The General and the Jaguar (22 page)

Milton James spent two weeks in Sisters Hospital in El Paso. He lay flat on his back, unable to turn over, listening to the
funereal whispers outside the door. When did they tell him Bessie was gone? Or did he already know it the moment she flung
away his hand as they ran toward the hotel? Milton also returned to Columbus carrying a bullet in his body. He had always
been thin, but now he was cadaverous, and so weak that it would be months before he could do any physical labor. “Since his
injuries, he has been extremely nervous, has been weak physically, and is unable to enjoy sound sleep; his nervous system
was severely shocked by seeing his wife shot down, and as a result of the wounds received by him,” his attorney would later
write.

Archibald Frost spent six days at a hospital in Deming. Both sides of his body had swelled badly from the bullet wounds and
it was days before he could get around without help. He carried his left arm in a sling and could barely move his right arm
because of the shoulder wound. One of the bullets had penetrated almost to his spine and doctors were afraid to remove it,
making him the third survivor carrying a bullet from the raid. He, too, suffered from “nervous prostration,” and in the years
to come would experience debilitating bouts of inflammatory rheumatism.

Maud left Columbus and went to El Paso to stay with friends while she awaited the arrival of her little boy. Venustiano Carranza
had instructed his representatives to make sure that Johnnie was put on a train and brought safely out of Mexico. When the
child reached Juárez, the Carrancista soldiers made Maud sign numerous papers and snapped a photograph of the boy to prove
he had been returned unharmed to the mother. Maud swept the child up in her arms and for the first time since the ordeal had
begun, she cried. “Oh, my baby, my baby,” she murmured, oblivious to the armed soldiers, as well as the reporters who had
dogged her every step. Wrote one, “She gathered her baby, smudgy gingham dress and all, to her breast, and turned and left
the cuartel.”

The raiders who had fallen into the brush would remain where they lay for weeks. H. N. Gray, the man who worked for the Mexican
consul’s secret service bureau, drove out into the desert with a wagon, determined to find his young friend, José Pereyra,
who had tried to protect the women at the Commercial Hotel. Vultures rose up lazily into the sky as he passed by and then
sank back down to their feeding. Pereyra’s body was unrecognizable but Gray was able to identify him by his new gray suit
and his Stetson, which was lying nearby. He had been shot in the back and the bullet had pierced his heart.

V
ILLA AND HIS TROOPS,
meanwhile, continued their flight south. Everyone was exhausted, even Villa, whose heavy body pitched forward in the saddle,
his mind swept clean, the rage momentarily gone. He wanted a warm bed, a woman, food, maybe red enchiladas stuffed with sausage
or a roasted sweet potato, its skin blackened by fire, and a glass of milk. The Villistas reached Ascención, a small town
roughly sixty to seventy miles south of Columbus, on the afternoon of March 10. The troops were billeted in the houses and
all available forage rounded up.

Cruz Chávez died on the afternoon of their arrival. Pablo López’s wounds had grown “alarmingly dangerous,” but he was still
hanging on. The other Villista generals—Nicolás Fernández, Candelario Cervantes, Francisco Beltrán, and Juan Pedrosa—had escaped
without injury and scoured the countryside for fresh horses and farm wagons for the wounded. Working swiftly, the soldiers
transferred the injured men into the wagons and resumed their march. Villa’s Dorados served as guards for the wagons and they
moved slowly in order to lessen the suffering of the wounded.

On the evening of March 12, the Villistas stopped at the Corralitos hacienda, passing beneath the ancient cottonwood trees
that arched over the driveway. The ranch, located a hundred miles south of Columbus, encompassed more than a million acres
and was owned by Commodore E. D. Morgan and several other New York investors. Villa billeted his troops in the ranch house,
a sprawling edifice that included a ballroom and more than three hundred rooms. They slaughtered cattle in the outlying fields
and commandeered a small buggy for Pablo López.

While he was at the hacienda, Villa contacted the Carrancista official in Casas Grandes and told him that he would be passing
by during the night. He reassured the official that “the Carrancistas need not consider him an enemy; that he was true to
his previous utterances of no desire left on his part to fight Mexicans; that the only ambition he had left was to kill Americans.”
Then he had the members of the Polanco family, who managed the ranch, brought before him and demanded to know where the fresh
horses were kept. When he was informed that there weren’t any horses left, he ordered the men stripped and beaten with wet
ropes. Then he ordered his soldiers to hang them, saying, “they were too damned American to live.”

In a small chapel courtyard, the ropes were draped over a beam that held several beautiful bronze church bells. The men were
repeatedly hauled up into the air. Just as they were about to lose consciousness, they were lowered and interrogated. One
of the men, Mucio Polanco, managed to break free and leaped on Villa and began to strangle him but was pulled off and beaten.
Enraged, Villa ordered five of the six men lined up against an adobe wall and executed. Afterward, he told the frightened
bystanders, “You may bury them or not, as you please.” He took the sixth member of the family, Gregorio Jr., twenty-one, back
to the mother and said, “I am going to leave you this one son to support you. You ought to thank me for leaving him.” It was
a gesture typical of Villa—a small, courtly courtesy after an unthinkable act of violence.

Continuing south, Villa and his men spent the night in the prosperous hamlet of Galeana, 140 miles from the border. In the
morning, from the open window facing the plaza, he harangued the crowd: “Brethren, I have called you together to inform you
that in an endeavor to enter the United States I was stopped by the gringos on the line and was compelled to fight large numbers
of them. I repeat to you, I shall not waste one more cartridge on our Mexican brothers but will save all my ammunition for
the ‘guerros’: prepare yourselves for the fight that is to come. I want to ask you to assist me in caring for the wounded
I have with me suffering for the good of our beloved country.”

The people of Galeana responded generously to Villa’s call, giving him food and clothing and even money. But they were unwilling
to join his ranks and five residents were forcibly pressed into service. Villa knew he and his band would be vulnerable to
capture unless they found fresh horses, so once again he dispatched Nicolás Fernández and a small detachment to scour the
countryside.

At the town of El Valle, 170 miles south of Columbus, Villa left most of the wounded in an adobe schoolhouse. They had suffered
severely and the only treatment they had received was from General Francisco Beltrán, who apparently had some medical training.
It had also become obvious that Pablo López could no longer keep up. Villa ordered ten men to escort López to Las Animas,
a village located some forty-five miles southeast of El Valle. Three days later, with a detachment of Carrancistas closing
in on him, López was forced to mount a horse and flee to a cave ten to twenty miles farther south.

While at El Valle, Villa made another incendiary speech and demanded that the townspeople join him: “War is being declared
and from this moment I want to see how many will join me, how many will incorporate themselves with me. I have people with
me from all the towns excepting El Valle from where I haven’t a single one and it is necessary that this town will give me
no opportunity for complaint. Do not fear, I promise you that I will not fire again, not even a single shot, against the Mexicans,
and if some day I do it, you may say that I am a malefactor.”

Forty additional men were pressed into service. “His custom,” the
New York Times
drily noted, “has been for either himself or one of his lieutenants to line up most of the male population for inspection.
The best physical specimens have been pulled out of line and told roughly that they were honored above the others because
they had become ‘Villa’s men.’”

At Namiquipa, 240 miles south of Columbus, the Villistas got into a pitched battle with Carranza’s troops. Despite their exhaustion,
Villa’s men succeeded in routing the Carrancistas in less than two hours and captured a hundred rifles, two machine guns,
a hundred horses, and about sixty prisoners. The victory went a long way toward restoring Villa’s confidence. Feeling charitable,
he let most of the prisoners go, but kept the rifles and machine guns. Villa knew he would need the weapons to fight the gringos
who would soon be coming after him.

THE HUNT

N
EWTON
D
IEHL
B
AKER
, a diminutive man dressed in black derby and imbued with the same flat, slightly elongated features as
President Wilson, was just leaving the White House on the morning of March 9 when a throng of reporters surrounded him and
began peppering him with questions.

“Are you the new Secretary of War?” one asked.

Newton Diehl Baker nodded.

“All hell’s broken loose in Mexico!” they shouted.

And so, Newton Baker, who had never played with toy soldiers and had hesitantly accepted Wilson’s offer to be secretary of
war only moments earlier, was plunged into his first military crisis. “My coming was taken advantage of by Villa,” he wrote
ruefully to a friend, “and I have a deep grudge against him for the days of anxiety and discomfort already given me. Perhaps
a man who has accumulated so many grudges, however, is indifferent to adding one from me.”

Wilson had approached Baker about serving as secretary of the interior in his first cabinet but Baker had made it clear that
he wanted to finish out his term as mayor of Cleveland. When Wilson approached him again, this time inquiring if he would
be interested in becoming his secretary of war, Baker had patiently explained to him all the reasons that he wasn’t qualified
for the post. He pointed out that he was a member of three pacifist organizations and had absolutely no knowledge of the army
or how it was organized. Furthermore, Baker confessed, he had been rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight when
he tried to enlist in the Spanish-American War.

But Wilson was undeterred and Baker finally agreed to accept the job. “His friends insisted that, whereas Theodore Roosevelt
had been born with a chip on his shoulder and a pirate sword in his formidable teeth, Newton Baker had arrived in the world
with a book under his arm,” writes historian Bruce Johnson.

The brief happiness that President Wilson felt upon getting Newton Baker to join his cabinet evaporated as news of the Columbus
raid reached him. Once again, events would compel him to act in a way that went against everything he believed in. A progressive
thinker, professor at Princeton and later its president, Wilson was brimming with ideas about domestic reform when he was
sworn into office. On the eve of his inaugural, he remarked, “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal
chiefly with foreign affairs.” But that is precisely what happened.

Certainly, the administration’s plan to checkmate the Germans by recognizing Carranza had backfired terribly; Villa’s rage
was just what the Germans had been angling for and they responded gleefully to the news. With the United States being drawn
ever closer to the European conflict, the last thing that Wilson wanted was a war with Mexico. But citizens who lived far
from the border were calling for revenge and Wilson knew he would have to do something. National honor required it. Besides,
it was an election year. Following the Santa Isabel train massacre, the president had managed to hold back the clamorous sea
of interventionists, adventurers, and Manifest Destiny agitators who wanted to extend the United States’ border down to the
Panama Canal by reassuring the American people that Mexico’s de facto government would bring the perpetrators to justice.
But Pancho Villa had demonstrated just how empty those promises were. “It was the feeling in the Cabinet circle that unless
the government met the situation by vigorous action,” wrote the
New York Times,
“Congress would be likely to take matters in hand and adopt a resolution calling for armed intervention. This was exactly
what the Administration desired to avoid.”

The most powerful voice of the interventionists belonged to Albert Bacon Fall, the Republican senator from New Mexico, who,
one day after the Columbus raid, vowed to introduce a measure in Congress calling for recruitment of five hundred thousand
volunteers to invade Mexico. Often clad in a string tie, wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and long, dark duster, Fall seemed to personify
the Old West. “He has no bonhomie and his face is marked by lines of harshness; his speeches are tart and rasping and his
demeanor is sour,” a contemporary observed. Fall had first gone into Mexico on horseback in 1883 and over the next twenty
years acquired financial stakes in mining, lumber companies, and railroads. In 1906, he claimed to have divested himself of
his Mexican interests, with the exception of a power of attorney he held for an unidentified partner “who had a great many
million dollars invested there.” Such a fuzzy arrangement was not surprising from a man who, in a few short years, would be
indicted in the Teapot Dome scandal.