In 1929,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, about an old prospector in the Mexican sierras, was published, and in 1948 was made into a movie classic directed by John Huston. Its author, B. Traven, disappeared south of the border during the 1930s. His fate remains unknown.
Pancho Villa’s archenemy, General Venustiano Carranza, was ousted from the Mexican presidency in 1920 by Villa’s other nemesis, General Obregón, after Carranza began the wholesale murder of political prisoners, including fifteen generals. Carranza tried to flee the country with millions in government gold. He almost made it, but was caught heading for the port of Veracruz and executed on the spot.
In 1919, Henry O. Flipper was hired as translator for Mexican affairs in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later served as an assistant to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. He retired in 1930 to his native Georgia and devoted the rest of his life to clearing his name. He died in 1940, the same year as Tom Mix. In 1999, President Clinton granted Flipper a full pardon for his court-martial conviction for “conduct unbecoming a gentleman.”
Pancho Villa was also granted a pardon, in 1920, by the government of Mexican president Adolfo de la Huerta and went on to become a peaceful farmer in Parral, where it was reported he was learning how to type. In 1923 he was assassinated by people believed to be associated with the wealthy Herrera family, four members of whom Villa had murdered during the revolution. He was forty-five years old.
General Rudolfo Fierro was leading his soldiers to the Battle of Agua Prieta when they came to a body of water the men did not want to cross. Leading by example, Fierro rode out in the stream and was caught in quicksand. It was said he might have escaped but for a load of stolen gold he was carrying, which weighted him down and drowned him.
Ambrose Bierce vanished in Mexico after being rumored to have joined Villa’s army as an observer. His fate has never been determined, despite the efforts of numerous biographers and historians.
General Pershing became commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. Under him, George Patton rose to the rank of colonel and went on to fame and fortune in the next world war. During the American invasion of Mexico in 1916, riding on the running board of a car, he personally shot and killed the top aide to Pancho Villa.
Toward the end of his last term in office, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. He died in 1924.
The figure upon which the character of Claus Strucker is based was a German agent in Mexico named Franz von Rintelen. His attempts to draw America into a full-scale war with Mexico proved futile and he left the country in 1917 after discovery and publication of the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, in which the Germans offered to assist in the return to the Mexican government of the states of California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in exchange for a declaration of war on the U.S.
The American owners of the huge estates and industrial holdings in Northern Mexico lost their land and their money when a series of Mexican revolutionary governments nationalized their property. The Mexican government subsequently decreed that foreigners could not own any property in Mexico—down to and including private residences—a restriction that has applied in one fashion or another until this day. C. V. “Sonny” Whitney, however, litigated the confiscation of his property through the Mexican courts and in 1927 was awarded $250,000, a fraction of its worth. He used the money to finance an aviation enterprise that became Pan American World Airways.
As to the research necessary for any book of this kind, I relied on several biographies of Ambrose Bierce, especially Roy Morris, Jr.’s fine work
Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company
. Quite a lot has been written about Pancho Villa and his lieutenants, much of it fantasy. Most recently and most notably, Friedrich Katz’s monumental biography
The Life and Times of Pancho Villa
is a worthy analysis. For the bullfighting sequences, no study in the English language has ever been more comprehensive on the subject than Ernest Hemingway’s
Death in the Afternoon
. I am deeply grateful to these authors, and many others, for their insights and illuminations.
