Terror Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  Worried about U.S. intervention, Madero sought to call off the siege, but Villa and ally Pascual Orozco Vázquez ignored that order, attacking on April 7, 1911, capturing the city’s international bridges, and severing telegraph service and electrical power. Surrounded, the federales surrendered on May 10, and President Díaz resigned two weeks later, retiring to exile in France. That did not end the revolution, though, as combat raged on, killing an estimated 10 percent of Mexico’s fifteen million people, while two hundred thousand refugees fled their homeland, mostly resettling in America’s Southwest. Díaz appointed Villa as a colonel in his revolutionary army and went on to win election as president in November 1911. Villa, in turn, soon tired of military discipline and went home to Chihuahua.

  Despite his status as a revolutionary firebrand, Madero proved an inept president, soon dismissing his former allies and relaxing into collaboration with Mexico’s wealthy elite. Worse yet, from Pancho Villa’s point of view, Madero snubbed Pascual Orozco and appointed former Díaz crony Venustiano Carranza as his minister of war. Orozco rebelled in March 1912, while Chihuahua governor Abraham González convinced Villa to oppose his former comrade. Leading four hundred cavalrymen, Villa soon captured Parral from Orozco’s defenders, then teamed with Federal Army general Victoriano Huerta to seize Torreón in Coahuila. In August 1911, Carranza secured election as Coahuila’s governor—a post denied him by Díaz two years earlier—instituting widespread popular reforms.

  All this, the Aguirre sisters watched with mounting interest from Doña Ana County, distracted by mourning for their father when pneumonia claimed his life in August 1912. Alejandro Aguirre lived to see his daughter Sonya marry Clint Parnell, and any disappointment at her wedding to an Anglo vanished with the birth of their first child in time to draw his final breath, ceding the ranch to his twin daughters equally.

  Dolores, for her part, still mourned Paco Yáñez, but she appeared to be recovering with ministrations from Eduardo Calderon, a wealthy Luna County rancher’s only son, whose love cracked her façade of ice, yet happiness eluded them. One week before their nuptials, during a celebration with his friends, Eduardo drank too much tequila before wagering that he could break the toughest bronco on his father’s ranch. The horse broke him instead—his neck at least—and he expired before Dolores reached his bedside.

  That time, her resumption of black widow’s weeds was permanent.

  Across the border, meanwhile, General Victoriano Huerta, military commander of Mexico City, schemed to replace President Madero, encouraged by U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, acting on orders from President William Howard Taft. Pancho Villa learned of the plot, and Huerta staged a preemptive strike, framing Villa for theft of a high-priced stallion. Villa punched Huerta and received a death sentence. Last-minute intervention by Generals Emilio Madero and Raul Madero—brothers of president Francisco—spared Villa’s life en route to face a firing squad, but Huerta still dispatched him to Mexico City’s Belem Prison, then transferred him to Santiago Tlatelolco prison in June 1912. Pancho used his time inside to study history and civics, then escaped on Christmas Day and crossed the Tex-Mex border near Nogales eight days later.

  From El Paso, Villa sought to warn Francisco Madero of Huerta’s impending coup d’état, but in vain. Huerta made his move in February 1913, executing President Madero with Vice President José María Pino Suárez on the twenty-second. Assassins killed Chihuahua Governor Abraham Gonzáles two weeks later, climaxing Mexico’s Decena Trágica—“Ten Tragic Days”—which claimed 5,500 lives and set the stage for even worse to come.

  Installed as president three days before Madero’s execution, Huerta faced immediate rebellion by Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata—forgiven in the interim by Villa, after all—but he acted swiftly to defeat it, driving Carranza from Coahuila to Sonora by August. Watching the events from Texas, Villa returned to join the fight in April 1913, backed initially by only seven men, and pack mules bearing sparse supplies.

  Despite his disappointing presidential tenure, from the grave Madero regained a measure of his reputation as a homegrown revolutionary, murdered by the traitor Huerta and gringo interlopers from los Estados Unidos. Overnight, he became a posthumous rallying point for revolutionaries led by Governor Carranza, forging a constitutionalist army led by seasoned fighters, including Pancho Villa, Álvaro Obregón, Felipe Ángeles, Francisco Múgica, Jacinto Treviño, Lucio Blanco, Pablo González Garza, and Emiliano Zapata. Although not a military veteran himself, Carranza served the force as primer jefe—“first chief”—while deferring to more experienced men on tactics.

  In essence, the new army sought restoration of Mexico’s 1857 constitution, minus vows of reform from the 1910 Plan of San Luis Potosí, which Carranza now deemed “unrealistic.” That compromise would create rifts within the Constitutional Army over time, but for the moment, revolutionary leaders focused on deposing Huerta, whether he survived the coup and fled or joined Madero underground.

  Rallying supporters to his newborn Army of the North—villistas in the popular vernacular—Villa returned to battle with a will. They inflicted a crucial defeat on Huerta’s federales at Zacatecas City on June 23 and pushed on from there toward Mexico’s capital, seizing Torreón, Coahuila, on October 1. One who marched beside him, making headlines in the States, was Ambrose Bierce, a septuagenarian author best known for The Devil’s Dictionary and his short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Bierce was present at the Battle of Tierra Blanca on November 23–24, 1913, then vanished in Chihuahua after penning a letter north on December 26, his fate unknown to this day. That same Christmas season, villistas captured Mexico City with aid from Carranza’s and Zapata’s soldiers, but were repulsed the following spring, whereupon Villa resumed life as a bandit warlord.

  Another of Villa’s American traveling companions, Harvard-educated journalist John Reed, played up Francisco’s role as a rural Robin Hood, reporting that his guerrillas and female soldaderas frequently seized crops and gold, distributing them to the poor. Reed further wrote to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson that Villa “even at one time kept a butcher’s shop for the purpose of distributing to the poor the proceeds of his innumerable cattle raids.”

  From personal experience with Villa, the Aguirre sisters took those rave reviews with a substantial grain of salt. President Wilson also questioned Villa’s good intentions after he arrested nine U.S. Navy sailors at Tampico in April 1914, dispatching two thousand three hundred American troops to occupy Veracruz for six months, resulting in death for twenty-two U.S. servicemen and some three hundred Mexican soldiers.

  Villa, for his part, briefly supplanted Carranza as governor of Chihuahua but seemed more interested in tapping Hollywood to fatten his personal war chest. On May 9, 1914, the Aguirre sisters drove to Albuquerque for the premiere of a Mutual Film Corporation (MFC) production, The Life of General Villa, starring Villa as himself, mixing staged scenes with authentic battlefield footage. The movie was a radical departure from MFC’s normal fare of Charlie Chaplin comedies, produced by D. W. Griffith a year before he embarked on his epic production The Birth of a Nation. Cinematographer Raoul Walsh doubled by portraying Villa as a young man, rejoining Griffith the following year to portray John Wilkes Booth. Villa received a $25,000 advance—$651,000 today—plus 50 percent of the movie’s profits.

  While foreign audiences cheered that cinematic effort, Villa’s war continued on the home front. Following his capture of Torreón, primer jefe Carranza diverted Villa’s forces to Saltillo, perhaps seeking to rob Francisco of the chance to seize Mexico City. Villa complied under protest, then submitted his resignation, but withdrew it prior to capturing Zacatecas City, source for much of Mexico’s silver, on June 23, 1914. That battle cost Villa one thousand soldiers, while slaying seven thousand federales, and when coupled with the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, it finally drove President Huerta from power, who fled into foreign exile on July 15. Huerta’s Federal Army dis
solved in August, while tensions mounted between rival revolutionary leaders.

  To the Aguirre sisters watching events in Mexico from Doña Ana County, it initially appeared that peace would be restored below the Rio Grande. On August 15, one month after Huerta’s disappearing act, Álvaro Obregón signed treaties at Teoloyucan whereby the Federal Army surrendered and recognized a constitutional government. Five days later, Carranza entered Mexico City with great fanfare and assumed command of the new government as “head of the executive power.” October 1 witnessed calls for a new constitutional convention, initially convened in Mexico City, soon shifted to Aguascalientes, three hundred miles north of the capital. Hailed as a “great convention of commanding military chiefs and state governors,” it was in fact the last attempt to forge a united revolutionary front, concluding without great success on November 9. Prominent warlords were barred from government positions, while Eulalio Gutiérrez Ortiz won election as provisional president.

  Villa and Zapata met privately, agreeing on a mutual mistrust of Carranza and Álvaro Obregón. The latter soon withdrew to Veracruz, leaving Villa and Zapata in command of Mexico City. Carranza launched a newspaper campaign portraying Villa as a lawless bandit, and the situation rapidly degenerated into civil war.

  In April 1915, while Sonya Parnell-Aguirre bore her second child, Villa met Obregón in battle at Celaya, Guanajuato, suffering a serious defeat with four thousand villistas slain and six thousand captured over the span of nine days. At the follow-up Battle of Trinidad, waged between April 29 and June 5, Villa suffered another grim defeat with three thousand casualties. Crossing into Sonora for another try, Villa met carrancista general Plutarco Elías Calles at Agua Prieta on November 1, losing many of his fifteen thousand men, while 10 percent of the survivors accepted Carranza’s amnesty offer. Before that month’s end, carrancistas captured Villa’s key advisers Calixto Contreras and Orestes Pereyra, executing them together with Pereyra’s son. Secretary Pérez Rul also deserted Villa, leaving a mere two hundred villistas for their retreat into Chihuahua’s mountains.

  Finally, with nowhere left to turn, Villa began to plot his next invasion of New Mexico.

  Much had changed in the American Southwest since Villa’s raid on the Aguirre ranch. New Mexico was granted statehood on January 6, 1912, followed by Arizona five weeks and four days later. New Mexico’s population had increased by 5 percent, although most of its people still clustered in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Cruces. Columbus, founded in 1891, claimed only seven hundred inhabitants, but it lay only three miles north of the Mexican border, an irresistible target.

  Striking at four fifteen a.m. on March 9, 1916, Villa and five hundred guerrillas wreaked havoc on the sleeping town, waging a ninety-minute firefight that killed nine members of the U.S. Army’s 13th Cavalry Regiment and wounded seven more, slaying fourteen civilians and injuring two others. Against those casualties, one hundred eighty-three villistas were killed or wounded, with seven captured unharmed. Of those, six were hanged for murder, while one’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, Columbus lay in smoking ruins, shops and homes looted and torched, while Villa and the rest of his guerrillas fled back into Mexico.

  Tension ran high along the border after the Columbus raid, and Villa was not finished with his border crossings yet. He struck again at Glenn Springs, Texas, on May 15 (killing three soldiers, one white civilian, and losing two guerrillas); at San Ygnacio, Texas, on June 15 (four soldiers and six villistas killed, four more soldiers wounded); and at Hancock, Texas, on July 31 (killing two soldiers and a U.S. Customs inspector, losing three guerrillas). Through it all, while residents of the Aguirre ranch remained on guard, Sonya and Dolores trusted Villa’s promise to avoid incursion on their land, and he did not return to trouble them.

  In Washington, President Wilson abandoned any former thoughts of Pancho Villa as a modern Robin Hood. Before the ashes of Columbus cooled on March 9, Wilson appointed Newton Diehl Baker to fill a vacant cabinet office as secretary of war, mobilizing five thousand troops under Major General Frederick “Fearless Freddie” Funston to punish Villa’s invaders. Funston, in turn, assigned subordinate John “Black Jack” Pershing to lead a “Pancho Villa Expedition” launched on March 14, 1916, continuing through February 7, 1917—by which time the United States was gearing up to join the First World War. Over the course of those eleven months, American invaders killed an estimated 170 villistas, including senior aides such as second-in-command Julio Cárdenas, General Francisco Beltrán, and Colonel Candelario Cervantes.

  While that mostly futile chase went on, Mexico approved a new constitution on February 5, 1917, including a foundation for land reform and contentious terms for curbing powers of the Catholic Church. Still, peace at home remained elusive during global conflict, while Villa welcomed German arms shipments and President Carranza’s paranoia mounted daily. On April 10, 1919, Carranza allies lured Emiliano Zapata to “peace talks” at Chinameca, Morelos, and shot him in an ambush. Villa fought on until May 21, 1920, when forces under Álvaro Obregón assassinated President Carranza at Tlaxcalantongo in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. Adolfo de la Huerta Marcor served as interim president until November 30, when Obregón succeeded him.

  Between those events, Villa sought and secured amnesty in July 1920, rewarded with a twenty-five-thousand-acre hacienda at Canutillo, near Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua. Two hundred surviving villistas joined him there, enticed by a pension totaling 500,000 gold pesos as bodyguards for what American reporters called a “military colony.”

  From Doña Ana County, it appeared to be all settled then, but such was not the case. Álvaro Obregón heard rumors that Francisco would oppose him in the next presidential campaign and opted for a preemptive strike. On June 20, 1923, while visiting Hidalgo del Parral on business, Villa drove into an ambush by seven riflemen, their fusillade killing Villa, chauffeur Miguel Trillo, personal secretary Daniel Tamayo, and two bodyguards, Claro Huertado and Rafael Madreno. A third bodyguard, although wounded, shot and killed one of the fleeing assassins.

  The Aguirre sisters mourned Francisco’s passing, despite all he had inflicted on their family almost a quarter century before. From a safe distance, they observed as Villa’s name was purged from books and monuments throughout his native land. Neither twin was living in 1975, when a mixed delegation of Mexican and U.S. officials exhumed Villa’s body, finding that someone had severed and stolen his head long ago. The following year, his partial remains were reburied in Mexico City’s Monument to the Revolution, belatedly accorded full military honors.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Ralph Compton stood six foot eight without his boots. He worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist. His first novel, The Goodnight Trail, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was the USA Today bestselling author of the Trail of the Gunfighter series, the Border Empire series, the Sundown Rider series, and the Trail Drive series, among others.

  Lyle Brandt is a pen name of writer Michael Newton, author of 252 novels (54 of them Westerns, 21 as "Brandt"), 98 nonfiction books, and 91 nonfiction articles published since 1977. Writing as "Brandt," Newton won the Western Fictioneers' first Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel in 2010, for Manhunt. Another "Brandt" novel, Avenging Angels, was a Peacemaker Best Novel finalist in 2011, as well as being a Best Paperback Original finalist for the Western Writers of America's Spur Award. In 2017 Newton received a Lifetime Achievement Peacemaker Award from Western Fictioneers. Terror Trail is his third novel in Ralph Compton's Trail Drive Series, preceded by The Badlands Trail and Drive for Independence.

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  Lyle Brandt, Terror Trail