Centennial

by James A. Michener

  They worked like mules. Some of the miners would be underground for days at a time. They ate little, for they were paid little. They were lashed and beaten as few workers in the world were in this relatively humane period, and when in desperation they went to the authorities for relief, they were repulsed by rural police, who took positive delight in shooting them, and by the parish priest, Father Grávez, who explained that it was God’s will that they should work in the mines and that if they agitated for higher wages, they would displease both God and Don Luis. The latter was the more important.

  General Luis Terrazas owned Chihuahua, not only the city, but the entire state. Starting in 1860, he had led a minor military assault against an undefended building, and as a consequence, had ordained himself colonel. With four thousand dollars he bought himself a ranch comprising seven million acres on which he ran cattle ultimately worth twenty-five million dollars. With this as his leverage, by the year 1900 he owned three banks, four textile mills, numerous flour mills and sixteen other critical businesses with a cash value of more than twenty-seven million dollars. He also owned the Temchic silver mine, and his managers would be very angry if the miners interrupted production, thus causing him to lose income. The managers, therefore, instructed the rural police to gun down any troublemakers, and warned Father Grávez that Don Luis expected the priest to keep the valley peaceful.

  It was by nature peaceful. On each side of the tumbling Rio Temchic, small huts, not much larger than doghouses, lined the stream. Up the slopes, set well back from the mule trails, stood the commodious white houses of the German and American engineers who operated the mines for General Terrazas. As a result of some historical accident, all the American families came from one small region in Minnesota, and they were treated so generously by Terrazas that they came to think of themselves as his chosen agents and fell into the habit of brutalizing the Mexican workmen almost as severely as did the rural police.

  “They’re really nothing but animals,” the American engineers were fond of saying as they supervised a work schedule of fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. “When they do get off work, all they do is run to their huts and womanize. They don’t need extra time.”

  In some respects the American wives were worse than their husbands, monopolizing the time of the miners’ wives, using them as servants and paying them seventy-five cents a week for working ten hours a day, seven days a week. “It takes four of them a whole day to do what one white woman would do in fifteen minutes,” the wives told each other in justification, “and if you don’t watch them, they’ll eat you blind.”

  Even so, Temchic was a place that people loved. It was an enclave protected from snow in winter and from extreme heat in summer. It could have been an ideal setting for the establishment of a mestizo paradise, except that silver lay hidden, and the engineers wanted it. Things would have continued to go well, thanks to the surveillance of the rural police and the church, if it had not been for a lean, long-legged, mean-visaged troublemaker whom the miners followed, but who the engineers named contemptuously Capitan Frijoles, Captain Baked Beans, the Windy One. “I wish the rurales would gun him down,” the principal engineer said when he heard that Frijoles was talking again of a strike. “What the hell does the man want?”

  What Frijoles wanted was one day off a week, no more than twelve hours’ work in the mines each day, more food, and a doctor for women who were having babies.

  Captain Mendoza of the rurales visited Frijoles and warned him, “Such talk is revolutionary. If I hear you make such claims—ever again—you’ll be taken care of.”

  Father Grávez also visited Frijoles and explained to him that “God gives each of us our work to do, Capitan, and your work is to bring silver out of the earth. God watches what you do. He knows your excellence and one day He will reward you. Also, General Terrazas needs the silver for the good works he does in Chihuahua.”

  This line of reasoning impressed Frijoles at the moment, but later when he tried to recall one good thing General Terrazas had ever done for the people of Chihuahua, he could think of nothing. The general spent his money on big houses and bigger ranches and automobiles for his many children and trips to Europe and the entertainment of European businessmen and the paying of bribes to politicians in Mexico City. “Perhaps,” Frijoles told his fellow workers, “when he’s finished with all that, one of these days he’ll get around to us.” The miners suspected, from past experience, that this might take a long time.

  So the agitation continued, and people in power resolved to destroy this troublesome Frijoles. The rural police saw him as a growing danger, and Captain Mendoza gave the simple order, “Shoot him.” The engineers saw him as a disturbance in their good relations with General Terrazas, and they agreed, “Get rid of him.” Father Grávez, and especially his superior, the cardinal in Chihuahua, saw Frijoles as an attack upon the order of the church, and both said, “He must be disciplined.” General Terrazas saw him clearly as the opening wedge of all kinds of demands from workers who wanted to work only seventy-two hours a week, and he passed the word, “Eliminate him.” And in Mexico City, President Porfirio Díaz, an old dictator aware that tremors in the north were beginning to threaten his beloved country, saw in Frijoles, the long-legged revolutionary up north, a portentous threat to the stability of the nation. “Kill him now!” the old man advised, for he had learned to recognize an enemy when he saw one.

  On a bright day in February, Captain Mendoza personally led a band of his rurales, hardened men accustomed to shoot without asking questions, into the village of Temchic, intending to arrest Frijoles. On the way back down the valley the revolutionary would be set free, and the gunmen, fourteen of them, would shoot him down, “as he was trying to escape.” This Ley de Fuga, the Law of Flight, saved both jail and court costs.

  “Don’t shoot him here,” Captain Mendoza instructed his men. “It always makes the women scream, and we don’t want any agitation.”

  As he entered the town he stopped at the office of the engineers and assured them, “You’ll have no more trouble with Frijoles,” and they thanked him, for engineers the world over wanted workmen to tend their jobs, work long hours and keep their mouths shut. “We’ll have him out of here in fifteen minutes,” Mendoza assured them.

  It was a long fifteen minutes. Frijoles, anticipating that his enemies might strike, had prepared his cohorts for this day, and now as Mendoza and his henchmen turned the corner leading to the mine, they were met by a fusillade which killed the captain and three of his lieutenants. A pitched battle ensued, and when the rurales ran back down the valley, they left seven of their men dead on the banks of the Temchic.

  A convulsion swept Mexico. This was revolution, the defiance of established authority, and all responsible people in the nation recognized the danger. An army battalion from Chihuahua was dispatched to Temchic, but was ignominiously defeated by Frijoles and his resolute miners. A new army was convened at Durango, with reinforcements moving in from Torreón, and this, too, was defeated. Generals long accustomed to terrifying farmers on open land discovered that they could not throw unlimited forces against Temchic, because they couldn’t be crowded into the narrow defile. This time it was seventy soldiers against seventy miners, and the latter were fighting for their homes and a new way of life.

  The war strung out from February till October, with the miners organizing their village as a redoubt capable of withstanding almost any assault. The American engineers and their families were sent down the valley under armed escort, and were now in Chihuahua city, giving interviews which explained that Frijoles and his gang were insane demons bent on destroying Mexico. The Germans were gone too, all except one quixotic young man who elected to stay with Frijoles and the miners. “We’ll take care of him when this is over,” the other Germans said, and they assured General Terrazas that it would soon end, because, as they explained, “Frijoles isn’t even educated.”

  Then, in late October, a very brave young captain named S
alcedo grew impatient with the pusillanimous behavior of the fat generals and devised a daring plan for climbing the Sierra Madre and sweeping down from the west while the generals moved up the valley and in from the flanks. The plan worked, and by the end of October the revolution at Temchic was doomed.

  At this point the men around Frijoles made a desperate decision. He must escape—somehow he must get out of the valley to lead the revolution in other parts of the country. They had no doubt that the evil old order whereby one man could own seven million acres of land and dispose of it as he wished would vanish. They would be dead, but in that new day men and women would not work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. So they devised a plan whereby four of them would set up a diversion to distract Captain Salcedo. They could not hope to escape; surely they would be shot—but their deaths would provide Frijoles with a chance to scurry into the mountains and on to the real revolution which lay ahead.

  The strategy succeeded, and by dawn Frijoles was far into the mountains. When he stopped to rest on a log beside the river, he could hear in the distance the cannonade of government troops overrunning his village. When he chanced to look up he saw a file of nearly naked Tarahumare Indians passing, thin, swift runners from the highest mountains, and his eyes filled with tears of rage. For a moment he looked at them as they ran, silent men confused by the appearance of a stranger in their land, and he wondered why over the past generations the miners and the Indians had not somehow united in a common struggle for justice, and then the shadowy Tarahumare were gone, and he realized that never in the history of Mexico could such a union have occurred, for the Indians were Indians and the miners were Mexicans, and there was no chance of mutual understanding.

  When Temchic was subdued—with German and American engineers reinstalled in their big houses—a matter of discipline arose. Nineteen of the rebellious miners had been captured alive, along with three women who had supported them, and it was decreed in Mexico City that they should be publicly shot as a warning to other potential troublemakers. Then someone had the creditable idea that it would be better if the doomed men and women were executed not by soldiers or rurales, who did a good deal of that sort of thing, but by ordinary villagers from the region, as if to show the world that sensible Mexicans shared no part of the miners’ revolution and did indeed reject it.

  Captain Salcedo, who had emerged from the final assault as some kind of national hero, was therefore commissioned to move into a village of farmers three miles down the valley and conscript a firing squad. In the selecting he was to be assisted by Father Grávez, whose church stood in the village and who could identify the men best suited for such service.

  Like Temchic, Santa Ynez clung to the sides of the river, but there the resemblance stopped. Its houses were the white adobe habitations of men who worked the soil, and not the dark hovels of miners. Nor could it boast commodious houses on the hill, for no Germans or Americans would want to bother with its meager riches. It did, however, contain one spot of excellence that surpassed anything the mining town could provide, the Spanish colonial church of Santa Ynez with its two historic doors.

  They were massive and made from wood which Tarahumare Indians had lugged down from the Sierra Madre. They had been carved by some forgotten priest who had learned his art in Taxco to the south, and depicted two scenes from the life of Saint Agnes, as she was known in Europe, the saint whose holy day came on January 21, when nights were bitter chill, as the poet Keats had said in his poem.

  The left door showed Ynez, the radiant child of thirteen, holding in her right hand a sword, the instrument by which she was martyred, and at her feet a protecting lamb which signified the purity of her life. The right door showed her entering into her heavenly marriage with Jesus. But it was the combination of these two doors, each complementing the other, that epitomized the town’s youthful innocence. It was a clean town, perched high in the Sierra Madre and protected on three sides by the pinnacles of those mountains.

  It was a village to be loved, especially on the saint’s day, when the population convened in darkness to sing before the doors of the church. All waited in silence, watching eastward for the first rays of the sun. When it appeared, farmers’ voices joined with those of their wives and children in the traditional birthday song, “Las Mañanitas,” honoring the little girl they loved:

  This is the birthday song

  Sung by King David.

  Because this is your day,

  I sing it to you.

  If the night-watch at the corner

  Wants to do me a favor,

  Let him dim his lantern

  While I whisper my love.

  “We need one reliable man to act as sergeant,” Captain Salcedo explained as he marched into the village with the priest. He was a trim man, with a small mustache and highly polished brown German boots which made a formidable impression on rural people.

  “Tranquilino Marquez,” the priest said without hesitation. “Solid man, twenty-three years old, married to a good woman named Serafina, with two children.”

  “He won’t give us trouble?” Salcedo asked. “No speeches or anything like that?”

  “Tranquilino?” Father Grávez asked. “Utterly reliable. Works his small plot. Pays his rent to General Terrazas like a good citizen.”

  Captain Salcedo summoned Tranquilino, and when the young farmer stood before him, taller than average, thin-faced, barefoot, straw hat deferentially in hand, the officer knew intuitively that here was the stolid, obedient type that made Mexico strong. “You’re a fine-looking man. You’re to stand at the right end,” he said enthusiastically. “Sort of a sergeant. I’ll give the command but you’ll see that your men are in line.”

  “To do what?” Tranquilino asked.

  “Oh! We’re executing the rebels. You’ve fired a gun, of course?”

  “Yes. But I don’t want to shoot ...”

  “It’s your duty! You don’t want rebels destroying your farm ... your family?”

  “I sell corn to those miners.”

  “Tranquilino! Mexico must rid itself of these criminal men. Explain it to him, Father.”

  So Father Grávez took Tranquilino aside and explained everything in clear, simple terms: “The mines belong to a good man, Tranquilino. General Terrazas does many fine things for Mexico, and if we allow strikers to steal his silver ...”

  “They didn’t take silver.”

  “Of course not. But when a workman strikes and doesn’t produce what he’s supposed to produce, it’s the same as stealing. He deprives General Terrazas of things that are rightfully his.”

  This made sense, and what Father Grávez said next made even more sense. “It’s just as if you lived on land belonging to the general and you refused to grow corn for him. Wouldn’t that be stealing from him?” Tranquilino had to agree that it would be, and never in his life had he stolen from anyone or given the rurales cause to discipline him.

  Step by step Father Grávez explained why it was necessary for the farmers of Santa Ynez to shoot the miners of Temchic, and in the end Tranquilino was convinced. Those men who had listened to Frijoles were a menace to Mexico and had to be exterminated.

  But when Father Grávez took Tranquilino to headquarters, the head of the American engineers came into the room where Salcedo was choosing his firing squad and said, “We’re still short eleven men in the mines. We’d better take a dozen or so of these farmers and convert them to miners,” and Father Grávez, always subservient to the authorities, said, “There’s no better man in the region than Tranquilino here,” and the engineer turned to Tranquilino and said, “Good. You can start in the mines right after the executions.”

  “It’s an opportunity,” Father Grávez explained. “You’re given your food and you don’t have to farm any more.”

  Tranquilino wanted to say, “I like to farm. I don’t want to work down in a mine and never see the sun.” But he sensed that if he said this, with Captain Salcedo and the engineer and Father Grávez
listening, he would be in serious trouble. Things were happening too fast, and he wanted to talk with Serafina, who understood complexities better than he, but instead he was handed a gun and marched up the valley to Temchic, where two dozen other confused farmers had assembled, and he heard Captain Salcedo saying, “Men, you are to line up on Tranquilino here. He’s your sergeant.”

  And they lined up, that bright, hot October morning, and the nineteen rebels were led out, ordinary men like Tranquilino, and behind them came three women with rags tied across their lips, for women are apt to scream, and the farmers heard Captain Salcedo giving directions: “We’ll shoot them in batches of six. Now, men, when I give the word ‘Fire’ you’re to shoot at the prisoner opposite you. Right at his heart.”

  On the first fusillade all the farmers fired at the prisoners standing toward the ends of the line, with the result that two men in the middle were left standing. Captain Salcedo had to leave the firing squad, march across the open space, and kill the survivors with his revolver, standing very close to them and shooting into their faces.

  The second time the same thing happened, and after Salcedo had fired point-blank at the two surviving miners, he berated the farmers, telling them that they would make a sorry lot of soldiers. He explained that he would now divide the firing squad into six groups, each being responsible for the execution of one of the miners. “And this time, if one of these six men over there is left standing, I personally will shoot the lead man in the squad that was responsible.” He stalked down the line, punching his forefinger at each of the six leaders, striking Tranquilino first. There could be no doubt that Salcedo meant what he said, and this time there were no survivors.