The Roughest Riders (31 page)

On the home front, with forest fires raging throughout the West, the government depended on greater numbers of men with the courage and training to put their lives on the line in an effort to tamp them out. There simply weren't enough white firefighters and military personnel available to get the job done, so the government once again called on the Buffalo Soldiers to fill the breach wherever more manpower was required. And then, as in the past, it was just a question of time before a new war broke out and black men were asked to do their part in expanding the growing American empire.

T
he enemy was closer to home this time around, but they were brown-skinned once again: Mexican revolutionaries under the leadership of José Doroteo Arango Arámbula—more famously known as Pancho Villa—and a few of his rivals. Mexico had freed itself of Spanish rule in 1821, following eleven years of revolution launched by a Catholic priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, on September 16, 1810. Spain had ruled New Spain, as it called Mexico before the revolution, for three bloody centuries.
“¡Mexicanos, viva Mexico!”
was Father Hidalgo's call to arms for the oppressed lower classes to reclaim the land stolen from them by their Spanish overlords. Sadly, as was the case with most revolutions, the following years were chaotic, with the presidency changing hands seventy-five times during the next fifty-five years. The United States and Mexico went to war in the middle of the nineteenth century, and attempts at liberal reform within Mexico were largely unsuccessful. A series of dictators ruled the land until the early part of the next century.

The troubles along the southwestern border of the United States had begun to erupt in 1912, when different bands of rebels attacked
Mexican government installations during the reign of Victoriano Huerta. The hostilities spilled across the border from time to time, fueling skirmishes with American troops patrolling the area from the mouth of the Rio Grande River in Texas all the way west to the Pacific Ocean in San Diego, California. It was a long stretch of border to protect, seventeen hundred miles of arid, treeless desert
with scarcely a square inch to find cover from the sun or protection against armed, hostile forces.

Mexican revolutionary José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, better known as Pancho Villa, eluded capture by American troops for almost a year before President Woodrow Wilson ended the action and shipped the soldiers to Europe during World War I.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-npcc-19554)

The US government retaliated by beefing up American military presence along the border, shipping the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth to Douglas, Arizona, in 1912, and the Tenth to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1914. Their ranks were thin as they patrolled the long stretch of sand and scrub, sporadically getting shot at by raiding parties of Yaqui Indians and Mexican rebels. The incidents were few and far between, but every now and then a man was killed or wounded on either side of the conflict before the rebels scrambled back to safer ground a few miles from the border. Despite the outbreaks of violence on US territory, the American government was not inclined to launch an all-out war against the insurgents. Rather, the War Department issued an order to the troops to make sure the gunfights did not “complicate the present situation.”

The so-called situation was a conflagration in the making, however; violence inevitably begets more violence, and it was all but inevitable that the rebellion would totter onto more volatile terrain. The US government, which had attempted to remain neutral in the beginning, decided to send arms across the border to support one of the rebel leaders, Venustiano Carranza, in his struggle to overthrow the Huerta regime. The tactic worked, briefly, when Carranza and his men forced Huerta to resign on July 15, 1914, forcing the former dictator into exile. Carranza then took over the government, with the endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson. But the United States had backed the wrong horse, as it were, since another rebel leader who had originally allied himself with Carranza decided that he should be the leader of the new Mexican government. His name was Pancho Villa.

In 1894, Villa returned home from the fields where he worked as a sharecropper and caught the owner of the estate in the act of trying to rape Villa's twelve-year-old sister. The sixteen-year-old boy
grabbed a pistol, shot and killed the child molester, and then took off into the mountains. From that point on, Villa lived the life of a bandit and rebel, establishing a name for himself as a Mexican Robin Hood of sorts, championing the rights of the disenfranchised peasants against the wealthy landowners and upper-class gentry. He attracted a loyal band of followers who helped him establish a base of operations in the mountain town of Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, just south of the US border.

During the next decade, Villa's fame grew. The revolutionary leader now commanded the Division del Norte and its crackerjack cavalry, Los Dorados. Following his defeat at a Carranza stronghold near Vera Cruz in 1915, Villa retreated again to his bastion in Chihuahua, where he contemplated his next move. Villa and his “Villistas” blamed the Yankees for engineering his defeat by Carranza and his followers, and they were regrouping their strength closer to US territory than the US government cared to see. In effect, the American government had unleashed a raging pit bull on the patio outside the hacienda door.

While the United States officially recognized the new Carranza regime, Villa had other ideas. War was what he wanted—not war between his band and the Americans, but between the Americans and the Carranza government, an action that would, he thought, ultimately create a void he intended to fill. In January 1916, Villa and his men raided a train that was crossing through Santa Ysabel in northern Mexico, removed sixteen American miners, and shot them to death. He followed up that attack when he crossed the border into the town of Columbus, New Mexico, early on the morning of March 9. As a local newspaper reported the day before, “Villa had been sighted 15 miles west of Palomas Monday night and was camped there all day Tuesday…. He is reported to have between 300 and 400 men with him. They are all well mounted and since arriving near Palomas have been slaughtering large numbers of cattle.”

Palomas sat just across the border from Columbus, a small frontier town with about three hundred residents and a cluster of adobe houses and wooden retail buildings. When he crossed the border on March 9, setting fire to parts of the town and looting horses, mules, ammunition, and other military supplies, the pit bull had crossed over the threshold onto US territory. Not surprisingly, the task of subduing Villa before he rampaged at will throughout the house would fall to a great extent on the shoulders of the Buffalo Soldiers.

The US Thirteenth Army Cavalry stationed at Camp Furlong outside of Columbus killed eighty of Villa's men and lost eighteen of their own before driving Villa's band back across the border, where Villa regrouped his forces. President Woodrow Wilson had little choice but to retaliate for the incursion, so on March 19 he ordered John Pershing, now a general, to assemble a “punitive expedition” to track down Villa and destroy his rebel army. Black Jack included the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth in his expedition, commanded by Colonel William Brown, whose chief adviser was newly promoted Major Charles Young, the black officer whose fame had grown since his heroic leadership during the Philippines campaign.

Pershing divided his troops into two “flying columns,” as he called them because of the speed they would move. They would head south across the border from different locations. The first comprised various white regiments, including the Thirteenth Cavalry, the Eleventh Cavalry, an artillery unit, the First Aero Squadron, and a company of engineers that left from Columbus. The faster column was made up of the black Tenth Cavalry, the white Seventh Cavalry, and another field artillery unit, all of which departed from Hachita, a few miles west of town. Their goal was to destroy Villa and his men, but without inciting the wrath of the Carranza
government—a virtually impossible mission to accomplish, since it involved invading Mexican territory with US military units without authorization from the Mexican government.

As Pershing had anticipated, Carranza refused to grant him permission to use the Mexico North Western Railway to supply his men, so Pershing had to improvise a “train” system of his own. He put together a truck convoy to carry food and ammunition, and he established a wireless telegraph network to communicate with his officers in the field. On March 19, 1916, Pershing sent a Curtiss JN-3 aircraft of the First Aero Squadron into Mexican airspace to conduct an aerial reconnaissance of the terrain. When everything was ready to go, he set his plan in motion, crossing the border in force into Mexico. The two columns headed southward and hooked up at Colonia Dublán on March 20.

At that point, Pershing decided it would be more effective to split his troops into three columns instead of two, with two of the columns containing squadrons of Buffalo Soldiers from the Tenth, an indication of the high regard Pershing had for the black troops in his command. Once inside Mexico, he commandeered the train located there without Carranza's permission. As it turned out, the Mexican train cars near the border were an unholy collection of twenty-eight dilapidated boxcars in various stages of decay. The Buffalo Soldiers went to work immediately, taking on the jobs of patching up holes in the floors, cutting windows and doors in the sides to allow entry by the troops and their horses, and placing bales of hay on the roofs so the men who couldn't fit inside had places to ride more or less comfortably on top. The black troops then hopped aboard and commenced a search for Villa and his men that would send them riding in pursuit for more than a week before they exchanged gunfire for the first time with the Mexican rebels.

The troops headed south in the patched-up railroad cars with no real logistical support from their government, which was growing
more and more focused on events in Europe. Their food supplies and ammunition were limited to what they had been able to load onto the train. Along the way, they abandoned the train and continued their journey on foot and horseback, purchasing additional supplies from locals who were willing to sell them anything with whatever money they could scrounge together. During the next few days, they encountered no signs of Villa and his followers, and the peasants they questioned were not inclined to provide them with any information they might have had.

Then, on March 27, Colonel Brown got word that a group of Villa's men were entrenched on a ranch about eight miles away. After a long march through the mountainous region, Brown gave the order to attack the ranch at dawn the following day. The Tenth's official diarist cabled the information to Pershing: “Arrived as per plan and surprised the inhabitants some sixty-five in number and undoubtedly Villistas but proof of same lacking.”

During the five-hour battle, the Buffalo Soldiers killed or wounded most of the men and forced Villa to escape into the mountains. Only five Americans were wounded in the first skirmish of the expedition. The men marched or rode in the saddle for as much as seventeen hours a day as they pursued Villa farther into the mountains, an area that was unfamiliar to them but home territory for Villa. The frustrations built as the rebel leader eluded them each time they thought he was trapped. Not only was the terrain as familiar to Villa as his own backyard—which to a great extent it was—but he enjoyed the loyalty of the local peasantry, who supplied him and his band with food and ammunition. As the Buffalo Soldiers drew closer to Aguascalientes on April 1, Major Young ordered his men to charge about 150 rebels dug in at the Villa stronghold, only to find that the rebels had retreated once again into the surrounding mountains.

T
he men of the Tenth chased after the Mexican rebels for seven miles through rugged territory, but they finally had to give up pursuit when the light started to fade and most of their horses ran out of steam. Again, the Villistas seemed to vanish into the mist, similar to the way Aquino had pulled his disappearing act time after time in the Philippine jungles. When the Tenth did encounter the enemy, however, Villa and his men proved to be some of the most formidable guerrilla fighters the Americans had ever fought.