by Frank McLynn
Juh and Geronimo raided San Carlos in August 1879 in a brilliantly executed cavalry manoeuvre that drew off the US Cavalry, allowing their ally Victorio to bolt with hundreds of warriors. At first on US territory, Victorio fought off his American pursuers in a number of skirmishes, then struck across the border into Chiricahua. Disregarding the niceties of international law, US Cavalry Major Albert Morrow followed the Apaches across the border, but in the meantime Juh and Geronimo had doubled back from Arizona and joined Victorio. Together they turned to face Morrow and, in a grim battle fought by moonlight north-east of Janos, forced him to retreat. Victorio then moved east into the Candelaria mountains in Chihuahua, where he ambushed two companies of rurales, killing thirty of them without loss to himself. He then avoided the resulting hue and cry by recrossing the border into New Mexico. At this stage, however, Juh and Geronimo felt they had had enough, surrendered and settled for a time on the San Carlos reservation.
In 188o Victorio and his men felt secure in their mountain fastnesses of the Black Range, but the US Cavalry trapped them in a canyon there and heavily defeated them. The Mimbres would probably have been annihilated had not the Americans run short of ammunition at the vital moment, allowing Victorio to slip away into Mexico once more. Yet again they made their base in the Candelaria mountains, but wasted precious time by fruitless attempts to penetrate the heavily patrolled border with Texas, hoping to raise the Mescalero Apaches of eastern New Mexico in revolt. These abortive ventures alerted the Mexican authorities to their presence. Porfirio Diaz, nagged by Chihuahua governor Luis Terrazas, at last released some regular army units, and, together with a large party of rurales he had collected, the governor's cousin, Colonel Joaquin Terrazas, finally felt strong enough for a decisive reckoning with Victorio. After a long and patient campaign, Terrazas laid a successful ambush in the Tres Castillos hills. On 15 October Victorio and his main war band were cornered. This time it was the Apache ammunition that gave out first, but they fought to the last man with lance and bow and arrow. The Apaches lost seventy-eight warriors dead; sixty-eight women and children were taken prisoner. Colonel Terrazas lost just three militiamen dead and ten wounded, earned $17,250 for the scalps of the dead warriors, and was lionised as a frontier hero.
Mexico was particularly proud that its men had succeeded in ending the Mimbres menace where the fabled US Cavalry had failed, but Victorio's death at Tres Castillos by no means ended the Apache menace. The Mimbres war leader Nana, who was commanding one of Victorio's flanking columns and thus escaped annihilation by Terrazas, struck back in 1881 in one of the legendary Apache raids. Beginning in New Mexico, he covered more than i,ooo miles in his devious circling flight back to the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, during which his handful of warriors, never more than forty and often only fifteen, fought dozens of skirmishes, killed nearly fifty Americans and took more than two hundred stolen horses and mules across the frontier with them.
Since Nana was joined in the Sierra Madre by Geronimo and Juh, who had once again left the San Carlos reservation, the authorities on both sides of the Rio Grande feared a rerun of the Victorio campaign. Diaz therefore instructed Luis Terrazas to cooperate fully with the North Americans and allow their forces to cross into Mexico in pursuit. Washington meanwhile assigned its greatest Indian fighter, General George Crook, to the task of pacifying the Apache. Crook's 1883 expedition into the Sierra Madre was in its own way as remarkable as the exploits of Victorio, Juh and Nana. Taking only one company of cavalry, but using zoo Apache scouts to enable him to locate the enemy quickly, Crook achieved the noteworthy feat of talking Nana and Geronimo back to the San Carlos reservation; Juh pointedly avoided Crook and could have been a continuing headache but fell off his horse while crossing the Casas Grandes river in Chihuahua in November 1883 and drowned. In 1885 Nana and Geronimo again jumped the reservation and spent seventeen months raiding from their mountain bases in northern Mexico, but once again it was Crook who coaxed them back to San Carlos in March 1 886.
That was the end of the Apache problem in northern Mexico: Geronimo's final raid, in late 1886, was a purely US-based affair. However, the importance of the Apache factor in the nineteenth-century history of Chihuahua cannot be overemphasised. It formed the people of Chihuahua in a martial culture, made taking up arms to solve problems seem like second nature, and (following Tres Castillos) greatly increased the prestige of the dominant Terrazas family.
Victorio was still spreading terror through northern Mexico when the man who would be known to history and legend as Pancho Villa was born. On 6 June 1878 a son, Doroteo, was born to Agustin Arango, the illegimate son of one Jesus Villa, and a sharecropper on the Rancho de la Loyotada, which was part of one of the largest haciendas in Durango state, owned by the Lopez Negrete family. Both Agustin Arango and his wife Micaela Arambula were indigent peasants from poor families. Agustin died young, leaving Micaela and five children to fend for themselves. Doroteo, the eldest child, never went to school and from an early age had to support his family by toiling on the El Gorgojito ranch, also owned by the Lopez Negrete clan.
According to tradition, and his own account, the young Doroteo Arango became an outlaw at the age of sixteen, after don Agustin Lopez Negrete tried to rape his sister Martina or (in some versions) demanded that she become his concubine. Not long after this he changed his name to Francisco ('Pancho') Villa, on the grounds that his grandfather's name was Villa. Dating this traumatic incident precisely to 22 September 1894, Villa claimed that he shot Negrete in the foot to stop his predatory advances towards his sister, as a result of which Negrete's men were about to execute him, but the hacendado forbade it. Fearing that Negrete might have second thoughts or have him arrested, Villa fled into the mountains of Durango.
It is typical of the obscurity that surrounds all aspects of Villa's early life that even those scholars who accept this story cannot agree on its details. Who was Agustin Lopez Negrete? Some say he was the son of the owner of the hacienda, others that he was the administrator. According to another version, the gunshot wound was more serious, Villa tried to flee, was caught, jailed and then given a death sentence under the ley fuga for `trying to escape'. Villa then wounded his jailer with a pestle and made his getaway.
Thereafter Villa claimed to have had all manner of hair-raising adventures: eluding posses, being captured and then escaping, outwitting unskilled rurales, outwitting soldiers. Eventually he joined a `supergroup' of outlaws led by Ignacio Parra and Refugio Alvarado. From being a fugitive, eking out a bare living, he became a left-handed form of entrepreneur: his share of the loot in the first week with Alvarado was 3,000 pesos - ten times what a peon in the fields of Chihuahua would get in a year. Shortly afterwards the gang robbed a wealthy miner of 150,000 pesos, of which Villa's share was 50,000. He claimed to have spent it all within a year, probably on high living, but, by the time he told the story of his early years, he was keen to portray himself as a `social bandit', so claimed he gave most of it away to his family or on charitable work. Keen to burnish his image as a latter-day Robin Hood, the myth-making Villa later claimed: `After eight or ten months I had returned to the poor the money the rich had taken from them.'
When his money ran out, for whatever reason, Villa returned to the gang. By this time Parra was the most famous bandit in Durango, the king of the mountains, prestigious enough to have the hitherto most notorious bandit in the state, Heraclio Bernal, serving under him; Bernal and his four brothers had been the scourge of Durango in the i88os. Just as Villa was to learn from Parra, so Parra had learned from the Bernals, and the most vital lesson he digested was the importance of cultivating good relations with peasant support networks; if you paid your way with hard cash in the villages, the peasants would always protect you against the authorities. Parra added the refinement that a good bandit leader would also have secret friends among the forces of law and order. He befriended, bribed, or intimidated judges and police chiefs so that, if apprehended, he would receive light sentences or even f
ind the authorities turning a blind eye. In these years Villa undoubtedly made the acquaintance of corrupt judges and magistrates who would serve him well in the future.
In 1902 Villa learned just how valuable such contacts were. The first record of him in official Porfirian documents mentions him as one of Parra's band, but shortly afterwards he fell out with him - he alleged it was because Parra had gunned down a harmless old man who would not sell him bread. This was a slice of luck for Villa; almost immediately after he had left the gang, Parra was shot in a gun battle with state police. Clearly in straitened circumstances, Villa was arrested in January 1901 for stealing two mules. He was saved from the inevitable ley fuga death sentence for such an offence by the powerful black marketeer Pablo Valenzuela, to whom the Parra gang used to sell stolen cattle. Primed by Valenzuela, on whose payroll he was, the judge in the case dismissed the charge `for lack of evidence'. Always a man to push his luck, Villa was rearrested four days later for assault and robbery. This time there had to be some punishment, so he was sentenced to a year's service in the Army.
In March 1902 he deserted and, finding Durango too dangerous, fled to Chihuahua, where he made his base of operations thereafter. Some say Villa worked in mines in Arizona for a time and on the railways in Colorado, but Villa later told his secretary Ramon Puente that he was never in the USA: at the time he was supposed to be among the gringos he was actually running a butcher's shop in the city of Hidalgo del Parral. The story of Villa in the USA seems to be a corruption of the verifiable fact that he did work for a short period for two American citizens, named Stilwell and Burkhead, who were particularly impressed by Villa's knowledge of cockfighting. Villa seems to have worked for the Americans as a mule driver, which came in handy later: he was able to cite Stilwell and Burkhead as character witnesses when his bandit past threatened to catch up with him.
The fact of the butcher's shop would seem to be well based. According to one story, Villa suddenly saw the light and realised that a life of banditry would lead only to the gallows. After working as a miner, mason and brickmaker, he had to flee when his true identity was discovered. For a while he rustled cattle and tried to sell them on the Chihuahua meat market, but could not make a go of his butchery business, as the Terrazas, the owners of the slaughterhouses, would not give him access. Refused permission to slaughter his own cattle on their high-technology premises, and unwilling to pay the middleman's commission, Villa gave up the idea of becoming a career butcher. Again he tried mining, again his identity was discovered and again he fled, this time turning to the only sure-fire way he knew of making a living: cattle rustling.
Here again the noose might be thought to be beckoning but Villa escaped the hangman, or the executioner's bullet, mainly it seems for two reasons, one cultural, the other personal. Every state had its mortal and venial sins, a consequence of the extreme localism in mores and folkways already noted. Banditry was frowned on in Chihuahua while being a bagatelle in Durango, but in Chihuahua cattle rustling did not attract anything like the same stigma and opprobrium as banditry. The main reason was that the people of Chihuahua simply did not accept the selfassigned right of the hegemonic Terrazas family to end open range and fence it in. On the personal level, Villa traded with a black marketeer, who was also a small rancher and butcher, and disposed of his stolen stock that way. Using black market contacts and the references from his American employers, Villa was able to navigate his way through the criminal rapids.
The more research that is done on Villa's early life, the more tangled the conjectural chronology becomes. From other sources we learn that he was employed for a time transporting and protecting huge payrolls (as large as 700,000 pesos) for the US-owned North-western Railroad. Another story is that he was employed for eighteen months as a muleteer by a wealthy Englishman, that he proved to be a tough hombre but honest: in charge of transporting ingots of gold and silver he never lost any and was never robbed. Probably the most we can say with certainty about Villa's life until tgio is that he alternated bouts of banditry with periods of `normal' existence. The American scholar Friedrich Katz, who has made the most thorough study of Villa's early life, has identified the core problem: there is no agreed history of the first thirty years in Villa's biography but three different traditions, which Katz labels the black, white and epic legends. The black legend makes out that Villa was a double-dyed psychopath, motivated only by hatred and revenge; the white that he was a simple man wanting a simple life who was catapulted reluctantly into a revolutionary milieu; and the epic that he was no bandit lusting only after loot but a genuine Robin Hood, desirous of righting wrongs, taking from the rich to give to the poor.
As Katz points out, each interpretation is backed by circumstantial evidence. Villa claimed that poverty, corrupt officials and the ley fuga turned him and a host of other Mexicans into outlaws and, later, revolutionaries, in short that he was a victim of the `system'. It was well known that the Lopez Negretes were extremely ruthless men, and it is entirely plausible that the young Villa might have suffered under them. Nor is there anything implausible in Villa's story that he was hounded by the Terrazas and their tame police authorities. On the other hand, if all he wanted was a quiet life, why did he not settle down with the 50,000 pesos he had received from the great Ignacio Parra raid instead of (allegedly) giving it to the poor? Even Villa admitted that his mother taxed him about this.
Moreover, the entire story about saving his sister from rape is suspect in its detail; there is no agreement in the traditional accounts even on the identity of the would-be rapist - was it Lopez Negrete senior, the hacendado, his son, the hacienda administrator, a sheriff or simply another peon? Villa's critics use the discrepancies in the various versions of the story to argue that the entire story of his early life, including the raped sister, is a fabrication and that Villa was never more than a simple murderer. What is probable is that the `white' legend is largely the result of Villa's reflections on his life after he had received a political education from the maderista agent Abraham Gonzalez in iglo and that his own account contains more than its fair share of rationalisation.
The `black' legend of Villa is equally unconvincing, if only because we know that most of the stories in this dossier emanate from the Herrera family, who were involved in a blood feud with him after igio. The Herrera version denies things we know to be fact, such as Abraham Gonzalez's patronage of him, and requires almost every criminal act in northern Mexico in the first decade of the century to be the work of Villa. According to his enemies there was almost no enormity he did not commit, ranging from disembowelling to forcing men to dig their own graves before shooting them. In short, Villa was accused of so many crimes that he would have needed to bilocate to have committed them. In this context one is reminded of the sardonic words of the old Australian folk song about the Ned Kelly gang: `I think I'll steal a horse myself and blame it on the Kellys.' Substitute `Villa' for `the Kellys' and you have the encapsulated form of the Herrera version of history.
Yet in some ways John Reed, the celebrated American left-wing journalist and chief promoter of the `epic' or Robin Hood interpretation of Villa, does give hostages to fortune in his account of Villa's rise to prominence. Reed claimed that in 19oi-9 Villa certainly murdered four people and was involved in ten premeditated crimes, including arson, robbery, rustling and kidnapping. The snag about the John Reed view - Villa as champion of the peasantry and scourge of the Terrazas - is that it requires him to be a person of far more importance in Chihuahua before i 9 i o than he actually was. Given that the same critique knocks the `black legend' on the head, we need to ask why Madero's political agents should have been so keen to recruit Villa's services in igio. Would the Madero agent in Chihuahua, Abraham Gonzalez, really have been interested in Chihuahua's `public enemy number one' if Villa had been either the Robin Hood of John Reed's imagination or the Jack the Ripper of the Herreras' frenzied fantasies? Documentary evidence from igio clearly shows Villa arrested for minor offences, rel
eased and even given his gun back, which would scarcely have happened if he was Chihuahua's `most wanted' man.
Because Villa was not an intellectual - indeed he was not much more than basically literate by r91o - it has been assumed that he could not have been a `real' revolutionary, that he must always have been actuated by the desire for loot. However, Abraham Gonzalez was very far from a fool, and he must have seen in Villa something more than a gun-toting thug when he took him under his wing in iglo. Old-fashioned writers, even ones as distinguished as John Steinbeck, referred to Villa as `nothing but' a bandit. The entire academic industry relating to `social bandits', pioneered by Eric Hobsbawm and others, has made us aware that there is no automatic law of excluded middle operating between `bandit' and `revolutionary'. To take the most simple example, Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle in 1967 was, looked at from one point of view, a bandit; but from another he was very clearly a revolutionary. There were in fact compelling reasons why Villa's early banditry could be seen to have objective socio-economic causes. John Reed was on the right lines when he identified the Terrazas as the problem, but he did not pursue his analysis far enough.
Even before his spectacular success against the Apaches, Luis Terrazas had been looking ahead, planning the next stage in his master plan for the dominance by his family of Chihuahua. He began by using his power as governor to acquire vast estates, either buying up land cheaply or expropriating the haciendas of the pro-French proprietors who had backed the wrong side in the r 86os. Soon it was the turn of the courageous but luckless military colonists, the people who had tamed the land and fought the Apaches. As soon as the Apaches were defeated, now that he no longer needed the free villages and the military colonies to provide manpower for his militias, Terrazas began filching their land and curtailing all their customary rights and privileges, such as hunting and wood gathering. Private acquisition of water supplies, fencing grazing land and the erection of barbed wire fences were just some of Terrazas's methods; taxing farming, the removal of local autonomy, and corrupt jefes politicos ruling through graft, corruption and nepotism were further weapons. In addition, the military colonist soon learned that Porfirio Diaz was a more dangerous enemy than Victorio, Juh and Nana had ever been: the colonists' position was further impaired by the coming of the railways and the telegraph, the opening of mines and the flood of foreign investment entering the state.