The General and the Jaguar (37 page)

The witnesses left quickly, some talking loudly and brashly, others subdued and thoughtful. The bodies were cut down, wrapped
in quilts, and taken to the cemetery, where they were buried in unmarked paupers’ graves. Governor McDonald issued no more
reprieves for the Villistas and three weeks later, on June 30, four more prisoners were transported back to Deming under heavy
guard. They ate a hearty dinner and slept well but refused breakfast. They went to the gallows in pairs, with Eusevio Rentería
and Taurino García going first. When the sheriff asked Eusevio if he had any last words, he merely shrugged and said he had
nothing to say. But Taurino was very frightened. His eyes were huge, his lips dry and cracked. He swept his tongue over the
interior of his mouth and what came out were words of forgiveness.

“I hope you people will pardon me like I pardon all of you.”

Eusevio tried to cheer him up. “Don’t be afraid to die,” he said. “We all have to die sometime, just as well die now.”

As the brilliant light of morning filled up the sky, the trapdoors opened and the two prisoners plunged through. They lost
consciousness immediately but their hearts continued to beat for another twenty minutes. The doctors, positioned beneath them,
periodically put their stethoscopes up to the hanged men’s hearts to see if they had stopped. When their bodies were finally
cut down, their necks were ringed with rope burns, their mouths and eyes wide open.

Juan Castillo and José Rangel ascended the scaffold next. When asked if they had any last words, Rangel remained mute. Juan
Castillo said, “I know I am going to die. I am going to die in justice. I pardon all of you.” Black masks were drawn down
over their faces. A moment later, the trapdoor opened. Their necks broke with audible cracks and their deaths were almost
instantaneous.

José Rodríguez was the only condemned Villista who escaped the hangman’s noose. Convinced that he hadn’t fired a shot in Columbus,
McDonald commuted his sentence to life and he was put to work at the prison brickmaking plant. “Rodríguez,” wrote the
Santa Fe New Mexican
on June 30, 1916, “now appears to be in good health and gives promise of becoming a good worker around the brick kiln.”

José Rangel’s will was made public ten days after the hanging. He wrote that he had neither friends nor family to console
him in his sorrow and expressed his love for Mexico. He admitted that he had, in fact, participated in the raid but was only
following the orders of his commander, Pancho Villa. Like the other raiders, he was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

W
HILE THE SEVEN
V
ILLISTAS
were going through the criminal-justice system, General Pershing and his troops captured another
three dozen or so men suspected of having participated in the Columbus raid and incarcerated them in crude, barbed-wire stockades
on Mexican soil. Some of the enclosures resembled open-air pens and offered scant protection from the blistering sun and the
thunderstorms that periodically swept over the desert. Wearing cheap straw hats and loose cotton clothing, the prisoners watched
the comings and goings of the cavalry soldiers. Pershing issued orders stating that only authorized personnel would be allowed
to have contact with the prisoners and also made it clear that they were not to be put to work cleaning up the camps or doing
other odd jobs. Still, the incarceration proved unbearable for some of the captives. A man named Adolfo Manquero bolted from
the stockade in mid-April and was shot and killed by a sentry. A few days later, his nephew, Jesús Camadurar, “a tubercular,”
died after stabbing himself in the chest with a knife.

When the prisoners were interrogated by the expedition’s intelligence officers, nearly all of them admitted to having participated
in the raid. Like their ill-fated companions, the majority claimed that they had been forced to join the column after Villa’s
men had threatened to kill them or their families. Using the intelligence gained from the prisoners, General Pershing refined
his hunt for Pancho Villa and his top officers, sending out night patrols to conduct surprise searches of homes and ranches.

On a routine excursion to purchase corn, Lieutenant Patton decided to make a surprise visit to a ranch where Julio Cárdenas,
the head of Villa’s vaunted Dorados, was said to be living. Cárdenas had remained at Villa’s side until the guerrilla leader
went into hiding. Then he had joined Nicolás Fernández’s detachment. Fernández had been excessively secretive about their
destination and Cárdenas had grown impatient with him. “This is as far as I shall accompany you,” he said one morning as they
were breaking camp, departing for home with his men.

Now, watching three vehicles filled with gringo soldiers approaching, Julio Cárdenas may have wished he had remained with
Fernández. The automobiles rumbled to a halt and the Americans leaped out. Patton was one of the first to reach the main gate.
Three armed Villistas burst from the entrance on horseback and Patton yelled at them to halt. Instead, the Mexicans reversed
direction, only to find themselves facing another contingent of soldiers. They veered back toward Patton, firing their weapons.
He returned the fire, hitting both a rider and his horse.

As Patton was reloading, another Mexican exited the yard on horseback. Remembering an old cowboy’s adage to always aim at
the horse of an escaping enemy, Patton shot the animal, waited for the rider to disentangle himself, then killed him, too.
When the skirmish was over, three Villistas, including Cárdenas, lay dead. The bodies were strapped onto the hoods of the
cars like deer and taken back to camp.

Pershing was delighted and dubbed Patton the “Bandit” and let him keep Cárdenas’s silver-embossed saddle and saber. “The Gen.
has been very complimentary telling some officers that I did more in half a day than the 13th Cav. did in a week,” Patton
said in a letter to his wife. He continued, “You are probably wondering if my conscience hurts me for killing a man. It does
not. I feel about it just as I did when I got my swordfish, surprised at my luck.”

Another coveted prize was Candelario Cervantes, considered almost as important as Villa by the headquarters staff, who continued
to receive tantalizing reports of his whereabouts. Around April 20, Colonel Dodd learned that Cervantes and about 150 men
were headed for Tomóchic, a remote village that was surrounded by mountains rising to more than ten thousand feet. The village
was home to mostly Tarahumara Indians, who lived in terrible poverty and suffered from typhus and smallpox. Dodd plunged into
the mountains, following trails that were so narrow and steep that his soldiers had to dismount and each hang onto the tail
of the horse in front of him. Although it was nearly Easter, the air at that elevation was still unbearably cold. The troopers
grew numb from the knees down and developed excruciating headaches, nausea, and bleeding from the nose. Dr. Eastman, who accompanied
the marchers, wrote of the startling beauty of the land and the intense suffering of the men:

Traveled three days through a wonderful, mountainous country, in fact this was the Continental Divide, very picturesque, heavily
wooded with pines, many of them magnificent great trees. Saw wild turkeys, the tracks of bear and deer and heard the lobo
wolf howl at night. Camped late in the afternoon of the third day within a few miles of our destination and waited for the
moon to rise. Started on again at eleven and had three hours of the most heartbreaking marching I had ever experienced, walking
and leading and no halts, stumbling along through deep cañons where the old moon failed to penetrate, up over steep rocks
and along narrow ledges where we would look down into utter blackness and a misstep meant destruction. The elevation here
was between eight and nine thousand feet and we had no time to filter and warm and moisten the air through our noses, but
took it in great gulps through wide open mouths.

On the afternoon of April 22, the Seventh Cavalry exited the mountains and sent scouts into the small village. Cervantes had
apparently received advance warning of Dodd’s approach from local residents and had slipped away, leaving a rear guard in
the hills to slow down the Americans. While Dodd’s troopers were finalizing their plans under the cover of trees, one of the
men accidentally discharged his weapon, alerting the Villistas to their position and leaving Dodd no choice but to attack.
The packmaster rang his bell to call the troop train together and the U.S. cavalry charged. One platoon was sent to the left,
the other to the right, sealing off the town. The Villistas fired upon the U.S. troops from the roofs of houses and from the
hills. Two troopers were killed, three others badly wounded.

After dispersing the enemy, the soldiers spent the rest of the day taking care of the wounded and searching the houses. They
found U.S. military uniforms that had been taken during the Columbus raid and took two men into custody. Official reports
state both captives were killed that night while trying to escape. But Henry Huthmacher suggested in a letter to his sister
that the troopers of the Seventh had adopted the Mexican practice of
ley fuga,
that is, killing their prisoners and then proclaiming they had been shot while trying to escape. “One case was pulled off
good by telling the Mex. to pull out, that they were through with him. He walked not over a dozen feet before he was hit 12
times starting at the top of his head and ending by shooting off his heel. Another case, we turned one loose and he hadn’t
gone 200 yds. from camp when he built a fire and started signaling. The man that watched him, shot only once and came back
to camp.”

The Seventh Cavalry hit the trail the following morning. “The dead were carried on pack mules and the wounded compelled to
ride horseback and suffered severely in spite of all we could do,” wrote Dr. Eastman. “All wounded parts were immobilized
as securely as possible, we moved slowly and rested frequently.”

As they rode along, they found traces of blood from the wounded Villistas who had preceded them and freshly dug graves. Dodd
put the enemy’s losses at twenty-five, then upped it to thirty-one. He was later told that the Tarahumara Indians gathered
up eleven wounded Villistas, poured pitch over them, and burned them alive.

Although Candelario Cervantes had escaped from the fight unscathed, the encounter had badly demoralized his men and one of
his colonels soon departed, taking with him about ninety followers. That left Cervantes with about fifty men, whom he split
into three commands. His band moved from camp to camp, occasionally spending the night in a house with a trusted sympathizer.
Eventually he gravitated back to Namiquipa, but the little town was one of the most dangerous places for him to be; Pershing
had established one of his advance bases on the outskirts of the town and five detachments of horse soldiers were sent out
regularly to hunt for him.

From his various hideouts in the hills, Cervantes watched in disgust as peasants drove their oxcarts to the Americans’ camp,
carrying
huevos
and
pan dulce
to the troops. They traded the foodstuffs for baling wire, which was used to make wheels, and for empty kerosene cans, which
became cooking braziers and water receptacles. Cervantes viewed the peasants as traitors but they could hardly be blamed;
Namiquipa had suffered greatly during the revolution and many of the residents were on the verge of starvation.

Cervantes tried to rouse the residents to fight the Americans and even appealed to the Carrancistas to join him. “We hope
that if you do not unite with us like the great family, since by force we can succeed, at least you will leave us free to
fight the miserable North American invaders; the only cause of our disagreement and national disgrace.” Instead of joining
the rebels, many of the
namiquipenses
formed a civil guard, called the
defensa social,
to protect themselves against the depredations of bandits.

Although almost all of Cervantes’s troops had deserted him or been captured, he remained defiant. On the morning of May 25,
dressed in a black plush jacket with white piping and a fancy Mexican sombrero turned up at the brim, he spotted a small group
of American soldiers scattered through a canyon, mapping the terrain and hunting for wild pigs. He decided to ambush the soldiers
and capture the mules. With eight or nine other companions, he swept down through the canyon, firing his weapon. The Americans
returned the gunfire, but not before one of them had been killed. The shooting soon brought other cavalry troopers to their
assistance. By that time, the Mexicans were withdrawing, leaving their companions where they had fallen. A young intelligence
officer searched the pockets of two dead rebels and removed several papers from the body of the well-dressed Mexican. As he
headed back down the canyon with two fellow soldiers, he skimmed the documents and stopped in midstride when he realized that
the dead man was Candelario Cervantes. The other was Cervantes’s close friend, José Bencomo. “We must have those bodies for
identification,” he said, instructing one of his companions to go back and get them.

Filled with apprehension and scanning the cliffs, the American hurried back up the canyon. When he got to the site of the
ambush, the two Mexicans and their horses were still lying on the ground. He dragged one body alongside the other and hastily
tied the legs together with a buckskin thong. Next, he took a braided lariat from one of the Mexican saddles, wrapped it around
the joined legs of the Mexicans, and tied it to his own saddle. Then he proceeded to drag the bodies back down the canyon.
By the time he caught up with the rest of the troops, the faces of the two Mexicans were so battered that they were unrecognizable.
The U.S. soldiers buried the bodies and sent a note to Pershing’s headquarters informing him of the incident.

The following morning, several staffers from headquarters returned to the burial site and exhumed the bodies. They had been
informed by a prisoner that Cervantes had a bullet wound below the left shoulder and another on the right leg above the knee.
Sure enough, one of the corpses had two old bullet wounds exactly where the prisoner had said they would be. “The death of
the notorious and dangerous leader, Candelario Cervantes,” Pershing exulted, “ranks in importance next to the death of Villa
himself.”