fifty-seven
pancho against pancho
On November 23, a day after the fighting started in Chihuahua, Pancho Murguía, who led the slowest support column in history, wrote a note to President Carranza who, in turn, consulted with Álvaro Obregón. Murguía concluded that, based on reports from soldiers and civilians, he could assure him that “the complete failure of Arrieta and Maycotte stemmed entirely from the absolute lack of military tactics and organization.” Insinuating cowardice on the part of both generals, he noted that they left behind 800 weapons with ammunition. “These people are not familiar with the most basic notion of discipline.” He blamed the commander of the Camargo garrison, Mariano López Ortiz, who deployed neither lookouts nor advanced positions. “The commercial spirit has awoken in our generals, and they are dedicating themselves to personal matters,” while others are dedicated to writing their “glorious biographies.” The other Pancho was burning everything in his path. “There are commanders who do not know anything about their troops or what they lack.” Carranza told Obregón to open proceedings against Maycotte, Arrieta, and López Ortiz for their responsibilities in the defeat, Obregón informing Murguía of this on November 24.
However, when he wrote this note, Murguía did not know that the disaster was going to be even bigger, and that Villa had already captured Chihuahua. He (Murguía) was Carrancismo’s final card to play to prevent Villa from controlling the entire state and, from there, restarting a national campaign. José C. Valadés wondered, “Who was that man, short with a wide strong back and curly hair, always dressed in a khaki guayabera with a white scarf tied around his neck, a good rider perched on a white horse with chestnut spots, always carrying his .45 in hand, and ready to leap at the enemy with his assistants close behind?”
Francisco Villa replied, “He was the only bull that I liked because the others they threw at me were just oxen.”
Pancho Murguía—born in 1873 in Zacatecas, exiled as a child because of his father’s political activities and trained as a photographer—was a Maderista from the beginning. He was trained in the Division of the Northeast and served as Obregón’s chief collaborator in defeating Villa in 1915. He was slightly older than forty when he began his latest campaign; his gaze hung between sadness and ferocity, a twisted mustache with the tips pointed up, short, dark, and gutsy; he wore wide trousers tucked into his boots like all cavalry men. He was a butcher who frequently ordered prisoners, suspects, and onlookers to be hanged, earning him the nickname of Francisco Mecate or Pancho Reata, two Spanish words for reigns and rope.
Murguía had 16,000 men under his command and was provisioned with five million cartridges and $2 million pesos. He was not subject to orders from superior officers in terms of his movements and he could appoint or remove civil authorities. On November 30, he met Jacinto Treviño in Bachimba along with the fugitives from Chihuahua—some 1,000 infantry and cavalry men. Osuna had pulled into Juárez with another 2,000.
Obregón doubted whether Murguía’s forces would be sufficient to defeat Villa and another setback would be terrible. Conversing with Carranza by telegraph in Querétaro, Obregón informed him that he had assigned 1,500 of Diéguez’s men in Jalisco to reinforce Murguía. Villa had captured twenty cannons and he had three trains. Wouldn’t it be better for Murguía to remain in Jiménez and, although he didn’t say it, to give up the capital temporarily? Carranza thought that Murguía ought to advance on Chihuahua with Treviño’s men.
Villa believed that it would be difficult to confront Murguía’s troops with the forces he had gathered with great difficulty; he didn’t want to jeopardize them and was thinking about saving the trains, provisions, cartridges, and arms he had obtained from the sacking of Chihuahua for a long campaign. Thus, he sent a column of no more than 1,500 men under the command of José Inés Salazar—who had missed much of the fighting and was therefore fresh—accompanied by a telegraph operator and a field apparatus that could string wire across any terrain in order to stay in contact using coded messages. Two days later, Villa received a message in which Salazar reported fighting and defeating the enemy at Horcasitas station. Villa didn’t believe it. That night, Martín López appeared with his guard and discovered the truth.
Murguía’s vanguard arrived at the Horcasitas station around eight o’clock in the morning on December 1. Cavalry forces began accumulating there, little by little, as the advance train moved up the tracks a few kilometers farther.
It was bitterly cold, and the soldiers began lighting campfires and preparing to get some rest; Murguía was reorganizing the column when the advance train started moving backwards and they heard the first horn blasts sounding “Enemy ahead!”
Simultaneously, both bands gave the order to charge. Salazar advanced quickly at the head of a line of riders who appeared approximately thirty meters from Murguía’s cavalry. Valadés recounted,
Men and horses crashed into horses and men. The riders fell head over heels on the ground, some dead, some wounded, others were dragged away at a gallop. Sometimes, they would back up a distance in order to charge again with greater force. Commanders and officers unloaded their pistols against Villistas and Carrancistas, almost at point-blank range. On other occasions, the Villistas’ charges were so powerful that they pushed right through the Carrancistas, spinning their horses on their hind-quarters, and then lunging from behind their enemies’ backs.
Salazar, dressed as a cowboy and mounted on a black horse, was beating Murguía’s cavalry when infantry units arriving on new trains began to join the fighting. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The Villistas couldn’t handle the additional kinds of forces, however, they gave Villa time to strip Chihuahua of everything he could use. Having completed that job, Salazar withdrew. A little more than 200 of his men lay dead on the battlefield; there were no wounded as Murguía’s division finished them off.
The Carrancista press presented the fighting at Horcasitas—a minor confrontation, a delaying action more than a real battle—as a great victory for Murguía, and several historians and chroniclers (Rafael Muñoz, Valadés, Sánchez Lamego) converted it into the first encounter between Murguía and Villa as if the absent Pancho Villa had been there.
Villa sent Martín López with a message saying that Salazar’s troops should not return to Chihuahua but instead turn to the west, and head for Santa Isabel as they were beginning the evacuation of the city in earnest that night. The first to leave were aboard trains under the command of Porfirio Ornelas, which headed northeast towards Santa Isabel, loaded with munitions, arms, and provisions from one last requisition of the city’s shops. Next, the infantry set out for Satevó. Villa and his guard waited behind to watch Murguía enter Chihuahua from a hill on the outskirts of Zarco avenue. They were either very angry or simply amused, who knows. Villa shouted to no one, “Cleaned out and miserable, I’ll trade you Chihuahua for Torreón.”
On December 4, 1916, Murguía arrived in Chihuahua and received command of the region from Jacinto Treviño, who had been wounded in the previous fighting and asked for permission to leave for Mexico City to recover. Some wondered if he was so sick of Chihuahua that he couldn’t heal there.
Pershing, in Dublán, wrote, “I feel the embarrassment of sitting here while Villa circles only a few miles to the south of our position.” Five days later, he said to Gen. Funston, “A quick blow should be delivered immediately to this hypocrite [. . .]. Our own prestige in Mexico must be taken into account. In light of Villa’s operations over the last two weeks, continuing inactivity on the part of this command does not appear desirable.” President Wilson rejected the request, he’d already had enough of the intervention in Mexico. Villa was now a problem for the Carrancistas. Years later, Barker commented, “From that moment on, all we did was stay in our seats [. . .]. From that moment on, the Punitive Expedition was a disgrace.”
Murguía instituted martial law in Chihuahua and demanded that the inhabitants “not collaborate with the bandit.” Officers in command of troops were constantly asking to be retired from the army amidst a “state of demoralization and complete disorganization.” In a report to Obregón, Murguía stated that Chihuahua fell because fifty “bandits” occupied Santa Rosa Hill and that Gen. Treviño did not counterattack, but instead abandoned the plaza, “leaving many of his people in danger.” Murguía ordered his infantry to remain at the Chihuahua train station while sending his cavalry to the city’s outskirts in anticipation of the arrival of a train carrying two million cartridges and $1 million pesos to pay the troops. The train arrived on December 5, but not without undergoing an ambush in Bachimba Canyon by a party of Villistas which was repelled by the guard of 500 Yaqui soldiers with machine guns mounted on the roofs.
Villa held a meeting with his generals in Santa Isabel and made a surprising proposal. He issued orders to gather in Satevó and left with a locomotive pulling only a caboose en route to the Chavarría hacienda. Andrés Rivera lived in a house near the ranch, and he had been commissioned to guard one of Villa’s deposits in a corral. A cellar had been dug under the corral and covered with a fifteen-centimeter layer of manure to hide the trapdoor. The train went about three kilometers past and then backed up in the opposite direction to arrive at the Rivera ranch. They pulled up the trapdoor using two handles and climbed down a ladder. The place was filled with wooden boxes marked Winchester containing .30-30 caliber and 7mm Mauser ammunition. It took Villa, and his six companions, six hours to load the munitions on the train. It was one of the many munitions dumps that had not been betrayed during the Punitive Expedition’s time.
And that was the only means of provisioning the troops. Villa also commissioned Braulio Páez, one of the Dorados, to organize a supply network. Braulio set himself up in Chihuahua and opened two bars, one of which was run by his father, and began purchasing bullets from Carrancista soldiers, even rifles, in exchange for liquor or money. Each month, he sent what he had collected to the Villista guerrillas. Páez became so confident that instead of stocking up bullet by bullet, he began buying cartridge belts and even whole boxes of munitions. Eventually, the same men who sold to him ended up denouncing him to Pancho Murguía because he didn’t give them enough alcohol in exchange. He was arrested and shot in March 1917. Villa also created a network in the South organized by Chon Lucero, Urbina’s brother-in-law, to buy bullets at retail in Parral using similar methods.
After the digging up the stash in Santa Isabel, Villa feigned a troop movement by sending trains towards Ciudad Guerrero; meanwhile, the fighters left on foot for Satevó. Villa, riding in a Ford, was one of the last to depart Santa Isabel. Along the way, the Dorados, who were following the column, pushed stragglers towards the appointed gathering, which took place on December 8. Falling for this faulty information, Murguía followed a clue which led him to the empty trains.
Rafael Muñoz wrote, “An audacious idea, the most audacious of so many that had been conceived of during all those years of struggle [. . .] a string of astonishing marches, dispersions and concentrations of forces all conducted with admirable precision [. . .]. He dispersed more than 6,000 men into small parties [. . .] some crumbled, some were lost. Is he in the mountains covered in snow during the ruthless winter? Is he in the desert? Is he headed for the West?”
Villa was aiming, in effect, to trade with Murguía Chihuahua for Torreón in a dizzyingly complex campaign. The 750 or 800 Villistas started off on their five-hundred-kilometer ride in a straight line which initially led them through Camargo without passing through any of the central railway stations where Murguía had positioned reserves and without coming close to any telegraph posts.
On December 9, they passed by El Conchito ranch, on December 10, Santa Gertrudis, and on December 11, they halted in a compact group without food or pasture.
Pancho’s column arrived in the proximity of Camargo during the night and could see the enemy’s campfires near the station. There was a terrible frost that Villa described as “one of the real dark ones.” So as to not give themselves away, they couldn’t light fires, but it was so cold by the middle of the night that they had no choice. At dawn, Baudelio Uribe attacked the station while the Dorados went on a mission to capture Rosalío Hernández, Villa’s compadre who had deserted in 1915. They went to his house, but Rosalío was not there; being well-taught in the school of Villismo, he lived there during the day, but left at night along with six of his family members to sleep in a different location.
A tremendous massacre ensued. The Carrancistas, many of them southern soldiers, were totally stunned from the cold. Villa seized military trains once again. By capturing Camargo they had cut Murguía’s supply lines. Meanwhile, the other Pancho, unaware of the whereabouts of his counterpart, was attempting to bring order to Chihuahua, complaining to Carranza that “Villa was feeding off the population’s discontent caused by the corruption of the Carrancista authorities and the robbery of civilians.” He reported that Treviño had looted Chihuahua and sold stolen food in Ciudad Juárez through an intermediary by the last name of Cuéllar.
Back at Camargo station, an event took place that cast a shadow over Villa and contributed, once again, to his black legend. It’s difficult to know exactly what happened, but it seems there was a group of captured Carrancista soldaderas in one of the trains (fourteen according to some sources, ninety or 200 according to other less reliable accounts) who, instead of being freed, were arrested because it was said that they had denounced Villista civilians when the city was retaken by the Federales. As Villa was passing by, a shot was fired from within the group, killing his assistant, Florentino Baray, who was at Villa’s side. Whether Villa ordered them to be shot, or whether Col. Ramón Tamargo (who Villa put in charge to investigate who had fired the shot) took the initiative, the fact is that the women were taken behind the station and executed. Mena Brito, always disposed to anti-Villista exaggeration, said that Villa “personally initiated the massacre of those unfortunate women and their children, many of whom were ripped from their mothers’ arms and smashed against the ground until their skulls cracked.” Rafael F. Muñoz wrote a macabre account that, along with Elías Torres’s reporting (“Orgy of Blood”), constructed the view that has gone down in history. Regardless of whether the events took place as they were narrated here, there’s no doubt that barbarity, which had always been close at hand, now began to close in on Villa. And without any moderating influences at his side, he either could not, or did not want to, dispel it.
On December 15, Pancho neared Parral. Baudelio Uribe, pretending to be drunk, entered the barracks, along with another Villista who was haranguing him, and shot Jacinto Hernández who had been a member of Urbina’s guard. Carrancista Col. Pedro Lazo was grabbed from his house in his underwear and shot. They took the city without any major problems. Villa called together Parral’s wealthy to impose a revolutionary tax on them. As they were reluctant to comply, Villa ordered the city’s well-to-do sons locked up in boxcars that were used to transport cattle.
Then, on December 18, using two trains and several flat cars left behind by the Arrietas, his troops disembarked for Bermejillo. Villa had trains again! Especially useful in a war of position based on mobility. Not even a year had passed since he dissolved the Division of the North. From Bermejillo they went on foot to Gómez Palacio where Luis Herrera’s Juárez brigade was stationed. Herrera was ordered to withdraw and concentrate his forces in Torreón. The Carrancistas weren’t waiting around.
One Villista recalled that on December 20, 1916, “around four o’clock in the afternoon [. . .] more than 1,000 sweaty riders, covered in mud, pallid, their teeth clenched, burst onto Lerdo’s highway. Their hats hung down their backs, kept in place by their chin straps” as their identifying sign. This was Lorenzo Ávalos’ brigade.
Villa had 2,500 men with him. In Torreón, Gen. Severiano Talamantes, Maycotte’s cavalry, the Juárez brigade, and Col. Juan Gualberto Amaya were all waiting for them with no fewer than 4,000 troops and several pieces of artillery. Taken by surprise, they were unable to make defensive preparations. They say that Villa declared, “Twenty-four hours is enough to take Torreón.”
Villa prepared the assault from Gómez Palacio. Several shells landed indiscriminately around them. Gen. Talamantes placed his infantry in a ring around the city while Gen. Maycotte tried to maneuver his cavalry to outflank the Villistas, but Ávalos blocked his way and then, after a vicious charge, forced him to return to the plaza.
The fighting started at five o’clock in the morning. Nicolás Fernández attacked to the right of the railway station and took the Calabazas and Polvorera hills on the first push. Baudelio Uribe advanced in the center, but met with stiff resistance from the Casa Colorada, leaving fifty of his men and his horse dead, among them was Juan Martínez, Villa’s brother-in-law, Martina’s husband. One thousand men led by Eligio Reyes advanced over some plains named El Pajonal, rapidly entering the city and approaching the Alameda town square.
Pancho was drawing on all the experience he had gained from having fought in Torreón twice. He avoided directly attacking the fortified zones, instead working to flank and isolate. On December 22, the Carrancistas counterattacked on Calabazas Hill. Seeing that the Carrancista infantry was advancing steadily and that the volleys from the hill’s defenders were having little impact on it, Villa took off at a full gallop along with Jaurrieta and four members of his guard, racing across a plain as artillery fire rained down on them. When they arrived at the hill, they prevented a stampede of fleeing Villistas. “We are going to take the hill just like they did, anyone who takes a step backwards dies.” The men snapped to attention. Villa left Nicolás Fernández in charge and went to go eat in Gómez Palacio. As he left, he remarked, “It’s going to get good tonight.” In Gómez, he gave the order to launch the all-out attack at dawn. Talamantes and Maycotte conferred as night fell.
“I know Villa well, tonight he’s going to throw everything he has at us and then retreat tomorrow,” said Maycotte.
Talamantes ignored him. Part of Maycotte’s cavalry began leaving the city, but Villa didn’t attack that night.
At eight o’clock in the morning, the assault began. Talamantes ordered the evacuation of the plaza and was among the last to leave. Two days later, grief-stricken, he committed suicide in the Enconada station on the way to Saltillo. At 10 a.m., José Inés Salazar sent a telegram to Villa telling him that Torreón had fallen. A poem titled “Romance Villista” goes, in part, “The enemy ran away/ as they always flee/ So long as they do so/ who cares who they be?”
More or less at the same time, Murguía’s Carrancistas took Ciudad Guerrero and seized three empty Villista trains.
Abandoned by his compañeros, Luis Herrera died fighting on the road to the Alameda during the final attack “in a state of total inebriation.” His soldiers retrieved his cadaver and carried it to a hotel, named the Francia or Iberia in various accounts. Whichever it was, Villista Gen. Eulogio Ortiz found the deceased Herrera there and ordered him strung up from a tree or a lamppost in front of the old railway station. Years later, Nellie Campobello heard an old wounded Villista say that “we hung a picture of Carranza in his zipper and a handful of Carrancista bills in his hand [. . .] the wretch had a terrified look on his face, like he’d seen the devil.” Vargas lamented, “Those details grate on your nerves.” The Villistas also found Gen. Carlos Martínez’s cadaver, but they didn’t mistreat it.
When the Carrancistas abandoned the city, they left behind a group of Yaqui soldiers in their foxholes in the hills to the south. Villa put together a strategy and, with a couple of his soldiers who were also Yaqui, convinced them to come down to the barracks where they disarmed them.
During the fighting in Torreón, the Villistas captured an obscure character, a rancher who worked with the social militias, Jesús Salas Barraza. Villa, or one of his men, shot him. But, as luck would have it, the bullet, as Rafael Muñoz told it, “hit Salas in the corner of his upper lip, grazing the membrane of the nose and piercing the flesh, and came out under the cerebellum without touching the spine.” The man fell to the ground bleeding and Villa left him there, believing he was dead. Salas lived to tell the tale many years later.
Baudelio Uribe didn’t kill prisoners; he was content with cutting off their ears. Yet, Baudelio was not a thug and confined himself to cutting off the ears of Carrancistas and former Villistas. The idea of slicing off ears came to him during a bullfight he saw in Torreón when the Division of the North withdrew after Aguascalientes in which Nacho Gómez was the matador. After a tremendous performance, Baudelio, a tall güero, over 1.80 meters in height, jumped into the ring from the stands, cut off the bull’s ears, and gave them to the young bullfighter. J.B. Vargas was repulsed after seeing him cut the ears of some 600 prisoners (which is why they called him Cropped Ear), but couldn’t fail to see a certain logic to it: earless Carrancistas would surely take care not to fall into the Villistas hands again knowing that their mark would designate them for the firing squad, and it was better than killing them.
The booty from Torreón was impressive. There was gold in the train station and seven hundred fifty bars of silver from the Santa Bárbara mining company, which had been under Herrera’s custody after he left Parral. There were also $400,000 silver pesos under the control of Gen. Carrasco in the other train. Finally, in Maycotte’s train, they found sacks of money designated for paying Murguía’s troops.
Villa convened a meeting of the city’s biggest merchants, industrialists, and ranchers, whom he told to hand over a loan of $2 million of pesos, although he only succeeded in obtaining one million. He also imposed a $100,000-peso tax on the Spanish, French, and Germans. Villa vanished for a day with Manuel Banda, Nicolás Fernández, and Aurelio Murga to bury $4 million silver pesos one kilometer from the Baca station just past Parral.
Although the attack on Torreón provided very important financial resources, it also allowed Villa to secure provision in large quantities, including horses and pasture and, for his men, clothing, boots, and blankets for the infernal winter. But Villa was going to have a problem. They burned a much larger amount of ammunition in the attack than they recovered from the enemy, so they were worse off than when they started. Likewise, the confrontation with the US was going to make it difficult to set up a cross border contraband network.
Before leaving Torreón, Pancho Villa, who his subordinates called the “Beast” or the “Old Man” behind his back, took the trouble, outlaw and all, to go before a notary to denounce a certain Pedro Meraz, who had been the manager of La Boquilla ranch and had taken advantage of Villa’s time as a guerrilla to confiscate some of his properties in Lerdo.
As news about the victory in Torreón spread through the Laguna region, hundreds of former Villistas—who had been part of the Division of the North—left their jobs to join up with their old boss. Padilla’s Madero brigade grew from 40 to 800 men. Even two former officers who had been amnestied, Manuel Madinabeytia and Julio Aviña, turned up. Villa accepted them back but did not immediately add them to the column.
Villa considered changing the axis of his campaign for a couple days, mulling over attacking Tampico, but decided to stick with what he knew and attack Murguía. He sent the wounded to Parral and, on December 26, headed north on his sixteen new trains.
The Villistas entered Jiménez with 5,800 men. One of the first measures Villa took was to detach Jaurrieta to deliver $15,000 to Sra. González, the widow of a Villista colonel, with instructions to dispose of one-third of the money to cover her necessities and to keep the remainder until further notice. Villa’s strange financial network was as surprising as it was complex, based on buried stashes, loans, depository widows, and saddlebags stuffed with bills, which he assembled and disassembled continuously and whose efficacy was based on his memory.
Villa charged a tax on the town’s wealthy, among them was Celsa Caballero, the seventy-year-old widow of Chávez, who was required to pay $15,000 pesos. When the widow refused, she was escorted by car to her house where the money was directly collected. Mena Brito, whose writing is not very reliable, accused Villa of ordering her to be taken once again to headquarters in the Charley Chi Hotel (which he called Chalet Chic) in front of the station, where she was two days later burned along with two Chinese prisoners inside the building. However, the dates that Brito offers do not correspond to Villa’s time in the city.
During a brief pause in Jiménez, Villa struck up a relationship with Austreberta, the daughter of Rentería, a tailor in town. She was sixteen years old and the sister of a Villista named Alejandro. Machuca recounts that “gossipy people made up that Villa had burned her father’s feet, that he walked like a scalded cat [. . .] but it wasn’t like that [. . .] the father had already been sick, and his feet were deformed.” Villa, after hiding her in Parral and visiting her during his brief visits to the city, returned her to her family to fulfill a promise made to an agonized Alejandro.
A message intercepted at the Jiménez station on January 2 shook Villa free from his financial and romantic concerns: Gen. Murguía was on his way. Baudelio proposed to Villa to give him 100 men to attack Murguía from behind and cut him off from Chihuahua. However, Villa believed that Murguía’s morale was extremely low, while his troops’ morale was very high after Torreón; thus, it was better to let loose with a brutal frontal cavalry charge.
Villa deployed his cavalry very close to Jiménez, in Santa Rosalía, to the north of the Reforma station on the first day of 1917. He placed generals José Inés Salazar, Nicolás Fernández, and Martín López in command and positioned the infantry along the train tracks.
At dawn on January 3, 1917, Villa deployed a firing line more than eight kilometers long around Jiménez. He reinforced his center with nearly 1,000 infantry under his direct orders, while there were nearly 2,000 men on each of his flanks. And the guerrilla left nearly 500 riders under Ávalos’s command as his rearguard.
Murguía was on the march with almost 8,000 men; his back was covered because Obregón had ordered that all forces in the North concentrate in Ciudad Juárez. He unloaded his troops in the middle of the night that same day, carefully advancing toward the Reforma station. He ordered the trains to turn back to avoid any temptation to flee. Soon after six o’clock in the morning, Villa’s advanced troops made contact with Murguía’s vanguard and, without engaging them, pulled back towards the Reforma station. Rafael Muñoz accurately captured the spirit that animated the battle, “No one was looking for an advantage on a steep hill or a trench, nor cannons that launched death from afar.”
José Inés Salazar, who was in charge of the first phase of the battle, advanced on Murguía’s right, which was soon at the point of breaking. The other Pancho was obliged to leave the center of the lines and join Carrancista Gen. González’s cavalry which had flanked Salazar’s first onslaught, forcing the Villista riders to fall back.
Villa, who had taken command of the Division, advanced brazenly to the center against Murguía’s infantry which had formed a semicircle, protected by machine guns placed on the roofs of the scout train. Villa and his men forced a part of the Carrancista infantry to fall back, withdrawing to the convoy’s wagons. However, 500 Yaquis of the 5th Battalion appeared on the left flank. The Indians, deployed along a firing line, advanced little by little, doing a great deal of damage to the Villistas who, feeling they were being flanked, began to withdraw despite Gen. Villa’s best attempts, furious, pistol in hand, to force them to remain on the line they had conquered. Finally, he opted to order his people to withdraw, setting up on the embankment of the train tracks while, at the same time, placing several machine guns there. The Villista fire was brutal, halting the Yaquis advance.
The feints and attacks continued. Murguía’s troops not only had a numerical advantage, they were also able to more easily move from one side to the other along the enormous front they had selected. Gen. Heliodoro Pérez appeared on Villa’s right with 500 riders. Villa set up a line of 500 riflemen and met them with a hail of bullets, forcing them to fall back. Soon after, another column of Carrancista infantry appeared.
Villa got his people and, continuing to fight, retreated in an organized manner to their first defensive lines. The veteran officers must have missed the discipline of the old Division of the North, but the new guerrilla commanders simply did not have it. They might have plenty of courage, but in a battle of this magnitude, with an over-extended front, their proclivity to engage in partial engagements was giving Murguía the chance to reinforce his lines over and over again, while the Villista troops were not acting in concert.
On the right, which had not yet engaged in the fighting, the Villista cavalry charged at Gen. Pedro Fabela’s troops, but Murguía sent Gen. González’s cavalry just in time to prevent the 1,500-strong Villista cavalry from mowing them down.
Just then, Gen. Francisco Murguía, who had seen the results from atop a nearby hill, ordered a general offensive all along the line. Pérez charged against Gen. Villa’s crude defenses on the rail line, forcing the Villistas to come out of their stronghold and begin a retreat. Murguía, for his part, dislodged the enemy from some low hills they occupied on his extreme right, winning the position for the Carrancistas by around one o’clock in the afternoon. Only a counterattack to cover the retreat avoided a debacle.
The casualties from the fighting at the Reforma station were never clear, but the final result was that Villa lost the momentum which had been carrying him towards total control of Chihuahua while the government regained the initiative.
Accompanied by José Inés Salazar, Villa headed back in the direction of Parral in a car, arriving at seven o’clock in the evening. Initially, he ordered Parral to be fortified, but then decided not to allow himself to be surrounded and weighed down in a prolonged struggle, even at the cost of losing the trains. Headquarters informed the inhabitants of Parral that fourteen trains of merchandise that had been confiscated in Torreón were now at their disposal. It took six hours for Parral’s poor to empty out the wagons while Villa watched with pleasure from his rail car. Then he gave the order to depart and to disperse his forces.
Murguía gave his troops a day to rest in Jiménez and then headed for Parral on foot because the Villistas had destroyed the tracks. When Murguía’s troops entered Parral, according to Nellie Campobello, “they took the wounded out of the hospital [those who had been so badly wounded in Torreón that Villa was forced to leave them behind] and [. . .] with the monks watching, they couldn’t kill them so they took them to the station, and put them in one of those wagons, like one used for horses, acting like a mob; some of them were very badly wounded [. . .]. The injured were dying of hunger and for lack of care, they hardly let them out at all or gave them water. Every night, a group of men came by with a little lantern to carry off a dead man.”
In Chihuahua, by order of Murguía, a second division was created under the command of Gen. Eduardo Hernández in a very precipitous manner. It comprised 8,000 men, many of them recruited from the social militias, including many former Villistas. Eugenio Coli explained, “We switched sides, we were Villistas, but the bosses told us to do it.” This column clashed with the Villistas on January 11, in La Joya and on January 12, at Cerro Las Mujeres, suffering a terrible defeat.
Murguía sent out expeditions in search of Villa and returned to Chihuahua. When his cavalry passed by Parral, they shouted, “We’re going to bring back Villa’s head!” A woman stepped out of her doorway and told one of the officers, “Hey you bastard, bring me a little bone from Villa’s wounded knee as a souvenir.”
From this point on, silence. Villa had been forced to fragment his army; he had no economic resources in the region to maintain such a large body of troops. For months at a time in the mountains, there was no sugar, or coffee, or salt. He sent men with horses to rural areas to fatten them up, spread out the wounded among trusted villages, and divided up the groups. He headed for the southern part of Chihuahua and tried to attack a small town in Durango, but Murguía anticipated his movements and chased him with a column of 3,000 men on horseback. Along the way, they traded strong words without ever coming face to face. Murguía said he would hang Villa from a tree in Chihuahua and Villa retorted that Murguía would end up at the end of his gun.
Pancho made his way through San Andrés, Bachíniva, and Guerrero. Manuel Madinabeytia reappeared in Santa Isabel. Villa assigned him to command a party that was going to be formed in Durango and gave him 10,000 cartridges. He was not well thought of, being considered a deserter. In fact, he had been a deserter, and not only that, he had fought on the other side. Villa once again reduced the number of his already dispersed troops and assigned Nicolás Fernández to command the largest group while he set out in mid-February to recruit isolated bands operating on the edges of Zacatecas and Durango. Later, he circled back to the area around Las Nieves.
Returning to the life of a guerrilla must have weighed on Villa after having taken Chihuahua and Torreón. If he had defeated Murguía at the Reforma station, he would have controlled all of Chihuahua and Durango, creating a huge territorial base. It hurt him to be unable to repeat in 1917 what he had done in 1913.
During the last days of January and the month of February, Carrancista headquarters lost sight of Villa. Murguía’s flying columns were evaded by the Villista bands which were permanently on the move. Murguía wanted to believe that Villismo had been destroyed and that Villa had no more than a handful of men who still followed him.
These were the months in which the new constitution was being debated in Querétaro, highlighting a confrontation between the moderate Carranza and his Jacobins. The capture of Torreón produced a shock among the constituents and undoubtedly helped the radicals in matters pertaining to agrarian and labor rights. Valadés remarked, “That was the only way to place Villa on the rightwing, the only way to designate the enemy, arrogant, and increasingly powerful, as the arm of reaction. He was dragged into it, but he didn’t care. What was taking place in Querétaro was Carrancistas debating Carrancistas.”
In January 1917, the Punitive Expedition received orders to depart Mexico and the last solder crossed the border on February 5, between Palomas and Columbus, while military bands played “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” In terms of US soldiers, 10,690 men and 9,307 horses returned, along with 2,030 Mexicans who had collaborated with them during the campaign, including 533 cooks, servants, laundry workers, and Chinese assistants, all seeking refuge from Villa’s wrath and reprisals.
Pershing’s public summary of the Punitive Expedition celebrated it as a success, dispersing Villa’s band and killing or capturing his most important men. Private opinions differed enormously from this vision. Braddy claims that word spread that the Punitive Expedition not only failed to capture Villa, but “turned him into a hero amongst the campesinos.” This same Braddy collected three testimonials from US soldiers: Thomas Sherburne reported, “I was in three wars [. . .] the Punitive Expedition was the worst;” Maj. Conklin, “The campaign was the most severe test of physical endurance that the army ever suffered;” and Capt. Hawkins, “We suffered more privations there than in Europe.” They had spent $130 million.
Three months later, Black Jack Pershing joined the World War in Europe. However, it seems that he didn’t want to leave Mexico without settling accounts because it was rumored that he offered $10,000 to Emil Holmdahl to kill Villa. Holmdahl started out as a Villista captain but ended up an Orozquista before being taken prisoner in the US for violating neutrality laws and ending up as a guide for the Punitive Expedition. He was suspicious and ended up rejecting the offer, arguing that it would cost a lot more to isolate Villa from his bodyguards and, besides, he liked the guy. Pershing then gave him—all of this according to Holmdahl’s not very credible account—three $20 gold pieces and told him to go see the commander of the garrison at Ft. Bliss in El Paso. Gen. Bell offered him $100,000 to kill Villa. Apparently, the Russell Sage Foundation would pay, an institution led by Slocum’s stepfather, the former commander of the Columbus garrison. It seems that Holmdahl didn’t accept.
Around the end of February, Villa had gathered approximately 1,500 men in Canutillo. Next, he headed for the meeting point to the southeast of Parral. Nicolás Fernández, leading the main column, had attacked and retaken Parral, Camargo, and Jiménez, kicking out Murguía’s small garrisons. Murguía himself was operating as a guerrilla, placing little value on controlling territory.
Villa met up with Nicolás, concentrating their guerrilla forces. They then tried to provoke Murguía, passing along false information to his spies about their own weakness and shortage of ammunition. Pancho Murguía once again mounted up and on March 3, left Chihuahua with the bulk of his division. He took his best troops and they had plenty of ammunition.
On March 11, Villa met with Fernández again who informed him about a conflict he’d had with Sara González (the widow holding Villa’s money) because he had defeated her new boyfriend who had died in the fighting (a Carrancista named Pascual de Anda) in Jiménez. After the battle, Fernández had hauled De Anda’s cadaver from her house while they were holding a wake. And despite the lady showing Fernández a safe-conduct pass signed by Villa, they hung his body in the plaza. Sara burned the pass over the cadaver. Villa was enraged and when news reached him that a powerful Carrancista brigade was on its way with two cannons, he sent Nicolás to contain it.
The encounter occurred in a place called Las Canteras, a mine accessible on a rail spur between Parral and Durango, adjacent to Rosario station.
Murguía was not confident because his 5,000-strong forces had not had time to choose their terrain. Villa must have had around 2,500 when he arrived.
Two hours after having dispatched Nicolás, Villa reconsidered and marched to the front with most of his troops at around three o’clock in the morning. Pancho took over direct command from Fernández, telling him that he had not properly prepared for Murguía’s attack. He repositioned his forces and waited for Murguía’s inevitable flanking cavalry maneuver. “Our pal is going to hit us with a hard flanking attack.” Pablo then talked to Martín López. Máynez reported Villa saying, “Look Martín, go and fight those bulls. Don’t use a lot of ammunition, but give him a blast and then play like you’re beaten, right under his nose. Then you gather your men back here, coming right down that path there where you can see those mesquite branches and you stay there. The signal to start is these two ladies I have right here,” and he showed him to hand grenades.
On March 12, Murguía’s infantry absorbed Martín’s attack behind defensive lines spread out along the tracks. They waited as the cavalry charged twice but then appeared to retreat in disorder after the third.
Villa instructed all the guards, even his own, to be placed under Baudelio’s command. Very pleased with what Villa had given him, he took off his black cowboy jacket and gave it to his assistant, wearing only a shirt despite the cold. He strapped on a triple Mauser cartridge belt and with 600 men, Villismo’s best at the time, went off in search of Murguía’s cavalry that was chasing after Martín. “Real soon there’ll be plenty of hats,” he told Villa, repeating one of Pancho’s favorite lines.
The two lines clashed at least six times. Murguía personally led his cavalry. Each time, riderless horses raced away. Villa observed the encounter through binoculars. The Carrancista infantry advanced without knowing that hidden Villistas, ordered to conceal themselves and stand by, were expecting them. They waited until they could see the Carrancistas’ faces, opened fire, and then fought hand-to-hand.
Murguía’s cavalry yielded to Baudelio’s attack and the Villistas attacked his infantry’s flank while another group led by Padilla cut off their escape route through the riverbed. “They made superhuman efforts to retreat in order, but it was useless.”
Murguía, realizing that he had no other choice than to open a pass through the enemy cavalry units and unite the 1,000 men he had left behind, probed the Villista lines for a weak spot. Pancho saw what he was trying to do and threw himself and the Dorados against Murguía’s line without managing to break it, but he did succeed in closing up the breach. Villa and Murguía were each personally involved in the fighting. “They’d advance, shoot their pistols, fall back, and then do it again.”
Villa realized that the only way to finish off Murguía was to mount up his troops who had been fighting as infantry. He gave the order and the new Villista cavalry tore apart Murguía’s proud column. When the cry “save yourselves” went up, what remained of order among the Carrancistas was lost. Valadés recounted, “Soldiers and horses ran in every direction; those who had managed to save themselves from the disaster jumped into the ravine, others ran for the nearby hills. Murguía himself was saved thanks to his horse’s quick hooves.” He tried to regroup what remained of his cavalry on San Ignacio ranch to cover the withdrawal of his cannons, but was pushed back. It was then a matter of pursuit and extermination. The Villistas chased them twenty kilometers to Stalford station.
The Carrancista division’s casualties grew to over 2,500 men. There was no time to dig graves, so the cadavers were thrown into the well of a mine. The Villistas captured 600 soldiers and shot every one of them. As they were very low on ammunition, they executed them with just one shot; several who survived their executions made their way to Parral only to be captured once again. However, they were pardoned. You shouldn’t kill a man twice, went the thinking.
During their escape, according to Valadés, Murguía’s group
[. . .] was overtaken by several Villista riders with Gen. Chico Cano in the lead, they yelled, “Come back, turn around, you so-and-sos” [. . .]. Cano, who had become a raving lunatic, came up behind the Carrancista-in-chief [as the two raced on horseback], who did not recognize him, shouting, “What’s up, you rat, didn’t you hear to turn around, you so-and-so?” He unsheathed his sword, slapping Murguía two or three times on the back. Murguía didn’t say a word. At that moment, at the bottom of the riverbed next to the trail, he came across some Carrancista infantry soldiers and, expertly turning his horse, jumped his horse into the riverbed [. . .]. The Villistas [. . .] made one or more charges, but to no ends [. . .]. Soon before reaching Parral, Gen. Murguía, who was leading his men along with several officers [. . .] came to a halt and addressed those under his command in a severe tone, “Don’t tell anyone what you have seen. And be very careful!”
The defeat was so complete that, according to his general staff, Murguía wanted to commit suicide. They retreated to Chihuahua, gathering up small units along the way.
The following day, Villa occupied Parral. Once again the southern part of Chihuahua was in his hands.
Soon after the Battle of Rosario, Villa took on a new secretary to add to the team of Jaurrieta and Trillo. A student named Alfonso Gómez Morentín arrived from El Paso after a long trip all the way from Mexico City. Camerino Rodríguez described him as “light-skinned, tall, very serious, with dark brown eyes.” Camargo was in the middle of a celebration. Villa was on a hill on the edge of town reviewing a parade of his troops who would moments later leave to continue chasing the Federales to the North. He was sitting atop a little pile of rocks with his gaze fixed on his men.
“We’ll talk later, Gomitos,” Villa said to his new secretary, tagging him with the new nickname that would stick with him for the next three years. “Right now, I’m repairing the damage done by the Carrancistas.”
In their flight northward, the Carrancista soldiers ravaged the territory. The locals explained that the fields could not be planted for the next harvest because the Federales had carried off all the mules and horses. Villa organized a parade and then had his men hand over the mules they were riding, dividing them up amongst the farmers.
Villa planned to finish off the victory he had won against Murguía by capturing Chihuahua once again and heading north so he sent scouts towards the capital. Manuel Banda, who joined up with Villa in Torreón, was charged with destroying the tracks between Chihuahua and Camargo to prevent reinforcements from reaching Murguía, but he was killed in a pointless accident when a rail pulled up by a locomotive hit him in the head.
In the vicinity of Chavarría, Villa and his guard made their way to an ammunition deposit. Before reaching their destination, they managed to get ahold of the Chihuahua newspapers and Gómez Morentín to read them out loud. Morentín recounted how Villa laughed when he heard a report claiming that Murguía’s retreat to the North was simply a “strategic measure” as the “main Villista nucleus contained only a couple hundred men.” However, another piece of news must have confused him and “Gen. Villa’s smile was transformed into a terrible expression.” It said that the Federales had discovered a deposit “where Villa had hidden several million rounds of ammunition.”
A piece of luck buoyed the downcast Murguía. Maj. Rafael Mendoza of the Dorados had been injured during the last campaign and sent to Bustillos to recover but was captured by the Federales. He was drunk at the time and, to escape being hanged, revealed the hiding place of Villa’s ammunition for the next campaign. Rafael had been told where the hiding spot was by Martín López during a bender. The Carrancistas set him free, and he escaped to the United States.
On March 25, both rumors and spies alerted Murguía to the fact that Villa was approaching Chihuahua, prompting him to order all his forces to concentrate there. That very night, the reinforcements that Carranza had sent him from Sonora were assembled with his division in the city plaza. He followed the same plan that Treviño had devised for defending the city, relying on the hills to the south, especially Santa Rosa Hill where he installed his artillery. He ordered foxholes dug from the dam running to the east. Murguía also organized two columns in Quintas Carolinas and Plan de Álamo to prepare a potential counterattack. Alarm ran so high that Obregón ordered 5,000 more men mobilized for Chihuahua with generals José Gonzalo Escobar, Eugenio Martínez, and Francisco Sobarzo in command. There were also the old, trustworthy battalions from Sinaloa and Sonora.
On the eve of the anticipated attack, Villa held a meeting of his generals in El Charco. It was necessary to capture Chihuahua to obtain ammunition, but they needed the ammunition to win the battle itself. Villa found himself trapped in a paradox. Worse, he had fewer men than the city’s defenders, just “2,000 tired men with little ammunition.”
The Carrancistas were waiting for them. A group of soldiers disguised as cowboys sounded the alarm, cavalry units were on the move on the highest ridges of the mountains. It was March 29. Villa appeared from the south and by nightfall fires were visible in the city’s environs. Pancho ordered part of his column to assemble in the south, while the bulk of his forces concentrated at El Charco hacienda to the east. Villa was gambling his troops in the south and west would catch Murguía’s attention while he moved his cavalry clandestinely towards the north. In El Charco, he reallocated the ammunition from the Durango troops, the least organized in his column, and distributed it to those who were going to lead the charge.
Rafael Muñoz recounted that on March 30, “At five o’clock in the morning, while the sun was rolling over the sharp peaks of the mountains, the Villista cavalry once again appeared against the unmistakable silhouette of the three hills surrounding Chihuahua: El Colonel, standing tall and humpbacked; El Grande, which appeared like a stone fist rising threateningly out of the plain; and Santa Rosa, a basalt cone whose grey peak was crowned with twelve cannons.”
A column of 500 Villistas approached, coming down from the hills on the city’s northern edge, tying up the horses and leaving one out of every three of them to watch them. The rest moved in a firing line until they made contact with the enemy near the station.
Valadés described how “There were no preliminary skirmishes or long maneuvers to take up positions as in a game of chess. No, one of them attacked blindly with all available forces at a point considered vulnerable. The other resisted for a moment, concentrated all its power there, and then counterattacked. The encounter was decided in a matter of minutes.”
Villa, apparently, attempted to enter the city from the east, which was not fortified, and to seize the trains to boot. Murguía reinforced the position with a regiment; however, the Villistas’ move towards the Pacífico station was simply one more feint. Another Villista column moved stealthily along the side of the Viejo and Nombre de Dios cemeteries. Murguía again moved his infantry, setting up his headquarters in the cemetery and forming a defensive line in the shape of a horseshoe while his cavalry remained on the rail line. Villa had hardly begun to attack Chihuahua’s cemeteries when the cavalry, under the command of Lorenzo Álvaro, Martín López, and Nicolás Fernández, pounced on the station
By nine or ten o’clock in the morning, a second wave of fresh Villista troops charged one of the Carrancistas’ flanks. Murguía’s cavalry fell back to the center of the city, but his infantry held out in the cemeteries thanks to its machine guns.
Villa personally led the fighting for six hours without having gained an advantage. His infantry was drained by fatigue, his camp was littered with cadavers, and the ammunition was running out. Valadés recalled, “The only thing left during those awful moments was courage on both sides.”
Murguía brought his cavalry to the front and counterattacked, taking advantage of their numerical superiority. The Villistas began to withdraw. At first, they did so in order, but they were unable to reorganize themselves while a group of cavalry had been surrounded in the city center. Pancho ordered the retreat.
Gen. Murguía, with the city under his control, gave the order to hang all the prisoners. Rafael Muñoz, the future novelist, was then a seventeen-year-old reporter. He narrated the gruesome spectacle as if he had been there on that March 31. Forty-three Villistas were hung from trees on the Nombre de Dios bridge, several strung up on each branch. “How hideous we will look,” said one of the last of the prisoners. “Well, what matters is that no one here knows us,” replied another.
Murguía knew “there was a general” among the captured Villistas, that is, Gen. Miguel Saavedra. Murguía pulled up in a Cadillac to interview him. Dry as always when dealing with death, Murguía asked, “What should I do with you?”
Saavedra offered to lay down his arms. Murguía replied that he had already had that opportunity. The Villista responded with a simple, “You’re in charge.”
Saavedra was one of Villismo’s historical figures. He had been in Ciudad Juárez with Villa in 1911, and was one of the men crisscrossed with cartridge belts in a photo that spread halfway around the world. He had forded the river with Villa in 1913, and was the commander of the artillery battery in Trinidad that shot off Obregón’s arm. Now, he stood hatless, he had either removed it or lost it; he wore a yellow guayabera tucked in at the waist and gabardine riding breeches. They tied a rope around his neck, a horse jerked forward, and the man was hoisted into the air. The death of Saavedra contained epic elements. Before dying, he wrote a letter to his wife who lived in Chihuahua, telling her that he had warned her that he would die like a dog and what they were going to do to him. His phrase became famous, repeated a thousand and one times. The most original version was relayed by Kock, a Parral teenager, who said that underneath the tree where they hanged him, they placed a cardboard shoebox which read: “Hang all dogs.”
The casualty figures offered up were very confusing. The Carrancistas claimed that Villa attacked with 2,000 men, but that he had suffered 3,000 casualties, and that they had captured 200 men, but only forty-three were hanged.
Villa feigned a surprise move towards Ciudad Juárez, however, facing the risk that he would be trapped between the cavalry pursuing them from the south and Fabela’s fresh cavalry forces to the north, he turned west. Eduardo Hernández’s cavalry kept up the chase, pushing Villa’s forces towards the Sierra Azul Mountains, northeast of Chihuahua.
The retreat ended in complete disorder and many men deserted. Gómez Morentín remembered that the march was slow and exhausting. No one spoke. Everyone respected the boss’s silence. When they gathered in San Andrés, Villa called an end to the campaign and set the next meeting point in Santa Gertrudis in six weeks. He left with his secretaries, Trillo, Jaurrieta, and Gómez Morentín, and four guards. As was his custom, he headed west for four kilometers and then returned to his starting point.
When Villa’s men met up again some weeks later, he headed for Namiquipa because he wanted to teach a lesson to a town’s population he thought had been faithful. Social militias had proliferated there, and he decided to abduct José María Espinoza, their commander, who had betrayed to the Punitive Expedition the spot where Villa had buried 600 rifles in a cave near town in the Rosal Canyon. They went looking for him at his house, but he was in the United States enjoying his reward. Years later, he would be gunned down by Maj. Anastasio Tena from the Rurales. Villa shared his attitude with his subordinates, including his two most savage commanders, Carmen Delgado and Baudelio Uribe, and they ordered the women on Espinoza’s ranch be locked in a house while they burnt the empty buildings nearby. Arguing that “Villa did not issue those orders” some members of the guard, led by Nicolás Fernández and Elías Acosta, tried to prevent things getting even worse. They detained Carmen and Baudelio for the excesses they committed and locked them in a room under guard. Later, the authors of the black legend of Villa claimed the women had been burned alive.
Jaurrieta was sent to find ammunition in the United States and Villa headed out for Cruces, San Buenaventura, and then to Hearst’s abandoned hacienda in Bavícora without knowing that Murguía was using mule drivers as spies and had located him. A month and a half after the attack on Chihuahua, Murguía arrived by train in Casas Grandes, discreetly approaching San Miguel Bavícora hacienda. The capture of a letter from Villa confirmed his presence.
At four o’clock in the morning on April 18, reveille sounded, slowly rousing the men. Beltrán’s Yaquis and Lucio Contreras’s troops (the son of the recently-deceased Calixto) were stationed outside the hacienda. At six o’clock, Baudelio saw a line of riflemen advancing out his window and sounded the alarm.
The Villistas emerged from the stables firing at the advanced firing line, who were also being shot at from the rooftops, but they saw the machine guns and Carrancista cavalry close behind and were forced to fall back. Just then, the Sonoran Beltrán’s troops arrived at the farmhouse, providing the besieged men around Villa with some relief. The Dorados put up a fight, but they were running low on ammunition. Pancho decided to make a break for it. The Vargas (or Valdivieso) brothers covered the escape from the rooftop with a Rexer submachine gun or a Hotchkiss machine gun.
To give an idea of the intensity of the fighting, which lasted for less than an hour, Murguía wrote in his report that he used up 127,000 Mauser rounds and nearly 30,000 .30-30 rounds. One hundred and fifty thousand bullets, 2,500 per minute. Villa, bareback on his horse, broke through the fence with his guard and headed for the hacienda’s gate. “They climbed over dead men who had been trampled by horses or shot down.”
Although he had not managed to capture Villa, Murguía had given Villa a taste of his own medicine with this raid. Casualties were high, including Gorgonio Beltrán and some 30 Dorados, leaving Baudelio Uribe wounded as well. Murguía claimed, exaggeratedly, that, although he had suffered many wounded, his men had killed 500 Villistas; what is certain is that he shot all the prisoners. Villa saved the silver he had brought to the ranch, but the Federales ended up with all the currency he had only just received from the United States.
Villa circled around the lagoons and crossed the mountains. Low on ammunition, he broke his force into three columns and left with one squadron of his guard for the Rubio hacienda. Towards the end of April, he headed out with four men for the Sierra Azul Mountains. He recovered $50,000 pesos on a peak called El Embudo, part of the old Banco Mineral booty that he had kept hidden since 1913 and some other amounts in various places. When he reappeared the following day in Rubio on April 24, with four bags tied to his saddle, he commented that “something smells funny.”
Col. Julián Pérez, commander of the second Dorados squadron, knowing that Villa had gone looking for money, sold him out to Gen. Eduardo Hernández who, with 300 Carrancistas, were hiding among the hacienda’s houses.
Villa sent Carmen Delgado ahead who noticed armed men on the rooftops and didn’t like the look of it. As he got closer, Pérez emerged from a house and tried to grab his horse, el Ruñis, by the reins, spooking the horse. Pérez grabbed his gun and Villa’s men returned fire. With shouts of “Death to Villa!” a shootout erupted. Villa’s crew reached the corral while Villa dismounted and provided cover to his men while some of them were wounded. The ambushers were not, however, able to give chase because many of the Dorados who were not in on the plot began shooting at their commander and the Carrancistas. Manuel Ochoa died in the fighting, another of the historic Villistas, one of the eight who had crossed the river with Villa.
From this time on, Villa was very distrustful. When he located Jaurrieta and Aurelio Murga, he set a meeting place in the Guerachi Mountains, telling them they were to come alone. Soon after, he connected with Nicolás Fernández and once again sent a group to sound him out. As one of his men said, “He didn’t even trust his own damned shadow.” And it wasn’t for nothing, he had fallen into two ambushes in just one month.
On April 27, in a Bisbee, Arizona, daily, a statement by Murguía was published in which he indicated that he would capture Villa and put him on exhibit in a circus cage. But Murguía was a long way from getting his wish.
Villa gathered his men in Satevó. Only 300 men with Nicolás Fernández, 200 with Martín López, and about 80 Dorados with Joaquín Álvarez answered the call. The column faced precarious conditions. Pancho decided to attack Parral to secure a large forced loan from the mining companies. He reportedly said, “If we can get to the station, I have a few pennies there. If we can stay a few days, we can eat beans with salt.” But his spies informed him that a column of 1,200 men under the command of an old acquaintance, Gen. Joaquín Amaro, was heading for the city. The important thing now was to prevent Amaro from reinforcing the Parral garrison. His inferior forces mean that he would have to rely on cunning.
Small parties of Villistas provoked the city’s defenders and then quickly retreated, drawing Amaro towards San Felipe Canyon where he ambushed him. Gen. Pedro Fabela’s cavalry and Gen. José Gonzalo Escobar’s infantry, which formed Amaro’s rearguard, however, avoided the ambush.
Fabela proposed to Escobar to mount up the infantry on his horses’ haunches to carry them up close to the Villistas on the hill at the mouth of the canyon. But the operation didn’t go as planned because Villista fire forced the cavalry to withdraw, leaving the infantry out in the open. Soon after, a Villista cavalry charge finished them off.
The chase was brutal. Miguel Martínez Valle recalled that they were “clotheslining them.” “One soldier tied a rope to his saddle and another tied the other rope end to his, then they would race at a full gallop behind the fleeing troops and trip them up with the rope. Imagine the damage they did if behind the first line of riders there were ten more clotheslining them.” Close on the heels of the riders with the ropes, others came with pistols to finish them off.
Amaro left behind 500 dead, plus arms and ammunition, and only just managed to get back to Parral with Villa’s cavalry chasing him all the way to the houses on the edge of town. Villa captured a large war booty, gave up on Parral, and vanished anew.
Villa marched north, desperate for the lack of ammunition. On May 12, he attacked La Boquilla dam, where generals Ernesto García and José Riojas were stationed. The Carrancista forces scattered quickly, forcing the men to jump into the water to save themselves. A few days later, Baudelio Uribe attacked Ojinaga, dislodging a garrison of some 300 men which fled to the United States. Villa sent Jaurrieta to Presidio, Texas, to purchase ammunition, but no one would sell any to him even though Villa had obtained money by exchanging checks from revolutionary taxes for cash at First City Bank.
Even as Carrancista headquarters insisted on May 28 that “the Villista groups in the state had been dispersed,” Villa was everywhere, first appearing, hitting back, then disappearing.
During the first days of June, headquarters in Chihuahua received word of Villa’s reappearance. Gen. Espinoza said that he had defeated him in El Pueblito (near Ojinaga), but soon after Gen. J. Muñoz, from the Jiménez garrison on the other side of Chihuahua, reported that he had been attacked “by the guerrilla himself.” Muñoz, who had been alerted to Villa’s approach with four hours lead time, set his men to work fortifying the train station, which would be the target of a Villista charge. Villa’s riders crashed against the foxholes that Gen. Muñoz had constructed, forcing Villa to realize the futility of continuing the fighting. Pancho, ever the guerrilla, retreated towards the Adargas Mountains and dispersed his troops. Six weeks later, Gómez Morentín recorded the following conversation:
“My general, there are dust clouds kicking up from the west.”
“From the west?”
“Yes, my general.”
“Good, it must be Albino Aranda sending some scouts.”
Throughout the course of that day, reports came in from the lookouts.
“My general,” said one, “there are dust clouds to the south.”
“Good, that must be Nicolás sending some scouts.”
“My general,” said the lookout, coming back once more, “over there, towards Durango.”
“Good, that must be Lencho Ávalos,” replied the general, “sending some scouts.”
Little by little, nearly 2,000 men were gathering.
The previous campaigns had lasted seven months. Villa added three spectacular victories to his belt, the capture of Chihuahua and Torreón as well as the victory at Rosario mine in San Felipe, but he had also suffered defeats. He was not fading away, his forces alternately expanded and contracted, but he was not able to consolidate a liberated territory, a region, a rearguard, a supply of ammunition. For Murguía and the Carrancista government, they had tried everything, but the Villista nightmare was not over. It was interminable.
