MORMON EXODUS FROM MEXICO

Five-year-old George Wilcken Romney was bewildered by all the activity in his home. His father, mother and three older brothers were dashing about their two-story brick house in Colonia Dublán, a Mormon settlement in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, trying to decide which items to pack and which to leave. Mormon officials had decreed all women and children must leave immediately, before the revolutionaries returned. The men would remain behind as long as possible to safeguard their property. Each woman could take 100 pounds of luggage plus 50 pounds for each child.

Out the window young George—a future governor of Michigan and father of governor, U.S. senator and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney—saw other Mormon families packing as fast as they could. Wagons clogged the maple-lined streets flanked with other respectable homes of brick and stone.

It was late July 1912, and the Mexican Revolution was in its second year. At its outset leading revolutionary Francisco Madero had used the mountains of Chihuahua as a base of operations against the government. Madero’s election as president the prior November had done little to quell dissent, however, and rebels now threatened the 4,000-plus residents of the near dozen Mormon settlements in Chihuahua and neighboring Sonora (known collectively as the Juárez Stake). George and the other children could hear gunfire in the hills as government troops clashed with rebels. For long weeks Chihuahuan marauders led by Pascual Orozco and José Inés Salazar had been harassing and looting from Mormons and locals alike. The rebels had even dragged out one of the prominent Mormons in nearby Colonia Juárez, standing him before a cottonwood tree and threatening to execute him if he did not give them cash.

It had become obvious to Mormon officials in Mexico that the safe harbor they had enjoyed under recently ousted President Porfirio Díaz was slipping away. Junius Romney, president of the Juárez Stake and George’s uncle, ultimately resolved the colonists should evacuate to the United States until the revolution was over.

It was not