THE COLOR GUARD of the Thirteenth Cavalry crossed the border at 12:13 on the afternoon of March 15. Although the Carrancista officer in Palomas had threatened to block the entry of the U.S. soldiers, General Pershing, anxious to avoid any last-minute glitches, had apparently “bought off” the commandant by hiring him as a guide. The village consisted of a scattering of adobe huts and was brown and lifeless except for a thatch of brilliant green grass that grew up around a spring. A few chickens pecked in the dirt and an old couple with leathery, impassive faces told the troopers that all the inhabitants had fled. One correspondent commented on the malodorous air and likened it to the stench of “stockyards, abattoirs and tannery combined.”
The column made camp a mile south of the little settlement. The wagons were arranged so they formed a hollow square, machine guns were stationed at the perimeter, and the animals picketed in the center. The soldiers fried bacon and potatoes in their mess kits and boiled coffee in their tin cups. Night fell quickly, dropping like a black cloth over the red-tinged sky. The troops shivered in their thin, army-issued blankets and on the picket line the horses swayed, filling the darkness with their rippling sighs. When the white rays of the sun appeared, reveille was sounded and the soldiers rose and broke the ice from their water pails, stirred the fires to life, cooked their breakfasts, and continued on their way.
E. A. Van Camp, the telegraph operator and partner of George Seese, tagged along with the soldiers as far as Palomas. He dallied the next morning when the troops broke camp, thinking he would have no trouble catching up to them. As he trotted out of town with his two packhorses, he picked up the wrong trail and found himself in the small settlement of Lake Guzmán, where Carrancista soldiers shouted and cursed him. Once they realized he was a journalist, they calmed down and permitted him to file a story at the telegraph office. When Van Camp caught up with the American expeditionary forces, he was placed under arrest for having sent out an uncensored news story and escorted back across the border with instructions not to return. His sojourn in Mexico had been brief but he had discovered something that would soon become apparent to the rest of the country: Carranza’s troops were as hostile to the Americans as the Villistas were. General Pershing just might wind up fighting both.
The U.S. soldiers were following roughly the same trail that Villa and his men had taken north. At one of his abandoned camps, they found a pile of cartridges and a small expense booklet belonging to Charles Rea Watson, the third piece of evidence linking Villa to the train massacre. Near the Boca Grande River, the soldiers came across the body of one of the cowboys slain by the Villistas, which may have been the camp cook, James O’Neal, who had been trampled to death. “It looked like an old suit of underclothing stretched on boards, a scarecrow perhaps. But when alongside you could see that it was a man, stiff and stark, face jammed down hard in the dirt,” remembered C. Tucker Beckett, an army photographer. Later they came across the body of Arthur McKinney, lying below a tree limb with a severe rope burn. His hanging, it seems, was not the lighthearted affair that Bunk Spencer had described. He had been shot and stabbed multiple times and had been hanged with such force that his head had been completely severed from its torso. McKinney’s remains were returned to Columbus in a light spring wagon and buried in the little cemetery alongside the fresh graves of Bessie James and James Dean.
Both the cavalrymen and the infantrymen wore wool shirts, wool sweaters, pegged breeches, peaked brown hats, leggings, and leather-soled shoes. The wool was hot and itchy and soon grew soaked with sweat; the leggings, which fitted over the top of the shoe, often caused severe damage to the Achilles tendon, and the shoes themselves, with their smooth leather soles, did little to protect the feet from rocks and produced such enormous blisters among the infantrymen that many were forced to fall out and wait for the ambulances.
Each soldier was issued a Springfield rifle with ninety rounds of ammunition, an automatic pistol, which was carried on a web belt, a first-aid pouch, canteen, cup, fork, knife, and spoon. In their backpacks or saddles, the troops carried shaving equipment, tooth powder and toothbrush, undershirts and underwear, two pairs of socks (which could be used to carry coffee or sugar), a towel, cake of soap, handkerchief, tobacco and rolling papers, matches, toilet paper, writing paper, envelopes, fountain pen, pocketknife, shoelaces, buttons, shelter tent, and blanket. The horsemen also carried a saber, lariat, grain bag for their animals, and two extra horseshoes, tacked beneath the stirrups.
By day two of the expedition, the novelty had rubbed off and the soldiers began to think longingly of the comforts of even poor, ransacked Columbus. The sun melted the bacon in the knapsacks and the grease poured down the soldiers’ backs. The infantrymen who followed the horse soldiers were nearly blinded by the billowing clouds of dust. The troops doused their bandannas with water and draped them over their hats or around their faces. Some even tried to shield the delicate nostrils of the animals with wet cloths. A few of the lucky soldiers had brought along “sand goggles” and those who hadn’t wrote to family members immediately, begging them to send the eyewear. William P. Harrison, a trooper with the Thirteenth, remembered: “Most of the fellows rode along with their eyes shut to keep out the dust and glare. Many of the men were half-blind by noon. My eyes began to itch soon around the edges; then they felt as big as camp kettles, and everything got dark. You could feel the blood beating back of your eyeballs. Then the headache would begin.” On one of the laps, Colonel Slocum briefly took charge of the advance guard and they raced ahead to the Casas Grandes River.
Shortly after midnight, twelve hours after the first, or eastern, column departed Columbus, a western column, consisting of mostly the Seventh and Tenth cavalry regiments and Battery B of the Sixth Field Artillery, marched into Mexico from Culberson’s ranch, which was about forty-five miles southwest of Columbus. This column was led by Pershing himself and had originally planned to depart at 9:30 p.m. on March 15 but was delayed when Pershing was involved in an automobile accident on his way to the ranch. He was not injured, and when he arrived he gave the order to saddle up. The soldiers were instructed not to smoke or talk “so that caused us to leave the good old U.S.A. very quiet,” recalled trooper Henry Huthmacher.
There was no moon and the soldiers dozed in their saddles, reins loose in their hands, lulled by the clink of bridles, the squeak of wheels, the muted squeals of a close-packed herd moving together. Temperatures plummeted and the wool shirts and sweaters that the troopers wore now seemed far too flimsy. Some of the soldiers pulled out their blankets and draped them Indian-style around their shoulders. As daylight broke, a captain in the Tenth Cavalry looked back at his African-American troopers and saw that dust had covered them so thoroughly that the only color left was in their eyelids, which “stood out like flies in a pan of milk.”
The column rode for twenty-five miles, going into camp at 6:00 a.m. at a place called Geronimo Rock. At noon, they saddled up and rode for another fifty miles, finally resting for the night at the ranch where Bunk Spencer had been taken hostage. The soldiers erected their dog tents next to the irrigation ditches and purchased hot food from women who worked on the ranch. It was the first time many of them had ever seen tortillas, and the young Henry Huthmacher struggled to describe them in a letter to his sister: They were “kind of a corn cake that looks something like flap jacks and they tasted like good old pound cake.” While they were eating, someone stole Patton’s saddle blanket. Pershing lent Patton one of his blankets. And later, Patton wrote in his diary, “I stole another one for him.”
The next morning, the troopers struggled to their feet. As the hours passed, the fatigued packers soon began discarding hardtack and whole cases of army bacon—the weight was too much and abandoning the supplies seemed momentarily sensible. The soldiers jettisoned their oil slickers and blankets, the picket ropes and steel pickets that they used to stake out their horses, and their long, straight French sabers. A few of the old-timers had enough sense to grab up the discarded blankets and it was they who would sleep most soundly in the months ahead.
At about eight o’clock on the evening of March 17, the western column made camp near the Mormon settlement of Colonia Dublán. Located about a hundred miles south of Columbus, Dublán was one of nine large colonies that had been established in Mexico by the Mormons at the turn of the century after they ran into conflict with U.S. authorities over polygamy laws. Their wide streets, two-story brick houses, fruit trees, and green lawns made them seem like prosperous midwestern communities that had been disassembled and reassembled in Mexico.
With no wagon trains or infantry to slow him down, Pershing’s column had actually beaten the eastern column to the agreed-upon rendezvous point. The march had been relatively uneventful; two mules and eight horses had died and George Patton’s mount had fallen on top of him, breaking his flashlight, but leaving him with only a few bruises. Three days later, the eastern contingent arrived in Dublán. When all the stragglers were finally assembled, the expedition’s combined strength was 192 officers, 4,800 men, and 4,175 animals.
Upon arrival in Colonia Dublán, Pershing handed his fine bay horse to his orderly. From that point on, he would travel by more modern means: a low-slung Dodge touring car with an American flag on one bumper and his brigadier general’s guidon flying from the other. Riding in the car with him were his orderly and his personal cook, who was confronted nightly with the task of creating an appetizing meal from hardtack and grease and whatever else he could scrounge from the countryside. Tagging along with Pershing and his headquarters staff were the national correspondents and their “gasoline steeds.” They were a good-humored bunch, well bred and well educated, and thrilled to be covering a story that promised some blood and a lot of color. They included Frank Elser of the New York Times, whose copy had a distinctly poetic touch; Floyd Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune, who had good sources on both sides of the border; and Robert Dunn of the New York Herald Tribune, who had spent the previous year covering the war in Europe.George Seese, the Associated Press reporter who had scooped his peers on the Columbus raid, also accompanied the troops into Mexico, but by the end of March he had either been fired or resigned and a correspondent named H. W. Blakeslee had been sent as his replacement.
GATHERING UP A BASKET of food, Bishop A. B. Call and several Mormon elders called on Pershing. The general was still sleeping in his tent, but rose immediately and went out to greet them. Together they visited a Carrancista commander in nearby Casas Grandes before returning to the bishop’s house for dinner. Pershing asked for several Mormon scouts to guide the expedition. The church elders were hesitant because they felt cooperation might jeopardize their relationship with the Mexicans, who, after all, would continue to be their neighbors long after the American troops had departed. Reluctantly, they agreed to provide Pershing with the men he needed. One of them was a rakish daredevil named Lem Spilsbury, who not only spoke Spanish but knew Villa well and had even been an overnight guest in his house. Other scouts, lured by the promise of a regular paycheck, needed no arm-twisting. They included a Chickasaw Indian named Bill Bell, a trapper, guide, miner, hunter, and, most recently, deputy sheriff in Columbus; Henry Vaughn, a young Texan who boasted of being a vaunted Dorado and claimed to have executed nine prisoners at Villa’s request; and Dr. A. E. Gates, who had practiced medicine in Mexico and had once been a member of Madero’s dynamite squad.
By lantern light, Pershing pored over a crude map of Mexico and plotted his campaign. He had received information that Villa and his men were on a fertile plateau some sixty miles to the southwest, reportedly replenishing their food stocks and replacing their worn-out ponies at Luis Terrazas’s fabulous spread, San Miguel de Babícora, or farther south, at one of the three lovely ranches belonging to the Hearst family. By now, the few working ranches in Mexico that had not been destroyed or seized had come to resemble military forts and the heavily armed vaqueros spent as much time fighting off revolutionaries as they did rounding up cattle.
The main house on one of the Hearst ranches, for example, consisted of a central building of stone and adobe that opened onto a patio. The walls and doors of the house, as well as the corrals, which could easily accommodate hundreds of animals, were equipped with portals for rifles. Had Villa actually been heading for one of these ranches, he would have been in for a nasty fight. But Pershing had no way of evaluating the information and ordered three columns to move out immediately. On the evening of March 17, after resting for just a few hours at Dublán, 675 soldiers of the Seventh Regiment struggled to their feet and departed. The following day, two smaller squadrons composed of troopers from the Tenth Cavalry left. The plan was for the three columns to surround Villa on the plateau, blocking his escape to the south and cutting off his routes to the east or west.
Pershing sent a telegram to Columbus on March 19, instructing Captain Benjamin Foulois and his airplane squadron to join them at Dublán. The enthusiastic Foulois took the instructions literally and at five o’clock, just as the sun was setting, the eight Jennies roared off on their great adventure. The pilots had no lights, no navigation equipment, and no maps to guide them, and only one man had any experience flying at night. In place of a stick, the pilots used a wheel that was set on a movable bar in front of their bodies. Turning the wheel changed the direction of the plane and pushing or pulling on it made the plane climb or dive. A foot pedal, much like the accelerator found in an automobile, controlled the speed.
One plane had barely gotten off the ground when its engine malfunctioned and the pilot was forced to return to Columbus. The other seven JN-3s flew on in loose formation, guided by the planes in front of them. They could see the bluish shapes of the mountains, the North Star, the moon. As darkness blanketed the earth, Foulois realized that he had made a tactical error by leaving so late and decided to land at Ascención, one of Villa’s first stops upon fleeing Columbus and some sixty to seventy miles south of the international line. Three other planes followed him down. The four Jennies landed without damage—a “remarkable” event, Foulois would later write in his war diary, given the fact that a cavalry regiment had just rolled over the ground and produced a cloud of dust ten feet high.
The other three planes, which were flying perhaps one to two thousand feet above the pack, flew on. Lieutenant Joseph Carberry finally landed his plane on the road leading to the small hamlet of Janos, forty miles beyond Ascención. Lieutenant Robert Willis, a flying enthusiast who had left the Sixth Infantry for the aviation corps, crash-landed farther south and walked for thirty miles until he caught up with a detachment of U.S. troops. The third pilot, Lieutenant Edgar S. Gorrell, kept going, lured by an orangey smudge on the horizon. Gorrell thought the glow was from fires that the pilots were told would be lit to guide them to their makeshift landing strip. Instead, he found himself flying over a raging forest fire. He reversed course, heading north again. Near the town of Ojo Caliente—“hot eye”—some thirty miles northeast of Ascención, he ran out of gas and brought the plane down in a pasture filled with horses and cattle. Grabbing his revolver, canteen, and compass, he cautiously crept away from the herd, filled his canteen at a nearby stream, and set off on a brisk march, hoping to cross the trail of the southerly moving troops. He walked for about six hours, then lay down and slept. At dawn, he resumed his march but soon grew so thirsty that he decided to return to the plane. Once there, he filled his canteen and choked down some dry rations. Refreshed, he noticed for the first time several adobe houses nearby. Eventually he persuaded one of the residents to lend him a horse and take him to Ascención. There, he found a group of American soldiers and spent the night with them. The following morning, he borrowed some gasoline, hitched a ride back to the plane, filled his tanks, and resumed his flight. The plane had gone only about thirty miles when Gorrell spotted a convoy of trucks and decided to land and beg for more gas. The truckers were more than happy to oblige and Gorrell refueled quickly and taxied down a dirt road. As his plane was climbing into the air, one of the wings struck a gasoline drum and tacks began to fly off the cloth covering. Finally beaten, Gorrell set the plane down and hitched a ride to Dublán with the truckers. The ordeal had taken four days. By then, the horse soldiers of Seventh and Tenth regiments had already moved on.
THE TROOPERS OF THE SEVENTH had not yet recovered from their arduous march into Mexico, and whenever halts were ordered, the men tumbled from their saddles and fell asleep. “Until daylight,” remembered young Henry Huthmacher, “I tried to get some sleep but awoke time and again by someone growling at his horse telling him to get off his arm or out of his belly.”
The two smaller detachments of the Tenth Cavalry had been on the move since the day after the raid and their horses were already feeling the strain on their legs. To give them a rest, Pershing decided to send them part of the way by train and asked the manager of the El Paso Southwestern Railroad to send some rolling stock to Dublán. The train arrived in terrible condition, filthy and unventilated, with large gaping holes in the floors where campfires had been built. The soldiers tore down nearby stock pens and used the wood to repair the flooring. Working rapidly, they loaded the horses and the train began inching south. Scores of soldiers rode “Mexican style” on the tops of the cars, bales of hay stacked along the edges to keep them from falling off.
The train crew was not imbued with the same urgency as the soldiers and stopped frequently for water or fuel. When the train reached the town of El Rucio, twenty-eight miles south of Dublán, a disgusted Colonel William Brown off-loaded his squadron of 272 men and took off across country. Major Ellwood Evans, meanwhile, continued south with his 212-member squadron, only to meet with tragedy when two cars loaded with horses and men overturned on a switchback. Troopers and their mounts were flung down a steep embankment. Several horses had to be destroyed and eleven men were injured, including a saddler, who later died of his injuries. Evans left the injured men behind with a medical corpsman after receiving assurances that a train would be sent the following day to convey them back to Dublán, and struck out on horseback with the rest of his detachment.
A few days later, Pershing hurled four more columns south. Their mission was to back up the troops in the field, occupy territory already searched and vacated by the cavalrymen, and guard the mountain passes. Pack mules laden with food and grain were sent after them, though trucks eventually became the most efficient way of supplying the columns. “The pursuit of Villa was a triple chase,” recalled Sergeant John Converse, an observer who accompanied the Thirteenth. “Villa fled south, the cavalry after him and the motor trucks after the cavalry.”
The trucks traveled in long convoys, moving at about fourteen miles per hour. “Their tops are always visible above the gray and green chaparral, their bulk is impressive, and their speed, combined with the rifles of the guards who ride on top of the loads, make them seem some dangerous engines of offense,” noted one correspondent. With no signs to mark the routes, the truck drivers used mesquite branches, laid diagonally across the ground, to indicate a turn or a dangerous pothole. Somehow they managed to find goggles and even respirators to protect themselves from the dust. At night, over their campfires, they sang Broadway songs and sipped “cowboy coffee,” a bitter, dark brew made by boiling water and coffee together and then allowing the grounds to settle to the bottom.
The columns carried enough food to last two or three days—hardtack, bacon, a little coffee, and perhaps a potato or two. When the rations were gone, they tried to buy whatever they could find, with the officers often paying for the provisions with their own money. Using mortars and pestles purchased from the locals, the cooks ground up corn, mixed it with water, and fried it into cakes. Sometimes the cornmeal was mixed with the broth from beef bones, which were transported from camp to camp and boiled over all-night fires. The few stores that existed had been thoroughly looted but occasionally residents would come to the camp to sell eggs, tortillas, tamales, or sweets. Soon the Americans’ diet came to resemble that of the Villistas they were chasing: beans, corn, and half-cooked beef—“the last run down and killed in the hot sun of the afternoon and eaten the next day, tough, stringy and indigestible,” remembered Major William Eastman.
Eastman was a young doctor assigned to the Seventh Cavalry who also served as the regiment’s dentist and veterinarian. He had only scant supplies to treat his patients: tincture of iodine, phenol, bismuth, soda bicarbonate, magnesium sulfate, licorice tablets, and Vaseline. Fortunately, the water was pure and clean and despite an occasional attack of dysentery from the beef, the soldiers’ health remained good. Dental cavities turned out to be the biggest problem and Eastman plugged them with cotton soaked in phenol or tincture of iodine.
When breeches wore out, the soldiers patched them with cloth from their saddle blankets or tents. New shoe soles were fashioned from stirrup covers, hats were constructed from the lining of saddlebags. Once the writing paper was gone, the soldiers used the cardboard from the hardtack cartons. The temperature changes were extreme, plunging as much as ninety degrees during the night, and sleep was often elusive. To keep warm, the men dug trenches and built fires within them. When the ground was thoroughly warmed, they raked away the coals, spread a tarp, and lay down fully clothed, piling blankets and saddles on top of themselves. They also slept in pairs, one blanket underneath, a second on top, and a fire at their feet. Sometimes tents were used as windbreaks and strung up between two trees. A log was placed parallel to the tent, a fire built next to the log, and bedding placed as close to the flames as possible. At many campsites the native grass was almost four feet high, and fires broke out frequently. “In spite of precautions we seemed to be continually setting fire to the country wherever we went. The grass was dry as punk and if it got a good start with the wind blowing, it was almost impossible to put out,” remembered Sergeant Converse.
The horses suffered the most. They were not the tough little ponies that the Villistas rode, but large-boned thoroughbreds or crosses between several breeds. They were big and powerful, but fragile, too. Nearly all of them were classified as “bays,” a stingy army description that failed to capture the many hues of a brown horse. In actuality, they were the color of ginger, cinnamon, and cloves; rich, warm chocolate, coffee, and the watery tannic of tea. Only their eyes were the same, huge dark pools revealing an animal capable of great fear and great courage.
Horses have a grazing animal’s nature; they are self-reliant and content enough to live alone, in the middle of a great plain, with only the wind and crows for company, but happier still with another horse that they can stand parallel to in the buggy months of summer, noses and rumps reversed, the tail of one swatting the flies from the face of the other. They are creatures of habit and thrive on the monotonous turning of day into night, looking forward to a pat of hay for breakfast, a pat of hay for lunch, a pat of hay for dinner, and grass in between. They become cantankerous when their feeding time is altered, startle at loud noises and sudden movement, and are made uneasy by changes in their environment. Yet these were precisely the travails that they would have to endure on the expedition.
Soldiers are expected to stand and fight, but everything in a horse tells it to flee when confronted with danger. Horses are gentle and unaggressive by nature, but their dispositions can turn rebellious in the hands of the wrong rider. Their mouths open willingly for the bit, which sits at the corners of their lips. If this most intimate of spaces is violated, if the reins are jerked or pulled repeatedly, horses can become tough mouthed and nonresponsive, or even worse, clamp the bit between their teeth and run away with their passenger. Their flesh is extremely sensitive—who has not seen a horse shudder under a fly’s weight?—yet ignorant riders think it necessary to pummel them with whips and spurs until the animal retreats into some reptilian corner of its brain and refuses to move at all.
A horse’s back—the beautiful curve that begins at the top of the head, slopes down across a smooth plain, and gently rises into the tail—must be carefully tended. Horses that experience pain and discomfort while being saddled learn to jig and prance and fill their bellies with air so that the girth strap needs to be repeatedly tightened. The long, twisting rivers of muscle covering the leg bones are susceptible to strains and microscopic tears, and an injury in one leg often means the other three have to compensate, with one injury frequently leading to a second. Even more impractical are a horse’s ankles, dainty as a ballerina’s and prone to wind puffs—swollen tissue that subsides only with rest and liniment.
The hooves, which are hard as stone, seem to be perfectly adapted to withstand the enormous impact of walking and trotting and cantering. At their center, though, is a wedge-shaped “frog” prone to drying and bruising. The wrong kind of food can flood the thick horny material with heat and cause permanent damage. Regular trimming and properly fitted shoes are essential. Unfortunately, the animals ridden into Mexico received neither, and their hooves grew long and added to their fatigue and the strain on their legs. The cavalrymen were considerate of their horses and tried to lessen their suffering. They brushed them twice a day and turned them loose to graze whenever possible. (The young Patton was adamant about the need for grazing and wrote scorching memos whenever he saw horses standing on the picket line.) But even the most tender, loving care could not make up for the lack of rolled oats and green alfalfa. The horses chewed up leather bridles, saddlebags, halters, and ropes. The soldiers purchased native corn, but before the grain could be fed to the horses, it had to be dumped onto blankets and the many small pebbles found in the mixture laboriously picked out. Starved though they were, many horses simply stopped eating if their teeth struck a rock. As the flesh melted from their bones, extra blankets were needed under the McClellan saddles to protect their backs. “Great care was taken of the horses’ backs,” remembered Sergeant Converse. “Blankets were folded carefully, saddles packed so the weights were distributed evenly and the men not allowed to lounge in the saddle.”
Many of the horses taken into Mexico were debilitated from the trauma of being boxed up and transported in railroad cars and they suffered from shipping fever and lice. During the campaign, they developed constipation, diarrhea, and life-threatening colic. Some fell to their deaths when they lost their footing on the mountain trails, or were dragged off a cliff by the wagon they were pulling. Many more were killed in the running gunfights, for they were always the largest targets on the battlefield. The majority, though, died of exhaustion and hunger. Quickly, like the little Villista ponies, they gave up their lives. A few were let go on the trail, to fend for themselves, but most were put out of their misery by a merciful bullet to the head. The soldiers grieved their deaths. Poor beasts, they muttered as they passed the huge, ungainly forms, bloated and barrel shaped, a blasphemy of the graceful creatures that they had been in life. With each one lost, Pershing’s challenge became greater. And the fighting had not yet begun.
ON MARCH 21, Colonel George Dodd, a cigar-chomping West Pointer and classmate of Colonel Slocum, took charge of the Seventh Regiment south of Galeana, one of the string of towns that Villa had passed through on his flight south. Dodd was sixty-three years old and yearned for one more good fight before he reached the army’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-four. He had been twice cited for gallant conduct under enemy fire and was a veteran of San Juan Hill and the Philippines, where he had participated in twelve pitched battles. He was an experienced soldier, physically fit with a craggy handsomeness, and every bit as driven as Pershing himself.
Dodd’s orders were to move directly south and then veer west toward San Miguel de Babícora and connect with the other columns. On March 23, he passed the town of El Valle, a picturesque community of adobe homes and flower gardens. Colonel Jorge Salas, a Carrancista commander, rode out and demanded to know by whose authority the U.S. troops were in Mexico. Dodd showed him a proclamation from General Obregón himself, which stated in part that the Mexican government had “entered into an agreement with the government of the United States, so that their respective troops may cross the International boundary in pursuit of bandits who are committing depredations along the frontier.”
Seemingly satisfied, Salas confided that Villa was reportedly holed up in Namiquipa, the little town that was home to Candelario Cervantes and many of the raiders who had attacked Columbus. Buoyed by the news, Dodd raced on. As the column neared Cruces, an ardent Villista community fifteen miles north of Namiquipa, he struck off the dirt road and followed an arroyo to avoid detection.
Dodd planned to surround Namiquipa the following morning, March 24, and take Villa by surprise. While bivouacked, he learned that Villa had already fled. “I was in doubt, which of the many divergent rumors to follow, at this juncture, and will admit being perplexed,” he later wrote. Dodd decided to stick to Pershing’s plan and proceeded to march west across the mountains toward the Hearst properties. A late winter storm suddenly swept down from the Sierra Madre, bringing sleet, high winds, and bone-chilling cold. Sand mixed with snow and ice was driven into the tender, sunburned faces of the horse soldiers. “It cuts like a knife, filling the eyes and hair and mouth, filtering through the clothing and into boots and shoes,” wrote correspondent Frank Elser. “Even the horses are suffering. They have turned their backs to the wind, and with heads down, like cattle drifting before a blizzard, they stand dejected at the picket lines.”
The Seventh Cavalry soldiered on, following a steep rocky trail up and over the Continental Divide. The elevation was between ten and eleven thousand feet and icicles grew from the mouths of both soldiers and horses. Despite the intense cold, the troopers could not help noticing their beautiful surroundings.
The hills and valleys were filled with virgin forests teeming with deer, bear, wolves, and wild turkeys. It was as if they were looking back in time at an untouched piece of the American West. Upon reaching one of the Hearst estates, Dodd learned Villa had not been seen anywhere near the place for months. Wearily, the Seventh went into camp and continued on the following day. “It was bitter cold in the morning when the march began,” the regiment’s narrative reads, “some cases of frost-bitten fingers being reported. The regiment walked several miles to keep warm. Later in the day and afternoon coming down into the valley east of the mountains the weather was very hot.”
The Seventh crisscrossed mountains, canyons, and wind-scoured plains, hoping to pick up Villa’s trail. Messengers from other columns periodically caught up with them, sharing their latest information regarding Villa’s whereabouts. Dodd also sent his Spanish-speaking guides into the towns to query the residents and the Carrancista commanders about Villa’s location. The reports were maddeningly vague and often unreliable. Dodd finally stopped listening to the reports and went by instinct, confident they were still on the right trail when they passed fresh graves, the worn-out carcasses of dead ponies, or cattle from which a few cuts of meat had been taken, the rest left for the coyotes.
WHILE DODD’S TROOPERS floundered through the mountains, wearing out their mounts and expending valuable energy, Villa’s men were recuperating in the small town of Rubio, almost three hundred miles south of Columbus. “The abundant supplies found here cheered us considerably,” recalled one raider. Villa knew from his spies that the gringos were already on his trail, but what he didn’t know was how fast they were moving and how close they actually were to catching him.
Since the skirmish with Carranza’s troops at Namiquipa on March 19, his band had continued south, but they were traveling east of the region that the Americans were searching. On the evening of March 24, Villa and his men changed direction, swinging to the southwest toward the town of Guerrero, a Carrancista stronghold in a fertile valley located in the Sierra Madre.
At 3:00 a.m. on March 27, Villa gathered his troops together to inform them of his daring plan: they were to attack Guerrero and the neighboring settlements of San Ysidro and Miñaca simultaneously. His loyal officers nodded and the main body separated and rode through the darkness. At Miñaca, Francisco Beltrán and Martín López caught 80 sleeping Carrancistas, who surrendered without firing a shot. But Nicolás Fernández’s detachment encountered 250 Carrancista soldiers under the command of General José Cavazos at the pueblo of San Ysidro. Surprised and badly outnumbered, they fell back toward Guerrero, where Candelario Cervantes and Pancho Villa and their troops were engaged in a furious firefight. At about six o’clock in the morning, on a sweeping mesa, Villa jumped out of an arroyo, and ran on foot toward the opposing line. As he did so, one of the conscripts taken in El Valle raised his rifle and shot him from behind. “It was our intention to kill him and go over to the Carrancistas,” recalled Modesto Nevárez. “But just at the time when he was shot, the Carrancistas gave way and ran, leaving us with no possible way to escape, so we again assumed the pretense of loyalty and declared that if he had been shot by any of us it was purely accidental.”
Villa had been shot with an old-fashioned Remington rifle, which uses a very large lead bullet. His right leg had been in a forward position as he ran, and the bullet entered from behind, opposite the knee joint, and ricocheted down, coming out through the shinbone directly in front and about four inches below the knee. The bullet had made a big hole where it went in and a much larger hole where it exited. “The shin bone was badly shattered and I afterward saw them pick out small pieces of bone from the hole in the front,” Modesto recalled.
Villa instructed his officers to tell the rank and file that he had been thrown from his horse. Then several of his most trusted Dorados hurried to the home of a doctor, where they were given cotton bandages and a coarse-grained drug, which was dark blue in color and turned red when dropped into water. Villa’s pant leg was cut back nearly to the hip, the wound was washed, and the leg bound with splints and bandages.
Villa spent the night on the outskirts of Guerrero in the home of a trusted sympathizer. Although he believed that Dodd’s men were in El Valle, some 150 to 200 miles to the north, he was still anxious to get away. The following evening, March 28, Villa slipped out of town with a small group of trusted soldiers. Since he could no longer mount a horse, he rode in a carriage with fifty of his Dorados riding in a tight cluster around him. Three other wagons carrying wounded officers, including Juan Pedrosa, who had been shot in the foot, rattled along behind him. Nicolás Fernández and his detachment rode alongside the wagons, watching for potential ambushes. Occasionally, members of the advance guard would stop to remove large stones from the road so Villa’s ride would be less jarring.
On the same day that Villa’s entourage left Guerrero, Dodd’s men captured a native who said that Villa had been badly wounded in a battle there. Dodd considered the information reliable and decided to head for the town at once. Lieutenant Herbert A. Dargue, flying one of the still-operational Jennies, arrived in camp with a message from Pershing. The general advised Dodd that he was sending fresh troopers to pick up the chase and instructed him to turn over his pack animals and recuperate for a few days. But Dodd wrote back that he would break off the chase after Guerrero. Before taking off with the message, Lieutenant Dargue passed out candy and tobacco and gave his shoes to one of the soldiers.
Dodd decided to make a forced night march of thirty-six miles through the mountains in order to attack the town at dawn. It was a daring and almost reckless thing to do, given the condition of the soldiers and horses. By then, the regiment had been on the march for fourteen straight days, covering nearly four hundred miles and subsisting on corn, beans, fresh beef, and whatever else they could find. Their guide hadn’t been to Guerrero in years and no reliable native guides could be enticed to join the column. Despite the single-digit temperatures and their inadequate knowledge of the terrain, Dodd nevertheless set off on the march shortly before midnight. The column was forced to make frequent stops in order to figure out which way to go. During the halts, the troopers sank to the ground, reins in hand, and slept. “Words cannot describe the tedious effort demanded of the tired trooper when he is forced to dismount and lead his weary horse over a difficult trail on a dark night, making effort to keep in touch with the horse in front, for to lose contact in the dark means going astray, causing long delays in reassembling the column,” Major Tompkins later wrote.
He must carry his rifle in one hand and lead the horse with the other. Many times the horses are so played out that they hang back and make the troopers pull them along. The soldier is animated by the prospect of meeting the enemy but the poor horse has nothing to stimulate him to abnormal effort except the instinct of service which is born in him. It is too dark to see the trail, so horses and men go stumbling along, drunk with sleep and fatigue, with the horse sometimes on top of the man. No wonder it is a common saying “he swears like a trooper.” The trooper learns to swear when leading his mount in a long column, on a night march, over a rough trail.
At dawn on the morning of March 29, Dodd and his men finally spied the rosy domes of Guerrero’s two whitewashed churches. The Americans, as it turned out, had taken an unnecessarily long route to Guerrero and had emerged from the trail south of the little settlement. On their right was a grassy plain with the faint outlines of fence posts, indicating barbed wire. To their left was a cliff that dropped down one hundred to two hundred feet to a river. The town itself was strung out on both sides of the river about half a mile north of where the troopers were standing. The bluff that led down to the river was cut by deep arroyos. More bluffs rose to the west of the town and blended into the mountains. These, too, were cut by deep arroyos. Dodd realized immediately that the terrain would make a surprise attack difficult, if not impossible. Everywhere, it seemed, were obstacles.
In Guerrero, several residents spotted the “strange mounted force approaching” and rushed to the cuartel to warn the remaining Villistas. Although Villa had instructed his troops to leave for the state of Durango immediately, Candelario Cervantes and Martín López and a combined force of two hundred men had dallied. Cervantes ordered his men to retreat, designating a town in the mountains to the west where they would rendezvous. López slipped out of Guerrero and galloped to San Ysidro to warn Francisco Beltrán and his 120 soldiers. Beltrán’s detachment quickly saddled up and headed south.
Dodd ordered his squadrons to circle the town, with instructions to cut off all escape routes. As his troopers were working their way down the bluff, they saw a large body of soldiers moving out of town at a leisurely pace and carrying the Mexican flag. The U.S. soldiers suspected that they were Villa’s men masquerading as members of the Carrancista army but didn’t dare fire upon them until they were absolutely sure. When the American troops drew closer, however, the Mexicans broke and ran, confirming they were indeed Villistas.
Dodd ordered the men to attack. He no doubt envisioned a glorious pistol charge, but the horses were incapable of moving faster than a “slow walk.” Two collapsed beneath their riders as they were being urged forward. The troopers dismounted and inflicted what damage they could from a distance, using their Springfield rifles and machine guns. By the time the engagement was over, Dodd estimated that thirty of the enemy had been killed and an even larger number wounded. By contrast, only five cavalrymen had sustained injuries and they were so superficial that the men were soon returned to action. The Seventh also captured forty-four rifles, two machine guns, and thirteen horses. Two of the horses were confirmed as having been stolen in the Columbus raid and were in such terrible shape that they had to be shot. The Americans also captured twenty-three mules, including one that the troopers jokingly referred to as “Villa’s drug store.” The animal was carrying quinine capsules, antiseptics, bandages, and coffee—which both sides considered almost as important as medicine in conducting a military campaign.
When the U.S. troops entered Guerrero, they discovered that it had been completely sacked by the Villistas. “Such a mess I had never seen,” recalled William Eastman, the physician assigned to the Seventh. “Men lying around wrapped in dirty serapes, ragged women squatting over fires cooking ‘Jerky’ or making tortillas. Sorebacked ponies, dogs and pigs with their refuse, scraps and bones and drying hides.” He treated a Carranza officer who was ill from a “debauch,” as well as soldiers suffering from ulcers, infected wounds, or fevers, and one man who had come down with bronchitis, “which he said he had contracted about a week ago from having taken a bath.” In a courtyard behind one of the more successful stores, they found the body of a Frenchman. The shopkeeper had displayed an ear purportedly belonging to a Villista in his store window, offering five hundred pesos for its mate. Unfortunately, the man had neglected to remove the display when Villa’s men arrived and they hanged him from a tree.
Although the Guerrero fight had been a small one, it made big headlines back home. President Wilson nominated Dodd for promotion to brigadier general and the nomination was quickly approved by the Senate. Dodd’s victory was bittersweet. After the skirmish he had learned that Villa had, in fact, been in Guerrero but had left only hours earlier. If Dodd had had more reliable guides on that cold march, he might well have caught el jaguar himself.
THE CARRIAGE CARRYING VILLA clattered south. In agony, Villa guzzled gin in large quantities to dull his pain. He wept and cursed, slipping in and out of consciousness. At one point, he asked to be shot. At another, he ordered that the driver of the wagon be shot. Remembered Modesto, “I noticed that after that he entirely lost his courage and at times seemed to be unconscious; he would cry like a child when the wagon jolted and cursed me every time I hit a rock.”
Villa’s party was now moving to the southeast, following a route that would take them to Parral, a town of twenty thousand inhabitants located approximately 150 miles southeast of Guerrero and the southernmost town of any size in the state of Chihuahua. The residents of Parral had been among the first to answer Francisco Madero’s call. During the long-running revolution, the town had been bombarded and plundered by various factions and the residents subjected to threats and torture and terror. Through it all, they had maintained their revolutionary fervor. Villa had lived in Parral for many years and considered it his hometown. He knew he would survive if he could get to Parral, which was five hundred miles south of Columbus, but getting there was the challenge.
Like the American troops, the Villistas were also caught in the freezing sleet and snow that had swept down out of the mountains. The trails were treacherous and men and animals staggered from exhaustion and hunger. The Mexicans were wet and cold but could not build fires because the countryside was crawling with Carrancista troops. One of the most aggressive detachments was led by José Cavazos, who had repelled Fernández’s men at San Ysidro. Cavazos hated the Villistas; they had killed 250 of his men following a battle in February and he wanted revenge. Once again, the Villistas were forced to restrict their movements to darkness.
On March 29, they paused at a small ranch house on the outskirts of the mountainous town of Cusihuíriachic, the destination point for the ill-fated mining party and 350 miles from Columbus. In the grayish light of dawn, they shook the stiffness from their limbs only to feel their muscles tightening again at the sounds coming from Villa’s carriage. Villa’s leg had swelled grotesquely and had begun to turn black for about twelve inches above and below the bullet wound. Villa refused to go into the villages where medical care and a warm bed might be found, camping instead in the shadowy bottoms of arroyos or in mesquite thickets. “They traveled almost day and night,” Modesto remembered. “When they wanted to stop, General Villa would not stand for it. He was the worse scared man I ever saw.” To compound their gloom, one of the wounded officers was found dead in his carriage. A second officer was so close to death that they were forced to leave him behind. Once past Cusi, their progress slowed considerably and they covered only a few more miles before going into camp. On March 30, they killed four cattle and spent almost all day resting. The Mexicans had not eaten or slept since leaving Guerrero and six men deserted at this point.
The following day, the entourage stopped and a litter was made for Villa from tree limbs and rope. A litter was also prepared for General Pedrosa, though his was not so elaborate or sturdily built as Villa’s. Sixteen men, all staff officers or personal friends, were detailed to carry Villa. His brother-in-law rode next to him, leading his horse, a beautiful blue roan pinto. “He is a very strong, well-built man and he lifted Villa around in his arms like a child,” remembered Modesto.
Their progress was unbearably slow. Even under the best conditions, the two litters, each carried by four men, could not travel more than two miles an hour. The cargadores tried to be gentle, but a certain amount of jostling was inevitable. “When I last saw him,” continued Modesto, “his big fat robust face was very thin and frail. His staff officers hunted everything dainty for him that they could find for him to eat. He ate very little, and seemed to grow weaker day by day.”
On April 1, the Villistas approached the Hacienda Cieneguita, twenty miles south of Cusi. It was still snowing and the road was very slippery. Two miles before they got to the ranch, the driver of Villa’s carriage lost control of the horses and the vehicle flipped over and was smashed so badly that it was left behind. Villa was in such great pain that he failed to notice his close brush with death. Instead, he put two poison tablets in a gin bottle and swigged down the mixture. His staffers waited for him to die, but noticed later that he had not given the pills time to dissolve.
At the ranch house, the Villistas were cheered by the food they found—corn, sugar, rice, cheese, and coffee. On April 2, still moving in a southeasterly direction, the group passed the settlement of San Francisco de Borja. They continued on for another ten miles, bivouacking in an arroyo on the outskirts of the tiny village of Santa Ana. It was here, according to a detailed map prepared by the Punitive Expedition’s intelligence section, that the Villistas decided to split up.
Juan Pedrosa wrapped his wounded foot in a blanket, remounted his horse, and headed south. Nicolás Fernández and his men proceeded separately in the same direction. Villa and a small escort, meanwhile, were taken in extreme secrecy to a place called Ojitos, five miles to the southeast. To get there, Villa had to mount a horse and travel over extremely rugged terrain. His purpose, wrote the expedition’s intelligence officers,
was concealment for a period long enough to enable him to recover from his wound. He could not have accomplished this if he remained in contact with his forces, deserters were frequent enough even when in command, now that he was wounded they would occur with much greater frequency. His location, if surrounded by his troops, would undoubtedly have been known sooner or later. His decision, it appears, was to lose temporary contact with everyone, except the close relatives with him and to remain at a place known only to them.
Villa remained in Ojitos for only four days—not nearly long enough for his leg to heal, but ample time for General Pershing to reorganize and send more troops against him.