Pancho Villa — Fourth Horseman of the Mexican Apocalypse — Part I

Gunfighter, expert horseman and brilliant commander of irregular cavalry, Villa was also cruel and capricious — a dangerous man.

“Francisco Villa was a bandit. There might be some arguments whether he was a villain or a hero, a madman or a genius, but everyone agreed he was a bandit…”

 

—         William Webster Johnson, “Heroic Mexico”

Pancho Villa was the kind of man around whom legends gather. During his lifetime, hundreds of corridos — Mexican narrative ballads — sang his story, from his days as a bandit riding the sierra to his pinnacle of power as the commander of the mightiest fighting force in the Western Hemisphere. To this day, he remains a figure of legend and controversy. Was he a hero or a villain, a freedom fighter or a terrorist? The not-so-simple answer is: Yes.

Just as there is no argument that Villa was a bandit, it is also beyond doubt is that he was a highly capable frontier partisan. He honed the fundamental skills during his bandit days, becoming a deadly marksman and a breathtaking horseman. Not for nothing did they call him the Centaur of the North.

“Villa had the reputation of being one of Mexico’s greatest gunfighters. ‘For Villa, the gun was more important than eating or sleeping,’ a subordinate wrote about him. ‘It was a part of his person indispensable to him wherever he was, even at social occasions, and one can say that it was only very rarely that he did not have a gun ready to be drawn or placed in his gunbelt.’”

(Another contemporary observed): ‘He is a remarkable horseman, sits on his horse with cowboy ease and grace, rides straight and stiff-legged Mexican style, and would only use a Mexican saddle. He loves his horse, is very considerate of his comfort, probably due to the fact that they have aided him in escaping from tight places so many times. He has often ridden over a hundred miles within 24 hours over the roughest mountain trails…’”

— Friedrich Katz, “The Life and Times of Pancho Villa”

 

The Mexican Revolution was a complex and deadly brew of power-lust, idealism, betrayal and conspiracy. Every one of its major leaders died violently.

At its start in 1910, Francisco Villa was weaving along the indistinct line between solid citizen and outlaw, operating a butcher shop in Chihuahua — and supplying it with rustled beef. He was swept up by the revolutionary fervor of Abraham Gonzalez and Francisco Madero, classic liberal reformers driven to arms by the intransigent dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Villa would distinguish himself as a gifted leader of irregular cavalry and a charismatic commander of a hodge-podge of revolutionary forces.

Along with former muleskinner Pascual Orozco, Villa won the key victory of the 1910 Revolution in the Battle of Juarez. Americans in El Paso climbed up on boxcars and sipped beer on hotel rooftops as they watched the fighting across the Rio Grande.

Francisco Madero became president with the promise of reforms that would raise the stature of the poor in Mexican society. Then as now, hope and change were easier to promise than to deliver. Madero was soon assailed by a rebellion by Emiliano Zapata in the south, frustrated by the slow pace of land reform. In the north, Orozco rebelled, too, financed by the old regime hacendados who felt their power slipping away.

Villa stood by Madero and soon he and Orozco were at each other’s throats. Again, Villa proved himself a wily commander and vicious fighter, scoring lighting victories in a campaign that ranged across the northern tier of Mexico.

Madero had kept Diaz’s federal army intact and a porfirista general named Victoriano Huerta led the effort to suppress the Orozco rebellion. Huerta was a sonofabitch if there ever was one, treacherous and mean, with a bottomless capacity for Napoleon brandy. He held Madero in contempt and hated irregulars in general and Francisco Villa in particular.

Pancho was fond of good horseflesh and commandeered a horse during one of his operations. Huerta accused him of brigandage, had him dragged out of a hotel room shaking and half-delirious with fever and stood him up against a wall. Villa, as he was prone to do in moments of stress, broke into tears of rage and frustration, a humiliation he would not forget. The intervention of one of Madero’s brothers saved him from the firing squad and instead he was carted off to prison in Mexico City. There he had a bed installed in his cell, where he availed himself of Mexico’s liberal (and humane) attitude toward conjugal visits, learned to write his name and read (or had read to him) “Don Quixote” and the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas.

A group of plotters tried to enlist him in a coup against Madero, but Villa truly was loyal to the hapless little presidente and he not only declined, but escaped from prison and made his way to El Paso, where he sent word to his mentor Abraham Gonzalez that he stood ready to defend Madero and his revolution.

Huerta had Madero and his vice president whacked and seized power. In March of 1913, Villa, with a handful of followers, crossed the Rio Grande and announced that he was coming after Huerta. Game on…