The General and the Jaguar (43 page)

Inspector General Garlington added that Slocum had followed correct military procedures. “The fact that he was barred from
sending patrols across the boundary line into Mexico deprived him of the only sure means of discovering the presence of bandits
or others with hostile purpose in time to adequately protect his territory from sudden incursions by them.” And General Scott
summed it up: “I recommend that Colonel Slocum be advised that no stigma rests upon his conduct of command at Columbus, N.M.,
at the time of Villa’s attack, and that he and his command are highly commended for their prompt and valorous action in the
repulse of Villa’s force and pursuit of the same.”

A
LTHOUGH
P
ERSHING
publicly supported Slocum, privately he was still fuming. He wrote two highly negative critiques of the colonel, one of which
he sent to Funston and the second to Tasker Bliss, Scott’s aide in the War Department. “He is old for his years, and thinks
too much of his comfort,” he told Bliss. But Pershing’s harsh opinion was not shared by everyone. Colonel Dodd, the crusty
officer who had led the Seventh Cavalry deep into Mexico and almost captured Villa, considered Slocum’s regiment to be the
best in Mexico. And Slocum’s loyal friend, Captain Ryan, in an August 1, 1916, letter to Scott, continued to praise him. “He
is too good a man and one of such fine character, high sense of duty and greatness of heart that he should not be risked in
these out of the way parts on expeditions of this kind. I miss him very much but for his sake I am glad he is safely out of
Mexico.” As far as the U.S. government was concerned, Herbert Slocum had done just fine.

B
ACK IN
C
OLUMBUS
, a white sun hovered in the sky. Thunderheads boiled up over Tres Hermanas in the late afternoon and then
drifted away. It was what local residents referred to as the monsoon season, but the rain seemed to fall everywhere but Columbus.
The faithful were convinced that the town had fallen out of favor with the Almighty and the settlement did seem a less innocent
place: the music of cabarets tumbled from the doorways and newly deputized watchmen swaggered through the streets, wearing
roweled spurs and guns. The watchmen were a brutal lot, recruited by an even more brutal sheriff who enjoyed chaining his
prisoners to trees. The watchmen had recently pistol-whipped an army major, contributing to the growing animosity between
the soldiers and the locals. In addition to the increasing number of burglaries, assaults, thefts, and embezzlements, organized
criminal enterprises such as bootlegging, gambling, drug smuggling, and gun running were also flourishing. As always, there
was prostitution.

In the tumbled-down shacks and cribs of Columbus’s red-light district, flies swarmed over the open latrines and whores lay
in sticky embrace with their customers. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Farnsworth, the commander of the military base in Columbus,
concluded, like Pershing, that it was more efficient to regulate prostitution than to try to stamp it out altogether and two
red-light districts—one for whites and one for African-Americans—were established. By late summer, fifty prostitutes were
working in Columbus. Their teeth were crowned with gold, their arms and legs decorated with blue, fuzzy tattoos, their hair
scorched by harsh dyes. They suffered from tuberculosis and tonsillitis, infections and venereal disease. Thomas Dabney, the
town’s physician and also the newly elected mayor, examined the girls himself and collected $2.50 for each examination. But
the women soon began complaining to military authorities that Dr. Dabney was actually contributing to the spread of venereal
disease because he used only Vaseline or alcohol to clean off his instruments as he went from woman to woman. Eventually a
military doctor took over the exams and the disease rate declined.

Alcohol was another huge problem. Two years earlier, the village board of trustees had passed an ordinance limiting the sale
of liquor to “near beer,” which contained 2 percent alcohol. But a loophole still allowed private clubs to sell alcohol, which
was one reason they grew so quickly. Military authorities, working with Mayor Dabney, succeeded in getting voters to pass
an ordinance prohibiting the sale of liquor in the private clubs, as well. Several months later, the sale of near beer was
also banned. The grips of passengers debarking from the train were searched, automobile trunks were inspected, freight offices
were watched. One day in September, thirty-three joints were raided. “We haven’t been able to put liquor out of Columbus,
but we’ve made whiskey cost $2.00 a pint in a back alley and it’s a certainty soldiers on $15.00 a month can’t afford to drink
long at that figure,” asserted one officer.

Drug use among soldiers was also growing. Truckers smuggled cocaine and morphine across the line in the vehicles returning
from Mexico. “The business of selling drugs has been so little molested by the proper authorities that men have been seen
‘decking’ (putting into small-size packages) cocaine and morphine, in public saloons in the presence of customers at the bar,”
the commander of the military police advised his superiors in Washington.

Gun smuggling was another lucrative business. Military intelligence officers in Columbus soon grew suspicious of Sam Ravel,
the general-store owner whom the Villistas had hoped to find in the Commercial Hotel. In July, Ravel was arrested by civil
authorities after crossing the border with six men, all of whom were alleged to be “notorious saloon keepers.” The automobile
they were riding in contained, among other things, ninety-six pints of whiskey, a keg of wine, a Colt revolver, a Mauser and
two rifles, a hundred rounds of Mauser ammunition, forty-five rounds of thirty-thirty ammunition, and thirty-five rounds of
pistol ammunition. Ravel insisted he was innocent and vowed to go to Washington to get his passes back.

The violence against Mexicans continued through the summer. A laborer working on the Deming road was shot through both legs.
Three Mexicans employed by one of the infantry regiments were pistol-whipped. And on July 23, the bodies of two Mexicans were
found two miles west of town. They had been killed on the railroad tracks and dragged into the bushes. Next to them were two
Mexican hats with a bullet hole through each crown. An inquest panel composed of six local citizens fatuously concluded that
“two unknown Mexicans” had come to their death by “unknown causes.”

P
ERSHING APPLIED FOR PROMOTION
to major general in late September. Newton Baker recommended the promotion to President Wilson, who approved it on September
25. George Patton couldn’t have been happier, and at a lemonade reception in Mexico he toasted the new two-star general enthusiastically.
A week later, Patton was working in his tent when his kerosene lamp exploded, burning his face and ears. “My face looks like
an old after-birth of a Mexican cow on which had been smeared several very much decomposed eggs,” he advised his wife in one
of his typically colorful missives. Though the burns were healing quickly, Patton nevertheless went on sick leave to California,
where his father, a Democrat, was campaigning for the U.S. Senate. The elder Patton lost the race, but George believed his
father’s campaign had helped President Wilson carry the state of California. When his father was offered no consolation prize,
such as a cabinet post, he grew even more embittered toward Wilson. Pershing urged Patton to be cautious in his public statements.
“You must remember that when we enter the army we do so with the full knowledge that our first duty is toward our government,
entirely regardless of own views,” he wrote in an October 16, 1916, letter.

Patton returned to Mexico in mid-November. He was cold, miserable, and bored. In a letter to his wife, he confided that he
was actually considering getting out of the army. “If I was sure that I would never be above the average army officer I would,
for I don’t like the dirt and all except as a means to fame. If I knew that I would never be famous I would settle down and
raise horses and have a great time. It is a great gamble to spoil your and my own happiness for the hope of greatness. I wish
I was less ambitious, then too some times I think that I am not ambitious at all only a dreamer.”

Pershing, the hard-eyed realist, was busy shaping his image for posterity. Even before the expeditionary troops pulled out
of Mexico, he had begun framing a response to the critics who would claim the expedition had been a wild-goose chase and a
failure. In truth, the expedition had actually fulfilled its amended mission by killing or dispersing nearly all of Villa’s
band, but many would remember only the administration’s flamboyant promise to capture Villa “dead or alive,” and conclude
that the whole affair had been a waste of taxpayers’ money. In a well-crafted letter to General Scott, which Pershing undoubtedly
knew would be made public someday, he put the blame squarely on the Carrancista government. “Going back to the early days
of the campaign,” he wrote, “you will recall that the Parral incident halted the expedition and under our instructions it
was necessary to wait on diplomatic action between the two governments. I want to invite your attention to the fact that at
that time we had four cavalry columns converging toward Parral, which, as you know, is near the Durango line. These columns
were all south of Villa and if we could have continued the pursuit, there is little doubt but that Villa would have been captured.”

But perhaps one of Pershing’s most remarkable efforts to manipulate the historical record was his “major damage control operation”
to cover up the assassination plot to poison Villa. Charles Harris and Louis Sadler, the two New Mexico historians who discovered
the plot, maintain that public knowledge of the assassination attempt would most certainly have jeopardized Pershing’s military
career and possibly President Wilson’s reelection campaign. The two historians found evidence that documents had been removed
from the expedition’s intelligence files at the National Archives as late as 1926:

The identity of the person who weeded the files is not known. However, a memorandum in the Punitive Expedition records dated
November 19, 1926, states that General Pershing, who had retired as Army Chief of Staff two years earlier, had possession
of two operational folders, and that the files of the Punitive Expedition Intelligence section were checked out to Colonel
Aristides Moreno, a senior Intelligence officer who had served under Pershing in Europe during World War I. Whether or not
General Pershing or Colonel Moreno removed certain telegrams and intelligence reports from the Punitive Expedition files is
unclear. What is clear is that a number of telegrams and several reports of the Japanese agents are missing.

By the time 1917 rolled around, the expedition forces were making preparations to return home. At Dublán, the adobe huts were
broken up, the refuse collected and burned, the camp raked clean so that the prairie looked the way it did when they had first
come upon it. When the cavalry regiments and the infantry started north, they were accompanied by five hundred Chinese refugees
and fifteen hundred Mexicans, who carried their worldly possessions in wagons and pony carts and on the backs of worn-out
burros. On February 5, the troops crossed back into the United States. Covered with dust, footsore, deeply weathered, they
passed beneath the reviewing stand where Pershing had gone ahead to receive them. His stiff, erect body was enclosed in a
heavy coat and he stood before them and saluted crisply, still unbowed and unbeaten.

That evening he had dinner with the Farnsworths, who were living in a converted store that still bore the bullet holes of
Pancho Villa’s raid. A new Edison telephone sat on a table in the living room and two outlets had been drilled in the ceiling
for electricity, which now came on for a few hours each day. Pershing rose early the next morning and boarded a train for
Fort Bliss. As he sat on a dusky pink cushion, doing paperwork, the morning sun illuminated the tar-paper shacks and tents
receding behind him. The little town glinted for a moment and then faded into the mica wash of the desert. After ten months
and three weeks in Mexico, General Pershing had completed his duty.

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
General Funston was dining with friends at the elegant St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio. The brief Texas winter was giving
way to a hot, yellow spring and Funston was enjoying himself, the crushing worry over Pershing and his troops finally lifted.
The hotel orchestra was playing the familiar notes of the “Blue Danube” waltz and Funston listened appreciatively. “You know,”
he said, turning to a friend, “there is no music as sweet as the old tunes.” Then his breath caught in his throat and he collapsed
onto the floor and died. He was fifty-one years old.

Pershing was ordered to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to take over the army’s Southern Department. There, he would encounter
some of the remarkable men who had not gone into Mexico but would play important roles in the years to come, including Captain
Douglas MacArthur and a young lieutenant by the name of Dwight Eisenhower. And fate was not yet finished with General Pershing.
On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, and one month later Pershing was named head of the American Expeditionary
Forces in Europe.

After Pershing’s troops had exited Mexico, Villa returned to Namiquipa to punish the townspeople who had revealed the location
of his weapons cache and cooperated with the gringos. The men fled to the hills, so Villa simply had all the women rounded
up and then allowed his troops to rape them. Nicolás Fernández was revolted by the barbaric act, and took several women under
his protection, threatening to kill any man who came near them. It was yet one more atrocity committed by Villa, and he no
longer had to worry about an American reprisal.

W
HILE THE SOLDIERS CELEBRATED
their homecoming in Columbus’s dance halls, twenty-one Villistas squatted on their haunches
in the military stockade south of the railroad tracks, wondering what would become of them. These were the men who had been
captured in Mexico by Pershing’s expedition and were sent back to Columbus prior to its withdrawal. The youngest was seventeen,
the oldest forty-eight. Unlike the sad young conscripts who had gone to their deaths six months earlier, most of these men
were veterans of Mexico’s long-running revolution. Nineteen had served in the División del Norte for anywhere from six months
to two years or more. And two-thirds, or fourteen prisoners, were from the revolutionary town of Namiquipa or nearby villages
and had been under the command of Candelario Cervantes.