KNIGHT OF THE TIGER
LEGENDS OF THE DESERT, BOOK 3
KNIGHT OF THE TIGER
THE BETRAYALS OF HENRY FOUNTAIN
W. MICHAEL FARMER
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, a Cengage Company
Copyright © 2018 by W. Michael Farmer
Maps were designed by W. Michael Farmer Copyright © 2018
1. Trail of Pancho Villa in 1916 after the Columbus, New Mexico, Raid
2. The March to Agua Prieta
Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Farmer, W. Michael, 1944-author.
Title: Knight of the tiger : the betrayals of Henry Fountain / W. Michael Farmer.
Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, [2018] | Series: Legends of the desert ; book 3 | Identifiers: LCCN 2018004735 (print) | LCCN 2018009808 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432837969 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432837952 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432837990 (hardcover)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3796-9
Subjects: LCSH: Villa, Pancho, 1878-1923--Fiction. | Mexico--History--1910-1946--Fiction. | New Mexico--History--20th century--Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3606.A725 (ebook) | LCC PS3606.A725 K58 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004735
First Edition. First Printing: August 2018
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3796-9
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Visit our website–http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/
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Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 22 21 20 19 18
“THE TYGER”
BY WILLIAM BLAKE, 1794
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
What the furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAP TRACKING PANCHO VILLA 1916
MAP OF THE MARCH TO AGUA PRIETA
PREFATORY NOTE
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Knight of the Tiger
ADDITIONAL READING
On the trial of Pancho Villa in 1916 after the Columbus, New Mexico, Raid
The March to Agua Prieta
PREFATORY NOTE
“The pursuit of truth, not facts, is the business of fiction.”
—Oakley Hall, Prefatory Note to Warlock
In 1910, Pancho Villa dreamed of a Mexico where the peons had rights and privileges and were much more than serfs for the wealthy to use or abuse. Charismatic, often brilliant, sometimes shortsighted to the point of blindness, narcissistic and stubborn, he wrote his name large on the history and legends of Mexico and the American southwest. Admirers called him a great hero, a man of the people. Enemies called him a murdering bandit who bathed Mexico in blood. The men and women who followed General Francisco Villa through years of hard-fought battles, marching and suffering across burning deserts and freezing mountains, feeling his fire and knowing his crouching, catlike energy, understood his demand for loyalty and his brutal, mafia-like revenge for a betrayal. They called him El Jaguar Indomado—the untamed jaguar, El Tigre—the tiger, El Centauro del Norte—the centaur of the north, and La Fiera—the fierce one. They loved him, but mostly, they feared him.
In the early morning hours of 9 March 1916, Pancho Villa attacked the small army camp and town at Columbus, New Mexico, three miles north of the United States border with Mexico. Villa’s raiders killed eighteen American civilians and eight soldiers, wounded many others, burned a hotel and several businesses, and stole as much as they could carry in their arms or stuff in their shirts and raggedy pants pockets.
A week after the Columbus raid, much to the anger and embarrassment of the Mexican government led by El Presidente Venustiano Carranza, a United States Army division led by Brigadier General John J. Pershing crossed the border on an uninvited Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa. The expedition’s stated mission was to pursue and disperse the Columbus raiders, but no one doubted its true purpose was to capture or to kill Villa and destroy his army.
The American army stayed in Mexico eleven months. Most of its fighting was against Carranza government soldiers, not the Villa army raiders who attacked Columbus and scattered south in small groups to parts unknown. The Punitive Expedition achieved its stated mission in less than two months but failed to catch or kill Pancho Villa. It was the first major American military operation using trucks for carrying supplies, automobiles for transport, and airplanes for reconnaissance, and the army’s last major horse-mounted cavalry operation. The Columbus raid and the Punitive Expedition marked the end of the classical Old West and prepared America for entry into World War I.
During the six months before the Columbus raid, Pancho Villa saw his army of over twenty thousand men, División del Norte, and his dreams of just treatment for peons destroyed by his inability to effectively counter European-style trench warfare, a lack of supplies, and American treachery. His downfall began in the spring and summer of 1915 with his defeats in three major battles with a former turkey farmer, General Álvaro Obregón, who had learned trench-warfare tactics from German advisors and had studied Villa’s tactics in the 1910 Revolution.
After his defeats by Obregón, Villa regrouped División del Norte and, in the fall of 1915, moved an estimated ten-thousand-man army with few supplies, starving and thirsty, across the Sierra Madre and up the Bavispe and San Bernardino river valleys for an attack on Agua Prieta, a small village he believed was lightly defended and easy to take, just across the border from Douglas, Arizona.
The march across the Sierra Madre was an accomplishment admired even by Villa’s enemies. But, after attacking Agua Prieta and failing, and then attacking the capital of Sonora, Hermosillo, and failing,
División del Norte was essentially destroyed, and in December of 1915, its few survivors staggered back across the snow-covered Sierra Madre toward their homes in Chihuahua. To a rational mind, it was the end of the war between Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa. In early 1916, the Carranza government told Americans they were safe to return to their properties in Mexico. The war with Villa, it said, was over. Yet in spite of devastating losses, Pancho Villa refused to quit fighting, refused to believe he was defeated, refused to surrender.
Described in today’s vernacular, the Pancho Villa of 1915/1916 was a terrorist. After Woodrow Wilson betrayed him at Agua Prieta, Villa, once a sworn ally who protected American citizens and property in Mexico during the 1910 Mexican Revolution, vowed to kill any American and destroy any American-owned business he encountered in Mexico.
The attack on Columbus and the Punitive Expedition response nearly brought the United States and Mexico to war, and some historians believe that was Villa’s objective. Understanding how Pancho Villa, once a strong friend of the United States and hero of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, became an enraged enemy can teach Americans much about border relationships and the significance of personalities and honorable dealing in the asymmetrical wars in which we become entangled.
The historical record of the marches and suffering for Pancho Villa and División del Norte in 1915/1916 is spotty and often apparently contradictory. I have endeavored to make this story as historically accurate as possible by using known and undisputed facts with close study of the lay of the land and the personalities involved and describing marches and events accordingly. However, the reader is advised to remember that the objective of this story is to pursue the truth and not necessarily the facts. This is the context of Knight of the Tiger, a story of friends becoming enemies, of betrayal, of betrayed and betrayer, of the fire that produces madness in a time of blood and steel, and of the deaths of dreams. It is a story of the end of the Old West, a time that lives still in our myths and legends and in our hearts.
W. Michael Farmer
Smithfield, Virginia
April 2016
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Fictional Characters
Camisa Roja (Guillermo Camerena)
CPT Sinolo Gutierrez
Doctor Henry Grace (also known as Henry Fountain)
Doctor Oñate
Gamberro
Jesús Avella
José Soto
Juanita
Lupe
Magritte
Marco Guionne
Marta
Moon on the Water
Old Juan
Pelo Rojo
Persia Peach
Quentin Peach
Redondo
Rooster
Runs Far
Sergeant Sweeny Jones
Yellow Boy
Historical Characters
Bunk Spencer
C. R. Jefferis
Candelario Cervantes
Colonel Nicolás Fernández
Colonel Slocum
Comandante Macario Bracamontes
Doctor Miller
Doctor Thigpin
E. B. Stone
Edward Wright
Father Abelino Flores
Frank Hayden
General Francisco Villa (also known as Pancho Villa)
General Funston
General Pershing
General Rodolfo Fierro
George Carothers
Henry Fountain
Hipólito Villa
Johnnie Wright
Lieutenant George Patton
Lieutenant Martin Shallenberger
Mariana Fountain
Maud Wright
Sam Ravel
Sara Hoover
Susan Moore
Texas John Slaughter
Will Hoover
PROLOGUE
The same day the university gave me my medical degree in May of 1915, I headed for a train to New Mexico. I’d left Las Cruces more than six years earlier to attend medical school, left my aging mother, who had pulled strings to get me into Stanford, and left my grown siblings, who had no idea of my true identity. I was no longer known as Henry Fountain or Hombrecito, as Rufus and Yellow Boy had called me. I was Doctor Henry Grace.
In the years since I’d left to study medicine, New Mexico had become a state and many other changes had come. I returned home to find much of Las Cruces lighted by electrical power. Automobiles stirred up dust on the roads, and the ring of telephones was becoming common in town. In Mexico, a revolución had started, had been won, and then a civil war had begun. My friend, Doroteo Arango, also known as Pancho Villa, had been one of the revolución’s most important generals and was now at the center of Mexico’s civil war. I didn’t know it at that time, but I was about to be drawn into that war.
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
COMING HOME
Darkness crept in from the desert as the train stopped at the Las Cruces station platform. I took my bags and hoofed it down to the Río Grande Hotel where a room, meals, and corral space were two dollars a day.
After supper, I rented a horse and rode over to my mother’s place. There were several buggies and a couple of cars parked out front, and electric lights glowed in every room. I assumed my brothers and sisters and their families were visiting, so I stayed back in the shadows, smoked my pipe, and waited for them to leave.
I looked at my watch. Its ivory horse-head fob she had given me years ago to remember I was her knight protecting my father brushed my hand, and as I glanced up at her house, it brought back a flood of painful memories. Memories of how, at eight years old, I had believed I was responsible for my father’s death because I couldn’t act as her knight to protect him. Memories of how ten years later she begged me to forgive her for asking me to go into the desert with my father when he had been threatened with murder and that his death was never my fault. Although I no longer carried a burden of guilt, I still fancied myself as her knight, now armed with a medical doctor’s degree that would allow me to help her in old age and to do all the good she thought I could and should do before I left for medical school.
An hour later, my siblings were all gone, and I knocked on the door. Old Marta opened it.
She studied me for a moment, her eyes beady, birdlike. Recognition flooded her wrinkled face, and, unlike the first time I’d appeared, she seemed glad to see me. “Señor Grace! You’re back from the university. Bueno. La señora speaks of you many times. Por favor, come in, come in. You’re a doctor now, sí?”
I had to grin. “Sí, Marta. I’m a doctor with a university degree, and I’ve come back to practice medicine in Las Cruces.”
Marta left me in the parlor and headed for the back of the house to get my mother. A couple of minutes later, I heard the swish of long skirts and the rapid thump of a cane coming down the hall. I turned toward the door just as my mother pushed it open.
I was stunned when I saw her. She looked so frail, leaning heavily on a cane. But her eyes sparkled with joy. “Enrique, my son! Doctor Enrique!” We sat together and talked a long time, and I showed her my diploma from Stanford, which brought tears to her eyes as her fingers ran across the lines and came to rest on my name.
She wanted me to stay with her, but I told her it was better I didn’t and that I’d visit her every day. Letting me out the door, she whispered, “I understand you need privacy, my son.”
I found office space to rent for a medical practice in Las Cruces, ordered supplies, put up my reference books, and then told my mother I had to go to Alamogordo on business and would be back in five or six days. She wasn’t happy about it, but said she understood and for me to hurry back as soon as my business was done. I took the train to El Paso and then to Tularosa, where I hired a horse and rode up the winding trail to the reservation to visit Yellow Boy.
Yellow Boy, his wives, Juanita and Moon on the Water, and their children, Redondo now about ten, and John, who was born after I left for California,
still lived up the canyon where they’d stayed since returning from Mexico the year before I left for medical school. I found their tipi just about dusk and felt my heart warm with delight upon seeing the glow of a suppertime fire. A wave of thanks to the great creator god of the Apaches, Ussen, filled my soul.
Through the dusk, I made out the dark outlines of horses in the corral where the creek ran back into the big pines close to a nearly vertical canyon wall. I chewed my lip, looking for Satanas, until I saw him wander out from under the pines and peer in my direction, his ears up. Tying my horse to some bushes, I walked over to the corral to renew acquaintances with the stallion I’d named after the lord of the underworld.
Satanas pushed his nose out to me, and we exchanged breaths. I held out an apple for him and he took it, making it snap in its juice.
“So, Hombrecito, you speak with your great horse before you speak with your grandfather? It’s good for my eyes to find you. You’ve been gone many seasons, my son.”
I turned slowly to look into the strong, peaceful face of Yellow Boy, who stood smiling at me, his arms crossed. “The sweetest fruit comes last in the meal, Grandfather. My eyes have longed to see your face and those of your family many times since I left. Now I return a White Eye di-yen, a medicine man. My heart fills with pleasure now that I see you.”
We took right forearms and squeezed each other’s shoulder in the pleasure of the moment, and he said, “Come, unload your pony. My sons are anxious to see their brother, the di-yen.”
Yellow Boy’s sons appeared out of the gloom from the far side of the corral. Redondo, four or five when I left, rushed silently at us like a warrior on the attack, followed by his little brother, John, barely off the cradleboard, his pudgy legs churning to keep up with his brother, but fast losing ground to the older boy. Yellow Boy held up his hand to stop them and to make proper introductions.
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