The General and the Jaguar (30 page)

Tompkins breezed by the villages that Villa’s escort had skirted just a few days earlier—Cusihuíriachic, Cieneguita, and San
Francisco de Borja—impoverished communities consisting of flat-roofed adobe homes and inhabited by burros, old men, women,
children, and dogs, all hollowed out by hunger and revolution. Near San Borja, a group of Mexican soldiers rode out to meet
Tompkins, bringing a note from their commander, José Cavazos, the Carrancista officer who had been aggressively searching
for Villa. In polite language, Cavazos asked Tompkins to halt until he had talked with his superior. “I would esteem it very
much if you would suspend your advance until you receive the order to which I refer.”

Tompkins rejected the request and rode on to the outskirts of San Borja, where he instructed one of his lieutenants, James
Ord, who spoke Spanish fluently, to proceed into town and ask Cavazos to come out for a conference. While he was waiting,
he ordered some of his men to dismount and take control of a nearby hill so that they would have the military advantage in
the event Cavazos and his men “should think of indulging in any little act of treachery.”

After a while, the general and his entourage trotted out to meet him, the bright colors of the Mexican flag waving in the
breeze. In comparison to the villagers, the Mexican troops were well armed and smartly clad, wearing khaki-colored uniforms,
leggings or chaps, and gray felt sombreros with smallish peaks and tasseled horsehair bands. They carried six-shooters on
their hips and thirty-thirty carbines in their saddle boots. Slung around the pommels were more belts of ammunition. Long,
cruel-looking spurs hung from their boot heels and heavy, curved bits weighed down the mouths of the ponies—pintos, roans,
sorrels, and bays.

Cavazos said he could not allow the U.S. troops to go through town. Besides, he said, Villa was dead, buried at Santa Ana,
and his troops were just leaving to search for the body. (Cavazos was lying; by then he knew Villa was hiding at Ojitos and
was on his way to search the area, but he wasn’t about to share his information with the gringos.) Tompkins reluctantly agreed
to halt his journey south. As a show of friendship, Cavazos pulled out a quart of brandy, took a long drink, and handed it
to Tompkins. “I took a good long pull and handed it to Ord who got his share and handed it to another of my officers who all
helped to lower the line. When the bottle got back to Cavazos he took one look at it, made some exclamation in Spanish, which
sounded like strong language, and threw the bottle in the bush.”

Tompkins and his men swung east toward the town of Santa Rosalía and then resumed their southward march toward Parral. They
stopped at clear streams to water their horses and let their animals graze whenever possible on the tender new grass. At each
place he camped, Tompkins would summon the leader—or “head man,” as he preferred to call him—from the nearest village and
inform him that if the Americans were fired upon, Tompkins would promptly burn down his house. “These head men did not like
this arrangement and put up the plea that they could not possibly know in advance of any such hostile intent toward my camp.
I would only reply: ‘Then you are out of luck,’ and terminate the conference. I used this method when camping near any settlement
and never had my camp disturbed. Other commands were not so fortunate.”

The cavalrymen had been given the usual rations of hardtack and bacon, a few potatoes, as well as some flour and salt, which
they mixed with water and fried in grease to make “cowboy bread.” To supplement the fare, Tompkins ordered the local officials
to bring them food. Although he always paid for the meals with Mexican silver, his arrogance and threats did not endear him
to the inhabitants. One village official, who had been ordered to deliver a cauldron of hot beans to the camp, protested that
the villagers had no beans and no pot to cook them in. “I told him we would have nice hot beans for breakfast or his house
would burn. The beans came on time and were paid for in Mexican silver. There were enough for breakfast and luncheon, too.”

W
HILE
F
RANK
T
OMPKINS
and his troopers were eating their beans, Major Robert Howze and his squadron had succeeded in picking up Pancho Villa’s
trail. Howze, a Texan, was in some ways the opposite of Major Tompkins. Unfailingly polite, he preferred to win allies through
friendship and used intimidation only as a last resort. Like most of the other officers on the expedition, he was also a West
Point graduate and greatly respected by his men. Accompanying him was a Mormon scout named Dave Brown, who spoke Spanish fluently,
was also courteous in his dealings with the local inhabitants, and was almost as skilled as the Apaches when it came to tracking
humans.

In San Borja, Howze and Brown conferred with the
jefe político.
Although the man was unwilling to share any information, Brown managed to get his wife to talk. Despite her husband’s hostile
glares, she told the Americans that Villa’s troops had split up and Villa himself was going south. Howze’s troopers trotted
out of town and soon found bloodstained bandages, cotton, and the remains of a campfire. The following day, they came across
two more abandoned campsites and judged that they were moving four times as fast as Villa’s entourage.

As it turned out, Villa had been forced to leave his lair in Ojitos on April 6 after a sympathizer had rushed to warn him
that General Cavazos was on his way. Still in great pain, he mounted his beautiful pinto and started south. On April 7, he
stopped in the tiny settlement of Aguaje, ten miles directly south of Ojitos.

The following day, Howze arrived in a village that was just five miles to the northwest of Aguaje. Howze bivouacked in a deep
canyon, and at daybreak, after being forced to shoot five horses, resumed his march. The American troopers passed within a
mile of the village where Villa was staying and were now on a collision course with the rebel leader’s southerly moving escort.
Then, the Americans came to a fork in the road. The left fork was covered with hoofprints, suggesting that a large contingent
of mounted soldiers had taken it and were going east toward the village of San José del Sitio, which was nine miles away.
A smaller group of shod horses had taken the right fork. Major Howze was inclined to take the left fork, in part because he
was in desperate need of food and forage. But Dave Brown, the scout, suspected that the Villistas had deliberately driven
a large herd of riderless horses up the left fork to throw the Americans off the trail and recommended that they take the
right fork instead. After a long, agonizing discussion, the troopers decided to take the left fork. This enabled Villa, who
undoubtedly knew exactly where the Americans were, to hurry down to Santa Cruz de Herrera, where he had been told that he
would be safe while his leg healed.

The trip to San José del Sitio turned out to be fruitless for Howze and his men. The residents refused to sell the gringo
soldiers food or forage. Desperate, Howze ordered the Mormon scout to round up and butcher some cattle anyway. As they were
preparing to eat them, “a slender, mean-looking fellow” came into camp and demanded payment. They would later find out that
the scowling visitor was a Villista, who undoubtedly had used the rustled cows as an excuse to scope out the troop strength
and equipment of the gringos.

On the morning of April 10, Howze’s squadron left San José del Sitio. Knowing they were surrounded by spies, they marched
east out of town and then reversed direction and cut back toward their old trail. Eventually they arrived on the ledge of
a mountain. Spread out in the valley below them was the settlement of La Joya. Through their binoculars, the U.S. soldiers
watched as several mounted men galloped into the town plaza, dismounted, and went inside the church. Soon they reemerged and
began moving slowly away. A man mounted on a sorrel horse and wearing a large sombrero rode in the middle of the horsemen
and appeared to be receiving a lot of attention. On the outskirts of the village, the Mexicans split up, with most of them,
including the important-looking man, going south. A few headed in the other direction toward a canyon. Was this man Villa?
Or a decoy? By the time Howze’s squadron had worked its way down the cliff, all the villagers had fled except for a Tarahumara
Indian, dressed in white muslin, who had been circulating among the horsemen at the church. He was immediately taken into
custody and questioned intently, but responded with a “perpetual smile.”

Howze dispatched soldiers to search the canyon. A young lieutenant took his rifle and hid in some bushes. When two mounted
Mexicans appeared, he stepped out and demanded that they halt. Instead, they wheeled their horses and began galloping away.
The lieutenant fired, dropping both men. One was wounded, the other killed. The villagers later identified the dead man as
Captain Manuel Silvas, an officer who had participated in the Columbus attack. Back in La Joya, Howze’s troopers searched
the homes and found several articles of clothing taken during the Columbus raid. As usual, the problem was trying to distinguish
friend from foe; a Villista without a gun became just another Mexican. Howze’s men nevertheless tried to elicit what information
they could before leaving town to follow the trail of the Mexicans who had gone south.

As they were meandering across a relatively flat piece of land, the troopers were caught in a vicious ambush. Two lieutenants
galloped up the ridge where the enemy fire was coming from and eventually succeeded in dislodging the snipers. This time,
the Villistas’ aim was more accurate: several troopers were wounded and a young private from Tennessee killed by a bullet
through the head. His body was wrapped in a blanket and buried. The troopers, who had brought no shovels with them, used mess
kits, forks, sticks, and even their bare hands to dig the grave. By the time they had finished, it was nearly ten o’clock
at night and the squadron decided to rest for a couple of hours.

The ambush had obviously been staged by Villistas to slow down Major Howze’s progress. As the Americans bandaged the wounded
and buried the dead, Villa reached Santa Cruz de Herrera and went to the home of Dolores Rodríguez, the father of a Villista
general killed by the Carrancistas several months earlier.

Sometime after midnight, the cavalry troops arose and saddled their horses and marched sixteen miles south to Santa Cruz.
They reached the village at 3:00 a.m. on April 11—only hours after Villa’s arrival. As the Americans approached the settlement,
they were fired upon and returned the fire, killing two men. At daylight, they searched the houses and then rode a few miles
out of town and camped. The command, “being more or less exhausted,” remained there for the rest of the day.

Afterward, one of Howze’s aides, Lieutenant Summer Williams, went into town to buy food and saw a group of Yaqui Indians,
unarmed but wearing face paint, exiting from a ranch house a mile away. Knowing that some Yaquis had allied themselves with
Villa, he became suspicious and returned to camp and urged Howze to attack the ranch house at once. “No one of us could get
him to listen to the possibility of Villa and a small band being in hiding in this house. He prohibited any of us from going
to this ranch house, and the following morning we marched south,” the frustrated lieutenant would later write. “I fully believe
that this is where Major Howze and his column lost Villa and also lost our great opportunity.”

It’s not clear why Major Howze, who had been so dogged in his pursuit, stopped short of searching the house. But one thing
was certain: both the men and the horses were on the edge of starvation. “Our animals were low in flesh, lame and foot sore;
our men were nearly barefooted; the country was nearly devoid of food, and wherever we turned, we found less horse feed,”
he would later write. Howze decided to head to Parral, fifty miles to the southeast. Though it was a two-and-a-half-day march
away, he hoped to find there the supplies he so desperately needed.

B
Y
A
PRIL 11,
General Pershing and twenty members of the headquarters staff were camped in a cornfield on the outskirts of Satevó—four
hundred miles south of Columbus, eighty-three miles north of Parral, and midway between his roving columns. The entourage,
which consisted of four automobiles and three trucks, made a defensive square in the cornfield. Pershing ordered shallow trenches
dug and inspected the small group, including the correspondents, to make sure their rifles and sidearms were in working order.
The
Times
correspondent, Frank Elser, had lost his rifle.

“Soldiers don’t lose their rifles,” Pershing growled.

“No, sir, they don’t, soldiers,” responded Elser.

Pershing slept outside the square, on a dinky cot by himself. In the distance, he could see the flickering lights of the Carrancistas’
campfires. “The big moon, rising higher, touched everything with a luminous and breathtaking beauty. Sentries paced the hills.
The coyotes yipped, a thousand of them,” wrote Elser.

Pershing could sense his troops were close to
el jaguar
now and wanted to be in on the kill. Driving toward Parral were Howze’s troopers, the swashbuckling Frank Tompkins, and Colonel
William Brown, another magnificent officer in his sixties. A fourth detachment led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Allen had been
ordered to cut the weak men and animals from their squadron and concentrate on finding Pablo López.

On the way to Parral, Major Tompkins and his troopers had encountered an amiable Carrancista captain named Antonio Mesa who
had offered to telephone ahead to arrange for a campsite and forage for the tired troopers. Given Parral’s history, it seemed
highly unlikely that its inhabitants would look kindly upon the foreigners, but Captain Mesa assured Tompkins that they would
be treated well. Urging their tired horses forward, the officers thought longingly of the amenities awaiting them. “We pictured
the hot baths we should have, the long cool drinks, and the good food,” remembered Tompkins.