The General and the Jaguar (31 page)

Sometime around noon on April 12, Tompkins reached the outskirts of the town. No representatives of the Carrancista government
were on hand to meet him so the major left the main body of his troops outside the town and proceeded with a small group to
the guardhouse, where he asked to be taken to the headquarters of the
jefe de armas.
When he arrived, he was introduced to General Ismael Lozano, who invited him upstairs for a private conference. Also present
at the gathering was José de la Luz Herrera, Parral’s civilian mayor. The room had French windows overlooking the street and
Tompkins could see his squadron down below, looking impressive and alert. The Mexican officials were agitated and alarmed
by Tompkins’s presence. (“Their entrance into the city was so sudden and unexpected that it was regarded as an act of hostility,”
Mayor Herrera would later explain.)

General Lozano asked Tompkins why he had come. Tompkins responded that he had been invited into the city by Captain Mesa,
who was supposed to have sent a message in advance notifying the town officials of their arrival. Lozano said he had received
no such message and emphasized that Tompkins and his men would have to leave immediately. Tompkins replied that they would
go, but not until they had received the food and forage they had been promised.

Lozano called a man to his office to arrange for the supplies. As they were finishing their business, Tompkins heard a ruckus
and looked out to see a mule hitched to a heavy cart bolting down the street, which he interpreted as an effort to cause confusion
among the soldiers. “A big Yank grabbed the mule by the bit and stopped that little act,” remembered Tompkins. “This incident
was so indicative of treachery that I slipped my holster in front in anticipation of immediate need.”

By the time Tompkins and Lozano had reached the street, a huge mob led by a beautiful young woman named Elisa Griensen had
gathered.
“Viva Villa! Viva México!”
they shouted. As the troops started out of town, other women leaned out of their second-floor windows and dumped their slop
jars and spittoons onto the soldiers. Tompkins was infuriated and dropped behind to keep an eye on the crowd. One compactly
built man, with a neat Vandyke beard and mounted on a very fine Mexican pony, seemed to be exhorting the mob to violence.
“Todos! Ahora! Viva México!”
he shouted. Tompkins thought the man looked German and made up his mind to shoot this “bird” first if violence did erupt.
Then Tompkins did something that seemed totally out of character: wheeling his horse around, he shouted,
“Viva Villa!”
If his aim was to confuse, he momentarily succeeded. The mob stopped and laughed. Then it surged forward.

Lozano was at the head of the U.S. troops, leading the soldiers in a northeasterly direction out of Parral. They were moving
toward the railroad tracks and a depression between two smallish hills when gunfire erupted at the rear of the cavalry column.
Tompkins realized his troops were being fired upon by someone in the crowd and raced ahead to notify General Lozano.
“Los hijos de la chingada!”
cursed the general, retracing his steps. Lozano slashed at the mob with his saber and another Carrancista officer fired into
the crowd, shooting four or five people. The Parral residents instantly turned their wrath on the Mexican soldiers, yelling
obscenities and throwing fruit and stones at them.

The ever-suspicious Tompkins thought Lozano had been deliberately leading them into a trap and ordered two groups of troopers
to take the two hills. Then he deployed his rear guard under First Lieutenant Clarence Lininger along a railroad embankment.
While the troops were moving to their new positions, a group of Carrancista soldiers had gathered on a third hill some six
hundred yards to the south. Lozano begged Tompkins to retreat at once. But Tompkins would not be budged: After we get our
food and forage, he responded. The Mexican troops on the hill advanced toward them. Tompkins stood and waved his arms and
screamed at them to go back. When they refused, he ordered a captain and three armed men to drive them back and to fire upon
the Mexican soldiers when they had them within range.

Tompkins decided his first target would be a soldier waving a Mexican flag. He turned and borrowed the rifle of Sergeant Jay
Richley, who was lying behind him, his forehead peeping above the railroad embankment. When the flag suddenly disappeared
from sight, Tompkins turned to hand the rifle back to Richley, but the young man was dead—a bullet had struck him in the eye
and passed out the back of his head.

Now the fight began in earnest, and Tompkins, who had been secretly yearning to do something more than threaten to burn a
poor man’s house down, was ready. With Mexicans converging on his flank, he realized their position was extremely vulnerable
and ordered his men to withdraw across country toward the dirt road leading north to the small village of Santa Cruz de Villegas
(not to be confused with Santa Cruz de Herrera, where Villa was holed up). As the main body retreated, Tompkins flung a line
of troopers across the road to fend off the Carrancistas, who continued to follow them for the next sixteen miles. The U.S.
forces were outnumbered by three to one and forced to fight a rearguard action the entire way.

Before they had reached the dirt road, Private Hobart Ledford, a tenderhearted man who had befriended a little white dog on
the way to Parral, was shot through the lung and toppled from his horse. The detachment’s medical officer, First Lieutenant
Claude Cummings, leaped off his mount and dressed Ledford’s wound while bullets sputtered into the ground. Cummings managed
to get Ledford back onto a horse and then he turned to minister to Corporal Benjamin McGhee, who been shot in the mouth and
was bleeding profusely.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Lininger and his eight men continued to hold the Mexican troops at bay while the main body retreated.
The Mexicans returned the fire, but their aim was so inaccurate that Tompkins’s men were able to withdraw in an orderly fashion,
marching two abreast down the road.

Enraged by the deaths of their fellow soldiers, the Carrancistas continued to dog the U.S. forces, traveling parallel to the
road that the Americans were on. The land was flat and rolling, the fields separated by stone walls four feet high and four
to six feet thick. At each wall, the Mexicans had to dismount, remove the stones, get back on their horses, and gallop to
the next barrier.

Tompkins’s aide, Lieutenant Ord, noticed that Hobart Ledford, the lung-shot private, had fallen off his horse again. He raced
back and pushed Ledford onto the mount. Slowly they returned to their lines, with Ord holding Ledford on one side while a
second soldier propped him up on the other. Major Tompkins followed the threesome, urging Ledford’s horse forward with his
whip. “Ledford begged us to go on and leave him. His agony was great,” remembered Tompkins. “I gave him a pull from my canteen,
told him the ranch was just ahead, to hold on for five minutes more and we would have him where the doctor could make him
comfortable.” Moments later, another bullet slammed into Ledford, entering through his back and coming out near his belly.
He tumbled from the horse dead. The three soldiers hurried to catch up with their disappearing column, leaving the young man’s
body where it had fallen.

Convinced that the Carrancistas would make one last charge, Tompkins deployed his men across the road. “In a minute or two
they came,” he wrote, “without formation, hellbent-for-election, firing in the air, yelling like fiends out of hell and making
a most beautiful target.” The U.S. soldiers went into action and Mexican soldiers and their mounts rolled in the dust, screaming
in agony; only a few Carrancistas managed to check their horses and turn away at the last minute.

Upon reaching the village, Tompkins ordered his best marksmen onto the roofs and sent other soldiers to try to make contact
with the American columns that were marching behind them. The Carrancistas gave no indication that they were about to give
up the fight and Tompkins suddenly had images of the Alamo in his head. But when one of the army’s best rifle shots picked
off a Carrancista sitting on his horse eight hundred yards away, the Mexicans stopped their advance.

Soon a messenger carrying a white flag and a note from General Lozano rode into Tompkins’s camp. “I supplicate you to leave
immediately and not bring on hostilities of any kind,” the Mexican general wrote. “If on the contrary, I shall be obliged
to charge the greatest part of my forces.” Tompkins dashed off a response in which he laid the blame for the altercation on
the Mexicans:

I have just received your letter and regret very much that you were unable to control your soldiers. We came to Mexico as
friends and not as enemies. After you had left us, I awaited in good order for the grain and fodder contracted for. When your
soldiers, without provocation, fired upon mine, killing one and wounding two, as from this moment it became a question of
self-defense, I also opened fire to permit my main body to retire, it still being my intention to avoid a general fight. It
was your soldiers who followed me five leagues firing at every opportunity. I did not answer their fire until those who fired
came dangerously near.

He added that he was willing to continue his journey north, provided that he would not be molested. Two hours later, the besieged
troops heard a trumpeter from Colonel Brown’s Tenth Cavalry bugling Attention followed by Officer’s Call. The trumpeter for
the Thirteenth answered, his wavering notes going out across the darkening plain. Once the U.S. soldiers realized the fight
was over, they grew exhilarated, but many were saddened, too, by the deaths of Hobart Ledford and Jay Richley and the suffering
of Benjamin McGhee, who would soon die from his wounds. (In addition to these three fatalities, a fourth soldier would eventually
be listed as missing in action.) The skirmish also took its toll on the horses, with five killed and sixteen wounded.

Two days later, Major Howze and his exhausted troopers of the Eleventh Cavalry reached the Tompkins camp. In all, his squadron
had marched 691 miles since leaving Columbus. One man had been killed and four wounded, and thirty-six horses and five mules
were dead.

A few days later, Parral’s mayor, José de la Luz Herrera, rode out to the cavalry camp to apologize for the incident. Herrera
wanted Villa captured or killed as much as the Americans; his two sons, Maclovio and Luis, had fought under Villa, but had
switched sides when Villa broke with Carranza. The elder Herrera had publicly declared Villa a bandit and knew that his life
was in danger as long as the rebel leader lived. Nevertheless, Herrera still believed that Tompkins provoked the fight by
going into town unannounced. The mayor also pointed out that it was the citizens of Parral—not the Carrancista troops—who
were the aggressors. Here again, he was telling the truth, although it was doubtful that cavalry officers believed him. After
the U.S. troops had withdrawn, some thirty Parral residents who were purportedly sympathetic to the Villistas were arrested
and two would eventually be executed.

Troopers from the Tenth and Thirteenth regiments retrieved the body of Hobart Ledford. His corpse had been stripped of shoes,
pants, shirt, and valuables, but the little white dog was still at his side. The animal had been without food and water for
nearly twenty-four hours. Touched by its loyalty, the soldiers adopted the dog as the official mascot of the Thirteenth Cavalry’s
Troop M.

Ledford’s body was wrapped in a blanket and buried in the local cemetery, along with a sealed bottle that contained his name
and military record. Lieutenant Lininger composed his eulogy and recited the Twenty-third Psalm. Three volleys and taps followed.
The next day, Jay Richley’s body, enclosed in a casket, was brought by hearse from the town of Parral and was also interred
in the cemetery. Over the next ten months, the army’s Burial Corps would make repeated trips into Mexico to recover the bodies
of some thirty-one soldiers or civilians who had died on the expedition. But for some reason, six bodies were left behind.
One of them was Private Ledford.

T
HE NEWS OF THE
P
ARRAL FIGHT
reached Washington first. On April 13, with Pershing still ignorant of what had happened, Secretary of State Lansing received
two notes, one from Carranza’s secretary of foreign relations and another from Don Venustiano himself, protesting the incident
and blaming it on Tompkins’s “imprudence.”

Pershing finally learned of the situation on April 14 when Benjamin Foulois, who had gone to Chihuahua City with dispatches,
hurried back to give him the news. “Uh,” he grunted, rubbing his chin in characteristic fashion. But he was furious and told
the correspondents that they could write whatever they wanted. “Nothing should be kept from the public. You can go the limit,”
he declared. Pershing dispatched two members of his headquarters staff to investigate the incident, instructed all cavalry
columns in the field to make haste toward Parral, and ordered the Sixth and Sixteenth infantries and the Fourth Field Artillery
to start south from the base camp at Colonia Dublán. Tompkins rejoiced to see the reinforcements. “We now felt as though our
force was strong enough to conquer Mexico, and we were hoping the order to ‘go’ would soon come,” he wrote.

But Pershing realized that he could not keep the soldiers there for long. With the Carranza government still adamantly opposed
to allowing the Punitive Expedition to use its railroads, it would soon become nearly impossible to feed the men and animals
converging on Santa Cruz de Villegas, which was 484 miles from Columbus. The combined cavalry units consisted of 34 officers,
606 enlisted men, 702 horses, and 149 mules. The animals alone required six tons of hay and nine thousand pounds of grain
daily to say nothing of the two thousand pounds of food required by the humans.

Pershing decided he had no choice but to order the troops to move north, at least temporarily. “On Saturday, April 16, 1916,
we piled in the cars and headed toward our own border. We drove all day and all night. Pershing sat grim and silent, his big
frame taking the jounces of the rocky trails. He was suffering from indigestion,” Frank Elser wrote.