What turns a story about a particular event into a memorable history? Eileen Welsome’s answer to this challenge is to polish enough small details until they reflect a sharp image of our past – in this case, a vivid picture of the Mexican frontier during the revolution.
Welsome is a tireless researcher who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for unearthing the story that eventually became “The Plutonium Files,” which documented how human beings became experimental nuclear guinea pigs. The event at the heart of this book, however, Pancho Villa’s raid against Columbus, N.M., happened 90 years ago. How much light can she bring to bear on something so old and remote? Plenty.
The book opens with a scene that would be quite at home in a Cormac McCarthy novel – a tense description of the kidnapping of Maud Wright from her ranch in Mexico, and her anxious nights riding toward the border as a captive of Villa’s troops. From that enveloping prologue, Welsome steps back to sketch the mythic figure of Pancho Villa in historical perspective.
An orphan turned bandit, catapulted into leading the revolutionary Division del Norte, by 1916, after a string of defeats in a civil war with Mexican President Venustiano Carranza, who had been aided by the United States, Villa had become an outlaw. No longer interested in killing his countrymen, Villa now was driving his ragged band northward to attack gringos, whom he blamed for Mexico’s problems.
Was Villa a puppet of German meddling trying to distract the United States on the eve of the First World War, taunting the United States to attack Mexico to topple Carranza? Or, as some of his captured soldiers adamantly insisted, was the whole purpose of the raid to take revenge on a particular arms trader who lived in Columbus? Welsome’s primary reliance on survivor accounts from north of the border perhaps places her viewpoint too close to the ground to answer the question adequately. The precise reasons for Villa’s attack remain a mystery.
Spreading the blame
While Villa quickly retreated south, raiding and terrorizing foreign-owned ranches for fresh horses, Welsome recounts instances of vigilantism against the Mexican inhabitants of Columbus, who were rashly blamed for collusion in the attack. The Army was complicit as the furor helped cover up the shortcomings of the local garrison’s commanders
The strength of the book lies in Welsome’s forensic attention to the actions, the traumatic wounds and the brutal deaths of Villa’s victims, and the Army’s lumbering response. Within days the Woodrow Wilson administration launched the Army on a punitive expedition into Mexico under the command of Gen. John Pershing, who took along Lt. George Patton as his aide. Welsome tracks the arduous march of the various Army columns as they choked their way southward through the dust. Denied access to Mexico’s railroads, this expedition became one of the first mechanized military operations. Even the Army’s entire air force, eight Jennies, tagged along for a month until all the fragile craft were destroyed.
Villa proves elusive
Even though Villa suffered a serious leg wound from his own soldiers two weeks after the hunt began, he still managed to escape. Pershing blamed the uncooperative Mexican government and its forces threatening his extended supply line. The Army quickly formulated grander plans to take over all of Mexico should the hostile Carrancista forces attack. In June, Pershing even ordered a maneuver designed to provoke a confrontation, but news of the hostile incident at Carrizal reached Washington before it did Pershing, resulting in orders to keep his troops in idle encampment for the next several months until they eventually withdrew.
At the outset of the advance, the Army captured several Mexican soldiers and returned them to New Mexico without extradition. Despite high-level concerns about a fair trial, the captives were quickly tried and convicted of murder by a county court in Deming. Welsome narrates this miscarriage of justice and the hangings in clinical detail. (A later group of captured soldiers was acquitted and deported.)
One can imagine many parallel situations peeking around the edges of this account seeking timely advice. (Troops, for example, have just been deployed again on the Mexican border.) But Welsome studiously avoids any moralizing that would turn this story into a cheap parable. She lets the facts speak for themselves. In the end, one can only marvel at how meticulously and dispassionately she has mined the archives to bring that startling event of March 1916 to light. The story is as evocative of the era as a tattered photograph.
David J. Poundstone is a freelance writer.
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The General and the Jaguar
The Hunt for Pancho Villa: A True Story of Revolution and Revenge
By Eileen Welsome
Little, Brown & Company, 416 pages, $25.95
