The General and the Jaguar (26 page)

By lantern light, Pershing pored over a crude map of Mexico and plotted his campaign. He had received information that Villa
and his men were on a fertile plateau some sixty miles to the southwest, reportedly replenishing their food stocks and replacing
their worn-out ponies at Luis Terrazas’s fabulous spread, San Miguel de Babícora, or farther south, at one of the three lovely
ranches belonging to the Hearst family. By now, the few working ranches in Mexico that had not been destroyed or seized had
come to resemble military forts and the heavily armed vaqueros spent as much time fighting off revolutionaries as they did
rounding up cattle.

The main house on one of the Hearst ranches, for example, consisted of a central building of stone and adobe that opened onto
a patio. The walls and doors of the house, as well as the corrals, which could easily accommodate hundreds of animals, were
equipped with portals for rifles. Had Villa actually been heading for one of these ranches, he would have been in for a nasty
fight. But Pershing had no way of evaluating the information and ordered three columns to move out immediately. On the evening
of March 17, after resting for just a few hours at Dublán, 675 soldiers of the Seventh Regiment struggled to their feet and
departed. The following day, two smaller squadrons composed of troopers from the Tenth Cavalry left. The plan was for the
three columns to surround Villa on the plateau, blocking his escape to the south and cutting off his routes to the east or
west.

Pershing sent a telegram to Columbus on March 19, instructing Captain Benjamin Foulois and his airplane squadron to join them
at Dublán. The enthusiastic Foulois took the instructions literally and at five o’clock, just as the sun was setting, the
eight Jennies roared off on their great adventure. The pilots had no lights, no navigation equipment, and no maps to guide
them, and only one man had any experience flying at night. In place of a stick, the pilots used a wheel that was set on a
movable bar in front of their bodies. Turning the wheel changed the direction of the plane and pushing or pulling on it made
the plane climb or dive. A foot pedal, much like the accelerator found in an automobile, controlled the speed.

One plane had barely gotten off the ground when its engine malfunctioned and the pilot was forced to return to Columbus. The
other seven JN-3s flew on in loose formation, guided by the planes in front of them. They could see the bluish shapes of the
mountains, the North Star, the moon. As darkness blanketed the earth, Foulois realized that he had made a tactical error by
leaving so late and decided to land at Ascención, one of Villa’s first stops upon fleeing Columbus and some sixty to seventy
miles south of the international line. Three other planes followed him down. The four Jennies landed without damage—a “remarkable”
event, Foulois would later write in his war diary, given the fact that a cavalry regiment had just rolled over the ground
and produced a cloud of dust ten feet high.

The other three planes, which were flying perhaps one to two thousand feet above the pack, flew on. Lieutenant Joseph Carberry
finally landed his plane on the road leading to the small hamlet of Janos, forty miles beyond Ascención. Lieutenant Robert
Willis, a flying enthusiast who had left the Sixth Infantry for the aviation corps, crash-landed farther south and walked
for thirty miles until he caught up with a detachment of U.S. troops. The third pilot, Lieutenant Edgar S. Gorrell, kept going,
lured by an orangey smudge on the horizon. Gorrell thought the glow was from fires that the pilots were told would be lit
to guide them to their makeshift landing strip. Instead, he found himself flying over a raging forest fire. He reversed course,
heading north again. Near the town of Ojo Caliente—“hot eye”—some thirty miles northeast of Ascención, he ran out of gas and
brought the plane down in a pasture filled with horses and cattle. Grabbing his revolver, canteen, and compass, he cautiously
crept away from the herd, filled his canteen at a nearby stream, and set off on a brisk march, hoping to cross the trail of
the southerly moving troops. He walked for about six hours, then lay down and slept. At dawn, he resumed his march but soon
grew so thirsty that he decided to return to the plane. Once there, he filled his canteen and choked down some dry rations.
Refreshed, he noticed for the first time several adobe houses nearby. Eventually he persuaded one of the residents to lend
him a horse and take him to Ascención. There, he found a group of American soldiers and spent the night with them. The following
morning, he borrowed some gasoline, hitched a ride back to the plane, filled his tanks, and resumed his flight. The plane
had gone only about thirty miles when Gorrell spotted a convoy of trucks and decided to land and beg for more gas. The truckers
were more than happy to oblige and Gorrell refueled quickly and taxied down a dirt road. As his plane was climbing into the
air, one of the wings struck a gasoline drum and tacks began to fly off the cloth covering. Finally beaten, Gorrell set the
plane down and hitched a ride to Dublán with the truckers. The ordeal had taken four days. By then, the horse soldiers of
Seventh and Tenth regiments had already moved on.

T
HE TROOPERS OF THE
S
EVENTH
had not yet recovered from their arduous march into Mexico, and whenever halts were ordered, the men tumbled from their saddles
and fell asleep. “Until daylight,” remembered young Henry Huthmacher, “I tried to get some sleep but awoke time and again
by someone growling at his horse telling him to get off his arm or out of his belly.”

The two smaller detachments of the Tenth Cavalry had been on the move since the day after the raid and their horses were already
feeling the strain on their legs. To give them a rest, Pershing decided to send them part of the way by train and asked the
manager of the El Paso Southwestern Railroad to send some rolling stock to Dublán. The train arrived in terrible condition,
filthy and unventilated, with large gaping holes in the floors where campfires had been built. The soldiers tore down nearby
stock pens and used the wood to repair the flooring. Working rapidly, they loaded the horses and the train began inching south.
Scores of soldiers rode “Mexican style” on the tops of the cars, bales of hay stacked along the edges to keep them from falling
off.

The train crew was not imbued with the same urgency as the soldiers and stopped frequently for water or fuel. When the train
reached the town of El Rucio, twenty-eight miles south of Dublán, a disgusted Colonel William Brown off-loaded his squadron
of 272 men and took off across country. Major Ellwood Evans, meanwhile, continued south with his 212-member squadron, only
to meet with tragedy when two cars loaded with horses and men overturned on a switchback. Troopers and their mounts were flung
down a steep embankment. Several horses had to be destroyed and eleven men were injured, including a saddler, who later died
of his injuries. Evans left the injured men behind with a medical corpsman after receiving assurances that a train would be
sent the following day to convey them back to Dublán, and struck out on horseback with the rest of his detachment.

A few days later, Pershing hurled four more columns south. Their mission was to back up the troops in the field, occupy territory
already searched and vacated by the cavalrymen, and guard the mountain passes. Pack mules laden with food and grain were sent
after them, though trucks eventually became the most efficient way of supplying the columns. “The pursuit of Villa was a triple
chase,” recalled Sergeant John Converse, an observer who accompanied the Thirteenth. “Villa fled south, the cavalry after
him and the motor trucks after the cavalry.”

The trucks traveled in long convoys, moving at about fourteen miles per hour. “Their tops are always visible above the gray
and green chaparral, their bulk is impressive, and their speed, combined with the rifles of the guards who ride on top of
the loads, make them seem some dangerous engines of offense,” noted one correspondent. With no signs to mark the routes, the
truck drivers used mesquite branches, laid diagonally across the ground, to indicate a turn or a dangerous pothole. Somehow
they managed to find goggles and even respirators to protect themselves from the dust. At night, over their campfires, they
sang Broadway songs and sipped “cowboy coffee,” a bitter, dark brew made by boiling water and coffee together and then allowing
the grounds to settle to the bottom.

The columns carried enough food to last two or three days—hardtack, bacon, a little coffee, and perhaps a potato or two. When
the rations were gone, they tried to buy whatever they could find, with the officers often paying for the provisions with
their own money. Using mortars and pestles purchased from the locals, the cooks ground up corn, mixed it with water, and fried
it into cakes. Sometimes the cornmeal was mixed with the broth from beef bones, which were transported from camp to camp and
boiled over all-night fires. The few stores that existed had been thoroughly looted but occasionally residents would come
to the camp to sell eggs, tortillas, tamales, or sweets. Soon the Americans’ diet came to resemble that of the Villistas they
were chasing: beans, corn, and half-cooked beef—“the last run down and killed in the hot sun of the afternoon and eaten the
next day, tough, stringy and indigestible,” remembered Major William Eastman.

Eastman was a young doctor assigned to the Seventh Cavalry who also served as the regiment’s dentist and veterinarian. He
had only scant supplies to treat his patients: tincture of iodine, phenol, bismuth, soda bicarbonate, magnesium sulfate, licorice
tablets, and Vaseline. Fortunately, the water was pure and clean and despite an occasional attack of dysentery from the beef,
the soldiers’ health remained good. Dental cavities turned out to be the biggest problem and Eastman plugged them with cotton
soaked in phenol or tincture of iodine.

When breeches wore out, the soldiers patched them with cloth from their saddle blankets or tents. New shoe soles were fashioned
from stirrup covers, hats were constructed from the lining of saddlebags. Once the writing paper was gone, the soldiers used
the cardboard from the hardtack cartons. The temperature changes were extreme, plunging as much as ninety degrees during the
night, and sleep was often elusive. To keep warm, the men dug trenches and built fires within them. When the ground was thoroughly
warmed, they raked away the coals, spread a tarp, and lay down fully clothed, piling blankets and saddles on top of themselves.
They also slept in pairs, one blanket underneath, a second on top, and a fire at their feet. Sometimes tents were used as
windbreaks and strung up between two trees. A log was placed parallel to the tent, a fire built next to the log, and bedding
placed as close to the flames as possible. At many campsites the native grass was almost four feet high, and fires broke out
frequently. “In spite of precautions we seemed to be continually setting fire to the country wherever we went. The grass was
dry as punk and if it got a good start with the wind blowing, it was almost impossible to put out,” remembered Sergeant Converse.

The horses suffered the most. They were not the tough little ponies that the Villistas rode, but large-boned thoroughbreds
or crosses between several breeds. They were big and powerful, but fragile, too. Nearly all of them were classified as “bays,”
a stingy army description that failed to capture the many hues of a brown horse. In actuality, they were the color of ginger,
cinnamon, and cloves; rich, warm chocolate, coffee, and the watery tannic of tea. Only their eyes were the same, huge dark
pools revealing an animal capable of great fear and great courage.

Horses have a grazing animal’s nature; they are self-reliant and content enough to live alone, in the middle of a great plain,
with only the wind and crows for company, but happier still with another horse that they can stand parallel to in the buggy
months of summer, noses and rumps reversed, the tail of one swatting the flies from the face of the other. They are creatures
of habit and thrive on the monotonous turning of day into night, looking forward to a pat of hay for breakfast, a pat of hay
for lunch, a pat of hay for dinner, and grass in between. They become cantankerous when their feeding time is altered, startle
at loud noises and sudden movement, and are made uneasy by changes in their environment. Yet these were precisely the travails
that they would have to endure on the expedition.

Soldiers are expected to stand and fight, but everything in a horse tells it to flee when confronted with danger. Horses are
gentle and unaggressive by nature, but their dispositions can turn rebellious in the hands of the wrong rider. Their mouths
open willingly for the bit, which sits at the corners of their lips. If this most intimate of spaces is violated, if the reins
are jerked or pulled repeatedly, horses can become tough mouthed and nonresponsive, or even worse, clamp the bit between their
teeth and run away with their passenger. Their flesh is extremely sensitive—who has not seen a horse shudder under a fly’s
weight?—yet ignorant riders think it necessary to pummel them with whips and spurs until the animal retreats into some reptilian
corner of its brain and refuses to move at all.

A horse’s back—the beautiful curve that begins at the top of the head, slopes down across a smooth plain, and gently rises
into the tail—must be carefully tended. Horses that experience pain and discomfort while being saddled learn to jig and prance
and fill their bellies with air so that the girth strap needs to be repeatedly tightened. The long, twisting rivers of muscle
covering the leg bones are susceptible to strains and microscopic tears, and an injury in one leg often means the other three
have to compensate, with one injury frequently leading to a second. Even more impractical are a horse’s ankles, dainty as
a ballerina’s and prone to wind puffs—swollen tissue that subsides only with rest and liniment.

The hooves, which are hard as stone, seem to be perfectly adapted to withstand the enormous impact of walking and trotting
and cantering. At their center, though, is a wedge-shaped “frog” prone to drying and bruising. The wrong kind of food can
flood the thick horny material with heat and cause permanent damage. Regular trimming and properly fitted shoes are essential.
Unfortunately, the animals ridden into Mexico received neither, and their hooves grew long and added to their fatigue and
the strain on their legs. The cavalrymen were considerate of their horses and tried to lessen their suffering. They brushed
them twice a day and turned them loose to graze whenever possible. (The young Patton was adamant about the need for grazing
and wrote scorching memos whenever he saw horses standing on the picket line.) But even the most tender, loving care could
not make up for the lack of rolled oats and green alfalfa. The horses chewed up leather bridles, saddlebags, halters, and
ropes. The soldiers purchased native corn, but before the grain could be fed to the horses, it had to be dumped onto blankets
and the many small pebbles found in the mixture laboriously picked out. Starved though they were, many horses simply stopped
eating if their teeth struck a rock. As the flesh melted from their bones, extra blankets were needed under the McClellan
saddles to protect their backs. “Great care was taken of the horses’ backs,” remembered Sergeant Converse. “Blankets were
folded carefully, saddles packed so the weights were distributed evenly and the men not allowed to lounge in the saddle.”