The General and the Jaguar (25 page)

George Carothers had warned of the hostility in his letter to Secretary of State Lansing immediately following the raid: “They
all believe we are cowards, and have a lurking desire to try a tilt with us. My fear is that no matter how hard we try to
keep out of it, once our soldiers commence an invasion in pursuit of Villa, we will be drawn into the greater task of pacifying
the whole country.”

On March 15—only six days after the Columbus raid—a great, confused body of men and horses and mules floundered to its feet
and started down the flat, sloping plain into Mexico. Major Frank Tompkins and his little horse Kingfisher had the honorary
position of advance guard and were followed by Colonel Slocum and the troopers of the Thirteenth Cavalry. A train blew its
horn, a military band played, and the townspeople and the soldiers’ wives gathered along the dirt road to cheer the troops.
But it was unseasonably warm, nearly eighty degrees, and there was something grim and dispiriting about the whole affair.
The pessimism only deepened when the news rippled through the crowd that a young private named Dean Black had been accidentally
shot in the stomach when he failed to give the proper countersign to a border guard. He was rushed aboard a train headed for
El Paso but died on the way.

The sweating backs of the army mules “shone in the sun like anthracite,” wrote Frank Elser, a
New York Times
correspondent. “One by one they passed through the gate, and once through it they were in Mexico. The land dips away from
the boundary line to the south and the transports in their neutral colors soon faded away.” No one really believed that General
Pershing would ever capture Pancho Villa. He was a ghost, a phantom, returned to the brown hills of Mexico.

T
HE COLOR GUARD
of the Thirteenth Cavalry crossed the border at 12:13 on the afternoon of March 15. Although the Carrancista
officer in Palomas had threatened to block the entry of the U.S. soldiers, General Pershing, anxious to avoid any last-minute
glitches, had apparently “bought off” the commandant by hiring him as a guide. The village consisted of a scattering of adobe
huts and was brown and lifeless except for a thatch of brilliant green grass that grew up around a spring. A few chickens
pecked in the dirt and an old couple with leathery, impassive faces told the troopers that all the inhabitants had fled. One
correspondent commented on the malodorous air and likened it to the stench of “stockyards, abattoirs and tannery combined.”

The column made camp a mile south of the little settlement. The wagons were arranged so they formed a hollow square, machine
guns were stationed at the perimeter, and the animals picketed in the center. The soldiers fried bacon and potatoes in their
mess kits and boiled coffee in their tin cups. Night fell quickly, dropping like a black cloth over the red-tinged sky. The
troops shivered in their thin, army-issued blankets and on the picket line the horses swayed, filling the darkness with their
rippling sighs. When the white rays of the sun appeared, reveille was sounded and the soldiers rose and broke the ice from
their water pails, stirred the fires to life, cooked their breakfasts, and continued on their way.

E. A. Van Camp, the telegraph operator and partner of George Seese, tagged along with the soldiers as far as Palomas. He dallied
the next morning when the troops broke camp, thinking he would have no trouble catching up to them. As he trotted out of town
with his two packhorses, he picked up the wrong trail and found himself in the small settlement of Lake Guzmán, where Carrancista
soldiers shouted and cursed him. Once they realized he was a journalist, they calmed down and permitted him to file a story
at the telegraph office. When Van Camp caught up with the American expeditionary forces, he was placed under arrest for having
sent out an uncensored news story and escorted back across the border with instructions not to return. His sojourn in Mexico
had been brief but he had discovered something that would soon become apparent to the rest of the country: Carranza’s troops
were as hostile to the Americans as the Villistas were. General Pershing just might wind up fighting both.

The U.S. soldiers were following roughly the same trail that Villa and his men had taken north. At one of his abandoned camps,
they found a pile of cartridges and a small expense booklet belonging to Charles Rea Watson, the third piece of evidence linking
Villa to the train massacre. Near the Boca Grande River, the soldiers came across the body of one of the cowboys slain by
the Villistas, which may have been the camp cook, James O’Neal, who had been trampled to death. “It looked like an old suit
of underclothing stretched on boards, a scarecrow perhaps. But when alongside you could see that it was a man, stiff and stark,
face jammed down hard in the dirt,” remembered C. Tucker Beckett, an army photographer. Later they came across the body of
Arthur McKinney, lying below a tree limb with a severe rope burn. His hanging, it seems, was not the lighthearted affair that
Bunk Spencer had described. He had been shot and stabbed multiple times and had been hanged with such force that his head
had been completely severed from its torso. McKinney’s remains were returned to Columbus in a light spring wagon and buried
in the little cemetery alongside the fresh graves of Bessie James and James Dean.

Both the cavalrymen and the infantrymen wore wool shirts, wool sweaters, pegged breeches, peaked brown hats, leggings, and
leather-soled shoes. The wool was hot and itchy and soon grew soaked with sweat; the leggings, which fitted over the top of
the shoe, often caused severe damage to the Achilles tendon, and the shoes themselves, with their smooth leather soles, did
little to protect the feet from rocks and produced such enormous blisters among the infantrymen that many were forced to fall
out and wait for the ambulances.

Each soldier was issued a Springfield rifle with ninety rounds of ammunition, an automatic pistol, which was carried on a
web belt, a first-aid pouch, canteen, cup, fork, knife, and spoon. In their backpacks or saddles, the troops carried shaving
equipment, tooth powder and toothbrush, undershirts and underwear, two pairs of socks (which could be used to carry coffee
or sugar), a towel, cake of soap, handkerchief, tobacco and rolling papers, matches, toilet paper, writing paper, envelopes,
fountain pen, pocketknife, shoelaces, buttons, shelter tent, and blanket. The horsemen also carried a saber, lariat, grain
bag for their animals, and two extra horseshoes, tacked beneath the stirrups.

By day two of the expedition, the novelty had rubbed off and the soldiers began to think longingly of the comforts of even
poor, ransacked Columbus. The sun melted the bacon in the knapsacks and the grease poured down the soldiers’ backs. The infantrymen
who followed the horse soldiers were nearly blinded by the billowing clouds of dust. The troops doused their bandannas with
water and draped them over their hats or around their faces. Some even tried to shield the delicate nostrils of the animals
with wet cloths. A few of the lucky soldiers had brought along “sand goggles” and those who hadn’t wrote to family members
immediately, begging them to send the eyewear. William P. Harrison, a trooper with the Thirteenth, remembered: “Most of the
fellows rode along with their eyes shut to keep out the dust and glare. Many of the men were half-blind by noon. My eyes began
to itch soon around the edges; then they felt as big as camp kettles, and everything got dark. You could feel the blood beating
back of your eyeballs. Then the headache would begin.” On one of the laps, Colonel Slocum briefly took charge of the advance
guard and they raced ahead to the Casas Grandes River.

Shortly after midnight, twelve hours after the first, or eastern, column departed Columbus, a western column, consisting of
mostly the Seventh and Tenth cavalry regiments and Battery B of the Sixth Field Artillery, marched into Mexico from Culberson’s
ranch, which was about forty-five miles southwest of Columbus. This column was led by Pershing himself and had originally
planned to depart at 9:30 p.m. on March 15 but was delayed when Pershing was involved in an automobile accident on his way
to the ranch. He was not injured, and when he arrived he gave the order to saddle up. The soldiers were instructed not to
smoke or talk “so that caused us to leave the good old U.S.A. very quiet,” recalled trooper Henry Huthmacher.

There was no moon and the soldiers dozed in their saddles, reins loose in their hands, lulled by the clink of bridles, the
squeak of wheels, the muted squeals of a close-packed herd moving together. Temperatures plummeted and the wool shirts and
sweaters that the troopers wore now seemed far too flimsy. Some of the soldiers pulled out their blankets and draped them
Indian-style around their shoulders. As daylight broke, a captain in the Tenth Cavalry looked back at his African-American
troopers and saw that dust had covered them so thoroughly that the only color left was in their eyelids, which “stood out
like flies in a pan of milk.”

The column rode for twenty-five miles, going into camp at 6:00 a.m. at a place called Geronimo Rock. At noon, they saddled
up and rode for another fifty miles, finally resting for the night at the ranch where Bunk Spencer had been taken hostage.
The soldiers erected their dog tents next to the irrigation ditches and purchased hot food from women who worked on the ranch.
It was the first time many of them had ever seen tortillas, and the young Henry Huthmacher struggled to describe them in a
letter to his sister: They were “kind of a corn cake that looks something like flap jacks and they tasted like good old pound
cake.” While they were eating, someone stole Patton’s saddle blanket. Pershing lent Patton one of his blankets. And later,
Patton wrote in his diary, “I stole another one for him.”

The next morning, the troopers struggled to their feet. As the hours passed, the fatigued packers soon began discarding hardtack
and whole cases of army bacon—the weight was too much and abandoning the supplies seemed momentarily sensible. The soldiers
jettisoned their oil slickers and blankets, the picket ropes and steel pickets that they used to stake out their horses, and
their long, straight French sabers. A few of the old-timers had enough sense to grab up the discarded blankets and it was
they who would sleep most soundly in the months ahead.

At about eight o’clock on the evening of March 17, the western column made camp near the Mormon settlement of Colonia Dublán.
Located about a hundred miles south of Columbus, Dublán was one of nine large colonies that had been established in Mexico
by the Mormons at the turn of the century after they ran into conflict with U.S. authorities over polygamy laws. Their wide
streets, two-story brick houses, fruit trees, and green lawns made them seem like prosperous midwestern communities that had
been disassembled and reassembled in Mexico.

With no wagon trains or infantry to slow him down, Pershing’s column had actually beaten the eastern column to the agreed-upon
rendezvous point. The march had been relatively uneventful; two mules and eight horses had died and George Patton’s mount
had fallen on top of him, breaking his flashlight, but leaving him with only a few bruises. Three days later, the eastern
contingent arrived in Dublán. When all the stragglers were finally assembled, the expedition’s combined strength was 192 officers,
4,800 men, and 4,175 animals.

Upon arrival in Colonia Dublán, Pershing handed his fine bay horse to his orderly. From that point on, he would travel by
more modern means: a low-slung Dodge touring car with an American flag on one bumper and his brigadier general’s guidon flying
from the other. Riding in the car with him were his orderly and his personal cook, who was confronted nightly with the task
of creating an appetizing meal from hardtack and grease and whatever else he could scrounge from the countryside. Tagging
along with Pershing and his headquarters staff were the national correspondents and their “gasoline steeds.” They were a good-humored
bunch, well bred and well educated, and thrilled to be covering a story that promised some blood and a lot of color. They
included Frank Elser of the
New York Times,
whose copy had a distinctly poetic touch; Floyd Gibbons of the
Chicago Tribune,
who had good sources on both sides of the border; and Robert Dunn of the
New York Herald Tribune,
who had spent the previous year covering the war in Europe.George Seese, the Associated Press reporter who had scooped his
peers on the Columbus raid, also accompanied the troops into Mexico, but by the end of March he had either been fired or resigned
and a correspondent named H. W. Blakeslee had been sent as his replacement.

G
ATHERING UP A BASKET
of food, Bishop A. B. Call and several Mormon elders called on Pershing. The general was still sleeping in his tent, but
rose immediately and went out to greet them. Together they visited a Carrancista commander in nearby Casas Grandes before
returning to the bishop’s house for dinner. Pershing asked for several Mormon scouts to guide the expedition. The church elders
were hesitant because they felt cooperation might jeopardize their relationship with the Mexicans, who, after all, would continue
to be their neighbors long after the American troops had departed. Reluctantly, they agreed to provide Pershing with the men
he needed. One of them was a rakish daredevil named Lem Spilsbury, who not only spoke Spanish but knew Villa well and had
even been an overnight guest in his house. Other scouts, lured by the promise of a regular paycheck, needed no arm-twisting.
They included a Chickasaw Indian named Bill Bell, a trapper, guide, miner, hunter, and, most recently, deputy sheriff in Columbus;
Henry Vaughn, a young Texan who boasted of being a vaunted Dorado and claimed to have executed nine prisoners at Villa’s request;
and Dr. A. E. Gates, who had practiced medicine in Mexico and had once been a member of Madero’s dynamite squad.