The General and the Jaguar (18 page)

They sprinted toward the adobe hotel, ghost colored and floating like a ship in the first glimmer of morning. Coming toward
them down Broadway Street was a crowd of Mexican soldiers. The troops raised their rifles and screamed,
“Viva Villa!” “Viva México!”

Milton was hit once, then a second time. He began to fall, folding himself around a fiery redness that had materialized somewhere
below his waist. On his left, he saw Bessie, leaping into the air, her eyes round as those of a caught fish. On his right,
Myrtle staggered against some invisible current and then was sucked under. Only the little girl, Ethel, made it safely through
the hotel door.

Ethel told Will Hoover, the big-bellied man who owned the hotel and who also happened to be mayor of Columbus, that the Mexican
soldiers had killed her sister. William Hoover and his mother, Sarah, crept down the hall to the office. Cautiously they looked
out the window and saw their dear neighbor, Bessie, groaning in the sand. William Hoover was very frightened, but he took
a deep breath, opened the door, and dragged Bessie back into the hallway. His mother stood by with a blanket, begging God
to spare them. They could see the Mexicans in the street firing indiscriminately at the windows and doors. “Why they did not
shoot into the hall, was God’s answer to my earnest prayer,” Sarah Hoover later wrote.

Bessie’s skirts were soaked with blood. She had been shot twice, once in the abdomen and once through the chest. With William
and Sarah Hoover crouched over her, the young woman murmured, “I am safe,” and died.

Will Hoover and his mother returned to her room, where the rest of the family lay on the floor. It was the safest room in
the hotel because the raiders couldn’t shoot directly in. Charlie Miller, the druggist, lived in one of the upstairs rooms.
During a seeming lull in the fighting, he grabbed up his keys and decided to check on his business. As he opened the hotel
door, wrote Sarah Hoover, “They shot him and he fell back dead in our office.”

In a tiny house next to the Hoover Hotel, Susan Parks, a nineteen-year-old telephone operator, cowered with her baby daughter,
Gwen. When she peeped out the window, she saw a Mexican officer giving orders:

A bugler stood beside him and a little farther off was a drummer. The man in the uniform was Villa. I am absolutely certain
of it. He was dressed in a brigadier’s uniform with a cap on in front of which was a medallioned Mexican eagle worked in gold
braid with a black background. I have seen so many pictures of the man that there is no possibility of mistake. His beard
was about two inches long. If I had not been sure of recognizing him by his features, the proof would have been in the way
the Mexicans came dashing up to him every minute or so for orders.

Villa’s exact position during the raid has been a matter of controversy for decades. Some Mexicans who were captured said
that he remained at the rear, directing the fight. Others argue that he was superstitious about dying on U.S. soil and hovered
just on the other side of the international border. But Maud Wright insisted that Villa was mounted on horseback and entered
Columbus with his officers.

Mrs. Parks grabbed up her little baby girl and crept to the switchboard. When she lit a match to see the instruments, bullets
shattered the window, covering them with glass and splinters. On her hands and knees, she crawled back across the room and
put the baby under the bed and then returned to the switchboard and began dialing the number for the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss.

A
LL OVER
C
OLUMBUS,
in the wooden houses that rose tentatively from the desert floor, the residents were making life-and-death decisions. Should
they flee? Should they stay? Would the marauders burn them alive?

Archibald Frost and his wife, Mary Alice, lived in a modest home behind their furniture store with their four-month-old son.
Archibald thought the best place to hide might be the store basement. “I realized by the bullets flying around it was an attack
of some kind, and I thought possibly that we had time to get into the store and get in the cellar.” He grabbed his pistol
and his wife held their infant son. Together they crept around to the front of the store. “We had to pass through what seemed
to me was machine gun fire. The bullets sang as they came through the air. And there seemed to be many of them in the air
at the same time,” Archibald later said. He unlocked the door and Mary Alice dashed inside with the baby. Archibald returned
to the porch and looked in the direction of the gunfire. “It was to the west and southwest of me and there were so many guns
firing that it caused a halo for a space of about a block, the light of the flashes from the rifles. Previously to that I
had heard a bugle, it must have been a Mexican bugle, for its call was different from any bugle call I had ever heard, and
was beautiful to listen to.”

As Frost started across the porch, a bullet slammed into his right shoulder and knocked him to the ground. On his hands and
knees now, he crawled into the store as bullets shattered the windows behind him. Once inside, Frost realized that the cellar
might not be a safe place after all because the raiders could set the store on fire and roast them alive. Then he remembered
his new Dodge Brothers touring car parked in a garage behind the store. “I whispered to my wife that I thought we had better
get into the car there, and get started and beat it; she did not know I was even wounded at that time, so we walked out the
back door and I managed some way to unlock the garage in the night.”

Frost’s car turned over readily enough. He released the brake, threw the machine into reverse, and started to manually push
the automobile out of the garage. “Usually I give her one shove that sends her clear to the middle of the road.” This time,
though, the car rolled back inside. He gave the car another shove and the vehicle hit the door. On his third attempt, he saw
a Villista standing across the road. The soldier shot at Frost and Frost returned the gunfire. “This Mexican soldier continued
to fire at us during the time the car was being backed down on him, stopped for gear shifting, and started forward again,
except such times as he dodged back of our car to avoid being fired upon himself, when he seemed to be having things too much
of his own way.”

As they raced down the dirt street, other raiders fired on them. A second bullet tore through Frost’s left arm, ricocheting
off the bone before exiting. He kept his foot on the gas and gunned the car north toward Deming. He was bleeding heavily and
soon grew so weak that he asked Mary Alice to take the wheel. She had never driven a car before and hit a bump with such force
that her infant son was catapulted from the backseat to the front seat. Fortunately, he was unharmed. Only after they were
in Deming did they examine the automobile and realize how miraculous their escape had been. Multiple bullets had pierced the
metal behind the driver’s seat. Another bullet, clearly meant for his wife, had ripped through the leather cushion on the
passenger side and struck the windshield. Frost’s clothing was soaked with blood. The front seat, side of the car, and its
running board were also covered with blood. Marveling at their close escape, Archibald suddenly remembered something else:
it was his thirty-fifth birthday.

James Dean and his wife, Eleanor, and their son, Edwin, twenty-three years old, lived north of the business district. When
they heard the gunfire, James thought it was only the cavalry staging a mock battle. “If you have good sense, you will go
to bed and get your rest,” he told his wife and son. Eleanor and Edwin dressed anyway. Edwin loaded a rifle and left it at
the head of his parents’ bed and started down to the grocery store to get more guns and ammunition. Eleanor wanted to go to
the home of their neighbor, R. W. Elliot, whose house was made of adobe. James told her to go ahead and that he would join
her later. “So I went & he came but would not go in the house. We all tried to get him in but he wanted to watch. He would
go over to the house & look around and then come back.”

As James paced back and forth, the attack on the small town intensified. The Mexicans set fire to the Lemmon and Romney general
merchandise store and the flames soon leaped to the dry wood of the Commercial Hotel. James decided to go downtown and help
put out the fires. “Mr. Dean, you can’t do that. Come back here. They’ll kill you!” screamed a neighbor. But he would not
be deterred and disappeared into the night. Eleanor grew frantic with worry. She went home, built a fire, made coffee, and
waited for her husband and son to return. “I knew there would be lots of wounded & they would need water & made coffee, so
that any who needed it could be refreshed. I took some over to the others and drank a cup myself. . . .”

The Commercial Hotel began to burn rapidly, the fire stoked by the kerosene and gasoline stored in Ravel’s warehouse on the
ground floor. Upstairs, Rachel Walker and Laura Ritchie and her three daughters ran from window to window looking for help.
Laura Ritchie kept wondering where the U.S. cavalry was. “I wondered why—the soldiers had always been good to us—I wondered
why they had not come to us; I wondered why somebody did not come to our assistance after our building had caught on fire.”

Suddenly up the back stairs came Juan Favela, the modest and gentle cowboy-rancher who had tried so hard to warn Colonel Slocum
of the impending attack. “The hotel was afire. At that time my daughter, Edna, appeared at the back door; she darted back
again and she said, ‘Oh, mamma, there is Juan Favela at the bottom of the stairs.’ She recognized Juan Favela’s voice, and
he says, ‘Edna, come to me, I will take care of you.’ So we all went down.” Joining them was Uncle Birchfield.

Favela led the group down the stairs and across the alley toward an adobe hut that had already been ransacked. Edna suddenly
remembered her canary and broke free and ran back up the stairs to retrieve the bird. But the cage was smashed and the canary
already dead. Then she ran down the front steps to look for her father and saw his body lying in the street. “So it was Edna
who brought back the sad news that our father, our wonderful, gentle, gay and lighthearted father was dead,” Blanche would
later write.

Rachel Walker, irrational after seeing her husband’s body, remembered a man holding her, telling her she must get out, that
the hotel was burning, and that she must not go down the front stairs as they were burning, too. Two men lowered her from
a rear window with a blanket. When she was about half a block from the army post, an American soldier ran out from their lines
and carried her to the post hospital, where she spent the remainder of the night, begging someone to go for her husband’s
body.

One man did not escape with the others and his remains would be found in the rubble the following day. William Ritchie had
registered him and Laura thought he was a soldier. “Any more than that, I do not know,” she said.

F
ROM ABOUT 4:30 TO 5:45 A.M.,
the battle raged. Horses stampeded through the streets and small groups of men could be seen fighting in the lurid light
cast by the burning buildings. In the army camp, the cooks engaged in fierce, hand-to-hand combat with attackers who sought
shelter near the adobe cookshacks. One group of Mexicans broke down a door only to find the cooks waiting for them with pots
of boiling water and kitchen axes. A second group was dislodged from their hiding space by the shotgun pellets that the cooks
used to hunt game. A third was raked by machine-gun fire.

Corporal Paul Simon, twenty-six, who played in the regiment’s marching band, was killed when a bullet crashed through the
flimsy walls of the barracks. John C. Nievergelt, fifty, another member of the band, was shepherding his wife and daughter
from their home to the camp when he was fatally wounded. Sergeant Mark Dobbs, twenty-four, one of Lucas’s machine gunners,
was shot through the liver but remained at his post until he died from loss of blood.

Lieutenant Castleman and his troopers set up a skirmish line, with the Hoover Hotel on their left flank and the Columbus State
Bank on their right. Nearby was Castleman’s own house, where many of the officers’ wives had taken cover. Using the light
from the fires, they aimed their rifles down Broadway, methodically picking off the invaders. Lieutenant Lucas had three of
the machine guns aiming north into the town from various points along the railroad tracks and a fourth trained on the corrals.
Thirty riflemen were deployed along the railroad tracks facing the town. South of the railroad tracks, in a deep ditch that
ran parallel to the Deming road, crouched Lieutenant Horace Stringfellow and his men.

An army account of the raid noted that Herbert Slocum managed to join his troops “about dawn,” which is consistent with what
several eyewitnesses remembered. Louis Ravel, who had been hiding beneath the pile of hides, escaped out the back door of
the store and ran into Slocum in front of the colonel’s house. Slocum asked the young man what was going on and Ravel told
him “that the town had been attacked by Mexicans and was then in possession of the Mexicans, and that part of the town was
burning. . . .”

Edwin Dean, who had wound up at the intersection where Castleman and his troopers were having good success at methodically
picking off Villistas, saw Slocum coming down the street from the direction of his house. Castleman reassured Slocum that
everything was under control and urged him to go home. “Everything is all right, Colonel, you had better go back. You can
not do anything here.” Slocum “stood around and talked a little bit and then went back north,” Dean added.

Eventually Colonel Slocum made his way to the small knoll south of the railroad tracks, which the Villistas had used as a
cover and landmark to coordinate their attack. Also converging on the hill were Lieutenant Stringfellow and Captain Smyser
and Major Tompkins and some sixty other armed soldiers. Remembered Stringfellow: “Colonel Slocum had been shot at. He had
a bullet hole transversely through the barrel of his revolver and began walking up and down the firing line on top of the
hill with me at his side until I persuaded him not to risk his life so freely.”