The General and the Jaguar (11 page)

“Why did you not send an escort with the train, as you told me you were going to do?” asked García.

“I did not have the men to send, and it was not needed from here to Chihuahua, but I ordered General Gonzáles to give them
an escort from Chihuahua to Cusi.”

“Why did not General Gonzáles give them the escort?”

“He said he did not have men enough, and, in the second place, he advised me that the train did not need an escort, as there
was no danger, as that portion of the country had been rid of the Villistas.”

Andrés García sighed. “We will wait and see the consequences of this stupidity.”

On the evening of January 13, 1916, a riot broke out in downtown El Paso when two U.S. soldiers knocked two Mexicans from
the sidewalk at San Antonio and Broadway Streets. Generalized fighting erupted in the streets and saloons. A National Guard
unit hurried to the police station to guard a jail where twenty-three Villista generals and politicians loyal to Villa were
imprisoned. Several companies of soldiers from nearby Fort Bliss were sent to the business district to help maintain order.
Instead of quelling the uprising, though, some joined it. Wrote a local reporter, “It was estimated that not less than 25
Mexicans were beaten up and assaulted by the soldier mobs and many of these came or were brought to the police emergency hospital
for treatment, though the majority were hastened to their homes by friends.”

The reports of the beatings quickly made their way to Juárez, where Mexican soldiers became so enraged that they began agitating
to cross the river and go to the defense of their brothers. Fortunately, El Paso officials were able to disperse the rioters
with a water hose. Nineteen men were arrested and many more taken briefly into custody. Soon the only sounds in downtown El
Paso were the coyote yelps of the peanut sellers and the sulfurous thump of moving-picture men lighting their fuses.

T
O
M
AUD
W
RIGHT
, the desert sometimes seemed like a choppy sea and the jagged, blue mountains like waves caught in the moment
of turning. The effect was heightened by the voices of the soldiers, which were muffled and indistinct, as if the sounds were
traveling across a large body of water. She let the voices spill over her, too exhausted to grab the words from the air and
break them into English.

Each morning she awoke expecting to be killed by the end of the day. Unable to withstand the strain any longer, she finally
asked Colonel Fernández why they didn’t just go ahead and do it. Unmoved by Maud’s terror, Fernández regarded her impassively.
Then he shrugged and said that Villa hoped that she would die from the rigors of the march. “He intends for you to die a terrible
death.”

But the rank-and-file soldiers displayed an unexpected delicacy toward her, finding her shelter in the ruins of an abandoned
adobe hut where she could rub a little cool water on her burning thighs and caked cheeks. Impressed by her stoicism, they
began calling her the queen of the Villistas. Many of the soldiers, she realized, were mere boys and she grew less afraid.

The alkali dust rose from the horses’ hooves and covered her in white powder. At night, when she lowered her lids over her
scorched eyes, she thought of her dim, clean rooms; the drowsing baby and her husband, blinking as he crossed the threshold,
momentarily blind. Not given to introspection or self-pity, Maud had thrived in Mexico. She had filled her kitchen vases with
the wildflowers that grew along the irrigation ditches and had seen the drenched reds that burst once a year from the palms
of the cactus plants, and the moon, bigger than what she remembered from childhood, lofting up over the wrinkled hills.

One night she crept past her guards and tried to escape on one of Villa’s horses, but the horse pranced uneasily and before
she could untie it, a guard awakened and demanded to know what she was trying to do. “Untangling the horse,” she replied.
He shoved her back inside, and from that moment on she was watched around the clock.

Maud pushed her heels down in the stirrups to brace her body against the painful trot of her flat-footed horse, ate the unsalted
mule meat and tortilla scraps that were tossed her way, and watched as the soldiers around her began developing the classic
symptoms of dehydration. Their tongues became thick in their mouths and their eyes grew red. Even Villa’s watchful eyes flared
with red, as if he had swallowed a piece of the sun. For the first time she noticed couriers coming and going from their camp,
which meant that Villa was in communication with the outside world. And when the column stopped to rest or graze the horses,
she saw Villa and his officers huddling together in animated conferences. As the mental fog began to lift, she listened to
the Spanish conversations and with a shock realized the purpose of the march: Villa was going to attack Columbus, New Mexico,
a flyspeck of a town located just three miles north of the border.

It was the second time Villa had led his guerrilla band in the direction of the United States. In late January, after the
Santa Isabel massacre, he had planned to attack U.S. settlements in the Big Bend area of Texas. “I shall hold none of you
after that adventure and I assure you that you will not regret participating in this last expedition with me,” he promised
his troops. But his column suffered from so many desertions that he decided to turn back and rebuild his forces. On the return
trip, he held up a train bound for Juárez and allowed his soldiers to take as much loot as they could carry. One of the passengers
was a former Villista general named Porfirio Ornelas, who had accepted Carranza’s offer of amnesty. Villa killed him instantly.
“I might have let the fool live,” he said later, “but he did deserve punishment for his ingratitude toward me.”

O
N SUNDAY, MARCH 5,
the column of Villistas ransacked another ranch and took a second American hostage: an African-American named Edwin “Bunk”
Spencer. They “feasted” on molasses and corn they had taken from the ranch and then continued on their way. As they drew closer
to the border they grew more secretive and restricted their movements almost entirely to nighttime. Soon they were traveling
across a high flat plateau that tipped north like a tray. As shooting stars sped across the oceanic darkness, the soldiers
talked softly about Pancho Villa. Many were convinced that he wore an invisible suit of armor that kept bullets from piercing
his body. To Maud, though, he seemed almost shell-shocked, his forehead creased in a permanent frown, his mouth hanging open,
and his eyes fixed on some invisible point in the distance. She tried to talk with him repeatedly, but he always waved her
away, telling her to speak to one of his subordinates.

The following day, Monday, March 6, couriers arrived in camp with news of a dreadful fire that had occurred that morning in
the El Paso city jail. Sixteen men had been killed outright and another nineteen had been badly burned in the blaze, according
to initial reports. Villa grew crazed with rage, thinking the fire had been intentionally set and that some of his closest
supporters had perished. In fact, the El Paso newspapers reported that the fire had been accidentally started while the inmates
were undergoing their weekly delousing procedure. Some prisoners were just stepping from their vinegar and coal oil baths,
others were still dipping their clothing in gasoline, and many had already put back on their gasoline-soaked garments and
had been locked back into their cells. All the prisoners had been warned against smoking or striking a match, but a young
man named H. M. Cross, who had been arrested that morning for trying to steal a baseball glove, had apparently not been given
the instructions and started to light a cigarette. Instantly the gassy air exploded into flames. The prisoners who were still
wet from their baths or who had put back on their gasoline-soaked clothes died horribly. Others who were locked in cells on
the upper level suffocated. A lucky few managed to escape.

Forty-three people were in the jail at the time of the fire. Nearly two dozen former generals and politicians who had supported
Villa had been rounded up and jailed two months earlier, at the time of the train massacre, but the initial newspaper stories
make no mention of any Villistas among the prisoners and it’s not clear whether any, or all, of these men were still in jail
when the fire broke out. Nevertheless, the incident only bolstered Villa’s determination to attack Columbus; he vowed that
upon arriving, he would make “torches” of every man, woman, and child.

But two more days of hard riding still lay ahead of them and Villa’s officers struggled to keep the conscripts from bolting.
When darkness fell that night, five soldiers slipped away and Candelario Cervantes was dispatched to hunt them down. He returned
to the camp several hours later with their horses, saddles, guns, and ammunition, which were divided among the remaining marchers.
The deserters, presumably, were lying dead somewhere in the brush. It was not surprising that Villa would assign Cervantes
the task. He was a fanatically loyal and resourceful fighter who had come to Villa’s attention early in the revolution when
he scared off a contingent of federal troops by making them think that wood stacked on the backs of mules was artillery guns.
He had a square face, a fleshy nose, and a left eye slightly larger than the right, which gave him an unpredictable and volatile
air. The volatility was further enhanced by his hands, clenching and unclenching at his sides, at rest only when he was holding
his beautiful sword.

Cervantes commanded the eighty-member advance guard, the most cohesive and disciplined detachment in the column. Most of his
troops came from Namiquipa, one of the oldest towns in Mexico, whose proud and independent inhabitants had been fighting off
Indian attacks for hundreds of years and whose residents had been among the first to take up arms against Díaz. Cervantes
ruled his men with an iron will and they lived in dread of him and simultaneously felt indebted to him for past kindness.
He was the father of two children and appears to have been a prosperous man—a photograph obtained by the U.S. Army shows him
wearing a handsome suit and a Texas-style Stetson. “Cervantes’ control over them was perfect,” army intelligence officers
wrote, adding, “Villa appeared to repose greater confidence in Cervantes than in any other leader.”

On Tuesday morning, March 7, the column saw a wavering green that signified a stand of cottonwood trees. With its broad, shiny
leaves and great, outstretched limbs, the cottonwood was the most beloved of all trees in the desert and a sure sign that
water was near. The soldiers sprinted forward, eager to feel the wet mud between their
dedos del pie.
They had reached the Boca Grande River and the grassy plains of the Palomas Land and Cattle Company, a vast ranch encompassing
two and a half million acres that sprawled along the international border below the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

To the uninitiated, the Palomas ranch seemed like a desiccated wasteland of hills and arroyos flayed unceasingly by wind and
light. In fact, the ranch was quite fertile and capable of sustaining large herds of horses and cattle. Black grama, crowfoot
grama, white grama, and salt grass provided the animals with both sustenance and salt. The Boca Grande River meandered along
its southern boundary, springs bubbled from the ground, and more than 150 earthen reservoirs had been constructed to supplement
the water supply in the dry seasons.

Owned largely by U.S. investor Edwin Marshall, the Palomas Land and Cattle Company had become a frequent target during the
revolution. Cattle and horses were often stolen and the ranch cowboys were killed or held for ransom. Villa, as usual, was
blamed for the crimes, but a ranch official at the time identified at least three other bands who preyed upon the vast spread.
“I know that in the fall of 1914 and the spring of 1915, the Palomas Land and Cattle Company, in order to salvage their cattle,
drove approximately 40,000 head across the international boundary line,” rancher Walter P. Birchfield recalled in a 1936 affidavit.
The ranch owners were in the process of rounding up their remaining livestock when the column of Villistas arrived.

H
ENRY ARTHUR MCKINNEY,
the thirty-three-year-old range foreman, spotted the Mexican troops as they were unsaddling their horses and making coffee.
McKinney was an amiable, good-natured man who had lived in Mexico for many years and was not unduly alarmed by the troops’
presence. Before the revolution, Pancho Villa had often stopped at his ranch to visit the vaqueros who worked for him, and
whenever Villa saw McKinney’s little sister, Pearl, he tried to stroke her bright red hair. “To me he was repulsive, big and
burly and dirty looking,” Pearl recalled. “I didn’t want him to touch me. I learned later that it is an Indian superstition
that anyone having red hair is related to the sun god, and to touch such hair brings good luck.”

The McKinneys had deep roots in the Southwest, particularly in Texas, where a town had been named after the family. One ancestor,
Colin McKinney, had been a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence; another, Robert McKinney, had died at the Alamo;
and a third, Thomas L. McKinney, was with Pat Garrett when he killed Billy the Kid.

Like so many others, McKinney had been forced to abandon his ranch in Mexico as the civil war dragged on. He and his wife,
Mamie, were trying to reestablish themselves on a homestead claim near Hachita, a border town thirty miles west of Columbus,
New Mexico. They had no children, but Arthur was a kind and indulgent husband and they were happily married. To bring in extra
money, he had hired on as a foreman at the Palomas at a salary of $125 a month. On the eve of his departure for Mexico, Mamie
had been terribly worried for his safety and he had gently reassured her, pulling out three letters of safe-conduct he had
received from the Mexican government, including a letter from General Obregón himself.