A PRESIDENT SAVED, ANOTHER FORTUNE POSTPONED
HIS MINING VENTURES were temporarily on hold, but Burnham wasn’t idle. Eliot Lord, a go-getter and sometime literary agent in New York, had heard Burnham tell some of his African hunting stories, and convinced him to write down a couple of them. Eliot placed two of these with Collier’s, a well-regarded magazine, and urged Burnham to compile his African hunting adventures into a book. Hammond was enthusiastic, promising to get Richard Harding Davis to edit it and Roosevelt to endorse it.
In small groups, Burnham was mesmerizing as a storyteller. Hammond once noted that Burnham had the rare ability to turn Theodore Roosevelt into a listener. Eliot Lord had noticed the same quality: “He has amazing power of visualization, of re-creating any scene in his life as he sits quietly in his chair,” he wrote in a book proposal. “More than this, he has a vividness and felicity of description which make any paraphrase weak and insipid.” Lord convinced Burnham to get “a talking machine” and narrate his adventures into it. He devoted several weeks to the project in the spring of 1908.
In August the railroad king Harriman invited him to Pelican Lodge, his camp on Oregon’s Klamath Lake. This camp featured servants, a spacious lodge, and an ice plant. The guests’ tents had wooden walls, velvet carpeting, electricity, bathrooms, and running hot and cold water. Hundreds of workers had spent the summer building a road between Pelican Bay and Crater Lake, thirty miles north, so Harriman and his guests could drive to the trout fishing there. Harriman had split the cost with the county.
Most of his fifty guests were millionaires and politicians such as Oregon’s governor. Burnham’s reputation preceded him, and a professional marksman challenged him to a match on the rifle range. Burnham was intrigued to hear that the man had hit forty-nine out of fifty targets, but then learned that he had done so at a distance of 100 yards instead of 200—“quite a difference,” he wrote to Blanche. “I am going to make 100 straight this evening so it can’t be beat.” Harriman asked Burnham to take his fourteen-year-old son Roland on the boy’s first bear hunt. A few days later a San Francisco paper ran a story headlined “Magnate Rejoices at Son’s Prowess, Railroad Wizard’s Younger Boy Proves Mighty Nimrod in Northern Woods.”
Dictating African stories and supervising teenaged nimrods were tolerable diversions but didn’t generate cash. As always, Burnham was chasing a potential bonanza: the Yaqui Valley.
He wasn’t the first gringo to see dollars there. After President Díaz cleared out most of the Yaquis and expropriated the land, in 1890 he sold about half a million acres to a Mexican American ally, Carlos Conant, along with the right to irrigate this immense tract from the Yaqui River. With U.S. and Mexican investors, Conant formed the Sonora and Sinaloa Irrigation Company. When the mountain snows melted, the Yaqui River was a wide torrent, but in summer it dwindled to a trickle. Conant built a diversion dam to catch the spring melt. He also dug a wide canal and began dredging lateral canals. All of this enraged the remaining Yaquis, whose ancestors had been farming the valley since before the Spanish arrived. The Yaquis destroyed the canal dredge and frightened off prospective settlers. By the early 1900s Conant had sold less than 2,000 acres. The company went bankrupt.
While Conant was trying to farm the valley and tame the Yaquis, Davis Richardson came to Sonora to start over after his herd was wiped out by a terrible winter in the Black Hills (the same sort of disaster that ended Theodore Roosevelt’s Dakota ranching days). Richardson found silver and grew wealthy. He brought his brothers south to help him expand into land development. When Conant went bankrupt, the Richardsons bought his concession and added to it. President Díaz gave them the rights to most of the Yaqui River’s water, infuriating the valley’s Yaquis and other small farmers. The Richardsons dug forty more miles of canals, attracted some settlers, and built a town, Esperanza (Hope), as the project’s headquarters. But the enormous scale of the undertaking drained their finances. They estimated that completing the canal system would cost another $325,000.
They needed investors. Burnham heard about the Richardsons while crisscrossing Mexico. In November 1908 Burnham went to New York with Davis Richardson to sell the agricultural project to Hammond and his circle of investors. After two weeks of negotiations and delays, the deal closed. It was even better than Burnham had hoped. Harriman had declined to join, but Hammond and Harry Payne Whitney each put up $500,000. Hammond estimated that building a bigger storage dam and enough canals and laterals to irrigate the valley would cost about $12 million. Burnham would get a salary of $500 per month as managing director and vice president, plus about 100,000 shares that he expected to be worth a dollar each within three years. A bonanza. Potentially.
The new Yaqui Land and Water Company immediately began a marketing campaign in the United States to attract settlers. Posters, newspaper ads, and slick brochures touted the valley’s deep rich soil, mild healthy climate, long growing season, and early harvests, four to six weeks ahead of California’s Imperial Valley. The ads boasted that the company had miles of irrigation canals, with water rights guaranteed. Access to markets was easy. And Yaqui Valley land was cheap—only $16 an acre if you bought today, soon going to $25—at least ten times less expensive than comparable farmland in California. “Your investment will be absolutely safe,” promised a sales brochure:
More than $900,000,000 of United States capital is invested in Mexico, and the greater part of this immense sum has been invested in lands, by some of the most conservative bankers and financiers of this country. They see the opportunity and are taking advantage of it. Mr. E. H. Harriman is spending seventy-five million dollars to build the West Coast Line of the Southern Pacific Railroad through to the City of Mexico. None of these bankers and financiers would have invested his money in Mexico if it were not safe. Mr. Harriman KNOWS and the bankers and financiers KNOW it is safe. If it is safe for them it is safe for you.
So get in on this opportunity while it lasts, urged the ads, because the Yaqui land rush is on.
To Hammond and Whitney this wasn’t mere hype. In addition to their heavy investment, they bought thousands of acres for their own pleasure and planned to start a winter colony of their friends. The hunting in the valley was superb, and so was the fishing in the nearby Gulf of California. Whitney, an avid horseman, intended to raise polo ponies and thoroughbred racehorses.
By the end of 1908 twenty-two new settlers had begun clearing and fencing land in the Yaqui Valley. They too sensed a bonanza. A year or so later more than fifty American families had bought land and started farming. In 1910 the new company had 700,000 acres. About half was reserved for agriculture, more than 200,000 acres for grazing, and 80,000 acres for timbering. The settlers were growing a wide array of crops: corn, hay, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, fruit (lemons, limes, melons, grapefruit, kumquats, tangerines). Some were raising cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry.
Burnham’s letters during these years are crowded with the tasks necessary to establish and run this grand scheme. The company published a crop calendar with recommendations for more than seventy crops. There was a thousand-acre experimental farm to test soils and crops, including half a dozen kinds of Burnham’s old adversary, the orange. The company also had to arrange for goods and services necessary to attract and keep settlers: a general store, farm machinery, a sawmill and lumber yard, warehouses for grain, an ice plant so fruit could be preserved for shipping, an electric plant, a clinic with a doctor. The company brought in well-drillers and bricklayers, agronomists and pomologists. All this convinced many settlers to send for their wives and children. When he had time, Burnham also put in sessions with the dictating machine for Lord.
Sometime in 1908, while rambling through a forest of giant cactus in the Yaqui backcountry, he noticed a semicircular igneous rock, about eight feet wide, half-buried like a large tombstone. It was incised with strange swirls, scrolls, and circles, some with curving tails. Burnham suspected the forms were ancient Mayan hieroglyphics. He named the rock the Esperanza Stone. In 1909 he invited Charles Frederick Holder, a naturalist, sportsman, and author from Pasadena, to visit Yaqui for some fishing and incidentally to examine the stone. It excited Holder, who wrote a story about it for Scientific American. He wanted to donate it to Pasadena’s Throop College of Technology (later renamed the California Institute of Technology), but the valley’s people objected, and the Mexican government took possession of the stone.
In the autumn of 1909 Burnham took a break from his duties in the Yaqui Valley when Hammond asked him for a favor. Hammond was accompanying his friend, President William Howard Taft, on a railroad tour of the Midwest and Southwest. Taft had arranged a meeting on October 16 in El Paso/Juarez with Mexico’s President Díaz, the first such meeting between presidents of the two countries. The leaders also would ride in a parade. For El Paso and Juarez, the meeting was a great occasion, but for those in charge of presidential security, it was a nightmare. The border was volatile with malcontents and revolutionaries, and the security experts on both sides worried about assassins. By the day of the meeting, Mexico and the United States each had assigned about 2,000 men to guard the border and the parade route.
Nevertheless, Hammond was nervous. If either president was assassinated, it might spark a war. Hammond wanted to preserve his friends, Taft and Díaz, and perhaps also his Mexican investments. At his own expense, he asked Burnham to join the presidential train from California to Texas, and to assemble a special detail to bolster the presidents’ protection in El Paso. “The President has had more kinds of guards on this journey than he ever saw in the same length of time before,” wrote a reporter who was traveling with Taft for the New York World. He continued:
There have been Secret Service men, militia, regulars, cowboys, police, and rangers, and Chief Wilkie [head of the Secret Service] is to meet him at El Paso, but with Major Frederick Russell Burnham along, the necessity for Chief Wilkie’s presence is not apparent. The Major is so well known along the border that it is said the fact that he is seen in the crowd will ensure the departure of all trouble makers. There is a superstition down here that he has eyes in the back of his head, and that he can produce a gun from the air, if necessary. . . . He is the most modest and the quietest blue eyed 5 foot 4 inch man yet encountered on the Presidential tour, though he has the record here and in South Africa of having killed at least twenty men, either in self-defense or in the line of duty as an officer.
Burnham gathered a band of scouts, cowboys, former sheriffs, and customs officers, who were sworn in as deputies. Small groups were assigned to each section of the parade route and instructed to watch the crowd, not the presidents. Any lone person who looked or acted peculiar would be approached by two deputies. According to Hammond, more than 100 weapons were temporarily confiscated in this way, though the owners were probably just Texans rather than assassins.
Burnham noticed a man loitering near the entrance of a hotel just as Taft and Díaz were arriving. The man appeared to be writing in a notebook but looked furtive. Burnham signaled a Texas Ranger named Charles Moore, and they closed on him. Moore hooked his arm through the man’s as Burnham grabbed his wrist. Taft and Díaz were a few feet away. Concealed in the man’s right hand they found a small “pencil gun,” sometimes called a “palm pistol.” Its stub barrel and cropped stock made it a perfect assassin’s weapon. The man claimed to be a reporter, clearly the pretext of a scoundrel. He was jailed until Taft and Díaz left town.
Burnham touches on the incident in Taking Chances. With typical modesty he says, “I disclaim any important part” and gives credit to the sheriff of El Paso. He doesn’t even mention his role in nabbing the man with the palm pistol, which may have foiled a presidential assassination.
In March he was back in New York hoping to convince the Yaqui investors to put in another million dollars. He got sucked into the required social whirl, calling on the Harrimans, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts. “I am trotting round in a plug hat too small for me and a tail coat whose sleeves hang over my knuckles, and the tail hits just back of my calves,” he wrote to Blanche. He drew a cartoon of himself to illustrate.
Hammond raised another infusion of cash, including some of his own, to keep the project going. He was confident in it and in Burnham. Burnham shared his optimism. He traded about a third of his common shares in the company for 300 acres of the project’s best land, figuring that in a few years it would be worth $100 an acre no matter what happened to the stock price. He got a financial boost when legal papers from London informed him that the Belingwe Development Syndicate, a small subsidiary from Rhodesian days owned by him, Pete Ingram, and John Blick, was being forced into liquidation. His 1,050 shares were worth a bit more than a pound each, a jackpot of about $6,000.
He kept shuttling between Mexico and California, sometimes with Blanche. In August they traveled to Cheyenne, South Dakota, to meet Roosevelt and see a “genuine wild west show”—one of the last, suspected Burnham, since “the race of the cowboy is fast passing away.”
Throughout 1910 small brushfires of unrest had been flaring throughout Mexico. Burnham’s letters began mentioning revolutionaries. In June President Díaz arrested Francisco Madero for daring to announce his candidacy for president. But events were moving beyond Díaz’s control. As order broke down, belligerents and cutthroats took advantage. In July one of the Yaqui settlers came home to find his wife and two children murdered. In October, Madero escaped to Texas, and in November, he called for revolt. By the spring of 1911, revolution had spread across Mexico under Madero and others such as Pascual Orozco, Emiliano Zapata, and Francisco “Pancho” Villa. By the end of May Díaz had resigned and gone into exile, but Mexico remained turbulent.
The revolution spurred the Yaqui Indians to take back their ancestral lands. They rampaged through the valley, burning crops and running off livestock. Burnham directed defenses and tried to control the settlers’ panic. On May 22, 1911, he sent a telegram to Hammond: “Things now much brighter. Found settlers very uneasy. They have heavy losses.” At a meeting in mid-July the Yaqui settlers passed a resolution thanking him for his efforts to protect them “during the recent troubles.” The troubles, however, were just beginning.
The revolution in Mexico loosed everything that had been repressed during the Díaz years, from reformers to brigands. Nasty political rivalries erupted between leaders of the landed gentry and the campesinos, and among factions within each group. President Madero couldn’t control his own sometime allies such as Villa and Zapata, much less the countryside, which was claimed by rival bands of politicians, thieves, and Indians. The Mexican Revolution shattered into many revolutions, barely distinguishable from chaos. Madero was favorable toward the Yaqui project and similar developments, but American-owned enterprises were often targeted by angry Mexicans. In November a superintendent in the Yaqui Valley was murdered. Burnham tracked the criminals with a bloodhound, unsuccessfully.
By mid-December he was in New York. The project was nearly broke again, and this time Hammond didn’t have the liquidity and influence to fix it. Mexico no longer looked like a secure investment. In anticipation of more trouble there, Burnham bought two more bloodhounds and a machine gun that shot 400 rounds per minute. He and Hammond had dinner with President Taft, but to Burnham’s frustration didn’t discuss Mexico. He wrote to Blanche that Taft was “blowing soap bubbles of peace and arbitration” while Americans and American property were under fire. In late December bandits murdered another settler in the Yaqui Valley. Northern Mexico seemed to be spinning out of control. Some American politicians and businessmen were pressuring Taft to send in troops to protect American interests, and incidentally to take control of the country.
On March 2, 1912, Taft responded to these pressures by issuing a proclamation that warned Americans to stay out of Mexico and advised those already there to leave. He declared the absolute neutrality of the United States and said he had no intention of intervening in Mexico’s internal affairs, though he expected the Mexican government to protect U.S. citizens. Any U.S. citizens who did try to interfere in Mexican affairs would be prosecuted. Later that month he also forbade the sale or export of arms to Mexico.
Burnham was disgusted, not only with Taft but with a Yaqui Land and Water Company officer named H. A. Sibbet, the project’s manager. Sibbet had told the settlers that the women and children should leave at the first hint of more danger, and that if the situation grew deadly, the men should abandon the project and save their lives. Burnham accused Sibbet of panicking. Better to fight, he wrote to Sibbet, like the settlers before the First Matabele War; better to stick with it, like his ancestors in Minnesota and Kentucky. “Let us carry this thing through come what will,” he wrote. “Tis worth it and will outlast all of us.” This was bedrock principle for him, he wrote. Nevertheless, he pledged to support Sibbet and work with him on the company’s evacuation plan.
Burnham evidently also unloaded his bellicose views onto Hammond, because on March 21 Hammond sent a long stern reply. He said Taft’s proclamation had stated the situation exactly. The only valid reason for the U.S. government to step in would be to save American lives, not American property. Intervening simply to decide matters for Mexico would be very bad policy for future relations between the countries. The same restraint was required by their company.
“I need hardly enjoin on you the necessity of our Company being absolutely neutral in Mexican political affairs,” wrote Hammond, “and to commit no act which by any stretch of imagination could be regarded as aiding or abetting either the government in power or the revolutionists. What arms our settlers have must be used entirely for their own protection, and, of course, must not be sold or loaned to belligerents.”
He agreed that the men probably could defend themselves and should take all measures to do so, but insisted that the decision to stay or go must be entirely theirs: “it would be almost criminal to give the settlers false hope as to their security in case trouble should arise. We on our part are in no position to guarantee them protection. . . . In any event, it is far more important to save their lives than to save their or our property. The charge of cowardice should not deter them from seeking safety when they have no occasion to fight for any principle and where there might be danger of assassination by bandits. . . . it would be selfish cowardice on my part,” ended the letter, “to ask other people to defend property in which I am interested when I myself am at a safe distance.”
The letter was politic, large-minded, and wise, with a perspective beyond the personal. It illustrated why Burnham placed Hammond just below his pantheon of Rhodes, Roosevelt, and Lord Roberts. But Burnham’s character and values had been formed by fighting on frontiers, and he disagreed with most of Hammond’s points. Pioneers must fight for their land, to the death if necessary, and anyone who fled was cowardly.
The two men did agree on one thing: the settlers needed protection, and they didn’t have enough weapons. In mid-April Burnham went to Washington, D.C., to ask the Secretary of State to make an exception to Taft’s recent policy about guns. He wanted permission to buy 100 rifles and 20,000 rounds of ammunition from the government, strictly for use by the 200 settlers still in the Yaqui Valley. Bandits and Indians were regularly attacking and killing people. Taft immediately granted the exception.
As Burnham was making this deal, Blanche wrote to him that things were worsening in Mexico and she hoped he wasn’t going back. A week later he was in the Sonoran port of Guaymas, en route to the project. The railroad had been cut again. The company was set to evacuate the women and children, about fifty in total. The men were going to try to harvest the crops. In a feeble attempt to protect the settlers, the toothless Mexican government had sent 400 “convicts,” in Burnham’s description, to guard the valley. “The bandits and the savages are now running everything.”
When he reached the project, he found chaos. Some women were resisting the imminent evacuation, but Sibbet was forcing them to go. A few men were leaving with their wives. “A clear case of too much skirts,” wrote Burnham to John Hays Hammond’s son Harris, calling one of the men “a good plucked one.”
He found another problem: on April 22 a Los Angeles newspaper had claimed that he and 500 hardened fighters were camped on the Yaqui River and had smuggled an arsenal of weapons across the border, including several Gatling guns. Their purpose, said the story, was to guard the mining properties of the Guggenheims, Hammond, and J. P. Morgan.
The story was an ill-informed hash. The 400 “convicts” sent by the Mexican government had become 500 mercenaries hired by Burnham. The legitimate shipment of rifles en route from the U.S. government had turned into a smuggled arsenal including Gatling guns. Burnham had no association with Morgan, and the Guggenheims were not invested in the Yaqui project.
The story infuriated him but alarmed Sibbet and Richardson. They told him that his presence was endangering the project and insisted that he resign as director before the Mexican authorities invaded to capture him. They also informed him that he would be escorted to the border. Burnham signed the resignation, bitterly. But the settlers wanted him to stay, and he warned Sibbet (“that colossus”) not to try to eject him.
The harvest proceeded. Burnham predicted it would be the colony’s last until the chaos in Mexico ebbed. Abandoned farmhouses now dotted the valley. Two weeks later the bandits and Yaqui marauders had moved off, so he prepared to exit. At age fifty-one, it looked like ruin again.
“I wish I could get some of my salary—about $10,000 due me now, and nothing in sight but trouble,” he wrote to Blanche the day before leaving for Pasadena. “Still we are not so bad off as some of our settlers and should be thankful that we have any cash at all. Love dear I will soon be holding you to my heart and all else is then forgotten and fades to mere nothingness.”
The violence in Mexico continued throughout 1912. Properties owned by foreigners were often targeted. In the Yaqui Valley, crops and buildings were burned, cattle stolen. Most settlers didn’t return. In January 1913 Hammond conceived an audacious plan and asked Burnham to join him as guide and interpreter. He wanted to get permission from Mexico’s President Francisco Madero to ride into the Bacatete Mountains, stronghold of the rebel Yaquis, to negotiate directly with the warriors who were terrorizing the valley. He intended to give every family who left the mountains a free plot of land and the water to irrigate it.
Burnham immediately saw the similarity to Rhodes riding into the Matopos to meet the Ndebeles, an act Burnham considered one of the bravest in history. He agreed to go. Like Hammond, he admired the Yaquis in many ways, and understood their fury after decades of extermination and broken promises by the Mexican government. “I think it reflects wonderful forbearance, on the part of the Yaqui Tribe,” he wrote to Hammond about the proposed journey, “that they have not fallen upon our settlement and destroyed it to a man.”
President Madero seemed intrigued by Hammond’s courageous offer, but the following month Madero was overthrown in a coup by Victoriano Huerta, who rejected the proposal.
In spring of 1914 the London bank owned by Arthur Grenfell, the British partner in the Yaqui project, collapsed due to Grenfell’s reckless speculation in railroad stocks. His crash left the Yaqui project cash-poor and unable to pay salaries. Instead, Hammond gave Burnham another 500 acres in the valley and more shares. These could make them rich someday, Burnham wrote to Blanche from New York, “but will not help immediate cash a single dollar.” But he told her not to worry, their bills weren’t crushing, and he was working on new schemes, including buying another ranch, 500 acres on the San Joaquin River in Madera County, California. “I will pull it all out OK bye and bye,” he wrote. The date was May 11, 1914. “Do you realize I am 180 years old today,” he wrote. (He was fifty-three.) “But never mind, dear, I love you still with all the fire and passion of youth.”
Not long after his election in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson made clear that he sympathized with the Mexicans fighting to overthrow their exploiters, including American companies with large Mexican concessions. If these companies suffered losses, said Wilson, so be it; he would not intervene. American citizens in Mexico should protect themselves by leaving the country.
He stuck to this policy for several years. Then in May and June of 1915, Yaqui Indians from the Bacatete Mountains raided the valley, burning and killing. The Mexican government couldn’t control the Indians, and anyway was reluctant to risk Mexican lives to defend the remaining foreign settlers. Many Mexican soldiers resented the foreigners and pillaged them. The settlers appealed to the U.S. government for help. Wilson, fearing a massacre of American citizens, sent warships with Marines into the Gulf of California, and the U.S. Department of State informed the Mexican government that unless it protected U.S. citizens in the Yaqui Valley, the Marines would land and do so.
The countries seemed poised for war, a development urged by some U.S. businessmen and politicians who wanted to make Mexico a protectorate similar to Cuba after the Spanish–American War. The Mexican authorities insisted that the settlers leave the valley, for their own safety and to remove the goad to Yaqui violence. They warned U.S. officials that landing soldiers in Mexico would be considered an act of war. The remaining settlers had now been advised to leave by two governments. For Wilson, war was too steep a price to save a handful of stubborn colonists and the investment of some U.S. capitalists. He told the warships to stand down.
That averted the political crisis momentarily but infuriated the settlers and their supporters such as Burnham, who always took the martial view. Where Wilson saw obstinate squatters, Burnham saw stalwart pioneers. Where Wilson saw the need for political caution to preserve long-term relations with Mexico, Burnham saw the need for immediate action to uphold bedrock American principles. In letters he called the President “Woodenhead Wilson” or “that d–n capon Wilson.”
In a rant to his old prospecting friend William Kettner, now a congressman from California, he complained bitterly about “the small band of yappers . . . blowing trumpets and waving paper doves” while Americans were being murdered in Mexico. Kettner, in his affectionate reply to “My dear old Scout,” agreed with his friend, but added that people were frightened by the idea of war, perhaps because so many were then dying in Europe in the new World War. Among the thousands of letters sent to him about war with Mexico, he wrote, not a single one had supported the idea until Burnham’s, and the majority must rule.
Burnham found that hard to accept. He saw American courage and readiness to act being eroded by fear and timidity, not just in Mexico but worldwide. He blamed “the wretched, piffling, cowardly Wilson and the little milksop, weak-kneed cabinet officers,” and “the millions of mollycoddles” who supported them. He was ashamed that Wilson was preventing the country from joining Britain in the World War against the aggressions of Germany, especially after that country defied Wilson’s warnings in May 1915, when a U-boat torpedoed the passenger ship RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians, including 108 Americans. While pacifists waved paper doves, the world was being hijacked by villains willing to die for their country and their beliefs. Burnham wrote to his brother Howard that he had been reading Nietzsche on the doom of democracies, which in his dark moments he feared might be true. “At times,” he continued, “I feel that the political rock on which I was raised, of intense loyalty and patriotism, is crumbling under my feet.”
Meanwhile, the Yaqui Valley project was essentially suspended. On March 7, 1916, Burnham wrote to ask William Richardson what was being done to protect the few settlers still there. “Bear in mind always,” he said, “that I am ready to go any hour, anywhere.” That same day, he wrote to Hammond that the pillagers in Sonora now included the government, which had just announced new strictures and heavy taxes on foreign landowners, with the obvious goal of repossession. Burnham wrote that he had been in contact with representatives from other American landowners in Sonora, who “are now lined up and ready to make any action possible to save this total confiscation and destruction of their properties in Mexico.” He implied that a word from Hammond would light the fuse. It didn’t come. Though Hammond stood to lose a fortune, he understood that sending a few armed men into Mexico to provoke an international incident was less a defense of noble values than a foolish suicide mission and a diplomatic disaster.
The provocation came from the Mexican side. On March 9 the rebel army of Pancho Villa, who was fighting against President Venustiano Carranza, raided Columbus, New Mexico. Four days later President Wilson ordered Major-General John J. Pershing and a force of 4,800 men, including some Apache scouts, into Mexico to capture Villa. They chased him for eleven months, with small success, before Wilson recalled them in the lead-up to the country’s entry into World War I.
The Yaqui Valley project was again suspended by violence. So was Burnham’s income. It looked like another fortune might get snatched away. In the meantime, he needed to scramble again.