlement Columbia, after the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher
Columbus’s discovery of the New World, but it was rejected by the U.S. Post Office because so many others had requested the
same name. So he settled upon Columbus, taken from Columbus, Ohio, where he had once lived. The town grew slowly, with the
first settlers drawn by free land and reports of ample underground water.

In 1912, James Dean, a distinguished-looking man with a neatly trimmed beard, arrived in Columbus from Artesia, another sunbaked
New Mexico town. He was fifty-eight years old at the time and had suffered unbelievable hardship moving his family and household
goods to Columbus. Although it was only three hundred miles, the trip took nine days in his 1910 touring car. There were no
gas stations, no restaurants, no hotels, and only a few “made” roads. He had to stop often to repair the car himself and relied
on the kindness of strangers and their teams of horses to pull him through mud and vast stretches of deep sand. Compounding
his misery was a poorly capped tooth that had ulcerated and caused him great pain. In a letter to his wife, Eleanor, he talked
of crossing the Rio Grande, where he had gotten stuck in a hole and had to dig his way out: “It was awful hot & I got hot
and my drinking water got as hot as dish water. It made me sick, vomited & diarrhea.” He drove for another five hours, through
prairie grass and around the mud holes and sand bogs and arroyos. That evening, a family who lived nearby brought him a dinner
of bread and pork roast and coffee and he found himself sick again in the night. The next morning, after receiving more coffee
and food from neighbors, he continued on his way. “Did not get stuck in the sand but it was heavy pulling. Had to stop every
1/2 hour and let the engine cool.” When he finally reached Columbus and had recuperated from the ordeal, he began work on
his property, sinking a well and putting up the wild hay that grew on his land. Eventually he opened a grocery store and bought
several additional lots.

Other settlers, equally tough and independent, soon followed. Archibald Frost opened a store that specialized in hardware,
furniture, arms and ammunition. His wife, Mary Alice, was a mail-order bride, blue eyed, freckled, and petite. Archibald could
hardly believe his good fortune, and fifteen months later they were celebrating the arrival of their first son. John and Susan
Moore, a childless couple who had found each other in middle age, operated a dry-goods store. And Charlie Miller, an eccentric
fellow, though greatly admired, ran the drugstore. “He had come to the Mimbres Valley as a tubercular, got a herd of goats
and lived in the open until he regained his health, then resumed his vocation of druggist,” recalled Roy E. Stivison, a medical
doctor who served as the school principal.

The newcomers did what they could to improve Columbus, building churches, schools, and houses and planting rosebushes and
fruit trees in the sand. They established a chamber of commerce, a newspaper, and a literary club. (
Monuments of Egypt
was being read in 1912, with special attention devoted to a chapter on Queen Hatasu.) They organized masked balls and waltz
contests, and held outdoor tea parties under tall yuccas. Those who stuck around long enough often came to appreciate the
disinfecting power of bright sunshine and the stunning transformation that occurred in the blue slices of dawn and dusk, when
the air grew intoxicating and infused with a subtle perfume that seemed to seep from the earth itself.

The arrival of the U.S. cavalry and the town’s proximity to Mexico brought a faint veneer of prosperity to Columbus. Eventually
there was enough business to support three hotels, a bank, drugstore, livery stable, two restaurants, and several general
stores. Automobiles, or “machines,” as they were often called, were just coming into use and a few enterprising owners rented
them out for twenty-five cents per mile “or more according to the character of the roads” and charged one dollar per hour
for “standing time.” By 1916, the population had swelled to roughly thirteen hundred civilians and soldiers and Columbus had
managed to acquire an aura that, if not exactly gay, had a restrained liveliness.

The settlement was divided into four quadrants by a dirt road, which ran in a north-south direction from the town of Deming
to the Mexican border, and the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad tracks, which bisected the town in an east-west direction.
The commercial businesses and the residences were on the north side of the railroad tracks and Camp Furlong, with its barracks,
cookshacks, stables, and other miscellaneous buildings, was on the south side. Most of the military officers lived in small
clapboard homes in the northeast or northwest quadrants. The home of Captain Rudolph E. Smyser was typical of the officers’
quarters: Smyser and his wife and two children lived in a three-room house. The living room, which was converted at night
to a bedroom for one of the boys, was furnished with a cane chair and a cheap couch. Behind the living room was a bedroom,
which held a brass bed for the adults and an army cot on which the other boy slept. The kitchen, which also doubled as the
dining room, had a woodstove for cooking and heating. An orderly, or “striker,” lived in a tent opposite the kitchen and made
a few extra bucks each week cleaning Captain Smyser’s boots and saddle and currying his horse.

For the most part, a feeling of friendship and goodwill existed between the townspeople and the soldiers in the army camp.
The military families sent their children to the public school and the officers and privates alike attended church services
in town. “Many an evening my young wife and I spent in camp watching the flag come down at retreat and the officer of the
day inspect the guard for nightly border patrol. Every morning we were wakened by the bugle’s reveille and at night went to
sleep to the melancholy sound of taps,” Roy Stivison recalled.