Arthur, gray-haired now and a bit portlier, had been watching from the shade of a long open corridor between buildings, and after a while walked out to where Mix was finishing up his signing, not far from Katherine’s grave.
“You understand,” Mix said, “that I never wanted to keep those children. I said so at the time, but was overruled.”
“That’s what Katherine told us,” Arthur said. “You know, she developed a serious crush on you,” he added.
“I kind of thought so,” Mix replied. “At that time, though, I never had anybody have a crush on me. Didn’t really know what one was.”
“I’ve always wondered,” Arthur said, “why you got mixed up with Pancho Villa in the first place.” The great red-orange sun was setting low between a gap in the mountains and cast cathedral-like rays of light on the school and its yards, as if they were filtered in stained glass.
“Well,” Mix said, “I’ve thought a lot about that myself. What comes up to me is that there’s a difference between dreams and lies, and while I was with those people, I think I might’ve got it confused.”
Arthur nodded. “El Paso,” he said.
“What?”
“A lot of people come to El Paso hoping for a break, and then jump the wrong way.”
“That was me, I guess,” Mix said. “I went there to get in the movies and wound up in Mexico.”
“You’ve had quite a career, haven’t you?” Arthur remarked.
“It was a privilege, sir, to have known your son and daughter,” Mix said earnestly.
“I wonder,” Arthur said, “if you see your way to coming back here sometime. You’re such a big star to the children.”
“Mr. Shaughnessy,” said Tom Mix, “I will bring the whole show with me. And I’ll do it every year. It’ll be a pleasure, sir. Why, you have a whole family here.”
AFTERWORD
Casualty figures during the Mexican Revolution are sketchy, but millions are estimated to have perished. Students of the period will notice that I have occasionally tampered with the evidence. Some of the terrain has been altered and some historical events described happened at slightly different times than those fancied in the plot and have occasionally been condensed to suit the story line. I hope it will be forgiven, since this is a novel, not a history, and not even a “historical novel” in any conventional sense.
Of the actual, historical characters depicted in this tale:
Tom Mix went on, of course, to become the most famous cowboy movie star of his era. He later owned a traveling western circus and died peacefully in his sleep in 1940.
John Reed returned to the U.S. and wrote a popular book on Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. He also founded the American Communist Labor Party and in 1919, facing a charge of sedition by the federal government, he fled to Russia, where he wrote his famous book about the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, then contracted typhus and died in Moscow in 1920. He is buried in Red Square, near the tombs of other famous Communists.
In 1929, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, about an old prospector in the Mexican sierras, was published, and in 1948 was made into a movie classic directed by John Huston. Its author, B. Traven, disappeared south of the border during the 1930s. His fate remains unknown.
Pancho Villa’s archenemy, General Venustiano Carranza, was ousted from the Mexican presidency in 1920 by Villa’s other nemesis, General Obregón, after Carranza began the wholesale murder of political prisoners, including fifteen generals. Carranza tried to flee the country with millions in government gold. He almost made it, but was caught heading for the port of Veracruz and executed on the spot.
In 1919, Henry O. Flipper was hired as translator for Mexican affairs in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later served as an assistant to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. He retired in 1930 to his native Georgia and devoted the rest of his life to clearing his name. He died in 1940, the same year as Tom Mix. In 1999, President Clinton granted Flipper a full pardon for his court-martial conviction for “conduct unbecoming a gentleman.”
Pancho Villa was also granted a pardon, in 1920, by the government of Mexican president Adolfo de la Huerta and went on to become a peaceful farmer in Parral, where it was reported he was learning how to type. In 1923 he was assassinated by people believed to be associated with the wealthy Herrera family, four members of whom Villa had murdered during the revolution. He was forty-five years old.
General Rudolfo Fierro was leading his soldiers to the Battle of Agua Prieta when they came to a body of water the men did not want to cross. Leading by example, Fierro rode out in the stream and was caught in quicksand. It was said he might have escaped but for a load of stolen gold he was carrying, which weighted him down and drowned him.
Ambrose Bierce vanished in Mexico after being rumored to have joined Villa’s army as an observer. His fate has never been determined, despite the efforts of numerous biographers and historians.
General Pershing became commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. Under him, George Patton rose to the rank of colonel and went on to fame and fortune in the next world war. During the American invasion of Mexico in 1916, riding on the running board of a car, he personally shot and killed the top aide to Pancho Villa.
Toward the end of his last term in office, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. He died in 1924.
The figure upon which the character of Claus Strucker is based was a German agent in Mexico named Franz von Rintelen. His attempts to draw America into a full-scale war with Mexico proved futile and he left the country in 1917 after discovery and publication of the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, in which the Germans offered to assist in the return to the Mexican government of the states of California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in exchange for a declaration of war on the U.S.
The American owners of the huge estates and industrial holdings in Northern Mexico lost their land and their money when a series of Mexican revolutionary governments nationalized their property. The Mexican government subsequently decreed that foreigners could not own any property in Mexico—down to and including private residences—a restriction that has applied in one fashion or another until this day. C. V. “Sonny” Whitney, however, litigated the confiscation of his property through the Mexican courts and in 1927 was awarded $250,000, a fraction of its worth. He used the money to finance an aviation enterprise that became Pan American World Airways.
As to the research necessary for any book of this kind, I relied on several biographies of Ambrose Bierce, especially Roy Morris, Jr.’s fine work Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. Quite a lot has been written about Pancho Villa and his lieutenants, much of it fantasy. Most recently and most notably, Friedrich Katz’s monumental biography The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is a worthy analysis. For the bullfighting sequences, no study in the English language has ever been more comprehensive on the subject than Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. I am deeply grateful to these authors, and many others, for their insights and illuminations.
ALSO BY WINSTON GROOM
FICTION
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl
Gump & Co.
Gone the Sun
Forrest Gump
Only
As Summers Die
Better Times Than These
NONFICTION
The Generals
The Aviators
Shiloh, 1862
Kearny’s March
Vicksburg, 1863
Patriotic Fire
1942
A Storm in Flanders
The Crimson Tide
Shrouds of Glory
Conversations with the Enemy (with Duncan Spencer)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WINSTON GROOM is the celebrated author of twenty books, including the cultural phenomenon Forrest Gump. His other novels include Gump & Co., Better Times Than These, Only, Gone the Sun, Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl, and the a
ward-winning As Summers Die. In addition, Groom has established himself as an acclaimed historian with books such as Conversations With the Enemy (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), Kearny’s March, Shiloh, 1862, Vicksburg, 1863, and more recently, The Aviators and The Generals.
Groom grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where he went to University Military School, and graduated with a degree in English literature from the University of Alabama. He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. army, completing a tour of duty in Vietnam with the First Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division (1966–1967), which would inspire much of his work. Discharged with the rank of captain, he was a journalist for nine years for the Washington Star, after which he spent ten years in the Hamptons and in New York City writing novels.
Recipient of the prestigious Harper Lee Award and several honorary Ph.D. degrees, Groom regularly gives lectures on his novels and history books. He lives in Point Clear, Alabama, with his wife, Susan, and daughter, Carolina. Find him online at winstongroom.com.
Copyright © 2016 by Winston Groom
Selected lyrics from “More Than Yesterday” by Laura Moore Dickens © 1965 reprinted by
permission of Joan Hager Davis and DBA Maiden Fair Music
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Jacket art: (Bull Skull) © Mauro Grigollo / Stocksy; (Landscape) Detail of General Pershing's Camp on the border near El Paso, Texas. - Front. October 1916. Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. University of Houston Digital Library. Web. July 25, 2016.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Groom, Winston, 1944- author.
Title: El paso : a novel / Winston Groom.
Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a
division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021007 | ISBN 9781631492242 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Villa, Pancho, 1878-1923—Fiction. | Kidnapping—Fiction. |
Outlaws—Fiction. | Frontier and pioneer life—Southwest, New—Fiction. |
GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Western stories. | Adventure fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3557.R56 P37 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021007
ISBN 978-1-63149-225-9 (e-book)
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