The Roughest Riders (32 page)

The next testing ground was in the town of El Mesteno, where a continuing stream of rifle fire from Young's troops failed to dislodge the rebels from their positions. Colonel Brown ordered Young to mount his men and attack the Villistas' right flank, while he attempted to envelop them from the left with units of white soldiers. Young readied his cavalry and galloped on horseback with them, their rifles and pistols drawn. They roared toward their prey yelling and screaming in the same way they had charged up the hills in Cuba, but they failed to get a single shot off when the Villistas refused to meet their charge and instead scampered again back
to their mountain retreats. Again, their efforts to engage the enemy ended in frustration as Villa's guerrillas eluded what appeared to be certain defeat.

The pursuit continued deeper into Mexican territory without incident through early April 1916. But on April 12, Villa finally achieved the goal he was after. The US expedition onto Mexican soil infuriated Carranza to such a point that he dispatched regular army units north from Mexico City to halt the American advance. War—or at least what looked like the start of one—between Carranza's government and the United States appeared likely, and Villa was content to remain in hiding with his men while the two sides fought it out. At 6:30 on the evening of April 12, three troopers of the Thirteenth burst into Young's camp in Sapien. They informed the major that Carranza's contingent of more than five hundred regular troops had attacked the one hundred men of the Thirteenth in the nearby village of Parral. The white Thirteenth was on the verge of being wiped out. Those who could escape were retreating north toward Santa Cruz de Villegas.

The Buffalo Soldiers mounted up and charged toward Santa Cruz de Villegas. It took them less than an hour to reach the town, where they found the remaining soldiers of the Thirteenth ensconced behind barricades in the street and on rooftops, waiting for Carranza's men to attack again. The Tenth arrived just in time to prevent a complete disaster for the white troops, sending Carranza's men fleeing in the face of American reinforcements. Pershing was reported to be “mad as hell” when he saw what had happened. US troops had been on the march for weeks on end and had penetrated more than five hundred miles into Mexican territory by the time they reached Parral, with scant results to show for the effort. A total of ten thousand American troops would eventually be deployed into Mexico, and still they were unable to destroy
Villa and his band. And now Pershing had Carranza to deal with. He wired Washington, asking for permission to redirect his forces north from Santa Cruz de Villegas and capture Chihuahua, Villa's base of operations. But President Wilson refused to expand the expedition as Europe occupied his attention, adding to Pershing's sense of futility.

The battles that followed became increasingly difficult as Carranza dispatched more troops into the area in an attempt to push the Americans back over the other side of the border. Villa kept his men in hiding during most of the days and weeks that followed. While Pershing scoured the countryside looking for him, the main resistance he encountered was from the “Carrancistas,” whom he was instructed not to go to war with but rather to just defend himself against when they attacked. Pershing felt that he was not being allowed to fight the kind of war he wanted to fight—the war he needed to fight in order to win. It was as though he were being unreasonably reined in by Washington every time he hatched a plan for victory.

Later generals in later wars would voice the same complaints, smoldering about the “armchair generals” in Washington who had never worn a uniform directing actions on the battlefield, more concerned about political than military strategy when men were getting killed and wounded in action. In May, Pershing ordered his units to reassemble in Colonia Dublán, which he regarded as a headquarters of sorts while he contemplated further action.

On May 14, Lieutenant George S. Patton, the future legendary general of World War II, was out buying some corn for his men near Chihuahua when he came across a ranch owned by a top Villista named Julio Cardenas. Patton assembled fifteen of his men, loaded
them into three Dodge touring cars, and raided the ranch in America's first motorized military action. Patton and his men shot and killed Cardenas and two of his guerrillas, strapped each of them to the hoods of his cars, and drove them back to Pershing's headquarters in Colonia Dublán. Patton carved three notches into his rifle and earned the nickname “El Bandito,” which was bestowed on him by Pershing. The Villistas got their revenge less than two weeks later, however, when they ambushed ten Americans out looking for cattle, killing one of them and wounding two others.

Reinforcements, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, marched south across the border and joined forces with Pershing and the men of the Tenth Cavalry. For the next month they rode and tramped for miles on end across the territory, fording one river seventy-one times in the space of a few miles as they followed any signs indicating that the Villistas were camped in the region. Mostly they came upon inhospitable locals who increasingly resented their presence on Mexican land. The paths the Americans traveled led to one dead end after another. At the end of June, Pershing thought he found the break he was looking for when he heard about a rebel entrenchment at the barrio of Villa Ahumada. If that were true, it would put Villa and his men in a good position to destroy Pershing's lines of communications with Columbus. Pershing sent a detachment of the Tenth, commanded by Captain Charles Boyd, an aide to Major Young, to reconnoiter the situation.

What happened next turned out to be a fateful encounter for Pershing and his forces, as well as a pivotal development in the entire Mexican punitive expedition. The precise details and the motives that set them in motion have become somewhat obscured in the great fog of politics and war. The official version is that Pershing's instructions to Boyd were clear: “A clash with Mexican troops would probably bring on war and for this reason was to be avoided.”

More critical assessments have conjectured that a broader war between the two countries was exactly what Pershing—and, ironically enough, Pancho Villa—wanted, though for far different reasons. From that perspective, it would seem that Pershing had ordered Boyd to continue his advance on the Villista encampment, regardless of whether any Mexican army troops were in the area or not. Boyd carried out his superior's orders as he had interpreted them, believing that a clash with the Mexican army—if it came about—was what the general wanted. It appears less likely that Boyd would have taken the action he did on his own. Pershing, Boyd understood, thought that a show of American force would send the Carrancistas, despite their greater numbers, scurrying off into the bushes.

Boyd and his contingent of Buffalo Soldiers made camp at a ranch about thirty miles from their destination on the evening of June 20. They broke camp early the next morning and headed toward Villa Ahumada, but they never made it there. Before they completed the long march to the town where Villa was located, they spotted a large entrenchment of Carranza's troops well dug in near the barrio of Carrizal, about eight miles from camp and more than twenty miles closer than Villa Ahumada. Boyd moved his men to the edge of an open field lying between them and the Carrancistas, who were grouped along the far side.

The Buffalo Soldiers approached cautiously as the Mexicans formed a defensive perimeter. Boyd asked for permission from the Mexican commander, General Félix Gómez, to let his men proceed, but the general refused. At first, the enemy lineup did not appear to be that large in number, and Boyd decided to fight his way through. But as Boyd's men drew closer, they could see large contingents of Mexican troops filing out of the woods and flanking them on both sides. The Americans had walked into a trap. It was too late to back away now. Boyd sent their horses to the rear and urged his men to
charge ahead. The Carrancistas fired first as the Buffalo Soldiers launched their attack.

The Buffalo Soldiers were badly outnumbered and, as a result, they paid a heavy price during the battle. Boyd paid the ultimate price, along with another officer, when Mexican bullets found their targets. “I am done for, boys,” were the captain's last words as he fell on the battlefield. “All of our men were taking careful aim,” a Buffalo Soldier wrote afterward, “and Mexicans and horses were falling in all directions. But the Mexican forces were too strong for us as they had between 400 and 500 and we only had 50 men on the firing line.” So, even though the black troops were inflicting heavy damage on the enemy, the Mexicans outnumbered them to such a point that the Buffalo Soldiers were unable to stop them from advancing on their flanks.

Despite their smaller forces, the Buffalo Soldiers fought on for an hour and a half, holding off the Carrancistas as best they could as the enemy closed within thirty yards. Bullets fell like hot coals in all directions, taking a heavy toll on both sides of the conflict. As the battle raged on, the Tenth found itself running out of ammunition, and the men had no alternative except to escape from the trap sprung by the Mexicans. Some did get away, but the Carrancistas swarmed in and captured twenty-three of them, killed eleven enlisted men, and wounded ten others and a third officer. The Buffalo Soldiers had caused some serious damage of their own in return, killing Gómez, the Mexican commander who had refused to grant them safe passage, and forty-five of his soldiers, plus wounding forty-three others.

When Pershing received news of the defeat, he said that he was “surprised” and “chagrined” and was determined to revenge the
loss of his men. War fever against Mexico was building in the United States, and Pershing wanted to seize the opportunity to launch a full-scale invasion of Chihuahua and wipe out the Villistas once and for all. President Wilson had other ideas, however, and refused to allow him to escalate the conflict. The punitive expedition to destroy Villa and his men was over as far as he was concerned.

A new war beckoned, and Wilson's attention had turned increasingly toward German aggression in Europe while much of his army was stampeding across the hills of northern Mexico. It was time, he thought, to pull the plug and salvage what remained of US relations with the Mexican government. Wilson gave the order to withdraw from the country without accomplishing his goal there after nine months of bloody warfare. The United States never did find Pancho Villa. It took an assassin's bullet to claim his life while he visited Parral on July 20, 1923, most likely with the approval of the Mexican government he was still so eager to topple.

Shortly after the Battle of Carrizal, the Mexican government shipped the bodies of the Buffalo Soldiers killed there back to the United States, where they received a heroes' welcome in El Paso, Texas. The War Department transported six of the fallen men, including Captain Boyd, to Washington, DC, for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Crowds lined the entire route all the way from Union Station, across the Memorial Bridge, and out to the cemetery as the horse-drawn procession took the men to their final resting places.

In Mexico, there was little left for the troops to do except keep busy until each unit received its marching orders to head back north to the US side of the border. Pershing sent them out on tactical maneuvers, but he cut them short because of the hostility of the local population. They marked off makeshift baseball fields in the dirt, set up rings for boxing matches, and did calisthenics on the drilling field to stay in shape. On Thanksgiving Day, the
Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth and Twenty-Fourth roasted turkeys in the adobe ovens scattered throughout the area and served up dinner complete with stuffing, potatoes, corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and other trimmings. They topped it all off with cigars, local rum, wine, and brandy. Soon it would be time to head home—only to be sent off to the next war, which summoned them from the far side of the Atlantic Ocean.

All the American troops were back on US soil by February 5, 1917. They assembled in Columbus, New Mexico, the border town that had triggered the fruitless campaign to kill or capture Pancho Villa, and from there they departed to their new assignments, with the Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-Fourth Infantry ordered to protect the border dividing Mexico and the United States until the government decided where to station them next.