Villa is something strange and obsolete in our modern civilization, where everything we believe in is the work of disciplined intelligence and scholarly education [. . .]. We are frightened by anything we didn’t learn in school, not knowing how to read seems a sacrilege to us and we condemn those who ignore our almost standardized system of acquiring knowledge [. . .]. Villa emerged from the dark night of ignorance, and always remained half in the blackness, but in his plain celebration of life and his indifference to all doctrinal prejudice, the robust germ of a secret impulse appears to guide the spirits in the elaboration of his destiny [. . .] and direct the flow of an epoch in the history of a people.
During a period in which they found neither refuge nor rest, and the Carrancistas had carried off even the last chicken, as Villista Rivera Marrufo put it, “now we just slept here and then we’d wake up where we could.” But it was also the time of reunion with Felipe Ángeles.
Accompanied by Jaurrieta, Gómez Morentín, Pascual Cesaretti, and two guides, Ángeles left George Holmes ranch, thirty-five kilometers to the west of El Paso, Texas, on December 11, between ten and eleven o’clock at night. He was carrying two .38 pistols and an 8mm Springfield. They moved slowly southward through the snow because they were no longer used to long rides. It took almost three weeks to reach Cuchillo Parado, avoiding a Carrancista party along the way. The town welcomed Felipe Ángeles with a party thrown by Toribio Ortega’s old compañeros. After waiting for fifteen days, Gen. Ildefonso Sánchez contacted them, informing them that Villa had fixed Tosesigua as the meeting spot.
Ángeles wrote to Maytorena on January 10, 1919, from Rancho de la Majada, Chihuahua, asking him for “a very good horse, not a delicate one, which can sustain itself on prairie grass and, occasionally, corn [. . .] a real cowboy horse along with a field kit.”
Just prior, Villa had published a manifesto on December 15, in which he described Murguía’s forces as forces of occupation and warned Chihuahua’s social militias to stand down and to not collaborate with the Carrancistas; this was their last warning. And to demonstrate that he was serious, he attacked Satevó on Christmas. He forced the social militia to take shelter in the church and then threw bombs at the building until the roof collapsed on them.
Ángeles arrived in Tosesigua shortly before Villa and was met by Trillo. Pancho turned up soon after, not expecting him to be there. Camerino recalled that, immediately, “Villa ordered all his men to form up.” It was mid-January, one month after Ángeles had crossed the border.
The generals embraced. Valadés, relying on Gómez Morentín’s recollection, recorded the following dialogue:
“My general, the guerrilla life has treated you well,” began Ángeles.
“My general, life in New York has treated you well,” replied Villa.
“Don’t believe it, my general, that good bourgeois life (What? Was Ángeles poking fun at himself because he had spent the last years in misery?) has weakened me for this campaign; I feel like an armchair gentleman; my body is stiff, and I feel the harshness of winter since I crossed the border like I never did during the last campaign at your side.”
“Ahhh, my general, you know that you have good little horses at your disposal, and we are going to take all the time you need here to loosen up. . . . Good, my general, you organize the men and while you do that, I’ll keep playing with the changuitos. How does that seem?”
“Whatever you say, my general.”
How very British of both of them. Cervantes would later reflect, “I never saw Ángeles become emotional, never mind cry; neither did I ever see him have bouts of anger or great joy; he had an Indigenous temperament, he was astonishingly deliberate, and he exercised astonishing control over his feelings.”
The two sat in a corner to talk in the shade for several hours. They had not seen one another for years. Ángeles must have been surprised by the guerrilla, so different, scrawny, without trains or artillery, compared to the Division of the North he had known.
During the following days, Ángeles took direct charge of organizing the boys and began giving the 200 assembled guerrillas exercise classes and, to everyone’s surprise, made Pancho Villa run.
“You need to lose some weight. . . Fifty meters.”
And Villa, hobbling, ran as the plebes looked on in extreme unease.
“Are you tired yet?,” shouted Ángeles.
“Why would I be tired?,” replied Villa.
“Close your lips, my general, you do this exercise with your legs,” Ángeles shot back.
And then Ángeles and Villa took off running together. And then they raced around laughing, arm in arm.
Jaurrieta reported that Ángeles easily beat Villa in foot races and in jumping contests, but that Villa beat him in pistol target practice, where he hardly ever failed from one hundred fifty meters.
Later, they talked over new ways to organize the army. Ángeles spoke about “thirds” and “cavalcades” instead of squads and regiments. Their only difference of opinion arose from Ángeles’s very positive opinion of how the United States was developing, to which Villa replied, “My general, it sounds to me like you have gringofied.” They spent no more than three weeks there.
While Villa and Ángeles rested and planned, Martín López and Nicolás Fernández’s guerrillas were making incursions into new regions in Chihuahua, as Michel was doing in Durango. During their rides, they proclaimed that Villa was by their side.
Jaurrieta returned to the border after dropping off Villa’s familial correspondence and then, finally, the mother column began moving westward. They passed near Chihuahua, next went west towards the Calabacillas Mountains, and from there to Santa Gertrudis. Ángeles and Villa argued several times about the campaign’s tactics, Ángeles appearing to disagree with some of Villa’s decisions. But their mastery over the Carrancista columns continued, and information they collected about Carrancista movement kept them one step ahead. During the march, Villa disappeared for whole days at a time, sometimes heading south, other times to the north. Other times, he seemed to be retracing the path they had already traveled. He appeared wracked with doubt.
On February 23, the Villista vanguard arrived in Santa Gertrudis. Villa and Ángeles settled into the hacienda’s big house. Ángeles, at Villa’s request, reviewed the troops and gave a speech. According to one witness, he was dressed in a yellowish khaki uniform and was wearing the light olive felt hat he had used in 1915. “I see a lot of new faces,” said the general, recalling the faces of 1913.
In Chihuahua, political changes had taken place the year prior, and Gov. Andrés Ortiz had fortified the city. In February, Murguía relinquished command of the military zone to José Agustín Castro, who publicly apologized for his predecessor’s barbarities over the previous two years. Ortiz and Castro adopted a pacifist position, fortifying the cities, placing Chihuahua under martial law (not allowing anyone to enter the city at night), and left the social militias on their own in the countryside. The Villista guerrillas continued isolating the cities and cutting off communications.
On March 1, a manifesto from the San Antonio de Arenales social militias proclaimed, “The bandit Villa takes our innocent daughters prisoner and shares them among the fugitives.” This was certainly not true; among the many barbarities Villa committed, this was not one of them. Pancho’s attitude varied with respect to the militias: if they didn’t bother him and they acted merely as self-defense groups against bandit attacks, he left them alone, even giving them arms as he did in Valle de Allende. But when he did confront them, he aimed to exterminate them. The Villista guerrilla could survive their confrontations with the Carrancista generals, but the social militias drained their social base and turned their territory into a jigsaw puzzle of snitches, ambushes, and disguised enemies.
Nellie Campobello recounted a speech that Villa gave to a group of captured social militia members from Concho. “What has Pancho Villa done to the Concheños for you to keep messing with him? Why do you force Pancho to run? Why do you make war on him if he’s never attacked you? Why are you afraid of him?” Tears ran down Villa’s face. “The Concheños just looked at each other, astonished.”
A meeting took place in the mountains in Santa Gertrudis with the guerrillas from Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila. As many as 5,500 men had been sent by Fernández, Martín López, Albino Aranda, Porfirio Ornelas, and Michel. They say that Ángeles favored fighting in the big cities while Villa wanted to continue the guerrilla war and accumulate forces for another six months. They arrived at an agreement in which they would stick with Villa’s strategy until April when they would disperse to allow the men and horses to rest, subsequently launching an offensive against Chihuahua or Ciudad Juárez. Ángeles gave lectures about the history of the war and on military tactics every night, “Ángeles was a walking university.”
The gathering in Santa Gertrudis lasted until March 10. The bands dispersed after setting a new meeting point in April to start the campaign. Villa and Ángeles remained in the camp.
Two volunteers who had come to sign up were presented to Pancho, provoking a fit of mistrust. According to some accounts, he interrogated them. First together, and then separately. According to others, he just stared at them intently. Later, he ordered one of them to be hanged. Ángeles became angry, saying he was acting rashly. The second prisoner, seeing the other one hanging from a tree, confessed that they had been sent by Gen. Rosalío Hernández to kill Ángeles and Villa and that a third was supposed to arrive on a donkey in the next few hours. When the third man turned up, he was detained, and he confirmed the story. Villa brought the two prisoners to Ángeles, who was reading underneath an Oak tree; the general admitted that Villa had been right and that they should hang the two surviving prisoners. Villa replied, “Now, what for?” He then ordered the two returned to Rosalía, Villa’s former comrade, with a note that read, “Chalío (short for Rosalío), I am returning your little boys who did a very bad job; but only two are going back because the other one is staying here on the branch of a tree.” He added that he shouldn’t run away the next time he came looking for him as he had on previous occasions.
Hipólito Villa also showed up in Santa Gertrudis. After being released in Cuba in 1916, Hipólito went to San Antonio and reunited with his wife in Corpus Christi, where his second son, Frank, was born. He recovered the family jewels and immediately pawned them to finance Pancho’s guerrillas, who were then restarting their activities after Villa returned from the cave. Although the story goes that Hipólito entered Mexico in 1916, there is no evidence of his participation in the Villista guerrilla; the most probable story is that he was active in San Antonio, Texas, in the clandestine network Villa maintained in the United States. Rafael F. Muñoz, who characterized him as “stupid and inept,” stated that Hipólito worked to organize Pancho’s smuggling network in El Paso during those years with his compadre Kyriacopoulos. Jesús María López supposedly recounted that Villa once ordered Hipólito to be shot and that he was saved only because of Martín López’s intervention.
While in Santa Gertrudis, Ángeles began limping and was soon unable to walk. Villa ordered the nurse, a Japanese man, to see him, but the following day Ángeles wasn’t even able to put on his shoe. Villa sent two men to bring Dr. Francisco Ornelas covertly from Chihuahua and take him to Ochoa’s widow’s ranch. Ornelas operated on Ángeles at the ranch, removing a tumor as Villa watched. Ángeles left a suitcase with books and writings behind at the ranch. Ten days later, when the general had recovered, they headed out for the designated meeting spot.
Ángeles talked to the old men in the villages as they passed because he thought that he could prevent deadly confrontations with the social militias. He claimed that’s why they weren’t fighting. Villa maintained that he was mistaken, that they weren’t fighting because there were only a few of them. Ángeles surprised everyone in Santa María de la Cueva when, as Jaurrieta recalled, “. . . when we were least expecting it, Gen. Ángeles went off, alone and unarmed, towards the militia camp, and there he was, conversing with them for at least a half an hour.” When he returned, Villa scolded him, saying that he was starting to think about how they were going to retrieve his corpse. Ángeles replied that they were fine people, they were just worried that Villa was going to shoot them.
In the middle of March 1918, Pancho Villa contacted Lázaro de la Garza, trying to get back part of the money that the financier had stolen from the Division of the North. Villa, one year earlier, had filed fraud charges against him in a US court employing the legal services of Alberto Madero. This time, Pancho attacked in an indirect manner, “Leaving aside the outstanding matters between us [. . .] if you think about it, you will see that you should help me.” He asked him specifically to help arrange for the purchase of 340 horses in Ojinaga for $25 each. “You must know how much you owe me.” On April 29, Villa pressed his case and sent Juan Bautista Vargas to see him.
Already in the United States, Vargas was astonished by the palace De la Garza had constructed for himself in Beverly Hills. The house “was famous for its intricate combinations of doorbells and mirrors which, when any unknown person approached the garden doors, all sounded an alarm simultaneously.” Shielded in his castle, fearing that the Villistas would settle accounts, Lázaro said that he had earned everything legally through commissions and categorically refused to collaborate.
The campaign began in Parral. In the face of the government’s passivity, the Villistas set about isolating the city in such an effective manner that no trains had arrived for three months. Villa sent orders to assemble his troops on April 18 and then attacked on April 19. Nellie Campobello, who lived in Parral, recounted that “the dust cloud from Villa’s cavalry was seen coming from Caracol.” Martín López entered via the train station, while Nicolás Fernández and Hipólito Villa came through the San Francisco and San Juan de Dios neighborhoods. Col. Ríos Gómez was in charge of the town’s defenses which, aside from the social militia, consisted of a cavalry brigade under the command of Manuel Madinabeytia, the former Villista general who had once again switched sides. The regular troops defended the hills around the city, while the militias covered the churches.
Villa and his guard captured Iguana Hill and set up headquarters there. The attack progressed throughout the night. At dawn on Holy Saturday, the defenders were concentrated at just a few points: the Rayo church, the parish tower and rooftop, the telephone office, and La Cruz Hill. The assault on the Rayo church intensified during the afternoon as the Villistas set fire to its door to dislodge the militiamen in the tower and on the roof. The fire consumed the pews and the saints, the alters and the curtains. Once the Villistas seized the church, they could fire down on the telephone office rooftop, forcing the militia to flee. The Dorados charged the hills, led by Ernesto Ríos. Martín López attacked Carrancista headquarters and Hipólito and Nicolás Fernández moved against the parish house, getting cover from Villista snipers atop the church. The Parral cathedral was soon enveloped in flames and evacuated. All that remained was the bunker on La Cruz Hill.
Madinabeytia and the remnants of the Federales escaped the city that night. Celia Herrera accused him of arranging his departure thanks to an obscure pact with his former commander, but future events demonstrated that Villa had negotiated nothing with Madinabeytia.
Pancho ordered his men not to waste ammunition attacking the defenders unless they tried to break through the circle. The situation remained unchanged overnight, but they raised the white flag on Sunday. Col. Tavares promised to spare their lives and when Villa arrived, they were already being disarmed. José de la Luz Herrera tried to push through the prisoners to salute Villa and was met with a cold, “I don’t salute traitors.” Pancho ordered they be tied up and that the Herrera brothers be removed from the group. The rest of the militiamen were to be assembled in the elementary school along with the captured Federales. Jaurrieta counted eighty-five in all.
Rodolfo Alvarado, the son of mine owner Pedro Alvarado, had been detained with the social militia and Baudelio Uribe wanted to shoot him. Villa intervened at the request of Elisa Griensen (his very young aunt), and Pedro Alvarado himself. Villa ordered him to be released immediately.
Villa then went to the school where the prisoners were being held and let loose a fearsome speech, asking them why they were working for the Carrancistas if they were common people.
Family members had gathered outside the school to plead for the lives of their husbands, fathers, and sons. Villa told them that if the social militias had been created to fight bandits, they were screwed because according to them, he was a bandit and there should be no doubt about their fate. Faces in the crowd turned pale, sobs arose from the crowd, Villa himself shed tears. And then he decided to release all the prisoners, he offered them a safe-conduct pass if they went by his headquarters and suggested to Ángeles that he talk to the Federales to see which of them would agree to join the column.
Headquarters was installed in José Manuel Gutiérrez’s house, where the Herreras were being detained after they had unsuccessfully attempted to buy off their guards for $10,000 pesos.
Pancho Villa was eating, or perhaps he was cleaning his chaps in Parral’s plaza the following day, or perhaps he was at headquarters—there are many versions of the story—when Felipe Ángeles praised Villa for releasing the militiamen and asked him to do the same for the Herreras.
“Look, my general, let’s not keep arguing over this point. All crimes are pardonable except for two, ingratitude and treason. The rest are all yours, but the Herreras have to die,” responded Villa.
Villa accused the Herreras of not only having abandoned him during the split with Carranza, but of also having provided provisions and guides to the gringos during the Punitive Expedition. He instructed Jaurrieta to bring them a paper and pencil to write their goodbyes. The following morning, April 21, he ordered the senior José de la Luz Herrera, and his sons Melchor and Ceferino, strung up with wire in the cemetery from some mesquite trees. They died shouting insults at Villa, who attended the execution.
Pancho once said to Martín Luis Guzmán, “The defeated deserve compassion from the victor. Only the disloyal, or better the traitors, have no right to compassion from the fighting men who beat them, because that’s the way war is.” J.B. Vargas commented that “the drastic measures taken by Gen. Villa [. . .] were much lamented, even among his own forces because they had fought beside Maclovio.”
Continuing his policy of despoiling the wealthy to finance the war, Pancho demanded a forced loan from the Alvarado Mining Co. and took up a collection among the neighbors. In the end, he collected very little, some $7,000 pesos, which he turned over to build a school, leaving the money with a commission. Sometime later, the Carrancista Diéguez learned about the matter and detained the commissioners. When they explained it to him, he declared, “Very well, a school will be built, even though a bandit ordered it.”
On April 22, Ángeles addressed the people of Parral at the kiosk, “History won’t say a word about me because I don’t deserve it. I am an insignificant speck of dust that will be swept away tomorrow. But Gen. Villa has earned the right to go down in history, his eulogy will say that he kept his word and that, after having fought against the dictators Díaz, Huerta, and Carranza, he collaborated to establish democratic practices in this country.” He spoke to the people of Parral about the class struggle, about their condition as the exploited, about capitalism, and that it was necessary to make the war more humane, to respect the lives of the prisoners.
The column remained in Parral for a few days. Its military band marched through town, playing for the people in the mornings and the afternoons, accompanied by Villa, who inspected the merchants’ shops, revising prices for those who sold food to the poor.
Pancho next went up to the Valle de Allende district where, instead of initiating a confrontation, he sent a message to the social militia commander asking him if “they wanted noise or quiet.” At first, he didn’t receive an answer, but as his brigade was moving toward Valle an old Villista, Ismael Máynez—as he was living in the town while recovering from a wound—emerged from a small group of houses. He brought a letter from the militia commander, placing its weapons, ammunition, and the city itself, at Villa’s disposal. Villa ordered the commander to present himself in the town’s plaza and to form a commission to disarm his men in exchange for their lives and the protection of their personal interests. The result was 250 carbines and 15,000 cartridges.
Pancho took advantage of the deal to concretize his romantic relationship with twenty-three-year-old Soledad Seáñez, a school teacher and seamstress working at the Talamantes factory, who would later confess, “I never fell in love with him.” The religious ceremony was presided over on April 17, 1919, by a priest who said that the bride could not wear a veil because it was Holy Week. Villa replied that even if it were a little veil, the rest could be taken care of later. A reception was held in a small park on the edge of Río Florido in which Felipe Ángeles participated and then the couple celebrated their honeymoon in Parral. Pancho Villa may have been living underground, but he was in plain sight for all to see. At three o’clock in the morning on May 1, in Valle de Allende near Jiménez, Pancho and Soledad celebrated their civil marriage. The witnesses were Ismael Máynez, José Jaurrieta, and Baltazar Piñones.
Villa secretly visited Seáñez over the following months, bringing her love poems while “dressed as an aguas frescas vendor.” “I never called him Pancho, always Francisco,” Soledad later remarked. Under pressure from the Carrancistas, she would end up going to hide in El Paso where Toño would be born on April 17, 1920.
Around this time, Villa learned that Emiliano Zapata had been assassinated in an ambush and worried he might be next; Zapata’s death justified his fears. It’s clear that the assassin, Col. Jesús Guajardo, became very popular in the Mexico City press as he always had money in his pockets which he generously shared with the reporters. On June 19, he was quoted as saying that he would also take care of Pancho Villa. “When it comes to ambushes, no one is better than me.” Word was that he had been assigned to command one of Amaro’s brigades which was on Pancho’s trail. But Guajardo was caught up in a romantic scandal and he never made it to the North.
Meanwhile, Madinabeytia had once again captured Parral and, with the support of 200 reinforcements, fortified La Cruz Hill. That same afternoon, Pancho’s column departed Valle de Allende on its way to Camargo, but changed course that night. Pancho, Ángeles, and the Dorados rode in the vanguard. Capturing Madinabeytia was important to Pancho, and he told Ángeles that he was going to slip into Parral unannounced: “When you least expect it, you’ll see the streets light up right under your feet.”
His spies reported that Madinabeytia had entrenched himself in a tavern and Ángeles laughed at Villa’s cunning. At one in the morning, picking his way through little paths and nooks, Villa led his party to Borregas Hill to the south of the city. He immediately organized a group of 100 men to attack Madinabeytia’s rearguard. Jaurrieta recounted that Villa’s group was off by one block and Madinabeytia fled bareback on his horse. Another 100 men attacked La Cruz Hill. After three or four hours, they decided to withdraw, leaving a letter from Ángeles behind. Their take was 200 rifles and ammunition.
The column next moved towards Pilar de Conchos, where Villa received a check from American Smelting. It was the year’s revolutionary tax and Villa promised to respect their mines’ security. And maybe they got a little more because, while the tracks were cut, Nicolás Fernández was looking after silver from Santa Bárbara and La Palmilla—two of American Smelting’s mines—which were then shipped north. In Pilar de Conchos, 1800 men gathered. George McQuaters from Alvarado Mining Co., arrived in a Packard with the agreed-upon sum, but then asked Villa to loan him half the $40,000 dollars so he could pay the miners as there was no money in Parral, offering to return it to him within thirty days at the offices of La Palmilla. Villa accepted, noting that the gringo had a good head for business, and he had to give him enough slack to see where it would go.”
Haldeen Braddy’s papers contain a series of letters from US companies with operations in Mexico providing the government with information, or complaints, about the Villistas, including letters from firms who refused to pay the revolutionary tax and references to Martín López, who seemed to be the collector. There are more than one hundred of them; some from March 1919 are addressed to Villa himself in very formal language explaining the companies’ status and why they are unable to satisfy his demands. These documents give us an idea of the scale of the financial network Villa had constructed in Chihuahua.
Villa stayed in Pilar de Conchos with just ten men while Ángeles agreed to command the Camargo operation. This was a change from his initial refusal to fight; perhaps the column’s momentum encouraged him. Two days later, he met up with Martín López who had clashed with Carrancista cavalry units near Camargo, forcing them to retreat to the gates of the city. Just as they were about to launch the attack, three military trains appeared in the distance and Ángeles decided to suspend the assault in order to confer with Villa. He called on Martín to withdraw.
They were neither pursued nor harassed on their return, and Villa was waiting for them in Pilar de Conchos. They then decided to make a gesture towards Chihuahua to see if the Carrancistas had ventured out of their stronghold.
At a place called Hacienda el Charco, a party of twenty-six soldiers presented themselves to the Villistas under the command of Capt. Caloca. They had deserted from Amaro’s forces and wanted to join up. Villa—who was aware of how Zapata had been assassinated—said, “Ahh, those Carrancistas just want to repeat their little Morelos action.”
An argument arose as to whether to disarm or shoot them. Villa decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and allowed them to enter camp with their arms and appear before him. Pancho studied Capt. Caloca and, in the end, told him they could join Martín López’s troops. When they were saying goodbye, he held out his hand and added, “Watch yourself because I’m no Emiliano Zapata.”
Caloca had brought an offer from a former Colorado general named Alanís who claimed that he would open up a sector of Chihuahua’s defenses around the San Felipe sector so the Villistas could pass through. Villa ignored it. They approached the capital, passing no more than five hundred meters from the defenses lit up with floodlights. The Villistas shouted at the defenders, “Look out you lousy changos, your daddy’s here!” They shot at an artillery battery, but the defenders made no attempt to fight back or chase them.
Villa cut the tracks and moved northward. On June 6, he made camp in Villa Ahumada, on the road to Ciudad Juárez, probably over Ángeles’ objections, who later said, “I opposed Villa going to the border. I told him so on repeated occasions; I made it clear that he was not loved in the US.”
As the Villistas neared the United Station, the El Paso Herald began receiving reports. The paper reported that Ángeles shaved every day, even during active operations, he wore clean clothing, and carried a toiletry kit on his mule. Villa preferred a flannel shirt with a soft collar to starched clothing, he rarely shaved, and he wore hand-me-down suits and shoes with a rounded toe.
In Villa Ahumada, Hipólito suffered an attack of some kind and collapsed. They tried every kind of medication, but he didn’t react. Villa dictated a letter to Trillo for Dr. Andrés Villarreal, telling him to come. Villarreal had been the Division of the North’s chief medical officer before quitting after Villa ordered him shot because of a misunderstanding during the Battle of Aguascalientes. He was now residing in El Paso. Villarreal had his doubts, and not for nothing, but ended up arriving at the appointed place and time and treating Hipólito after he and Villa embraced as compadres. Jack Harris, a US reporter, received confidential information about what was going on and made his way down to Villa Ahumada.
Pablo welcomed him with a “What winds carried you down here?”
Villa refused to answer whether or not he would attack Juárez. The most Harris got out of him was, “You’ll find out in twenty-four hours.”
Their advance started on June 9. Headquarters was set up in Zaragoza and the Villistas clashed with a scout train on June 12, under the command of Gonzalo Escobar, forcing it to turn around. Escobar, suffering a flesh wound to his arm, left for El Paso for medical care and didn’t return until the battle had ended.
Villa moved his headquarters to the town of Senecú where he and Ángeles talked over the situation. Ángeles insisted that, if he knew the gringos, they were going to intervene. Villa was sick of it. Jaurrieta described how, placing his head on the bag that served as his pillow, he said, “The gringos and the Carrancistas are blood brothers. I’m going to order an attack on Ciudad Juárez so that bullets don’t cross the border and if, despite this, the Americans attack me, I’ll bring something for the gringos too.”
Ángeles limited himself to shaking his head back and forth.
Villa was not in good health, he had taken ill as they crossed the Samalayuca desert, sweating like crazy, wiping his forehead over and over with a red bandanna which he also used to shoo away the clouds of mosquitoes.
Telegraph communications with Chihuahua had also been cut. There were rumors that González, the city’s commander, wanted to surrender and Villa sent him a message without placing too much importance on it. “Bullets will count for more than all this hot air.” Gen. Francisco González, Abraham’s brother, had just been put in charge of the garrison; he was a Notre Dame student with a good reputation among the Carrancistas. He dug trenches a meter-and-a-half deep and placed coils of barbed wire around the perimeter, although it was not electrified. He built adobe blockhouses with straw roofs and placed floodlights and two cannons in the Hidalgo fort in a set of hills to the west of the city to go along with his 1,000 soldiers and sixteen machine guns.
There was a lot of commotion across the border. People said that Villa was going to capture Juárez and name Felipe Ángeles provisional president of the Republic. Some claimed—although it can’t be true—that Norman Walker of the Associate Press told Villa that it wouldn’t be good for the battle if it started during the baseball playoffs in the United States because he would be competing for news coverage. “If you wait until after the World Series, you can make the headlines.” Villa told him that Americans were strange people, to which Walker replied, “They think the same about you.” Villa supposedly postponed the first day of fighting.
The story isn’t very credible, however, as the fighting was not actually delayed, although the comment about “strange people” sounds accurate enough.
Villa had between 1,200 and 1,600 men, but he instructed Villarreal, upon his return to El Paso, to say that he had 4,000. The figure seeped into the popular mind because Muñoz vouched for it and Elías Torres did too (even describing the composition of each brigade). According to the El Paso Morning Times, who interviewed Villa before the battle, there were 5,800 Villistas.
Villa ordered his men to form up and they did so with great enthusiasm because Ciudad Juárez was central to Villista mythology. Villa reviewed the lines, asking if the men were afraid of the gringos, “Should we back out and head south?” His generals asked him not to personally intervene in the fighting because he was still sick with a fever owing to “the improper workings of his internal organs.” Villa resisted, but Martín López prevailed. Ángeles would not participate in the battle either, remaining in Senecú.
Rafael F. Muñoz recounted that the first sighting of Villistas in Ciudad Juárez was on Saturday, June 14, “An enemy cavalry patrol of fifty or sixty men appeared and formed an arc [. . .]. They were facing the sun and looked reddish-brown beneath the brown sky.”
Villa set himself up in the agricultural school and organized his system of communications. Pancho possessed precise plans for the city’s defenses (drawn up by his spies), which ran to the river towards the United States and then cut across the opposite direction through the area the Villistas had occupied. Villa issued exact instructions: although they had arranged their attacking forces in a semicircle, the main push had to come from the left flank (to the east and northeast) that was anchored in the Juárez Racetrack. The rest of the firing line only had to keep the Carrancistas busy. From east and northeast, they had to charge aggressively so that their fire ran parallel to the river. If their left flank collapsed, the Carrancista defenses would break.
Villa’s cavalry kept Ríos preoccupied, but stayed out of range. The provocation worked, prompting the Carrancistas to fire a small cannon at them from the Hidalgo fort.
At 11:35 p.m. on the night of June 14, the main thrust began by the light of the moon; Martín López led the cavalry, avoiding the floodlights directed from the blockhouses.
The fortifications were not as strong as they appeared at first sight. Muñoz described a “meter-and-a-half-deep winding trench with rusted wire that had tiny iron barbs that snapped every time the soldier tried to stretch it out too much. There were adobe bunkers with straw roofs protecting the irregular line’s outcroppings, and the trenches which cut across streets and spread out into the wheat fields were broken up by ditches lined with languid reeds where the soldiers got lost among the swell of arid mounds. The soldiers were spread out four meters apart and had been waiting for twenty days for the indefatigable and fearsome Villista cavalry to appear [. . .] there was also a parody of a fort built higher up in the hills [. . .] called Fort Hidalgo, but it was more like a country cottage than a fort; it was stocked with artillery shells, but also with bottles of cognac.”
It must have seemed different to the Villistas though; Martín’s brigade carried axes to cut through the wire, which had been supplied by Kyriacopoulos from El Paso the previous day. Shouting ¡Viva Villa! they shoved their pistols and rifles through the blockhouse windows and shot back at whoever was shooting at them. Jaurrieta said the attack by the cavalry-turned-infantry was the most courageous act he’d ever seen. There were nearly ninety casualties among the veterans of Martín’s guard. Near death, Capt. Caloca asked Jaurrieta to tell Villa there was no room for doubt.
They smashed into the line twice without breaking through, but on the third time, they came with leather bags filled with dynamite and old horseshoes; they lit the fuses with cigarettes and threw them over the walls. The Carrancista front crumbled. Some 150 riders got through. Sixty Carrancistas fell prisoner and were immediately executed. The defenders fled to the center of the city with the cavalry hot on their tails. It was two o’clock in the morning. The Carrancistas took shelter beneath the fort Hidalgo’s cannons.
When the Carrancista lines broke, and when the battle appeared to be won, many Villistas entered the taverns and bars and drank everything they could, they opened the jail, sipped hot coffee, and captured the Customs House.
At three in the morning Jaurrieta discovered a cache of ammunition, some 18,000 cartridges, thanks to a tip from a resident and went off to inform Villa. It was time to finish them off. But Pancho, who was very far from the front line, had not observed the panic among the Carrancistas and ordered his forces to stop pursuing them for fear of unnecessarily high casualties. Martín López installed himself in a Chinese café and organized a breakfast-lunch-dinner all in one. Trillo, Jaurrieta, and López decided to invite Villa. Chaos reigned on both sides.
At lunchtime, a counterattack dispersed the Villista groups. There were 200 dead on either side of Comercio Street. The previous night’s victory had almost turned into a defeat. The Villistas fell back towards headquarters in the agricultural school.
Villa entered the city without knowing what was happening and came face to face with a Carrancista patrol which emptied their guns at him and his guard in front of Tívoli. They managed to disperse the patrol with pistol fire. Jaurrieta, who had lost his horse, got only a caustic “They’re giving you lunch, too?” from Villa who had come to dine with them.
Villa was enraged. He said that he would recapture Juárez at two o’clock in the afternoon and that he would lead the assault: “whoever dies, dies.”
On the morning of June 16, Muñoz observed:
The cadavers stirred a macabre sensation, and upon seeing them the spectator experiences a series of precise emotional changes: insatiable curiosity draws them close, a vague interest in wanting to know what remains after death, if dead eyes still perceive images [. . .]. The women on their way to mass that sun-filled morning, passed quickly by the first groups, farther ahead they ventured some glances among the circle of spectators, and eventually stopped, timidly at first, audaciously later on, elbowing their way to the front line of the curious onlookers.
At 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, the Villistas opened fire and attacked using the same plan from the night before, this time with the advantage that the defenses had been badly damaged. Waves of cavalry began to charge. Muñoz recounted, “A horde of centaurs with fantastic silhouettes hastened along the edge of the river: four feet, four hands, three heads: the Villista infantry rode perched behind the riders charging at a gallop. The Federales scattered [. . .]. Villa appeared on San Lorenzo road, a rider on a slender, black horse who was running and jumping as if the devil’s tail were inside it: it jumped the ditches with one leap, the reeds scratching its belly, reared straight up on its hind legs, and spun around like a top.”
Nicolás Fernández turned up wounded back at headquarters in the racetrack, “the bullet had grazed his hairline.” Jaurrieta recalled that the final assault was set for that night when, from the Laredo international bridge, “very heavy rifle fire could be heard, it sounded heavier than the 7mm Mauser that both we and the Carrancistas were using.” The Villistas at headquarters were trying to figure out what was happening when a shell launched from the US side of the border landed in one of the racetrack bullpens. The gringos were firing from Sunset Heights.
Under the pretext that some bullets had landed in El Paso, Gen. James Erwin, the commander at Ft. Bliss, ordered a bombardment and sent a number of soldiers across the border that Mexican sources say grew to 4,000.
The Villistas put up minimal resistance. Alberto Jiménez fired on Black soldiers sent in from Ft. Bliss, wounding or killing several. Dorado José Corral died confronting US troops and a group of Villista stragglers faced off with them on the Indian Bridge. There are also claims that Carrancista troops fired on the columns entering Mexican territory. The US did not provide a casualty list.
Pancho ordered a withdrawal to Senecú where there were around 100 wounded in the hospital, believing this might be the start of a new punitive expedition.
Carrancista Gen. Francisco González gathered up his forces at the Hidalgo fort and—as if it were none of his business—let Villa deal with the gringos. Gómez Morentín, risking his life, delivered a note to Erwin written by Ángeles in which he demanded to know why, if his argument was that bullets had crossed the border, he had not intervened until June 16, asking whether or not he had authorization from his government to do so. Erwin did not reply and expelled Villa’s secretary from the United States for “violating immigration laws.”
The gringos were still bombarding Senecú without taking very careful aim while their cavalry crossed the border through the little town. US forces captured thirty or forty wounded Villistas who were turned over to the Carrancistas.
Villa pulled back slowly. Palo Chino, Tierra Blanca, Samalayuca, as if he were trying to draw the United States into Chihuahua’s interior, however, the latter soon returned to base. Jaurrieta drew up a balance sheet of the column, “downcast groups, without organization, without cartridges, hungry, prisoners of a profound sadness written on all their faces,” dying of thirst after marching thirty-five kilometers. They captured Villa Ahumada, where they fought the Carrancistas, as J.B. Vargas put it, “without enthusiasm.” They lived off butchered cows and asadero cheese, which they bought from the residents. They carried only a “meager supply of ammunition.” Hipólito was still in a coma, so they carried him towards the Palomas Mountains.
Scouts reported a column on its way from Chihuahua under the command of Gen. Pablo Quiroga. Soon after the Battle of Juárez, Gen. Manuel Diéguez, Villa’s old enemy from the battles of Jalisco, had substituted Castro as chief of operations in Chihuahua. Diéguez changed tactics: neither following Murguía’s hot pursuit, nor Castro’s abandonment of the countryside and concentration in the cities. Rather, he would pursue and harass them, moving throughout the state by train. Villa recovered rapidly from the defeat at Ciudad Juárez, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to put Diéguez’s pelados to a little test?”
On June 21, Pablo Quiroga recaptured Villa Ahumada. On the morning of June 22, his men set out ready to fight on tall, surplus horses that he had purchased from the gringo army, but his position was given away by an enormous dust cloud. Villa threw three cavalry columns at them, remaining behind with just one assistant on the roof of a mill. The cavalry charge did a great deal of damage to the Carrancistas as their large horses bolted off, “it looked like a riding school made up of novice students.”
Villa next headed down to Durango and tormented the region and then split up his brigade. Jaurrieta had attempted to collect the $20,000 owed to them by Alvarado Mining Co. to purchase arms, but the company didn’t make good on its promise. At the time, the Villista guerrilla had no other way to get ammunition other than what they obtained through fighting or buying it off Carrancista soldiers in Chihuahua. One of the last remaining arms and ammunition smuggling networks left in El Paso (in which Holmes, Frank Miller, and Dick Harrel from the United States participated), was dismantled when the three were arrested.
Villa and his guard arrived in Urbina’s territory, Las Nieves. However, the Villistas spread word of his presence throughout the entire north. As Vargas put it, Villa “had the knack of whereabouts and was [. . .] all over the state of Chihuahua.”
On August 13, Andrés Ortiz, the governor of Chihuahua, offered $50,000 pesos for Villa’s capture. Whether it was because of this or because of Emiliano Zapata’s recent assassination, the fact is that Villa was racked with distrust once again. Muñoz recounted that “he began to ride at the end of the column so as not to have his back to anyone. When it was time to eat, he watched the women making tortillas carefully, crouching beside them to eat, and at night he continued his old practice of waking up someplace different than where he was seen going to bed to sleep.”
Three Villista brigades gathered in August on the border between Chihuahua and Durango, and Villa unveiled a new and fantastic plan: capture the city of Durango. The operation had to be carried out in total secrecy, “One of Gen. Villa’s plans for a campaign that left the enemy completely stunned.”
As he approached the objective, Villa sent messages to the groups operating in Durango to cut the bridges that connected the capital to La Laguna, but his orders were not followed and access from Torreón was not severed.
The march was undertaken in the middle of terrible storms. Jaurrieta recalled that “On the eve of occupying the town of Canatlán, we walked for more than ten hours in the rain, on many occasions the water was up to our horses’ knees.” They occupied the town without resistance as the Carrancistas had fled, continuing on until, several hours later, they came upon a scout train that reversed directions when it saw them. (The train revealed their position by telegraph, prompting the Carrancistas to mount a relief expedition from Torreón.) Finally, Mercado Mountain, which overlooked Durango, came into view.
When the Villistas approached the outer reaches of the city, its defenders evacuated the plaza, but Villa sensed that reinforcements were closing in and did not advance. It turned out he was right, three trains appeared from the north carrying some 2,000 cavalry and infantry troops with machine guns mounted on the roofs. Martín López attempted to block the convoy, confronting it at Labor station. Villa, who was preparing to lead a charge against the fleeing Durango defenders, turned around to support Martín and tore up the tracks. The Federales were shocked to come under attack to cries of ¡Viva Villa! and, for several minutes, the assault from both sides of the train seemed to confuse them. Martín López and his brigade crossed over a flooded area and came within a few meters of one of the trains, but they were pushed back by machine-gun fire.
Gómez Morentín described how, “After the shock wore off and—upon realizing that the attackers on one side of the train could not advance because of the volcanic terrain, which blocked the Villista cavalry’s movements—the Carrancistas pushed all their people to that side and managed to fend off the revolutionaries, leaving the field littered with cadavers. After defeating the attackers on one side, the Federales charged furiously against the other side, which was in serious danger, to the point where the Villistas had gotten within forty meters of them.”
Now the troops that had evacuated Durango got themselves back together and began returning. Villa decided there was no other choice than to retreat. “We found ourselves obliged to fall back towards the north, defending the total width of La Calera plateau. The retreat was carried out in complete order.” During their flight, one last bullet hit Martín López without anyone realizing it. The bullet entered through his back, penetrating all the way through to his stomach; it was the twenty-third wound he had suffered.
Gen. Pedro Fabela’s troops continued to chase Villa. Trillo managed to get word to Villa that Martín was seriously wounded after they broke off contact with the pursuing troops. Villa ordered the column to continue while he and a small group brought Martín to Canatlán. The village healer tried to help him, but he was in very bad shape. They moved at night, carrying López through the area until they reached a Dr. Morales who diagnosed him with an advanced case of peritonitis. The doctor told Villa that Martín wouldn’t last twenty-four hours, but the wounded man appeared to perk up and Villa didn’t dare tell him. They retreated to the north, accompanied by the doctor. In Las Cruces, near San Juan del Río, Durango, the area around Villa’s birthplace, the doctor informed Villa that there was nothing else he could do. Villa reportedly responded, “If you believe there’s nothing more to do, give him an injection so we have time to bury him now while those friends of ours are still far off.”
The doctor removed a hypodermic from his bag.
Martín López died on September 4. Camerino Rodríguez saw “Pancho break down crying. I watched him from a distance take out a handkerchief and dry his eyes, he fell into despair, walking back and forth kicking stones.” One anonymous corrido recalls: “Pancho Villa cried for him/ the Dorados cried, too/ all the people cried for him/ even the most hardened he knew.”
Villa, distraught, dressed the deceased “in his own clothes.” They buried him beside a small shack on a ranch called Agua Vieja. Of all the deaths that had hurt him, this was one of the worst. Martín López was Villa’s son. For a man with so many children, this was his real son, his guerrilla son, who had been by his side since 1910.
When the Carrancistas trailing Villa discovered the grave, they couldn’t believe it and dug up Martín López’s corpse to “see the shot in his belly and they wiped the dirt off his face.”
At the end of September, Villa tried the commanders of his Durango troops, Bernabé Ávila, Isidro López, and Alberto Salazar, in a court-martial on La Zarca hacienda and had them shot for not carrying out his order to cut off reinforcements from Torreón. He then ordered the brigade to split up once again into several columns and set a new meeting spot for San José del Sitio.
The first two columns to leave were to spread word that Villa and Ángeles were traveling with them to throw the Carrancistas off the trail. The two generals, along with a small group of men, wandered through the mountains until they arrived at the ranch of Manuel Ochoa’s widow, where Ángeles had left a bag with his things.
During those months, Pancho married María Isaac Reyes in Rosario, Durango, and revived a relationship he’d maintained since 1917 with María Arreola Hernández, a native of Rincón de Ramos, Durango.
Around the middle of October 1919, the area was hit by a powerful storm while they were camped out on Cumbres del Gato Mountain. “The last days have been calm, all things considered. It doesn’t stop raining and we are out in the open.” This went on for several weeks. The differences between the two generals were becoming more acute. Ángeles questioned the point of such short campaigns and frequent dispersions. Villa responded that, as they didn’t have that many resources, it was necessary to rest the men and the horses. Gómez Morentín reported that Villa said: “If the horses tire out, where will we replace them? It’s not like it was five years ago when we killed horses by the hundreds and replaced them within hours from the haciendas. Now, my general, you can see that there are no horses in all of Chihuahua and that soon we are going to have to move to Coahuila or Nuevo León to provide for ourselves because Chihuahua isn’t good for making revolutions anymore.”
Ángeles argued that not campaigning for six months would give the Carrancistas time to recover. They could never come to an agreement. Ángeles had one more deep-seated disagreement with Villa: he couldn’t see the point of such a prolonged guerrilla war. He once said to Jaurrieta and Villa that he had not come to fight, but rather to bring organization and peace, to unite the armed dissidents under the program of the Alliance, even if it meant talking to the Carrancistas. Villa, so they say, replied, “Ah, my general, how innocent!”
In the end, Felipe Ángeles decided to part ways with the column. He believed his mission had failed. He couldn’t return to exile, believing that death was all that was left, or so he thought, but then he reconsidered. What really happened? Nothing was ever very clear about their separation. Villa told him, “Don’t leave my side, my general, because they are going to hang you. An old coyote is telling you this.” Yet Villa gave in and provided him with provisions and a guard.
Supposedly, the two had agreed to meet again in five weeks, but both knew it wouldn’t happen. They say that Ángeles later sent Villa a note in which he told him he had decided to continue moving forward. Forward? Ernesto Ríos claimed that the note said, “. . .I have better prospects of achieving the ends which inspire both of us.”
Villa recommended he go down the valley on the southern side of the mountain, that he stick to moving south and not trust anyone. Gómez Morentín recounted, “Gen. Villa watched sadly as Gen. Ángeles moved off. He seemed to sense that he would never see him again. The guerrilla spent almost a whole day like he was nailed in place in the highest part of camp, watching the small dust cloud kicked up by the group marching off under the command of Gen. Ángeles.”
The separation must have taken place during the third week of October 1919. Ángeles’s group was guided by Maj. Félix Salas from Martín López’s column who had received permission to go visit his family.
Ángeles’s group apparently ran out of food as they roamed, and he suffered an attack of malaria. Ángeles would later say that “finding myself in very difficult circumstances in the mountains, during which I spent whole days without eating, Félix Salas, the old commander of Martín López’s guard, offered to let me stay at his house, which was just a cave where he lived with his wife (in the Nonoava Mountains).”
Salas, who was very demoralized by his commander Martín López’s death, decided to apply for amnesty and went to Huejotitlán to meet with another converted former Villista, Gabino Sandoval, commander of the Balleza social militia. Sandoval offered Salas amnesty for himself and five of his men in exchange for turning over Ángeles.
In the official version, Sandoval left in pursuit of Ángeles on November 5, and found his group in a cave five days later, leading to a skirmish. Ángeles, taken by surprise, escaped with five of the men from his guard.
Five days later, November 15, they were captured in Ciénaga de Olivos. Ángeles was unarmed, as the witnesses were forced to admit in the future trial. Cervantes claimed that he had the “aspect of a corpse” due to hunger and malaria. He was carrying two books in his bag: La Vida de Jesús by Ernest Renán, and a biography of Napoleon.
Of the five men accompanying him, they shot Isidro Martínez in the heart and then hanged him; the social militiamen told him they would go wipe out his family, even the dogs. They shot two others without trial in Camargo and brought the two remaining, Arce and Trillo, (who were former Carrancista military officers) to Chihuahua to be tried together with Felipe.
Ángeles was initially brought to Parral by his captors, where Agustín González took a photo of him. Ángeles signed his autograph and wrote a note in Capt. Manuel Torres’ notebook: “My death will do more for the democratic cause than all my life’s work. The blood of the martyrs enriches all just causes.” His arrival by train in Chihuahua on November 22 produced a spectacle. Thousands of people of all social classes came to the Central station. A double file of soldiers from the 62nd Battalion guarded him. Tensions ran high as the authorities believed that Villistas could mix amongst the multitude and attempt to free him.
Diéguez, who arrived in Chihuahua a few minutes before Ángeles, also by train, attempted to intercede to avoid submitting him to a court-martial as he was not a soldier, but Carranza’s telegram was definitive: “Comply strictly with the law without admitting prejudices of any kind, neither for or against.”
The novelist Rafael Muñoz described how “The general wore a cheap Palm Beach suit,” which someone in Jiménez had given him and he had shaved his mustache. They locked him up in the cavalry barracks. Ángeles, who was very tired, threw himself on a cot and resumed reading Renán’s book.
The trial started on November 23. Carranza received hundreds of letters (one of them with one thousand signatures) and telegrams demanding amnesty. Roque González Garza, from exile in the United States, sent a telegram to which Juan Barragán replied, writing that he hoped “you will present yourself in enemy territory, I’m sure you would have the same luck as your defendant general.”
Some journalists and historians believed that Ángeles prolonged his trial with one thousand and one rhetorical flourishes because he was waiting for Villa to pull off a coup de main to save him; others claimed that he gave long speeches, waiting for Carranza to soften under the pressure and commute his death sentence, which he was surely going to receive. The arguments, however, don’t sound convincing. It was his style, how could he not give his captors a lesson, one last time, “If you are going to shoot me, I must justify my actions.” Muñoz recounted a very large part of the public that took his side, applauding him frequently.
No doubt, over the course of the trial and throughout his long declarations, he concealed Villa’s whereabouts, his movements, and his network of contacts. His line of defense was that he had crossed the border to promote the project of the Mexican Liberal Alliance and he had not participated in the fighting: “I never joined in combat at Villa’s side [. . .]. In the wake of the events in Ciudad Juárez, I separated myself from him [. . .]. I stayed for a long time in Norias Pintas.” It mattered little because they rapidly condemned him to death. His defense attorney, López Hermosa, received one last directive from Ángeles, who was already in the chapel awaiting his execution; he was, at his earliest opportunity, to tell Carranza, “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” López was in Mexico City and fulfilled his charge, which cost him life in exile.
On November 26, Felipe Ángeles was executed at 6:30 a.m. in the 21st Cavalry Cavazos brigade barracks in the city of Chihuahua. The garrison was put on alert since it was said that Villa would arrive at any moment. A photograph, reproduced by Cervantes, shows the streets of Chihuahua filled with people accompanying the coffin.
While Ángeles was roaming through the South, Villa had sent Manuel Banda to conduct operations in La Laguna and to deal with the demoralization among Martín López’s troops. Of the 200 in the brigade, only twenty-five turned up at the next assembly point. Baltazar Piñones’s appointment to commander did not go over well.
Diéguez ordered 6,000 men in several columns to begin pursuit of the guerrillas. The closest they came to capturing Villa was at a place called Presón de Trincheras, just two leagues from Villista headquarters. Villa had said it was better to gather together in order to trick them; he headed out and stole a group of horses at the Castrillón hacienda. When the circle was closing in, he ordered his men to build huge campfires, leaving behind a simulated camp, and then slipped his people out through the enemy lines after prohibiting anyone from smoking.
They clashed once again on November 26, on the Espejo ranch when a 600-strong Carrancista cavalry tried to cut off their path to the North. Villa let them take up positions and attacked them from higher up in the hills, confronting them with 150 men. Villa said that they were limited to “grabbing them by the tail” and used only a part of his troops because it was a “common enemy.” That same day, Ángeles was shot in Chihuahua. Did Villa know? Had he heard any news since his capture? Whatever the case, Villa ordered his men to take no prisoners.
Why go north? Why so far north? He assembled and dispersed his troops, all the while keeping out of sight of three planes (which bombarded and machine-gunned them to great effect) and dodging Federale squadrons which Diéguez had sent out in every direction to locate them. Pancho arrived at the next designated gathering point in Cuchillo Parado, Toribio Ortega’s territory in the northeast of Chihuahua, where he reviewed 1,100 men. He read a newspaper from El Paso there in which Gen. Manuel M Diéguez announced to the nation that he had completely exterminated Villismo.
After three very difficult days of travel through the mountains, they arrived in a village where Villa gathered together the townspeople in a little plaza and identified himself: “I am Francisco Villa and I want to know the oldest men in this town.”
Six or seven elderly men approached him and Villa said, “These old men are going to mount up on good horses and they are coming with me; until they return, nobody can leave town. If someone disobeys this order, I am going to shoot these men that I have with me; if the Federales come by and anyone reveals my arrival, I’ll also shoot them.”
The truth, as Ernesto Ríos told it, was that this was a speech for the gallery because he had already made a prior agreement with the old men.
It was the beginning of a series of brutal rides. They rode their thin and poorly-shod horses up to the watering hole of Carrizalejo, followed Alameda Canyon until it ran into the valley of Santa Rosa, and finally arrived at the gates of Santa Rosa on December 9. Gómez Morentín recalled that Villa “didn’t bring any guides and seemed to orient himself by the sun.” His lieutenants tried to figure out his plans, but the general, since the escape from Cuchillo Parado, had set foot on ground only long enough to change horses, he was a sphinx.
They had been riding for seven terrible days, seven hundred kilometers, in single file when Villa, on the night of December 12, pointed out some lights in the distance to his men: “Everyone should get a good rest now ‘cause at seven in the morning, we are going to fall on those changuitos in Múzquiz.”
Múzquiz, in Coahuila, sat across from the Villista camp, the gateway to one of the country’s richest mining regions. At three in the morning, they entered along Zaragoza Street. They took the sleeping garrison by surprise and killed five soldiers and a corporal in the ensuing fighting as well as wounding seven others. In less than a half an hour, they controlled the town.
In the morning, Villa gathered together the town’s wealthy and demanded $100,000 pesos, giving them until three in the afternoon to collect the sum. Some stayed behind as hostages while the others went to Eagle Pass to get the money. They left both Mexican and foreign businesses alone, with the exception of two owned by Arab businessmen (who were engaged in shady dealings with Carrancista general Paraldi) from which they took everything.
Paraldi, from his position in Monclova, received vague reports that something was happening in Múzquiz and sent a telegram asking who had entered the town. Villa controlled the telegraph office and replied that nothing was going on except that one of the garrison’s officers had gotten drunk and caused a scandal. Paraldi continued to push, and Villa responded that he had, in fact, captured the Múzquiz. In passing, he sent a telegram to Carranza, telling him where he was.
The reply came quickly. Two trains headed out from Monclova carrying troops. The population asked Villa not to fight within the town itself. Villa said that it was not his habit to do so and ordered Ornelas to deploy his cavalry on the tracks. As soon as the Carrancistas saw them, they turned around the trains and headed back to Monclova.
Although they say that Villa learned of Ángeles’ death there, that couldn’t be the case; he must have known sooner, but it is true that it was where he read about the details of his friend’s execution. They also learned about the heated presidential campaign from the newspapers between generals Álvaro Obregón and Pablo González and a civilian named Ignacio Bonilla, whom Carranza was trying to impose in the post. They say that Villa remarked, “We’re going to have another scuffle before summer!”
As long as they occupied the town, Villa ordered the bars closed and decreed the death penalty for any soldiers who got drunk. There were food and clothing distributions for the poor and Villa accepted just ten new volunteers. Villa remained in Múzquiz for three days and left with fourteen wagons filled with provisions, $350,000 pesos, and Stetson hats for his men.
The Villistas moved through the region collecting horses and mules. While doing so, they came across a colony of African Americans. Later, Villa asked for a formal meeting with the chiefs of the Kickapoo tribe to offer an alliance against the Carrancistas who wanted to kick them off their land. After a first meeting, the Kickapoo leaders decided to trust him, and the rest of the tribe came down from the mountains. They arrived dressed in their finest clothing and war paint. Villa told them to line up and gave $10 pesos to each.
The troops spent that Christmas Eve on the Hechiceros hacienda, already back in Chihuahua. Villa had 600 men at this point whom he would scatter for the next two months while he, with a small group, headed for the Pilar de Conchos region.
No matter if it was Murguía, Castro, or Diéguez, it seemed that no one could catch Villa. He could still move through Chihuahua and the north of Durango, as well as the Coahuila border area, as he pleased, time and again defeating whatever they put in front of him.
Five women approached him in Pilar de Conchos to ask him to baptize their children; as many others soon arrived and asked him to do the same, Villa tried to figure out what was happening. One of the women told him she was fulfilling a request from her husband who had been killed in the Durango campaign. Gómez Morentín recalled, “The news that Gen. Villa was going to baptize several kids spread rapidly throughout the area, and within a week, more than 150 children were baptized with Villa becoming their godfather. Villa seemed happy seeing how more and more women came every day with their children in tow, asking him to become their godfather.” He ordered them to bring the priest from Camargo who, in a collective ceremony, made one hundred women comadres (godmothers).