The Old Army in the Big Bend of Texas: The Last Cavalry Frontier, 1911-1921

By Thomas Ty Smith

Even before Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the following punitive expedition under General John J. Pershing, the U.S. Army was strengthening its presence on the southwestern border in response to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Manning forty-one small outposts along a three-hundred mile stretch of the Rio Grande region, the army remained for a decade, rotating eighteen different regiments, primarily cavalry, until the return of relative calm. The remote, rugged, and desolate terrain of the Big Bend defied even the technological advances of World War I, and it remained very much a cavalry and pack mule operation until the outposts were finally withdrawn in 1921.

With The Old Army in the Big Bend of Texas: The Last Cavalry Frontier, 1911–1921, Thomas T. “Ty” Smith, one of Texas’s leading military historians, has delved deep into the records of the U.S. Army to provide an authoritative portrait, richly complemented by many photos published here for the first time, of the final era of soldiers on horseback in the American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas State Historical Assn
• Release date: Jan 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781625110480

Book preview

The Old Army in the Big Bend of Texas

THE OLD ARMY IN THE BIG BEND OF TEXAS

The Last Cavalry Frontier, 1911–1921

BY THOMAS TY SMITH

FOREWORD BY DAVID W. KELLER

Texas State Historical Association

Austin

Copyright ©2018 Texas State Historical Association, Austin, Texas. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Thomas T., 1950– author.

Title: The old army in the Big Bend of Texas, 1911–1921 : the last cavalry frontier / by Thomas Ty Smith ; foreword by David W. Keller.

Description: Austin : Texas State Historical Association, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055091 | ISBN 9781625110473 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625110480 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Big Bend Region (Tex.)—History, Military—20th century. | United States. Army. Cavalry, 8th—History. | Mexico—History—Revolution, 1910–1920—Cavalry operations.

Classification: LCC F392.B54 S59 2018 | DDC 355.009764/93—sdc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055091

Design by David Timmons

Contents

Foreword

Map: U.S. Army Outposts and Stations in the Big Bend, 1911–1921

Introduction

Part I: The Old Army Returns to the Big Bend, 1911–1915

Part II: Villa and the Great Call-Up, 1916

Part III: Kingdom of the Eighth Cavalry, 1917–1919

Part IV: Twilight of the Old Army, 1920–1921

Part V: A Brief History of Army Outposts and Stations in the Big Bend, 1911–1921

Part VI: U.S. Army Commanders, Big Bend, 1912–1926

Part VII: U.S. Army Regiments in the Big Bend, 1911–1921

Part VIII: U.S. Army Unit Locations and Chronology, Big Bend, 1911–1921

Part IX: Bibliography

Index

Dedicated to Dr. C. H. Dusty and Edie Huddleston of Uvalde, Texas.

They taught our family a special passion for the Big Bend.

Foreword

It is hard to overstate the significance of this book to the military history of the Texas Big Bend. Between 1911 and 1921, ten cavalry units, four National Guard units, and four infantry units rotated through more than forty different outposts to guard the border during the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution. Yet despite the hundreds of soldiers and horses and pack trains operating during the period, there has never been a comprehensive treatment of this complex and important time in our past.

As a result, histories of the region either gloss over the subject, or worse, perpetuate errors that have arisen in the historical record. It isn’t hard to do. In my own research, one thing that became apparent very quickly was that newspapers of the time, one of the predominant sources used by historians, are often misleading if not outright erroneous. And to delve into the primary documents, as I attempted to do, opens a whole new universe—one that for someone unacquainted with military records can prove to be a test of tolerance for frustration.

This was the problem I faced when I met Ty Smith. At the time, I was involved in four separate projects dealing with military occupation of the Big Bend—three of them archaeological in nature and one as part of a book I was writing about Pinto Canyon west of Marfa. But it was fieldwork at a cavalry maneuvering ground associated with Camp Candelaria that prompted me to reach out to him. I’m glad I did, because that simple query ultimately led him to conduct extensive research at four major archives in three states in addition to making field excursions to several of the outposts that he was researching. For a while, Ty sent almost weekly updates on his findings, all given as freely as if he’d been commissioned to do so. It was an example of academic courtesy beyond anything I’d ever experienced.

In fact—to give you some idea of the spirit in which Ty operates—after giving me a copy of his excellent book The Old Army in Texas, along with a stack of papers containing hard-earned condensation of countless hours of painstaking original research, he bought me dinner. When I first reached out to him, my hope was that he might lead me in the right direction. But I never expected him to launch an all-out intensive effort to quantify and contextualize troop movements in the Big Bend during what turned out to be the last major occupation of horse-mounted cavalry units anywhere in the United States—what Ty appropriately calls the last cavalry frontier.

His wide-ranging understanding of military history, coupled with an intimate familiarity with both military records and military historiography, uniquely positioned Ty to undertake this project. The result is a work that will stand as the go-to source detailing Mexican Revolution-era military history of the Big Bend. Through research at the Archives of the Big Bend, the National Archives in Maryland, and the Military History Institute in Pennsylvania, he was able to finally resolve persistent problems addressing troop movements in, outside of, and within the region. It is among the most fundamental of data and critical to a full understanding of the greatest military occupation the region has ever seen.

Ty exceeded even his own initial goals. For in addition to his research on the Old Army, he also tackled a glaring omission in the historical record—the occupation of the border by the National Guard following the infamous Glenn Springs Raid of 1916. Beyond what could be found in newspapers and as passing references in a few books, information was difficult to come by. I should say nearly impossible because, as it turns out, the records were squirreled away in a filing cabinet in an obscure corner of a warehouse at Camp Mabry in Austin. Only someone with Ty’s level of dedication would ever have found them. His tenacity paid off. He struck gold.

In providing context, and in far greater detail than anyone has ever accomplished, Ty has rectified one of the greatest deficits in the local historical record and, in so doing, has made a major contribution to regional scholarship. Thanks to Ty’s stubborn curiosity, under which lies a fierce drive for accuracy and completeness, this book will stand for decades to come as the singular authoritative and comprehensive source for the Old Army’s occupation of the Big Bend.

DAVID W. KELLER

SENIOR PROJECT ARCHAEOLOGIST

CENTER FOR BIG BEND STUDIES

SUL ROSS STATE UNIVERSITY

Introduction

The purpose of this project is to provide historians and archaeologists an accurate, detailed catalog of major unit locations, in historical context and chronology, for the U.S. Army activities in the Big Bend of Texas during the period of the Mexican Revolution, 1911–1921. The Big Bend was the last true frontier for the Old Army. The project began by accident and proceeded through purely stubborn curiosity.

One day at Meyers Spring, just northeast of Dryden, Texas, I met David W. Keller, an archaeologist for the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University. He was doing a report on a structure at Camp Mayers Spring, as the army called this subpost of Fort Clark in the early 1880s. I had seen very little published on the history of this army outpost and decided to dig into the army records for him, which eventually led to an article in the Journal of Big Bend Studies. But more importantly, David had already written a great history of the 02 Ranch (Below The Escondido Rim: A History of the 02 Ranch in the Texas Big Bend, Center for Big Bend Studies, 2005) and told me he was also working on a history of the Chinati area and the Pinto Canyon Ranch. Since Ruidosa and Candelaria were nearby army outposts I became curious as to what units occupied them and when, thinking this information might help with David’s history. I soon discovered that published information of this sort is very scarce and scattered. Fortunately, although this would be a foray into the early twentieth century, new ground for me after thirty years of focusing on the army of the nineteenth century, I knew where to go in the army records.

The most detailed and accurate army records for troop locations are the monthly regimental and post returns. In the 1950s the National Archives microfilmed nearly every one of the regular army post returns from 1800 to December 1916 and the regimental returns from 1821 to December 1916. I had quite a few of the rolls of microfilm, and what I did not have on hand was easily accessed because Ancestry.com recently partnered with the National Archives and put the returns on the Internet. The real problem was that they ended in December 1916, which left the years 1917–1921 a mystery.

A second problem was locating the Texas National Guard unit returns for the two regiments serving in the Big Bend during the mobilization of 1916, which we knew served at, or near, Ruidosa. Several months of queries and searches in the Texas State Library and Archives and various university archives and libraries brought me to Camp Mabry in Austin and the Texas Military Forces Museum with a last hope. They had no unit returns but told me I might want to go down the street and talk to Jim. An hour later I was standing in a big warehouse across from the office of James O. Shive, chief of records for Texas Army National Guard Headquarters at Camp Mabry. Jim’s very patient and tolerant search finally ended at an old metal file cabinet containing the 1916–1917 monthly regimental returns and muster rolls of the First Squadron, Texas Cavalry, and the Fourth Texas Infantry. Victory.

The years 1917–1921 still posed an information gap for the regular army, and by this point I had decided we really needed to record all of the outposts in the Big Bend, not just Ruidosa and Candelaria. David Keller suggested I go see Melleta Bell and Jerri Garza at the Archives of the Big Bend in the Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, Sul Ross State University, at Alpine, Texas. This was an excellent idea, as it turned out. I spent multiple days and trips with the Earl H. Elam Papers, a huge trove of copies of primary army documents related to the Big Bend and the origins of Camp Marfa that Professor Elam had gathered from the National Archives. The memos, records, letters, and other documents in the Elam Papers produced a good list of units in the Big Bend during 1917–1921 and an excellent picture of operations during the period.

The list gathered from the Elam Papers became the road map for a trip to the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and the Military History Institute at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, which solved most of the 1917–1921 puzzle.

Finding the right images for this project, many published here for the first time, is entirely to the credit of a number of great Texas photo archivists whose professionalism, dedication, expertise, and kind patience made this possible: Linda Briscoe Myers and Michael L. Gilmore, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Melleta Bell, the Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas; Virginia Wood Davis at the Virginia W. Davis Archives of Southwest Texas, El Progreso Memorial Library, Uvalde, Texas; Norman Porter Jr., Pleasanton, Texas; Bob and Jean Gates, Texas Military Forces Museum, Camp Mabry, Austin; and Danny Gonzalez, Border Heritage Center, El Paso Public Library.

A portion of this manuscript previously appeared in The Texas National Guard in the Big Bend during the Mexican Revolution, which was published in the Journal of Big Bend Studies (volume 28).

And finally, much appreciation to my long-time trail partner in Texas history, Col. (Ret.) David L. Clark, who added valuable suggestions, comments, and corrections to the early manuscript and was a constant enthusiast for the project.

PART I

The Old Army Returns to the Big Bend, 1911–1915

Senator Fall: We hear a great deal about the Big Bend. . . . What is the Big Bend?

Colonel Langhorne: . . . [A] very peculiar country.—Senator Albert B. Fall to Colonel George T. Langhorne, Commander, Eighth Cavalry, testimony before Senate investigation of Mexican affairs, El Paso, Texas, Feb. 20, 1920

For the U.S. Army in 1911, the Texas Big Bend was a line on the map along the Southern Pacific Railroad that ran from Sanderson northwest 230 miles through Marathon, Alpine, Marfa, Valentine, Lobo, and Sierra Blanca to Fort Hancock. From that line the map ran southwest to the Rio Grande eleven thousand square miles of severe, uncharted, roadless, forbidding terrain that quickly wrecked men, horses, and equipment. Called by the Spanish despoblado, the deserted land, it proved to be a region that could not be conquered, merely endured. The population in 1911 was around five thousand, mostly in small villages and isolated ranches.

The army began a tenuous relationship with the Big Bend in the decades between the U.S. war with Mexico and the American Civil War with the explorations and mapping of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, as well as the U.S. Boundary Survey. By the mid-1850s there was fairly constant contact and exchange between Fort Davis and the stock-men, traders, and merchants of Presidio del Norte. After the Civil War, knowledge of the region improved significantly with scouts and expeditions, such as the efforts launched in the 1870s by Lieutenant John L. Bullis and his detachment of Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts and by Colonel William R. Shafter. Army experience in the Big Bend grew exponentially with the 1879 establishment of Camp Peña Colorado, south of present-day Marathon, and with Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson’s 1879–1881 campaign against the Mimbreño Chiricahua Apache leader Victorio. As a part of his field campaign, Grierson chose to guard and deny the West Texas waterholes necessary for Apache survival as the raiders moved back and forth across the Rio Grande. However, by 1911 the army had been absent from the Big Bend for several decades; only a few old soldiers would have remembered the lessons it taught—lessons to be painfully relearned—and the army lacked essential basic knowledge, including accurate maps. The army outpost at Presidio closed in 1893, the outpost at Neville Spring and Fort Davis were abandoned in 1891, and the outposts at Polvo and Camp Peña Colorado shut down by 1893.¹

The escalating turmoil of the Mexican Revolution brought the army back into the Big Bend in January 1911. What was expected to be a relatively short mission turned into ten years of manning scattered outposts, small unit operations, and the occasional larger scale cross-border campaign that eventually involved, over the decade, eighteen army regiments and forty-one Big Bend outposts and stations.

During the decade of the Mexican Revolution, the Republic of Mexico devolved into a region of warlords and city-states. The unrest and chaos were the result of growing repression, inequity, and injustice during the thirty-four-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, a fast friend of American business interests. In 1910, Francisco I. Madero, campaigning on a reform platform, challenged Díaz’s reelection. Díaz had Madero arrested and imprisoned. Posting bail, Madero fled to San Antonio, Texas, where he plotted revolution with the Plan de San Luis Potosí, gaining general support in Mexico. On the heels of a popular uprising, Díaz resigned in May 1911, Madero was elected in October, and Díaz fled to Paris. In turn, conservative opposition to Madero’s rule resulted in a coup and his assassination in February 1913, bringing Victoriano Huerta to power; he was opposed by revolutionaries in northern Mexico. Huerta, ousted in July 1914, was replaced by the governor of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, who was subsequently recognized by the United States. Two of Carranza’s rivals for power, Francisco Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, continued a revolt, which soon became a general civil war. Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916 led to a large-scale cross-border campaign, the Punitive Expedition, under Brigadier General John J. Pershing.²

The U.S. Army of 1911 was minuscule compared to the armies of the European powers; even Switzerland, with a fraction of the land mass and 3 percent of the U.S. population, had a peacetime army 40 percent larger than that of the United States. With a budget of $103 million, the U.S. Army had 4,818 officers and 77,523 enlisted men, of whom 17,885, one-quarter, were deployed overseas due to America’s evolving global interests in Alaska, Hawaii, China, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Panama.³

Headed again to the wilds of West Texas, the U.S. Army of the early twentieth century was in some respects the same as its nineteenth-century frontier predecessor, but in other ways greatly altered. Although armed with a very modern Springfield Model 1903 bolt-action rifle, it was still very much a horse-and-mule army, with only five trucks in the United States—three at the San Francisco depot, one at West Point, and one at Fort Sam Houston. The quartermaster general acknowledged that commercial trucks on good paved roads were more economical than wagons, but the current truck model was too fragile, not suitable as a means of transportation in the field. From June 1909 to June 1910, to keep the army mobile, the quartermaster general purchased another 3,928 horses, 1,520 mules, and 402 wagons. The army was also beginning to discover air power, having one Wright Brothers airplane and one lieutenant who could fly it.⁴

In the frontier army of 1874, 50 percent of the soldiers were foreign-born, 20 percent being Irish, and 12 percent German, the two largest groups. Of the 22,348 recruits in 1911, 89 percent were native-born, including 1,254 African Americans. Of the 3,253 foreign-born, 22 percent were German, 17 percent Irish, 12 percent Russian, and 10 percent English. Enlistments were for three years in 1911, changing in 1912 to four years in the active army and three in the reserves. Although recruits ranged from eighteen to forty years old, the men in the largest age bloc, 17 percent, were twenty-one years old. Twenty-five percent were laborers, 15 percent farmers, and 8 percent came from white-collar occupations, such as teachers, clerks, and bookkeepers. The officer corps that led them was also somewhat different from the men’s frontier antecedents. In the late 1860s, 75 percent of the officers came from West Point; in the 1870s it was 46 percent. By 1911, 44 percent of the officers had graduated from West Point, 43 percent were appointed from civilian life, and 13 percent rose from the enlisted ranks. However, as the army expanded over the next four years, West Point again began to provide the majority of commissions, 63 percent by 1916.⁵

Army pay had not significantly improved since the Indian Wars of the mid-1870s, when a private made $13 per month, a sergeant $17, a second lieutenant $1,400 per year, or $116 a month (with an extra $100 per year if mounted), and a cavalry captain made $2,000 per year, or about $166 per month. Four decades and a good bit of inflation later, an army cavalry or infantry private of 1911 made $15 per month, a sergeant $30 and after his sixth reenlistment $45, a second lieutenant $1,700 per year, or $141 per month, a cavalry captain $2,400 per year, or $200 per month, and after twenty years of service $280 per month.⁶

Low pay and hard living continued to contribute to army desertion, but at dramatically improved rates over the frontier army. In 1856, 21 percent of the 15,000-man army deserted; in 1871 the rate was 32 percent of a 29,000-man force, but by 1891 desertion had dropped to 6 percent. In 1910 there were 3,464 desertions, a rate of 3.6 percent, being 3.77 percent for white troops and 1.35 percent for soldiers of the four black regiments. In addition to the losses through desertion, 2,999 soldiers purchased their discharges after their first year of enlistment in a program that ran from 1890 to 1940. To make it easier for authorities to identify and prosecute captured deserters, the army in 1906 began to fingerprint and photograph recruits. Prior to this, beginning in 1889, each soldier had his physical characteristics and distinguishing features such as scars recorded on an outline-figure card, all on 331,000 cards filed with the adjutant general.⁷

The capture of a deserter of course led to a court-martial, or rather added to the many courts-martial conducted by the army each year. In 1876, the year of Little Big Horn, the 28,571-man army had a total of 12,301 courts-martial, meaning that about half the army was tied up in a court-martial sometime during the year. Of those courts-martial, 10,483 were lesser garrison or regimental courts-martial and 1,818 were general courts-martial where the punishment could be quite severe—prison or even death. Twenty-five percent of the cases were for being absent without leave (AWOL), and 20 percent for drunkenness or being drunk on duty. In 1910, with an army of just over 82,000, there were 47,827 courts-martial but only 25,351 soldiers who were tried, meaning there were multiple courts-martial for the same troublesome soldiers. Most were lesser garrison or summary courts, and of the 5,206 serious general courts-martial 28 percent were for AWOL, mirroring the 1876 frontier army, but only 243 (4.6 percent) for drunkenness on duty. Venereal disease remained a health issue, and alcoholism was still a problem for the army, but not at the rate it had been in the nineteenth century.⁸

Comparatively, the army was fairly healthy; in 1910 the secretary of war even ordered every field grade officer, major and above, to take an annual physical test to prove they were still fit for hard campaigning. The officer had to ride thirty miles every day for three consecutive days, one day in six and one-half hours, and two in seven and one-half hours, to spare the horse, not the officer. The antebellum army of 1850–1859 had a death rate of 25.9 per thousand, the post-Civil War army of 1870–1879 a death rate of 15.3 per thousand, and the U.S Army of 1911 a death rate of 4.8 per thousand, while that same year the male population of the United States’ death rate was 14.5 per thousand. Public and government concern over infectious diseases and other sickness in camp during the Spanish-American War drove the army into strict measures and detailed medical studies to attack field and camp sanitation, insect control, and preventive medicine. In 1911 nearly every soldier had been required to be vaccinated against typhoid, a serious killer of the era. Nevertheless, 320 soldiers died in 1911, including 175 from disease, two killed in action in the Philippines, thirty drownings, twenty suicides, and sixteen homicides.⁹

In 1911 the basic organization in the army was the regiment of fifty officers and 816 enlisted men. The regiment had twelve cavalry troops or infantry companies; each authorized three officers and sixty-five enlisted men, although typically 25 percent of the officers were absent on leave or detached service such as training the National Guard, or in service schools, leaving companies short of leadership. In 1914 Congress set new manning levels in which an infantry company was authorized sixty-five enlisted men in peacetime and 150 in war, while a cavalry troop had seventy-one troopers in peace and 100 in war. All units in the Big Bend operated on a peacetime authorization. The core of the field army was fifty-two regiments, fifteen cavalry, thirty-one infantry, and six field artillery.¹⁰

The regiment remained the basic unit of the army, although the senior leadership was experimenting with the multiregiment brigade structure, and even a divisional organization, as part of a drive for modernization. The army was very much a part of the fact-based, data-driven managerial revolution occurring in the United States in which military reports to Congress and appeals for changes in legislation often read more like scientific treatises than emotional editorials. Consolidation was the key to modernization; larger units improved discipline, training, professional education, and health; fewer posts cut costs and maintenance. The units of the army that were not overseas were stationed in forty-nine posts in twenty-four states, thirty-one (63 percent) of which had a capacity of less than a regiment. The average strength