The General and the Jaguar (20 page)

Upon crossing the international line, Tompkins spotted a low hill that was occupied by a rear guard of Villistas who had been
left behind to cover the retreating troops. He ordered his soldiers to draw their pistols. “Charge!” he bellowed. The horses
galloped up the hill. The Mexicans fired on them but their bullets went high and the Villistas broke and retreated just as
the cavalrymen reached the lower slopes. When the troopers gained the top of the hill, they dismounted and trained their Springfields
on the Mexicans. Their aim was far more accurate and dozens of Villistas and horses fell to the ground.

Realizing that they were now in Mexico and had violated standing orders from the War Department, Tompkins dashed out a note
to Colonel Slocum asking for permission to continue the chase. In forty-five minutes, a messenger galloped back with an ambiguous
answer: Use your own judgment.

Deployed at wide intervals, moving at a fast trot, the Americans charged the Villistas three more times. Each time, the rear
guard of Villistas returned the fire and then continued their southerly flight. Eventually the U.S. soldiers found themselves
on an open plain that was devoid of cover. The main body of Mexicans saw now that they outnumbered the cavalrymen by ten to
one and prepared to counterattack. Tompkins and his men fell back about four hundred yards and waited, but Villa’s men, it
seemed, were too exhausted to launch another offensive. Tompkins debated whether to continue the pursuit, but his troopers
were almost out of ammunition and the horses were badly in need of water so he decided to return to Columbus.

They arrived back in town about one o’clock in the afternoon. In all, they had traveled between five and fifteen miles into
Mexico and had made four stands. The chase had been deeply satisfying; Tompkins’s official report would claim seventy-five
to one hundred Villistas had been killed during the pursuit. The number is probably exaggerated but points to a vexing aspect
of the raid: the reported number of dead Villistas varied wildly. In Slocum’s official report, he stated that a total of sixty-seven
Villistas were killed in the town, the military camp, or in the desert leading to the international line, and later upped
the figure to seventy-eight. Whatever the number, there was no dispute that those charged with protecting Columbus had failed.

I
N THE RUNNING
gun battle back to Mexico, the Villistas dropped their loot, littering the desert with jars of chewing gum and cigars; spurs
and bridles and saddles; wedding rings and gem-studded brooches; shoes and socks and underwear; tablecloths, sheets, and pillowcases,
which caught on the sharp thorns of mesquite bushes and billowed gently in the dawn air. The Mexicans toppled from their horses
into the brush. Most of them died, not as Villa would have hoped—as gladiators with their faces to the sun—but facedown in
the sand, their mouths filled with vomit and soft pitiful moans that rose into the air and were carried off with the heat
of the new day. Among the dead were two boys, both no older than fourteen. One was holding several pounds of candy, the other
a pair of girls’ black patent-leather slippers.

At Arroyo del Gato, roughly sixteen or seventeen miles south of Columbus, the Villistas stopped and unsaddled their horses
for a two-hour rest. Pablo López was suffering greatly from his wounds and so was a colonel named Cruz Chávez, who had been
shot in the abdomen. The two officers were placed on stretchers and
cargadores
assigned to carry them. Nicolás Fernández gave Villa the sad news: sixty men were missing and unaccounted for, eleven of
whom were his beloved Dorados. In addition, twenty-six were wounded, including López and Chávez.

Villa regarded Chávez mournfully. Then he turned to Candelario Cervantes and said, “It has come to this, Cervantes. I gave
way to please all of you.” Cervantes, in turn, lashed out at Nicolás Fernández, saying it was Fernández who kept reassuring
everybody that the attack would be successful. Martín López shook his head in disgust, adding that it had been a “futile effort
for a few dollars.”

L
AURA
R
ITCHIE SLEEPWALKED
over the charred rubble, her three daughters trailing behind, their white faces fixed in the anxious
new expressions that they would carry into old age. The raiders had withdrawn and now her husband lay dead in the street,
his legs almost burned off in the fire. Broken dishes, quilts, and a squarish hump of something that might have been the piano
or organ were visible in the ruins. Puzzled and confused, she hailed Roy Stivison, the school principal, and the Reverend
C. H. Boddington as they made their way through town. In a low voice filled with disbelief, she told them that her husband
had given the raiders all the money he had in his pockets—and they had killed him anyway.

Rachel Walker, too, returned to identify her husband. Only nineteen years old, she had no way to negotiate around the image
of her husband lying in the street, an octopus-shaped puddle of black, sticky blood spreading out beneath him. His corpse
was wrapped in a quilt and taken to John Peak, an undertaker who had come from El Paso. After returning home to bury his “few
pitiful remains,” Rachel suffered a complete nervous breakdown. She remained in bed for weeks, bruised and sore, tortured
by insomnia, her face swelling and breaking out in mysterious eruptions. Her nervous system was so “badly perverted” that
her physician, E. C. De Moss, predicted she would never recover. She was “in a highly excited nervous condition, almost insane,
very ill, suffering from shock of the gravest nature,” he wrote, adding, “she was the most unnerved person that he [De Moss]
has ever seen, during the period of thirty-two years that he has devoted to the practice of medicine.”

Edwin Dean found his father’s body in the street among the dead Mexicans and had the task of returning home and telling his
mother what had happened. There was no easy way for Edwin to break the dreadful news and when Eleanor opened the door, he
blurted out, “Mama they got Papa, he’s killed.” In a sorrowful letter to her other sons, Eleanor wrote, “We got the auto out
& went to him. He lay in the street in front of Walkers store with Mexicans dead all around him but all I saw was Jimmie dead,
dead shot like a dog. They tried to keep me from him but I went to him just the same, oh so white and covered with blood &
all shot to pieces but his face not hurt only on one side.” She and Edwin loaded the body into their automobile and returned
home. Still stiff with unprocessed grief, they had to return to work almost immediately because their grocery store was one
of the few places in town where people could buy food. “People were crying bread, bread, bread,” remembered Ozella Stanfield,
who worked in the store and would eventually marry Edwin.

Members of the Elks Lodge came over from Douglas, Arizona, to help identify the remains of Dr. Harry Hart. Beneath one body,
a friend found a small piece of patterned cloth. “Now I know that this is Hart’s body,” he exclaimed, “for he and I ordered
suits from this same cloth. It was the last of the bolt and we said at the time, ‘No one else can have suits like ours!’”
Another friend remembered his ring and they continued digging until they found it. The gold had been darkened by the flames
but the rubies and diamonds still gleamed brightly in the sun.

Charles DeWitt Miller’s brother and several companions drove down from Las Cruces. Miller’s body had been pulled from the
wreckage of his car and moved to the bank building. His body, too, had been burned but was still recognizable. Confirmation
also came in the form of a Scottish rite ring with his name engraved on the inside.

Bodies were strewn everywhere, particularly on Broadway, where the fighting had been heaviest. Some Mexican raiders were still
alive and twitching or moaning weakly and a few had taken out their crucifixes and placed them upon their breasts. The soldiers’
wives regarded them with a cold indifference. “I passed any number of dead Mexicans, they were lying all through town, and
I could look at their shattered bodies with only an unwomanly joy,” Alice Tompkins wrote in a letter to her parents. Mary
Slocum, the colonel’s genteel and refined wife, experienced similar emotions. “When we came out of the house, the dead and
wounded were everywhere. I did not know I could have such hate in my heart. I saw Mexicans horribly wounded and suffering
terribly and did not care how much they suffered.”

George Carothers and E. B. Stone, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, hurried to Columbus to make separate investigations
of the attack. They were particularly eager to question Maud Wright and Bunk Spencer in order to confirm that Villa was indeed
the mastermind behind the assault and to evaluate the military strength of his forces. Maud was taken to Colonel Slocum’s
house, where a number of women and children had sought refuge, including Laura Ritchie and her daughters. Mary Slocum helped
Maud bathe and gave her lotion to rub on her sore, swollen feet. After Maud had bathed and put on fresh clothes, Bunk Spencer
was asked to pick her out from a group of women standing in a lineup. He identified her correctly, confirming both his story
and Maud’s.

The townspeople and the soldiers walked through the town, looking over the destruction and stopping occasionally to examine
the bodies of the dead Mexicans. They kept the rifles, pistols, swords, and bandoliers of the slain raiders as souvenirs.
One of the townspeople, Leo Lemmon, stooped down to examine the body of a man who was lying in the ditch that ran parallel
to the Deming- Palomas road. He was obviously an officer of some sort and was wearing a khaki uniform, leggings, and a band
around his hat. A commission tucked into one of his pockets identified him as Captain Francisco Prado. Lemmon also found a
small leather diary on his body, which consisted of a series of short entries, beginning on January 1, 1916, and ending on
March 7. Since Lemmon could not read Spanish, he turned the diary over to a companion, Roy Johnson, who read and translated
it. The entry for January 10 leaped out at him: “Today about eleven o’clock we assaulted two trains at Santa Isabel, killing
17 Gringos; leaving afterwards, sleeping at Lago.” The words were the first hard evidence that Villa had been behind the train
massacre. On the body of another dead raider, the soldiers found a leather wallet with the name T. M. Evans stitched on the
inside. The wallet belonged to Tom Evans, the young man who had tucked his gold watch into his underwear before getting off
the train. It was the second piece of evidence definitely linking Villa to the massacre.

A bulky portmanteau, which had apparently been dropped by Villa’s orderly, was also found in the street. It contained recent
commissions bestowed on various officers and numerous receipts for expenditures made by the División del Norte. The cash disbursements
showed that Villa, although dubbed a bandit, had been spending every penny he had on his army. In the months leading up to
the raid, for example, he had purchased large quantities of flour, corn, sugar, salt, chickpeas, and sardines; requisitioned
150 pack mules; shod 300 horses; disbursed funds to doctors who had taken care of the wounded; purchased lamps, tents, quilts,
and clothing; distributed fourteen thousand dollars to his troops and doled out countless smaller amounts as bonuses, commissions,
and rewards.

But the most significant document found in the portmanteau was the letter written from Villa to Emiliano Zapata in which he
suggested they join forces to fight the gringos. In a letter to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, George Carothers wrote,
“I attach importance to this letter, as it clearly proves that Villa has had the intention of declaring war against us for
several months, and has sent emissaries all over the country to incite the people.” Carothers also warned the secretary of
state that the United States would have to capture Villa quickly or run the risk of having to pacify the entire country. “A
very large percentage of the Carranza troops fought under Villa at different times, and deep in their hearts admire him. Furthermore,
they are all the same breed, and deeply resent any invasion of their soil by a foreigner.”

Carothers made the same points in a subsequent letter to General Hugh Scott at the War Department and threw in a few salient
observations about Villa: “He is crazy, from what I could find out among the prisoners, goes about with his mouth open, and
looks dazed. His obsession is to kill Americans, and he has undoubtedly what the Mexicans call ‘Delirio de Grandesa’ or Delirium
of Greatness. He inspired his whole column with the conviction that they could conquer the United States, and that they would
be in Washington in six months. This is a different man than we knew. All the brutality of his nature has come to the front,
and he should be killed like a dog.”

Seven Villistas who had been wounded were taken to the military stockade, including a twelve-year-old boy named Jesús Paez,
who had been shot in the leg. Jesús was a handsome youth, with shining black eyes and a scholarly gravity, and seemed eager
to cooperate with authorities. E. B. Stone, the Bureau of Investigation agent, was so impressed with him that he planned to
charge the captured Villistas with murder, using the boy as a witness. Unfortunately, only two of the seven wounded raiders
would survive: Jesús and a sixteen-year-old youth named Juan Sánchez, so small and slender that he seemed hardly more than
a boy himself.

On the southwestern edge of town, the soldiers and cowboys gathered up the partially burned wood from the Commercial Hotel
and whatever other combustible material they could find and laid it out in a grid. Then they dragged the dead Mexican raiders
onto the woodpiles. Kerosene was poured over the bodies and they were set on fire. An oily smoke rose into the air and a terrible
smell spread through the town. When the fires went out, several soldiers and their girlfriends, who wore immaculate white
dresses, squatted at the edge of one of the funeral pyres, where some of the human shapes were still discernible. One of the
soldiers lifted a blackened corpse into a sitting position and held a revolver to its head while another snapped a picture.