General Pancho and the Preacher

By Isaac M. Flores

Pancho Villa is in exile, improbably hiding out in a Southwestern
U.S. town, recuperating from a leg wound he received during
his recent incursion into American territory at Columbus, New
Mexico -- just down the road a bit. During this period he has gone from
a highly regarded revolutionary general to a desperado, hunted down
by both the U.S. and Mexico. Hes not worried. In the saloon, he meets
an American circuit rider, a preacher on horseback, who also happens
to be running from lawmen. Sheriff s deputies want to question the
parttime preacher in the killing of a rancher in Lincoln County. These
two unlikely characters start drinking and spinning their stories to each
other. They strike up a friendship that is to last throught the Mexican
Revolution -- until they are separately assassinated down Mejico way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462888276

Isaac M. Flores

Isaac M. (Ike) Flores spent 35 years with The Associated Press and covered many of the events he writes about. He has authored six books in his retirement and continues to write on a wide variety of topics. He splits his time between North Carolina and Florida.

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General Pancho and the

Preacher

ISAAC M. FLORES

Copyright © 2011 by Isaac M. Flores.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011909860

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-8825-2

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-8826-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-8827-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Chapter 1     Exiles In A Barroom

Chapter 2     The Tale Continues

Chapter 3     Columbus Raid

Chapter 4     Preacher

Chapter 5     Villa-Chihuahua

Chapter 6     Preacher-Deming

Chapter 7     Circuit Rider

Chapter 8     Preacher-Family

Chapter 9     Riding The Circuit

Chapter 10   Preacher’s Road

Chapter 11   Villa’s Chihuahua

Chapter 12   Rancher’s Shooting

Chapter 13   Villa’s Mexico

Chapter 14   Preacher’s Mexico

Chapter 15   Preacher’s Destination

Chapter 16   Santería

Chapter 17   Pancho And The Preacher Plot

Chapter 18   Pancho And The Preacher March

Chapter 19   Plot Fizzles

Chapter 20   Villa’s Defeats

Chapter 21   Revolution’s End

Chapter 22   War’s Aftermath

Chapter 23   Villa’s Assassination

Chapter 24   Pancho And Preacher At Canutillo

Chapter 25   Preacher-Canutillo

Chapter 26   Preacher’s Education

Chapter 27   Preacher’s End

Epilogue

Author’s Note

This book is categorized as historical fiction. Fictitious characters,

locations and events are woven into the historical line to create a

narrative flow. Any errors are solely attributable to me.

This novel is dedicated to my parents

and to my paternal grandfather

who unknowingly inspired it

Prologue

It was in a darkened barroom in a dusty town called Deming, in the southwest corner of the newly-declared state of New Mexico, where these two unusual characters first met.

The first man limped in alone, pushing back his stained white sombrero to expose a bleached-out forehead. He squinted and slowly oriented himself to the saloon, coming in from the harsh mid-afternoon sun.

He was in his late thirties, maybe, but with the look of an older, wearier road warrior.

The place was quiet, virtually empty at a time where it was too early for the wage-earners, ranchers, farmers and townfolk to begin drinking, boasting and card-playing. The establishment had a gleaming mahogany bar and stools, a few tables and chairs and a big darkened room with pool tables. A tiny dance floor and a bandstand were off to the side.

It wasn’t exactly cool in there but much better than out on the street.

With the aid of a crutch, the broad-shouldered man clunked his way to the far end of the smooth bar and ordered cognac as he sat down precariously on a tall-legged barstool. He placed his crutch against a chair at one of the tables in back of him, and it clattered to the floor.

Besides his large round hat, the stranger’s other distinguishing feature was a thick, raven-colored moustache that flowed down the sides of his mouth and curled up slightly, almost whimsically, at the ends. He was husky, with widespread dark eyes, a broad nose on a wide face and an easy smile at the ready.

The other man walked into the dusky place at about the time the first had just begun sipping his drink.

The newcomer was taller. He was a bit older, mid-forties maybe, and displayed a bearded face and sinewy arms darkened and leathered by the sun. But he had a lightness to his hair and complexion that stood him apart from the other man. He was maybe a cowpuncher, possibly a dusty traveler from up north—that being almost anywhere but next-door Texas.

It turned out this newcomer was being sought by deputy marshals extremely curious about the killing of a wealthy landowner that had taken place along the route he had traveled—up north in the mountain ranges and deserts of central New Mexico.

The new man looked around suspiciously. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he perched himself on a barstool several places down from the heavyset man, who had his left leg stretched out straight to the side. As it happened, this gimpy, dark-eyed sipper was also on the run, with one big difference: He was being hunted by authorities from both the United States and Mexico. He had accumulated too many bitter enemies on both sides of the border and would be executed by one government or the other if lawmen could track him down.

Evidently, though, the enforcers of the law weren’t trying too hard either to ferret him out or arrest him. He somehow seemed to be out-of-place here, but he looked relaxed and as free as a spirit could be.

Now here these two men were in this busy little town maybe thirty miles from the state of Chihuahua, just across the U.S. border with Mexico. Seemingly, this was an ideal place to hide out.

A Mexican revolutionary called Pancho Villa had once reigned supreme in Chihuahua and along the U.S. border, the newcomer thought as he thirstily gulped half his beer.

Strangely enough, he was about to find out that that was exactly who this smiling barroom companion turned out to be—that Pancho Villa, the famous rebel leader out of old Mexico.

Pancho himself told him so as he reached over, introduced himself and extended his big, meaty paw. They shook hands. The astonished beerdrinker was a gringo, a norteamericano named Thomas Henry Butler.

They eventually got around to talking, as thirsty, curious people do while sitting at a bar.

They politely drank to their health and agreed it was an awfully hot day for May, that this bone-dry place was in sore need of rain, that even a light sprinkle might settle down some of the dust and that it sure wouldn’t hurt the cotton and beans growing out there. They griped about the whirling sandstorms that didn’t seem to stop, and one of them said it was lookin’ to be an early summer; and on and on they went—keeping to that impervious small talk for awhile.

With a little more sipping and conversation came a little more openness and then a what-the-hell kind of indifference, a warming confidence in the other guy. They had nothing to fear from each other after all. So they slowly began talking more seriously, kinda quiet-like.

Still nervous, though, Thomas Henry was mostly listening, with a quiet apprehension and awe. He was totally focused on the revolucionario sitting beside him, chatting smoothly and totally relaxed.

They talked in mostly general terms about themselves and their lives, their women, their children, their dreams. Just regular strangers, sitting in a shadowed saloon, in an out-of-the-way stopover kinda town.

Although he was a rancher, Thomas Henry Butler had recently turned his life toward his early love of Methodism. He was, he now explained to Pancho, a circuit rider, a preacher on horseback reaching out to some of those needing his counsel and perhaps a change in their religious outlook. He was no Bible shouter, no religious salesman—just a talker to folks who wanted a bit of counseling or who were interested in a different manner of worshipping their God. He was a teacher more than a preacher, he said.

As a circuit rider, Thomas Henry spread the word of Methodism wherever he went throughout the beautiful mountains and deserts of la Tierra Encantada, his Land of Enchantment. Pancho nodded and sipped, holding up his glass as if in a toast to the gringo preacher-teacher.

New Mexico, or Nuevo Méjico, was a vast border territory that had been admitted to the American union of states just a few years earlier, in 1912.

But Thomas hadn’t been doing much preaching or teaching or counseling lately.

He had delivered nothing out of his Bible lately because he was trying his best to become as anonymous as he could be in his horseback wanderings, a rifle at his side and quick glances behind him now-and-again. That was how he had spent his days lately.

Ironically, this preacher said he had shot and killed a man in New Mexico. And, going against his religion, his principles and personal morals, he was not yet ready to answer for it. So he was running from justice—but only temporarily, he assured Pancho while taking a slower pull of another awful-tasting beer he had been served.

Thomas Henry abruptly stopped talking and appeared to be brooding, giving serious new thought to his troubles.

Villa, on the other hand, was boisterous. He seemed pleased with what would ordinarily be a stressful situation for a Mexican rebel hiding out in the United States. He appeared to be an intelligent man, maybe not well-educated but knowledgeable about the world around him. He liked to talk, and he boasted about some of his exploits, which were many.

Pancho Villa’s single most-significant accomplishment, so far as Thomas Henry was concerned, was that he was the Mexican bandit who had recently led a raiding party into the United States—at Columbus, New Mexico, just a few miles down the road from where they were now sitting, sipping and chatting.

Nothing like that had happened since the British invaded this country during the War of 1812. Thomas Henry knew his history.

Anyhow, that’s how it was when these two unlikely characters met. It was 1916—when rebellion was everyday talk and outright war was just around the corner. It was a time of violence and bloodshed. Violence was virulent in northern Mexico, much of it along the border and spilling over into Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

A different kind of violence raged in far-off Europe, where an all-out conflict threatened to engulf many nations throughout the hemisphere.

These two very different individuals with such diverse achievements and goals had come to their happenstance acquaintance from very distinct directions, both geographically and intellectually. Their barroom get-together was a singular occurrence in the lives of Pancho Villa and Thomas Henry Butler.

It resulted in an unusual friendship for the rest of their days.

Chapter 1

EXILES IN A BARROOM

Pancho Villa—born Jose Doroteo Arango Arámbula—was a peon, born into virtual slavery. He and his whole family worked in the fields from dawn to dark in the service of their patrón, a wealthy landowner who didn’t hesitate in cracking the whip. Looking into his future as a child, all he foresaw was more backbreaking labor and extreme poverty.

He received no formal schooling. He learned to ride and shoot at an early age, and when he could borrow a rifle he would go off into the countryside by himself and shoot cottontails for his family’s dinner. Now that was a feast. His mother and sisters would carefully butcher the rabbits and then flour-bread and fry them along with chopped potatoes and pinto beans.

His overworked father died when Pancho was thirteen. Pancho tried to run away from the widespread hacienda, but he was caught by the overseers and flogged.

Many answers to his personality lay in those troubled years of his childhood. He had no formal schooling but he was certainly not ignorant. He had an independent mind, gradually acquired a quiet confidence in himself and learned the lessons of life as he lived them.

He grew up a paradoxical creature in a society where it seemed the easiest way to survive and move ahead was through violence. He was sometimes unable to control his emotions but, without question, he was a courageous young man. From his teenage years, as the head of a small gang of cattle rustlers, he considered himself a Robin Hood-like protector of the common man.

Pancho Villa had acquired this crazy idea that the land of Mexico belonged to those who earned it and worked it, not to the dictators or the foreigners or the wealthy, who now claimed thousands upon thousands of acres of Mexico’s heartland as their own.

Most of the peasants had stayed on and worked on the confiscated properties made up of the small parcels that had once belonged to them, or so they believed. They became laborers for the new owners, often beaten until they did exactly as they were told without question. Most had wives and children, sometimes grandchildren. They had no choice, no alternative. They were born there. These were their homes.

So they dreamed of a savior.

In the end, he turned out to be one of their own: el loco-bandido-filósofo now known as Pancho Villa.

Pancho eventually offered them one thing only: to die like men fighting for the lands they had worked on all their lives, and their fathers and grandfathers before them.

He would see what he could do to bring an end to it.

"Hijos de puta!" he would exclaim whenever the subject of hacienda owners came up. Villa would become a savior or evil incarnate, depending on who was making the judgment at what particular time.

He educated himself slowly, agonizingly sometimes, in whatever was important for him to know politically and strategically. He liked to talk, so he orated to small crowds about the evils of the central government. As he became a prominent regional rebelde, he began surrounding himself with learned people who believed in his basic ideas.

Pancho Villa in 1916 copy.jpg

OUTLAW GENERAL—Pancho Villa is shown in his element

in 1916. (Library of Congress PD-US)

Thomas Henry Butler was now regarding Pancho Villa the man, rather than the legend he was becoming. He saw a big, expressive face, a wide white forehead that gave way to definite black eyebrows and thick dark hair with hint of a curl. Villa grew bushy sideburns and had a mouthful of teeth that gleamed in the shadowed light coming from behind the bar and though a curtained plate glass window.

He was dressed rather haphazardly in a winkled shirt that had a button missing and khaki pants that evidently were part of a uniform. The trouser bottoms were tucked into soft, scuffed brown boots reaching to his muscular calves. Maybe 190 pounds all told, most of it well-muscled.

Mexican women thought him handsome, and he didn’t find it difficult to choose whom he pleased as girlfriend or wife. He had many of both—semi-legal wives and girlfriends. He loved the ladies. He liked to sing and sometimes even broke out into an impromptu dance. His wide smile and devil-may-care manners were hard to ignore.

This stocky fellow sitting in that Southwestern saloon seemingly enjoying himself had once been a highly regarded general of the Mexican Army, and later a charismatic revolutionary leader, forever embattled against those seeking to take over someone else’s land, or his state or even the whole of Mexico.

"Esos pinches cabrones siempre trátan de oprimir la gente pobre, he exclaimed in his telling of it to Thomas Henry Butler. Those fuckers always look for ways to subjugate the poor," was the way Butler understood it.

Villa was a personable man, even a likeable fellow in the flesh. But he appeared to be real bad news to his enemies.

One of the reasons for his turning into a go-it-alone bandit beholden to no one was the way his country was being ruled by Mexican President Porfirio Diaz at the time Pancho was growing up and becoming aware of the life around him.

Diaz’ presidency, known as the Porfiriato, was actually a thinly veiled dictatorship lasting some thirty-three years. He was ruthless in repressing individual freedoms, while at the same time credited with bringing some order to the country’s economy by building roads and railways and beginning to put together an infrastructure of sorts.

You either loved Diaz or you hated him. Most Mexicans quickly learned to hate him.

To Pancho’s young mind, his president was committing criminal acts every day by:

– Selling, giving away or parceling out his country’s resources to foreign interests.

– Creating the vicious government-sponsored gangsters known as rurales, who terrorized, tortured and killed many of Mexico’s peasants for any imagined wrongdoing.

– And reigning over his country through systematic corruption.

Pancho Villa’s instinctive awareness and a maddog canniness as a youngster helped him evade the rurales, who were tripping over themselves trying to capture this rebellious youth, to torture him and then throw him in a dungeon as an example to others. From those rough beginnings, he grew up his own man, looking out for himself and making up his own rules as he went along.

In his impressive rise from peasantry, he once was appointed a provisional governor of resource-rich Chihuahua State, his adopted land. He spent much of his short tenure working on agrarian reform, long neglected by the central government.

But now, he was being hunted down by a slew of intelligence agents and lawmen from both the United States and Mexico. He was considered a murdering bandit, sought for execution by the leaders of his own country and Woodrow Wilson’s government in the United States.

Slowly but reluctantly, Thomas Henry came to realize the enormity of his own situation: He was actually sitting next to Pancho Villa in a bar, of all places—in this bar, right now, on a Sunday afternoon, when he would normally be out preaching or teaching.

But things certainly weren’t normal, were they?

This was the man the newspapers and townspeople all along the preacher’s recently traveled route called the butcher of Columbus and much, much worse.

At that point in his musing, two men walked into the saloon.

One was a short, stumpy fellow who was doing most of the talking.