COLUMBUS, NEW MEXICO, 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.
AT THE COMMERCIAL HOTEL, the guests listened in awe to the banging shutters and the shrieking wind, which sounded like something sinister and alive trying to get in. The unceasing din made the Methodists, who were in town for a Sunday school convention, think of God’s wrath, but the natives may have been reminded of El Delgado, the skinny, dark-eyed witch who was said to live at the base of the Tres Hermanas. The guests waited for something—a blizzard or a downpour—to douse the violent clamor, but the air contained no hint of moisture at all, only dust, which came through the cracks in the door and the windows. It was the color of an ancient seabed, of bleached fossils returning to sand.
In the Southwest, where wood was scarce, many dwellings were built from adobe bricks made of mud, stones, and hay. But William and Laura Ritchie had been determined to build the Commercial Hotel from the proper materials. So they had torn down their grocery store and house in Porterville, Texas, and shipped the wooden planks to Columbus, on the train that was often filled with inebriated salesmen and became known as the Drunkard’s Special. They built a ramshackle two-story building with the recycled wood and when it was completed, they sold the entire structure to Sam Ravel, a local merchant, and rented back the second story for fifty dollars a month. Located just north of the train depot, the hotel consisted of twenty-two rooms, a guest parlor, and a long porch facing the street. William Ritchie, fifty-seven, had been ill in recent weeks and much of the work had fallen to Laura. She was of Dutch ancestry, a short, plump woman who enjoyed an occasional glass of beer and wore dark shapeless dresses and old-fashioned black shoes. In one of the few photographs of her, she resembles a boxer—legs planted far apart, head flung back, hands closed into fists. Yet the aggressive posture could not conceal the kindness that emanated from her open face. The Ritchies lived in the hotel, along with their three girls, Edna, Blanche, and Myrtle, and a canary, which twittered brightly in its cage, oblivious to the tumult outside.
After the hotel was completed, Laura had managed to furnish it with amenities that made it one of the most popular places in town. Curtains framed the windows, rugs covered the floors, and kerosene lamps filled the small cramped rooms with soft yellow light. Each room was furnished with a washbasin and pitcher, slop jar, bureau, and bed. A hand-cranked Victrola, a piano, and an organ stood in the parlor. On the porch were eighteen rocking chairs. If the guests were hungry, they had only to walk downstairs to a restaurant owned by Sam Ravel. Also located on the first floor was a warehouse owned by Ravel, where two hundred cases of oil and gasoline, twenty cases of axle grease, and rock salt, coffee, flour, and other foodstuffs were stored.
The Ritchies had many guests staying with them. The best room in the house, located at the top of the stairs and overlooking the street, had gone to Rachel and John Walton Walker, who had come to town for the Methodist convention. Both were Sunday school teachers from Playas, New Mexico, a tiny community sixty-three miles west of Columbus. The Walkers had been married for less than a month and the trip to Columbus was also their honeymoon. They had much to celebrate. John Walton Walker, thirty-nine, was on his way to becoming a prosperous rancher and contractor. A native of Louisiana, he had been lured to the harsh climate of southern New Mexico by the Homestead Act, which awarded settlers 160 acres of free land after they had built a home and farmed the property for five years. His wife, Rachel, was two decades younger, a pretty woman who liked to ride horses and hike in the mountains. John was a good man, she wrote, “steady and moderate, and at all times hard-working and frugal, at no time given to intemperance in drinking or excesses of any kind.” The inclement weather gave the Walkers an excuse to linger beneath the extra quilt that Mrs. Ritchie had provided them and at the end of the day, they hurried back to their narrow bed.
Laura Ritchie was delighted to have the honeymooners as guests. She, too, had been looking forward to the Methodist convention. Her daughter Edna was to play the piano and her youngest daughter, Blanche, was to sing during the evening festivities. Laura had made Blanche a new dress out of frothy pink material and bought her a pair of patent-leather slippers for the occasion.
Another guest staying at the hotel was Dr. Harry Hart, a thirty-three-year-old veterinarian who had come to Columbus to inspect a shipment of cattle. He normally stayed at the two-story Hoover Hotel, which advertised rooms for twenty-five cents, fifty cents, or a dollar—“and WORTH IT!”—but for some reason, he had decided to break routine and checked into the Commercial Hotel. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Hart was the son of a well-known ice cream manufacturer and had attended Ohio State University from 1904 to 1906. In addition to his veterinary duties, Hart was allegedly moonlighting as a “secret agent” for the State Department. He knew both Carranza and Villa personally and had stated publicly that he hoped Carranza would be the victor in Mexico’s civil war. Hart was a sober and serious-looking man, with thinning hair and unlined skin. His only concession to vanity was the beautiful diamond and ruby ring that he wore on his right hand, which he had received from a Mexican refugee in exchange for a hundred-dollar loan.
José Pereyra, twenty-five, who worked for the Mexican consul in El Paso, also was staying at the Commercial Hotel. Several days earlier, Pereyra and H. N. Gray, who worked for the Mexican consulate’s secret service, were returning from Mexico when the car in which they were riding turned over. Gray had dislocated his shoulder in the accident and been unable to go to Columbus, where he had been assigned to keep an eye on border activities, and Pereyra had volunteered to go instead. Clad in a gray suit, a white shirt, expensive shoes, and a new Stetson, which had his name punched in the hatband, Gray was hardly undercover.
A number of guests lived in the hotel year-round, including Steven Birchfield, a withered cattleman whom the three Ritchie girls loved dearly and referred to as “Uncle,” and Sam Ravel, who lived in room 13. Ravel had emigrated to the United States from Russia in 1905 to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. His first stop was El Paso, where he worked in a pawnshop with two of his uncles and learned to speak English. When he had enough money, he sent for his younger brother, Louis, and got him a job working as a clerk at the Don Bernardo Hotel in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Eventually he bought another ticket for Arthur, the youngest of the three Ravel brothers, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone in steerage class with his aunt and uncle’s silver taped to his legs. When the Mexican Revolution began, Sam Ravel moved to Columbus and opened up a general store that catered to the locals, as well as to the military troops south of the border. He advertised aggressively and kept the store open until ten o’clock at night. Since there was little to do in the evenings, the store was always filled with “kibbichers,” Arthur recalled.
Sam Ravel was pugnacious and hot tempered and had a stormy, little-understood relationship with the Villistas. In July of 1914, he had been held prisoner for four days by “a bunch of Villa’s men” in Palomas, the little settlement across the border from Columbus. The reasons for Ravel’s imprisonment are unknown but in one letter he notes that he had delivered $771.25 worth of “merchandise” to one of Villa’s colonels and had not been paid. He was released after he contacted the powerful New Mexico senator Albert Fall, but continued to complain bitterly of his detention.
The man who had ordered Sam Ravel’s arrest happened to be Captain Leoncio Figueroa, another permanent guest at the Commercial Hotel and a dashing figure whom the young Blanche Ritchie would remember as having a constant stream of visitors to his room. In a letter to the state attorney general, Ravel complained about Figueroa: “He still continues to threaten me, and talks to all the citizens in a very unpleasant way about me, as he seems to do anything he pleases.” Two years earlier, Figueroa and another Villa agent who lived at the hotel had sued the Columbus constable, T. A. Hulsey, for forcibly entering their rooms and examining their private papers without authority. The outcome of the lawsuit is unknown.
FROM A WINDOW of his drafty headquarters south of the railroad tracks, Colonel Herbert Slocum, commander of the Thirteenth Cavalry, could see the horse patrols crow-hopping down the dirt streets. The wind made the horses spookier than usual and the animals jumped sideways when huge tumbleweeds spun toward them. But they were cavalry horses, big boned and well fed, and each morning they were saddled up and spurred out into the thrashing air. The patrols clattered along the crumbling rocks that comprised the international boundary between the United States and Mexico.
Slocum had been a handsome man in his youth, but the long years of campaigning had left his skin deeply weathered. Back East, he had kept his mustache waxed and trimmed, but now it was an unwashed mass of gray bristles that smelled of cigar smoke and his own body. Just a month shy of his sixty-first birthday, Slocum was beginning to think about retirement and his return to the East Coast. He missed the changing seasons, the pleasure of all-day rain, the luxury and abandon of growing things. Thanks to the generosity of his extremely wealthy and powerful aunt, he had more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life. But he had been in the cavalry for forty years and wanted to remain in the service until he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four. Despite the remote postings, the physical hardships, the utter lack of cultural activities, Slocum knew that he would greatly miss the U.S. cavalry. “Chivalry, courtesy, hospitality and consideration were characteristics of that old army,” one aged general reminisced.
Slocum was a direct descendant of Myles Standish, one of the original members of Plymouth Colony, and a town bearing the name of Slocum exists today in Rhode Island. The Slocums were a prosperous, well-educated clan but their financial position radically changed in 1869 after Herbert’s schoolteacher aunt, Margaret Olivia Slocum, married Russell Sage, a secretive and ruthless Wall Street financier. When Sage died, he left Margaret Olivia his entire fortune, which was valued at approximately seventy-five million dollars.
Mrs. Russell Sage, as his aunt preferred to be called, believed strongly in helping others. She established the Russell Sage Foundation, which was dedicated to the “improvement of social and living conditions in the United States,” and founded Russell Sage College in upstate New York to train young women entering the field of social reform. Mrs. Sage distributed the rest of the fortune among family members, with eight million dollars going to her brother Joseph Jermain Slocum—Colonel Slocum’s father. Joseph Jermain, in turn, passed some of the money on to his son.
Like his aunt, Colonel Slocum was generous and gave away more than what he earned each month in army pay. Even then, he had enough left over to hire house servants and provide monthly disbursements to his two sons. Wealth gave Colonel Slocum a special status even among the well-connected cavalry officers, yet he remained humble about his great fortune. He was a considerate husband, a thoughtful father, and had a soldier’s belief in duty and honor, which he sought to instill in his children: “Be constant on the job; do more than you are expected to do, and do it well. Get to the office, on the job, early, and stay late; get there before the time required, so that you may always be known to be a man on hand. Do all that which is placed before you to do to the very limit of your ability. But in doing all of these things do them without antagonizing those with whom you are associated for fear that jealousies may be aroused, which are sometimes injurious.”
Slocum’s long, thoughtful letters were prompted perhaps by knowledge of his own youthful follies. He had entered West Point in 1872, where he proved to be a lackluster student, ranking near the bottom of his class in most subjects. He also received a large number of demerits each year, which were given for various infractions. In 1876, the year he was to graduate, he was found deficient and discharged from the academy. The discharge did not seem to have any serious consequences for his military career and that summer he was made a second lieutenant in the Twenty-fifth Infantry. A month later he transferred to the Seventh Cavalry, which had suffered many casualties at Little Bighorn but was still stationed on the frontier.
Slocum was at Fort Beaufort in the Dakotas when Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada after the Bighorn battle, decided to surrender. “His rag tail outfit were bunched together on the prairie in front of the C.O. quarters and came forward and laid down their guns. Of course they did not have any modern or very serviceable guns, naturally, these had been left behind (for cash) with their late friends in Canada but we took what they had and searched their travois and the Red River Carts, old and dilapidated.” As Slocum was putting away their guns, an Indian named Lone Wolf pulled his own weapon from the pile and gave it to him as a gift.
Slocum participated in the military campaigns against the Sioux, Nez Percé, Cheyenne, and Apache. He went on to fight in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippines before returning to the United States. He was promoted to colonel in 1913 and soon thereafter was appointed commander of the Thirteenth Cavalry.
Despite his less than stellar performance at West Point, Slocum had made many good friends at the military academy, and by 1916 some of those friends had risen to the highest ranks of the War Department. They included Hugh Scott, chief of staff, and Tasker Bliss, assistant chief of staff, both promoted to major generals the previous year, and Ernest Garlington, the inspector general of the army and a brigadier general. But to the farmers and shopkeepers in Columbus, Slocum often appeared high-handed and pompous and frequently referred to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in derogatory terms. He was not alone; a pernicious racism existed in the army and in the civilian community toward all minorities. In routine dispatches and even official reports, rank-and-file soldiers and officers alike regularly referred to Hispanics as “greasers,” “chile peppers,” “half breeds” and “spics.”
Sitting on Slocum’s desk was a pile of yellow telegrams, all of which claimed to have solid information on Villa’s whereabouts. Like other military commanders along the border, Slocum knew Villa personally. “The old scoundrel and I had become very good friends,” he once told a military officer in an affectionate, rueful tone. Slocum had been in Arizona when Villa had suffered the devastating defeat at Agua Prieta and afterward threatened to lay siege to Douglas. He had not followed through with the threat and Slocum judged an attack on the United States even less likely now, especially given the fact that Villa’s army had dwindled to perhaps a twentieth of its original size. Besides, he thought (unwittingly echoing the same sentiments that Pancho Villa himself had expressed), what glory was there in attacking such an insignificant outpost as Columbus?
DESPITE PANCHO VILLA’S efforts to keep his whereabouts secret, both U.S. and Mexican officials were tracking his movements with a good degree of accuracy. His motives, though, remained obscure and contradictory. The man responsible for much of the confusion was undoubtedly George Seese, an ambitious, thirty-three-year-old reporter for the Associated Press, who had been in touch with Villa’s agents since the time of the train massacre. Villa was purportedly anxious to prove himself innocent of that crime and Seese had offered to personally escort Villa to Washington so he could make his case. Villa had allegedly agreed—provided he could be promised safe-conduct—but Seese’s supervisor in New York had quashed the scheme on March 2. (It’s unlikely Villa ever actually intended to cross the border peacefully but he may have deliberately encouraged Seese in order to confuse both Carrancista and U.S. authorities).
The first to suggest Villa was planning something serious was Zach Cobb, the U.S. Customs official in El Paso, a sparrowlike man with hair that was parted in the middle and plastered to either side of his skull. A staunch Democrat, perennial political candidate, and lawyer by training, Cobb was from an old Georgia family whose members had served in both national and local politics for decades. His grandfather had lost his family plantation during General Sherman’s march to the sea and as a consequence, writes his biographer, Cobb was passionate about the need to protect private property. In 1901 he had moved to El Paso, and quickly ingratiated himself with the powerful men who ran the city. In the run-up to the 1912 presidential election, Cobb had stumped tirelessly for Woodrow Wilson and had been rewarded for his effort with the coveted job of customs collector. He got a second job working as an intelligence agent for the State Department through his friend George Carothers, the special agent assigned to Villa, who suggested that his reports be filtered through Cobb. He worked tirelessly to crush Pancho Villa and in the fall of 1915 had largely succeeded in blocking the exportation of coal needed for Villa’s troop trains, as well as the importation of Mexican beef, which Villa depended upon to raise cash for his army.
Cobb had good connections in El Paso and Juárez and in March of 1916 these sources paid off. He sent six telegrams to the State Department, his sense of urgency increasing as his information grew more accurate. On March 3, he sent his first telegram: “Villa left Pacheco Point, near Madera, on Wednesday, March 1 with 300 men headed toward Columbus New Mexico. He is reported west of Casas Grandes today. There is reason to believe that he intends to cross to the United States and hopes to proceed to Washington. Please consider this possibility and the necessity of instructions to us on the border.” The State Department forwarded the message the following day to Hugh Scott in the War Department. From there, it was relayed to General Frederick Funston in San Antonio, who commanded the Southern Department, which had jurisdiction over all the cavalry posts along the border. Funston, in turn, passed the information along to Colonel Slocum. During the ensuing days, Cobb sent five more messages to the State Department. At least three of those messages were forwarded to the War Department:
* March 6: “My March 3, 2 p.m. seems confirmed. Commanding General Gavira in Juárez announced to reporters this morning that Villa was proceeding to the border and that he had asked the American military authorities to be on the lookout for him. My tip is that he is due tonight or tomorrow. I have instructed deputy at Columbus to rush any information.”
* March 7 (8:00 p.m.): “Deputy Columbus phones report that Villa with estimated four hundred men is on river southwest of Columbus, fifteen miles west and fifty odd miles south, where they stopped round up of cattle by employees of Palomas Land and Cattle Co., all of which employees except one are reported to have hastened to American side.”
* March 8 (12:00 noon): “Villa party captured and holds fourteen employees of Palomas Land and Cattle Company, thirteen Mexicans and one American named McKinney. Villa camped at point stated, and apparently unafraid. He is reported to have three hundred and fifty men and eight hundred saddled horses in good condition. His purpose is indefinite. He could take the part of Palomas, which has a Carranza garrison of about forty men all of who are prepared to cross to the American side if Villa appears. I suspect that Villa is in communication with agencies of himself and others on this side.”
In addition to Cobb’s warnings, General John Pershing, stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, had also received at least three reports of Villa’s whereabouts from Gabriel Gavira, the Carrancista general in Juárez. Six days before the raid, Gavira’s secret service agents had learned that Villa was not coming to the border to make a case in his own defense for the Santa Isabel train massacre but to “commit some act of violence” that would force the United States to intervene in Mexico. Gavira had passed the information along to Pershing, who, however, was singularly unimpressed. “The General replied that he had heard similar stories so many times before that he was inclined to take them all with a grain of salt. All of the army officers stationed at Columbus felt as did General Pershing. For years, we of the border patrol, had heard many rumors, which had never materialized,” wrote Major Frank Tompkins, who was stationed in Columbus at the time.
Pershing received a second report from General Gavira on March 6 stating that Villa had been seen one mile south of Palomas on the previous evening. He passed the information along to Funston in San Antonio, who once again relayed the information to Colonel Slocum in Columbus. And on March 7, Pershing received a third report indicating that “Villa, with 500 men southwest of Palomas, had raided the ranches of the Palomas Land and Cattle Company; that the Mexican consul stated that his information was that Villa was near Boca Grande, and that one of the stockholders of the company reported that his information was that Villa was about fifty miles southwest of Palomas going south.”
Other military officers stationed along the border were also picking up the disquieting reports. Colonel George Dodd, who was based in Douglas and was Slocum’s direct supervisor, had also sent a telegram to Funston reporting Villa’s appearance on the Palomas ranch and the capture of horses and the foreman. And finally, George Carothers, on March 8, had dashed off a telegram to State Department officials in Washington saying that Villa was supposed to be at a ranch about twenty-five miles south of the border, and headed west into Sonora.
The knowledge of Villa’s whereabouts was not confined to a handful of officials within the War Department or the State Department. Newspapers in El Paso and in Mexico were filled with front-page stories about Villa’s approach to the border and speculation about his motives. Some of these stories were picked up and carried in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune,New York Herald Tribune,New York Times, and Washington Post. Thus, virtually every member of Wilson’s cabinet and even the president himself could have read of Villa’s movements simply by opening their morning newspaper. The New York Tribune even reported that Villa was depending on his friendship with General Scott to secure favorable terms for political asylum and planned to confer with army officials near Columbus.
Colonel Slocum had the unenviable task of trying to make sense of the conflicting reports. Was Villa in Palomas? Or was he sixty-five miles away? Was he coming to the border on a peaceful mission or a violent one? Was he moving west into Sonora as George Carothers had reported? Or south as General Gavira had reported? Army scouts could have cleared up the mystery but Slocum was barred from sending troops across the border. Still, he did what he could to chase down the rumors, checking frequently with civilian authorities and questioning the “supposedly friendly” Mexicans in town.
On Tuesday, March 7, Slocum received strong confirmation of Villa’s whereabouts from two eyewitnesses: Juan Favela and Antonio Múñez, the two cowboys who had narrowly escaped being caught by Villa’s men on the Boca Grande River. When Nicolás Fernández’s troops surged up the hill after them, they had eluded the soldiers in a canyon. Juan had urged Antonio to remain behind and watch the soldiers through his field glasses in order to ascertain the direction in which they were headed. Meanwhile, he said, he would race ahead and warn the cavalry. At about eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, Favela had reached Gibson’s Line Ranch, fourteen miles southwest of Columbus. Exhausted and perspiring, he told a young lieutenant of the morning’s events. The lieutenant advised him to take the information on to Slocum. “I came on to Columbus and notified Colonel Slocum about 4 o’clock in the afternoon of that day,” said Favela.
Múñez—who hadn’t hung around for too much longer—also reached Columbus on Tuesday and went to Slocum to report what he had seen. Slocum hit upon the idea of sending Antonio back into Mexico to spy on Villa, persuading him with the promise of twenty dollars.
Slocum’s troops patrolled a strip of border sixty-five miles long. Most of their work was concentrated west of Columbus, the thinking being that it would be the most likely point of incursion since to the east there was almost no water, which was necessary for horses and men. At the Border Gate, three miles south of town, were 2 officers and 65 men of Troop G under the command of Captain Jens. E. Stedje. Another 165 men and 7 officers under the command of Major Elmer Lindsley were at Gibson’s Line Ranch. On the evening of March 7, Slocum also ordered an officer’s patrol from the Border Gate to go to Moody’s Ranch, which was located between these two outposts. These soldiers were to scout in both directions, meeting up with the other patrols. His troops thus deployed, Slocum was confident that his old friend Pancho Villa couldn’t slip through.