The General and the Jaguar (13 page)

A
T THE COMMERCIAL HOTEL,
the guests listened in awe to the banging shutters and the shrieking wind, which sounded like something sinister and alive
trying to get in. The unceasing din made the Methodists, who were in town for a Sunday school convention, think of God’s wrath,
but the natives may have been reminded of El Delgado, the skinny, dark-eyed witch who was said to live at the base of the
Tres Hermanas. The guests waited for something—a blizzard or a downpour—to douse the violent clamor, but the air contained
no hint of moisture at all, only dust, which came through the cracks in the door and the windows. It was the color of an ancient
seabed, of bleached fossils returning to sand.

In the Southwest, where wood was scarce, many dwellings were built from adobe bricks made of mud, stones, and hay. But William
and Laura Ritchie had been determined to build the Commercial Hotel from the proper materials. So they had torn down their
grocery store and house in Porterville, Texas, and shipped the wooden planks to Columbus, on the train that was often filled
with inebriated salesmen and became known as the Drunkard’s Special. They built a ramshackle two-story building with the recycled
wood and when it was completed, they sold the entire structure to Sam Ravel, a local merchant, and rented back the second
story for fifty dollars a month. Located just north of the train depot, the hotel consisted of twenty-two rooms, a guest parlor,
and a long porch facing the street. William Ritchie, fifty-seven, had been ill in recent weeks and much of the work had fallen
to Laura. She was of Dutch ancestry, a short, plump woman who enjoyed an occasional glass of beer and wore dark shapeless
dresses and old-fashioned black shoes. In one of the few photographs of her, she resembles a boxer—legs planted far apart,
head flung back, hands closed into fists. Yet the aggressive posture could not conceal the kindness that emanated from her
open face. The Ritchies lived in the hotel, along with their three girls, Edna, Blanche, and Myrtle, and a canary, which twittered
brightly in its cage, oblivious to the tumult outside.

After the hotel was completed, Laura had managed to furnish it with amenities that made it one of the most popular places
in town. Curtains framed the windows, rugs covered the floors, and kerosene lamps filled the small cramped rooms with soft
yellow light. Each room was furnished with a washbasin and pitcher, slop jar, bureau, and bed. A hand-cranked Victrola, a
piano, and an organ stood in the parlor. On the porch were eighteen rocking chairs. If the guests were hungry, they had only
to walk downstairs to a restaurant owned by Sam Ravel. Also located on the first floor was a warehouse owned by Ravel, where
two hundred cases of oil and gasoline, twenty cases of axle grease, and rock salt, coffee, flour, and other foodstuffs were
stored.

The Ritchies had many guests staying with them. The best room in the house, located at the top of the stairs and overlooking
the street, had gone to Rachel and John Walton Walker, who had come to town for the Methodist convention. Both were Sunday
school teachers from Playas, New Mexico, a tiny community sixty-three miles west of Columbus. The Walkers had been married
for less than a month and the trip to Columbus was also their honeymoon. They had much to celebrate. John Walton Walker, thirty-nine,
was on his way to becoming a prosperous rancher and contractor. A native of Louisiana, he had been lured to the harsh climate
of southern New Mexico by the Homestead Act, which awarded settlers 160 acres of free land after they had built a home and
farmed the property for five years. His wife, Rachel, was two decades younger, a pretty woman who liked to ride horses and
hike in the mountains. John was a good man, she wrote, “steady and moderate, and at all times hard-working and frugal, at
no time given to intemperance in drinking or excesses of any kind.” The inclement weather gave the Walkers an excuse to linger
beneath the extra quilt that Mrs. Ritchie had provided them and at the end of the day, they hurried back to their narrow bed.

Laura Ritchie was delighted to have the honeymooners as guests. She, too, had been looking forward to the Methodist convention.
Her daughter Edna was to play the piano and her youngest daughter, Blanche, was to sing during the evening festivities. Laura
had made Blanche a new dress out of frothy pink material and bought her a pair of patent-leather slippers for the occasion.

Another guest staying at the hotel was Dr. Harry Hart, a thirty-three-year-old veterinarian who had come to Columbus to inspect
a shipment of cattle. He normally stayed at the two-story Hoover Hotel, which advertised rooms for twenty-five cents, fifty
cents, or a dollar—“and
WORTH IT!
”—but for some reason, he had decided to break routine and checked into the Commercial Hotel. A native of Columbus, Ohio,
Hart was the son of a well-known ice cream manufacturer and had attended Ohio State University from 1904 to 1906. In addition
to his veterinary duties, Hart was allegedly moonlighting as a “secret agent” for the State Department. He knew both Carranza
and Villa personally and had stated publicly that he hoped Carranza would be the victor in Mexico’s civil war. Hart was a
sober and serious-looking man, with thinning hair and unlined skin. His only concession to vanity was the beautiful diamond
and ruby ring that he wore on his right hand, which he had received from a Mexican refugee in exchange for a hundred-dollar
loan.

José Pereyra, twenty-five, who worked for the Mexican consul in El Paso, also was staying at the Commercial Hotel. Several
days earlier, Pereyra and H. N. Gray, who worked for the Mexican consulate’s secret service, were returning from Mexico when
the car in which they were riding turned over. Gray had dislocated his shoulder in the accident and been unable to go to Columbus,
where he had been assigned to keep an eye on border activities, and Pereyra had volunteered to go instead. Clad in a gray
suit, a white shirt, expensive shoes, and a new Stetson, which had his name punched in the hatband, Gray was hardly undercover.

A number of guests lived in the hotel year-round, including Steven Birchfield, a withered cattleman whom the three Ritchie
girls loved dearly and referred to as “Uncle,” and Sam Ravel, who lived in room 13. Ravel had emigrated to the United States
from Russia in 1905 to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. His first stop was El Paso, where he worked in a pawnshop
with two of his uncles and learned to speak English. When he had enough money, he sent for his younger brother, Louis, and
got him a job working as a clerk at the Don Bernardo Hotel in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Eventually he bought another ticket
for Arthur, the youngest of the three Ravel brothers, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone in steerage class with his aunt
and uncle’s silver taped to his legs. When the Mexican Revolution began, Sam Ravel moved to Columbus and opened up a general
store that catered to the locals, as well as to the military troops south of the border. He advertised aggressively and kept
the store open until ten o’clock at night. Since there was little to do in the evenings, the store was always filled with
“kibbichers,” Arthur recalled.

Sam Ravel was pugnacious and hot tempered and had a stormy, little-understood relationship with the Villistas. In July of
1914, he had been held prisoner for four days by “a bunch of Villa’s men” in Palomas, the little settlement across the border
from Columbus. The reasons for Ravel’s imprisonment are unknown but in one letter he notes that he had delivered $771.25 worth
of “merchandise” to one of Villa’s colonels and had not been paid. He was released after he contacted the powerful New Mexico
senator Albert Fall, but continued to complain bitterly of his detention.

The man who had ordered Sam Ravel’s arrest happened to be Captain Leoncio Figueroa, another permanent guest at the Commercial
Hotel and a dashing figure whom the young Blanche Ritchie would remember as having a constant stream of visitors to his room.
In a letter to the state attorney general, Ravel complained about Figueroa: “He still continues to threaten me, and talks
to all the citizens in a very unpleasant way about me, as he seems to do anything he pleases.” Two years earlier, Figueroa
and another Villa agent who lived at the hotel had sued the Columbus constable, T. A. Hulsey, for forcibly entering their
rooms and examining their private papers without authority. The outcome of the lawsuit is unknown.

F
ROM A WINDOW
of his drafty headquarters south of the railroad tracks, Colonel Herbert Slocum, commander of the Thirteenth Cavalry, could
see the horse patrols crow-hopping down the dirt streets. The wind made the horses spookier than usual and the animals jumped
sideways when huge tumbleweeds spun toward them. But they were cavalry horses, big boned and well fed, and each morning they
were saddled up and spurred out into the thrashing air. The patrols clattered along the crumbling rocks that comprised the
international boundary between the United States and Mexico.

Slocum had been a handsome man in his youth, but the long years of campaigning had left his skin deeply weathered. Back East,
he had kept his mustache waxed and trimmed, but now it was an unwashed mass of gray bristles that smelled of cigar smoke and
his own body. Just a month shy of his sixty-first birthday, Slocum was beginning to think about retirement and his return
to the East Coast. He missed the changing seasons, the pleasure of all-day rain, the luxury and abandon of growing things.
Thanks to the generosity of his extremely wealthy and powerful aunt, he had more than enough money to live comfortably for
the rest of his life. But he had been in the cavalry for forty years and wanted to remain in the service until he reached
the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four. Despite the remote postings, the physical hardships, the utter lack of cultural
activities, Slocum knew that he would greatly miss the U.S. cavalry. “Chivalry, courtesy, hospitality and consideration were
characteristics of that old army,” one aged general reminisced.

Slocum was a direct descendant of Myles Standish, one of the original members of Plymouth Colony, and a town bearing the name
of Slocum exists today in Rhode Island. The Slocums were a prosperous, well-educated clan but their financial position radically
changed in 1869 after Herbert’s schoolteacher aunt, Margaret Olivia Slocum, married Russell Sage, a secretive and ruthless
Wall Street financier. When Sage died, he left Margaret Olivia his entire fortune, which was valued at approximately seventy-five
million dollars.

Mrs. Russell Sage, as his aunt preferred to be called, believed strongly in helping others. She established the Russell Sage
Foundation, which was dedicated to the “improvement of social and living conditions in the United States,” and founded Russell
Sage College in upstate New York to train young women entering the field of social reform. Mrs. Sage distributed the rest
of the fortune among family members, with eight million dollars going to her brother Joseph Jermain Slocum—Colonel Slocum’s
father. Joseph Jermain, in turn, passed some of the money on to his son.

Like his aunt, Colonel Slocum was generous and gave away more than what he earned each month in army pay. Even then, he had
enough left over to hire house servants and provide monthly disbursements to his two sons. Wealth gave Colonel Slocum a special
status even among the well-connected cavalry officers, yet he remained humble about his great fortune. He was a considerate
husband, a thoughtful father, and had a soldier’s belief in duty and honor, which he sought to instill in his children: “Be
constant on the job; do more than you are expected to do, and do it well. Get to the office, on the job, early, and stay late;
get there before the time required, so that you may always be known to be a man on hand. Do all that which is placed before
you to do to the very limit of your ability. But in doing all of these things do them without antagonizing those with whom
you are associated for fear that jealousies may be aroused, which are sometimes injurious.”

Slocum’s long, thoughtful letters were prompted perhaps by knowledge of his own youthful follies. He had entered West Point
in 1872, where he proved to be a lackluster student, ranking near the bottom of his class in most subjects. He also received
a large number of demerits each year, which were given for various infractions. In 1876, the year he was to graduate, he was
found deficient and discharged from the academy. The discharge did not seem to have any serious consequences for his military
career and that summer he was made a second lieutenant in the Twenty-fifth Infantry. A month later he transferred to the Seventh
Cavalry, which had suffered many casualties at Little Bighorn but was still stationed on the frontier.

Slocum was at Fort Beaufort in the Dakotas when Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada after the Bighorn battle, decided to
surrender. “His rag tail outfit were bunched together on the prairie in front of the C.O. quarters and came forward and laid
down their guns. Of course they did not have any modern or very serviceable guns, naturally, these had been left behind (for
cash) with their late friends in Canada but we took what they had and searched their travois and the Red River Carts, old
and dilapidated.” As Slocum was putting away their guns, an Indian named Lone Wolf pulled his own weapon from the pile and
gave it to him as a gift.

Slocum participated in the military campaigns against the Sioux, Nez Percé, Cheyenne, and Apache. He went on to fight in the
Spanish-American War and in the Philippines before returning to the United States. He was promoted to colonel in 1913 and
soon thereafter was appointed commander of the Thirteenth Cavalry.

Despite his less than stellar performance at West Point, Slocum had made many good friends at the military academy, and by
1916 some of those friends had risen to the highest ranks of the War Department. They included Hugh Scott, chief of staff,
and Tasker Bliss, assistant chief of staff, both promoted to major generals the previous year, and Ernest Garlington, the
inspector general of the army and a brigadier general. But to the farmers and shopkeepers in Columbus, Slocum often appeared
high-handed and pompous and frequently referred to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in derogatory terms. He was not alone; a
pernicious racism existed in the army and in the civilian community toward all minorities. In routine dispatches and even
official reports, rank-and-file soldiers and officers alike regularly referred to Hispanics as “greasers,” “chile peppers,”
“half breeds” and “spics.”