The General and the Jaguar (46 page)

Villa had many enemies and plots were constantly being hatched to kill him. Yet the would-be assassins could not penetrate
the veritable fortress that he had erected. “It is said that no one can approach Villa’s ranch without advance permission
or knowledge as all the approaches to the place are continually guarded by a system of guards and outposts,” the U.S. Army
wrote. Nevertheless, as the months went by, Villa’s animal cunning and vigilance lessened. He grew stout in middle age and
spent more time with the children who had been born of his many “wives.” On the morning of July 20, 1923, almost exactly three
years to the day since he had laid down his arms, Villa was returning to Canutillo from Parral. Villa himself was driving
his low-slung Dodge touring car and his driver was standing on the running board. The passengers included his secretary and
four bodyguards. As the vehicle slowed for a narrow turn, a pedestrian raised his fist and shouted,
“Viva Villa!”
The old war cry was the signal for assassins hidden in a house across the road, who raised their rifles and fired. Nine bullets
struck Villa, killing him almost instantly. Everyone else in the automobile was also killed, except for one man, who was badly
wounded but managed to escape back to Canutillo. Two and a half years later, someone opened Villa’s grave and cut off his
head. Neither the perpetrator nor the head was ever found.

As Mexico emerged from the wreckage of the ten years of civil war, it seemed that Álvaro Obregón would be the only high-ranking
revolutionary leader to escape the violent death that all his compatriots had suffered. Obregón served as president from 1920
to 1924 and then stepped aside for fellow Sonoran Plutarco Elías Calles, who had delivered the crushing defeat to Villa at
Agua Prieta. As Calles’s term drew to a close, Obregón’s supporters in the Mexican legislature wrote an exception into the
no-reelection clause of the Constitution so that Obregón could run for president for a second time. On July 17, 1928, two
weeks after he was elected, he was celebrating his victory at a fashionable resort twelve miles south of Mexico City. Bow
tied, mustached, and florid faced, he had come to resemble the prosperous chickpea farmer that he had been when the revolution
began; only the pinned and empty right sleeve was a reminder of what Villa’s troops had taken from him. After a speech, a
young artist stood by humbly, hat in hand, waiting to show him his sketches. The artist was actually a Catholic fanatic and
member of the Cristero Rebellion, a violent revolt that had erupted in the mid to late twenties after the Mexican government
had attempted to forcibly curb the influence of the Catholic Church by closing seminaries and churches, expelling hundreds
of foreign-born priests and nuns, and depriving clergy of their civil liberties. When Obregón turned toward the artist, the
man pulled a gun from the hat and shot him five times.

S
EVERAL YEARS AFTER
the raid, Nicolás Fernández’s wife and three children changed their last name and moved to El Paso. Fernández loved them
dearly but would go no farther north than Ciudad Juárez because he was fearful of being arrested. He slipped across the border
to El Paso only once, in 1926, when his wife was dying. Eventually he resumed his military career and became a general in
the regular army. He was active in politics, the confidant of Mexico’s presidents, and was addressed respectfully as
“mi general”
everywhere he went. “He was a very Victorian, very stoic man,” said his grandson, Rudy Herrera, who lives in Washington State.

When Fernández retired from military life, he turned his attention to farming. He grew cotton and raised breeding bulls and
horses for the army. He continued to carry a pistol and was chauffeured from place to place in a Dodge station wagon. He never
learned to drive, for cars held no interest for him; horses remained his passion. Though he must have suffered physical damage
from his years of fighting on horseback, his posture remained ramrod straight, his face wintry and austere, and he continued
to shun both alcohol and tobacco. Like Villa, he was concerned for the welfare of the soldiers who had been under his command
and often intervened on their behalf with the federal government to make sure they got their benefits. His granddaughter,
Gloria Roach, who also lives in Washington State, said he would never talk about the raid or his relationship with Villa because
he feared something might happen to his loved ones. “He was very protective of the family,” she said.

Fernández became one of the oldest living revolutionary generals in all of Mexico, outliving not only his beloved Pancho Villa,
but all the Maderistas, Huertistas, Villistas, and Carrancistas who had fought each other during those turbulent ten years.
He died on April 29, 1973, just four months shy of his ninety-ninth birthday.

I
N
C
OLUMBUS,
the spring windstorms gave way to the summer thunderstorms, which gave way to the bright confetti of migrating birds and
finally, the high, vaulted sky of winter. In the dry, shadowed recesses of their stores and homes, the survivors of the raid
continued to wrestle with the fears and anxieties that pervaded their dreams and all their waking hours. Susan Moore’s pale,
lovely face had been reshaped by harrowing trauma. Her mouth was pinched with sadness, her eyebrows stitched together in an
anxious, crooked line, and her thick black hair threaded with gray. She hired a young woman named Miss Farrar, who lived with
her in the back of the store and helped her run the business. In September of 1918, the bullet lodged in her right leg came
to the surface and she went over to the base hospital to have it extracted. An army doctor made two large incisions but was
unable to recover the bullet. “So I am now sitting, waiting for the wound to heal, or the bullet to again make its appearance,”
she said in a letter to New Mexico senator Albert Fall.

Mooreview, the little homestead that she and her husband had built, had become a ruin. The house had been repeatedly vandalized
and the windows broken out. She had tried to sell it but no one was interested and whenever she did succeed in renting it
out, the tenants never stayed for long. “They said the place was haunted,” she told Senator Fall. Periodically rumors wafted
across the border about some new raid that Pancho Villa was planning. In March of 1919, the reports had developed such urgency
that some residents went out to their garages (still called “auto houses”) and turned their cars around so the front ends
were facing the street. Mrs. Moore was so frightened that she decided she could not remain in Columbus for another day. She
sold off the inventory, leased the store, and moved to the Paso del Norte Hotel in El Paso. Full of despair and anxiety that
she seemed unable to shake, she moved from hotel to hotel. She could not sleep, cried easily, and came to the realization
that she would never be whole again. From time to time, there was talk in Washington of creating a compensation fund for U.S.
citizens who had suffered losses during the Mexican Revolution and Mrs. Moore began writing long letters to Senator Fall,
begging for his help:

Dear Sir:

. . . From the enc. Clipping, you will see I am still suffering from my wounds, and my nerves are all shattered ... much hard
work and suffering are the results of this raid on me—I have broken down my health in the two years and seven months I have
come back and endeavored to straighten out the tangles. . . .

Yours Truly,
(Mrs.) John J. Moore
(Susan A. Moore)

P.S. Which is the proper way for me to sign my name
now?

Laura Ritchie had also lost everything and did not even have Susan Moore’s elegant looks to fall back on. She developed high
blood pressure and severe rheumatism and suffered from the same nervous anxiety that Susan Moore had described. But Mrs. Ritchie
managed to find happiness again. In 1921, she married a former customs agent named Alvin Ash and moved to El Paso. Her husband
got a job on the police force and they built a new life together, going to parties organized by the Masonic Lodge and Eastern
Star, playing bingo, and taking short trips.

Rachel Walker also remarried and moved to El Paso. But she and her new husband, Ben Henry, struggled to make ends meet. They
resided on an unpaved street in a house that they rented for $12.50 a month. Her husband worked as a part-time street laborer
for the city of El Paso, making about $35 to $40 a month. He supplemented his income by mowing lawns and doing other odd jobs
and Rachel took in washing and ironing. Her mental health remained fragile, and in the years following the raid, she suffered
three more nervous breakdowns.

Milton James also suffered from extreme anxiety. He jumped when he heard noises, couldn’t eat or sleep, and complained of
overall weakness and numbness in his legs. “In my judgment,” wrote one doctor, “the health of Mr. James was materially affected
by the nervous shock which he received from seeing his wife shot down and he himself being wounded, and that he suffered intense
pain by reason of his wounds; that he will never be a well man, nor restored to his former physical condition.” But Milton
James defied the glum prediction. Doctors eventually succeeded in extracting the bullet that had been left in his body, and
in September of 1922 he married a woman named Merle Corn. Despite his injuries, he was able to have children and largely succeeded
in putting the horror behind him.

Ruth Miller, the wife of Charles DeWitt Miller, who was gunned down in front of the Commercial Hotel, also suffered from a
“nervous affliction.” But she had two small children to support and in the fall of 1916 she secured a teaching job. She then
worked as the state’s vocational director for a number of years before becoming a district representative for a large insurance
company.

Eleanor Dean withdrew from some of the activities she had been involved in, resigning as superintendent of the Methodist church’s
Sunday school and eventually selling her share of the grocery store to her son, Edwin. On the surface, at least, Eleanor didn’t
seem to suffer from the anxiety and depression reported by the others. She had already lost two sons and perhaps by the time
her husband’s death occurred, she had learned to grieve in private.

As for the family members of the young cowboys who were slain on the Palomas ranch, Mamie McKinney was faced with the difficult
task of working her homestead claim alone and eventually remarried. The aging father of James O’Neal, the camp cook who was
trampled by the horses, was so shocked by his son’s murder that his health declined precipitously. “He has suffered and brooded
almost constantly,” wrote his son. In a terrible oversight, the parents of William Nye Corbett, the other cowboy who was hanged,
were never even informed of their son’s death and six years later they still had hopes that he might be alive. “Any words
would be inadequate to express our appreciation of any information whatever in regards to the whereabouts of our son,” wrote
Mrs. Edward Corbett in a letter to her congressman.

Beginning in September of 1919 and continuing through March of 1920, Senator Fall held hearings around the country to investigate
the losses suffered by U.S. citizens and businesses during the Mexican Revolution. When the Senate panel came to El Paso,
many of the Columbus residents were invited to testify. Most believed that Fall would help them. But that hope was cruelly
dashed when Fall, who had gone on to serve as secretary of the interior under President Harding, was indicted on felony charges
in the Teapot Dome scandal. Fall was accused of secretly leasing out the naval oil reserves in California and Wyoming to two
old friends in exchange for “loans” totaling four hundred thousand dollars. He was convicted and served his time in the New
Mexico state penitentiary—the same facility that once housed the Villista prisoners.

A special claims commission was established in 1923 to adjudicate claims of U.S. citizens arising from the decade of turmoil
during the Mexican Revolution. Many of the Columbus residents who had lost relatives or property during the raid sought compensation.
It was a tedious and time-consuming process in which they had to obtain marriage licenses, birth certificates, diplomas and
degrees, and affidavits from numerous witnesses to support their claims. (Rachel Walker suffered yet another nervous collapse
and was confined to bed for three days while she was trying to prepare her claim. And the passage of time had not diminished
Susan Moore’s nervous anxiety and depression. “I am now fifty-three years old and my condition does not improve with age,”
she wrote. )

In the petitions, attorneys for the U.S. government once again revisited the issue of whether Pancho Villa was a bona fide
general or a bandit. A lawyer arguing the case for one of the families came up with a description that was somewhere in between.
Pointing to the Mexican government’s generous amnesty, he declared that Villa was a true revolutionary who had the “characteristics
of a bandit.” The claims languished in Washington for nearly fifteen years. Finally in 1938, on the eve of World War II, they
were settled and the paltry awards—none higher than fourteen thousand dollars—distributed.

In Columbus, the economy promptly collapsed in 1922 when most of the soldiers were transferred elsewhere. The bank lost its
customers, the newspaper closed its doors, and the mayor moved to El Paso. Other residents also departed, abandoning homes
and farms and businesses that they had poured their lives into. The Ravel brothers dismantled the new hotel that they had
built and shipped the bricks to Albuquerque, where they opened a successful chain of feed stores and nurseries. Other buildings,
including the post office, were dismantled and carted off. The electricity stayed on for a few hours every evening and then
stopped altogether and the residents returned to their kerosene lamps.

In 1928, much of the town was sold for delinquent taxes and Columbus returned to what it had been in the beginning: a small
farming community that once again tried to attract settlers by boasting of its sunshine, fresh underground water, and affordable
land. For a time, the trains continued to roll through the town, the clickety-clack of their wheels and their whistles, rising
and falling in the night, signaling order and comfort and connection to the greater world. “Oh, those huge, huge steam engines
that used to pull the trains through Columbus just seemed like something alive to me,” remembered Margaret Perry Epps, who
lived in Columbus for many years. “They’d stop there in front of the depot and just kind of chug, chug—just like, just as
if they were breathing.” The regular passenger service, a train known as the Flying Tortilla, made its last run on March 17,
1958. The population dwindled to roughly 350 residents and the streets grew silent. Some days, it seemed only the wind moved,
forever resculpturing the indifferent face of the desert.