War and Peace in the Borderlands

One day we went across the border and ate at the Pink Store in Palomas, Chihuahua, Mexico. (The longer name of the town, not much used, is Puerto Palomas de Villa.) We were helping our friend Esther and her two friends from Silver City, Pierre and Jerry, deliver one pickup load and two carloads of food and other goods to a senior center in Columbus, NM, and further, by relay, to a location (school or library) in Palomas. From Deming, Agapi and I were able to contribute a box of man's shoes, a box of woman's and kid's shoes, a box of sweaters, ties, and belts, a box of stuffed animals, puzzles, and games, and a small box of eyeglasses and soap.

We parked our car and crossed the border on foot.

Our associates for the day have been regulars at the Pink Store for years. On entering, they were greeted familiarly by the owner Sergio and his very personable wife Ivonne. We were seated in the restaurant at one end of the Store, an emporium of poly-chromed ceramics, tin sculptures, wooden religious icons, woven blankets, and assorted knickknacks, pattywacks, and bric-a-brac, all in that recognizably garish Mexican style. Agapi reported having the very best chile relleno since arriving in the southwest. I had bistek, which also was very good, if chewy.

On leaving, I came across my first retablos* in the Store. One I found particularly interesting (for $16) commemorated a good time a man had with a prostitute before getting a sexually transmitted disease. I did not note to which saint it was dedicated.

"Don't be startled," our hostess Ivonne said as we started for the door. She was referring to the soldiers coming in, one in desert camo, and the other two in olive-drab holding matte-black automatic weapons. "It is only one of our generals coming in for lunch." The general was smiling; his bodyguards were scowling. Needless to say, it was very creepy, very alien to us.

A colorfully-attired Tarahumara woman about four feet tall held open the door for us as we left the store. She also held a colorful basket in which to collect money. Esther told us we should give her some as all the money goes collectively to her tribe. The Tarahumara are renown for the their mountain ridge-top running game, sprinting for miles and miles at high altitudes while kicking a wooden ball. Because of these skills and their endurance they too often are recruited by the cartels as drug mules.

Palomas (the Spanish word for doves) is considered safe now that the war for control over that part of northern Mexico has been decided in favor of the Sinaloa Cartel, possibly with a supportive nod from the Mexican government. The rival gang has been pushed back to its base in Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas.

Things also have calmed down in Columbus since the entire local government, including the mayor, a village trustee, a former police chief, and nine other people, was busted by the US Feds in March 2011 for running guns across the border. Still, the images of violence all along the border during 2007-2011 can give one nightmares with eyes wide open. So, I leave you with this cleansing image of a morning's sunrise over Tres Hermanas, instead.

* Retablos are paintings on tin usually, at times on wood or leather, that serve as votive offerings of gratitude or supplication to various saints for help with life issues, such as recovery from illness or injury, successful marriages, starting university, usually contracted to village painters who charge a small fee.

Back Forty Denizens

The acreage to the west behind the house is mesquite-ridden. The boney-fingered, thorny-threatening plant, likely honey mesquite (prosopis glandulosa), has sucked the surface soil so dry that practically nothing else grows there, neither the yucca elata (soap-tree or palmilla) that is so abundant in this part of the desert otherwise (and is the New Mexico state flower), nor the nopal (prickly pear), which actually grows more on slopes and steep hillsides, nor many of the yellow grasses that dominate much of the wild range land in New Mexico.

The mesquite does not form thickets exactly. Rather, widely-spaced apart clumps called mottes (after the Spanish mata for bush or grove) alternate with flat open patches of featureless sheets of dew-caked and then sun-dried brown clay. Hardly a stone or bone in this back forty relieves the monotony. Yet, this land supports much wildlife. Walking around there one day, I came across a huge burrow in a cluster of mottes and learned soon enough who its inhabitants are.

One morning, just after the sun came over the Florida Mountains, five coyotes ran across the alfalfa fields in front and to the south side of the house. One was limping as if a leg or paw were missing or injured. Speculation arose among friends, with whom we shared pictures of this event, that here was proof that coyotes at times run in packs. I think they are likely a family, mom and kids, almost grown. Their yipping and howling just outside our windows on moonlit nights has been a hair-raising joy for us.

Several weeks after the event of seeing them in the day time, unfortunately, we found one of our coyotes out on Monte Vista road, not more than 100 yards from the driveway, mangled and crushed. Not sure if it was the lame one...

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Coyotes and yes, Beep-Beep, roadrunners too.

Known also by the Spanish appellation paisano, fellow countryman, this species manifested hesitantly to us at first. Then increasingly more and more members of this curious bird family blessed us with their presence.

One evening at a distance a silhouette (blink) appeared before darting into the shrubbery. It may have been that of a roadrunner, but it may also have been that of a boat-tailed grackle, occasionally seen in this area. Most definitely, a roadrunner glided down from a tree on Monte Vista Road very near to and across from our mailbox as we drove by one day. Its plumage appeared to be black outlined in white rather than the expected mottled white, black and brown, but the form was unmistakable. Next sighting was of a road-runner in a mesquite bush as we drove up our lane to the house.

I was hoping to see one close-up some day. 

December 8, 2013 was the date. Around mid-day, a roadrunner was sitting atop of one of the rusted 50-gallon drums near the pump-house. Agapi took several pictures of it from the foyer doorway. Sensing the door open but unable to divine its origin or direction, the bird went into a crouch similar to that of a dog pointing -- a straight line from crest to end of its long tail. The paisano eventually disappeared into the woods behind the garden.

Since that date, we have had several sightings, pretty much in the same spot and same time of day as mentioned. Two birds were darting at grasshoppers in the alfalfa fields one day recently. The male (?) would jerk his tail up suddenly, then ease it down slowly, up suddenly, down slowly-slowly, up, down easy-easy does it. Not sure if it was nervousness or a kind of amorous signal to its mate.

The bird will run as you approach it, but tends to stop after a few paces, look back at you, cock an eye, peek through the bushes. It is a curious bird, in both senses of curious. It is quite a bit more than...

a little cuckoo.

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Bonus:

Here are three pics of a desert effect known as the Fata Morgana. It is commonly seen on cool and clear mornings, persisting for maybe a half-hour to an hour at a time. Mountains at various horizons appear to flatten, stretch, distort; portals open to other worlds.

These are the Florída Mountains to the east of the house getting Swiss-cheesed by the Fata Morgana effect.

Billy the Kid: Dead? Or Alive?

I have been reading about Billy the Kid, who grew up in Silver City, a mischievous but amiable sort until he took to the gun at age 15. Depending on the historian consulted, he killed between 7 and 21 people in his short lifetime, quite a few who meant to kill him. Mostly he rustled livestock. Buck-toothed, blue eyed, slight build. There's a mural of him in Silver City wearing butterfly wings. 

His first crime was complicity in the theft of shirts off the clothesline of a local Chinese laundryman. Reportedly, he climbed out through the chimney of the town jail and, fearing he would face an even longer term for escaping, fled to Arizona. He killed his first man there, a blacksmith and former soldier who had been bullying him. Let out of the jail there, maybe for self-defense, he returned to New Mexico.

Henry William McCarty or Henry William Antrim as he was known changed his name to William Bonney. As Billy the Kid, he became a major player in the Lincoln County War, essentially a gang-war, which began as a feud between proprietors of two dried goods stores: McSwain-Tunstall on one side, Murphy-Dolan on the other. Billy the Kid joined on the so-called Regulators on the side of McSwain-Tunstall, the less powerful politically of the two factions. Murphy, serving as well as state legislator in Santa Fe, pretty much ruled the roost down in Fort Sumner, the area of most of the fighting.

One big shootout left Sheriff Brady of Fort Sumner dead. Billy had a price on his head now, though it's not clear his shot was the lethal one. In the midst of the shooting, he was observed retrieving the pearl-handled revolver that Brady, now corpse-Brady, had confiscated from him during his last stretch in jail. Newly deputized Sheriff Pat Garrett went after him and caught him, brought him in for trial. It looked as if Billy would hang. After being returned to Lincoln from Mesilla, where he had been sentenced, he made his escape, killing two men guarding him in the process, one of them Bill Olinger, a bad man whom even Garrett said he would not dare turn his back to.

The story is that Garrett killed the Kid. Billy was staying with friends out in the countryside after his escape. He left his room to get a slice of beef from the porch of Pete Maxwell's house and, entering the house, sensed a presence. “Quien es? Quien es?” he asked. Garrett was sitting on Maxwell's bed, shot the figure in the doorway in the stomach. Billy either fell back into another room or onto the porch, was declared dead by the coroner the next morning, quickly buried. A few say (and our neighbor Carl says) he didn’t die, but escaped again, and took on another identity.

What happened? Legend.

A convincing case is made in the book _Billy the Kid; Beyond the Grave_ by W.C. Jameson that Pat Garrett shot the wrong man and then covered it up, and that the true name of Billy the Kid was William Henry Roberts.

In 1948, a paralegal and history buff named William Morrison came across 89-year old Roberts living modestly in Texas. He was convinced the elderly but not frail man was the famous outlaw. At first, Roberts said he wasn't, but then said he was, and then that he wanted help getting a pardon for the murder of Brady from then New Mexico governor Thomas Mabry. Morrison taped interviews with Roberts and collected affidavits from people still alive who had known Billy the Kid and who swore that Roberts and the Kid were one and the same person.

Two years later, Governor Mabry agreed to meet with Roberts and Morrison, promising it would be a private meeting. When the two showed up in Sante Fe, however, they were confronted with a media circus and heavy law enforcement presence. Garrett's sons and other relatives and friends were there and along with Mabry were intent on disproving Roberts' claim. None of the evidence Morrison had accumulated was allowed to be presented. Moreover, Roberts was not pardoned and was sent back to Texas in humiliation. In December of 1950, he passed away shortly before his 91st birthday.

The author W.C. Jameson notes that the popular version of the death of Billy the Kid is based almost entirely on Pat Garrett's book _The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_, co-written with Marshall Ash Upson, and published in 1882. Others acknowledge, including J.C. Dykes, who wrote the introduction to the 1954 edition of that book, that much of the narrative was cribbed from adventure novels of the time; yet, the consensus is that the description of the hunt for Billy the Kid and his subsequent death was written by Garrett and is mostly truthful.

In my reading, however, Jameson effectively demonstrates that Roberts' story is logically consistent and contains new, verifiable, information that only the real Billy the Kid could have known, whereas Garrett's is shown to be often inconsistent, unproven in significant details, likely contains lies, and contradicts other first-person accounts of the events surrounding the Kid's life and death, including what Garrett himself told others later in life.

The proofs offered by Jameson are legion. They include facial-analysis of photographs of Roberts and the one existing tintype of Billy the Kid that revealed a near-100 percent match; scars on Roberts' body that matched known wounds the Kid received; Roberts' knowledge of the original layout, much altered in 1950, of the former Sheriff's office in Fort Sumner, and other sites; his knowing certain details of the shootout with Brady and other Lincoln County War incidents, not recorded previously that have since been verified; etc., etc. 

Roberts said that the person who died in his stead was Billy Barlow, about his size and with the same blue eyes, but part-Mexican, and that his friends helped him, Billy the Kid, get away. Garrett's own deputy on the scene, John Poe, first declared the Sheriff had gotten the wrong man. As did others present. In his own book, however, Poe repeats the Sheriff's contention that he could not have been mistaken in recognizing the Kid's voice in the dark, having known the outlaw for years -- yet, in his book, Garret also reports that he asked Pete Maxwell, in the same room at the time, who the person was saying "Quien es? Quien es?"

Immediately after the killing, Garrett shut himself in that house with his deputies and the dead man and allowed no one else entry. He did not, as was the custom of the time, have photographs taken of the corpse or himself with the corpse, and allowed no one to see inside the coffin as it was taken to the cemetery. One old-timer joked it was really the side of beef from Pat Maxwell's bunkhouse that got buried.

Still, some person or other must have seen the body before it was interred, and informed the media. A Silver City newspaper of the time described the man in the coffin as having dark skin and a full beard, whereas a Las Cruces newspaper, only six months earlier, had described Billy the Kid as light-skinned with only an immature fuzz above his lip. He wasn't called the Kid for nothing.

Though three coroner's inquests were prepared under Garrett's supervision, describing the victim of the shooting as William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, none of these are currently on file in any jurisdiction of the state of New Mexico. Nor apparently, if filed then but now lost, were they acceptable to the authorities of the time. Garrett never collected the reward money. There were too many questions unanswered about the outcome of the case.

Could there have been a cover-up? Is a cover-up still going on?

Billy the Car Salesman

A goodly portion of southern New Mexico relies on the legend of Billy the Kid, as-it-is, for millions in tourism dollars -- museums and tours of jails and grave sites and historical markers that all say the Kid died young. There's a Billy the Kid Scenic Byway. Sheriff's deputies in Lincoln County wear appliques on their sleeves with Pat Garrett's image.

 

Bill the Lead Guitarist

The Lincoln County Historical  Trust in 1988 conducted their own photo-analysis concluding that Roberts and the Kid were not the same.

Billy's Bar-B-Q

Television journalist Sam Donaldson did a show investigating the possibility of whether William Henry Roberts and Billy the Kid could have been the same -- and concluded they were not.

What was not revealed to the audience at the time was that Donaldson owned property in Lincoln County.

You be the judge. Was William Henry Roberts the outlaw Billy the Kid? One important thing to consider when comparing the two is that Roberts had all his teeth pulled in his 30s and that aging changes a person's appearance considerably. Also, Billy was likely a person of delayed physical maturity when he was in his teens and early 20s and still growing.

 

Pancho Villa Invades Columbus (New Mexico)

We visited the border city of Columbus, New Mexico. Very briefly. The Pancho Villa Museum and State Park was closed for lunch. Returning, we were stopped by a checkpoint, about 10 miles out. Four or five border guards and a dog. Are you US citizens? Yes. While we are distracted by the questioner, another guard swung the dog over briefly to our car. "Mesquite Curtain," said Agapi, as we drove away.

Are we US citizens? Is this the U.S.?

S.R?

Before it was founded as Deming in 1881 the town served as the port of entry from Mexico during the years 1848 to 1900, when that responsibility shifted south 33 miles to Columbus, NM. The old custom house, a museum itself, now sits across Silver Street from the Luna-Mimbres Museum, formerly an armory built only two months after Francisco (Pancho) Villa's infamous incursion into Columbus on March 9, 1916.

For two hours until just before dawn, 400-500* Villistas rampaged through town, looting, shooting, and burning buildings. The local commander Herbert Slocum's soldiers were caught completely off-guard -- though Slocum himself had been warned earlier by a local businessman of a possible raid. At the time of the raid, he was in Deming on his way to El Paso for an "officers call." 

The Camp Furlong soldiers' weapons had been locked away, and so their response was delayed. Once they set up their Howitzer machine gun though, the battle quickly went in their favor -- the light from the burning buildings silhouetting the invaders made them easy targets. Eight US soldiers and ten townspeople died in the attack, but Villa lost 80* men in the retreat from Columbus, many of whom reportedly had been recruited by Villa's forces at the point of a gun. Six Villistas, who were taken prisoner during the raid, were tried in Deming two months later, and five were hung in the jail yard beside the Luna County Courthouse.

As Pancho Villa may have appeared as he readied to attack Columbus...

No one is sure why Villa had his men attack Columbus, the only invasion of US territory by a foreign aggressor since the War of 1812. He had been having setbacks in his battles with rivals in Mexico after dictator Profirio Diaz was deposed and did blame the US and President Woodrow Wilson for not supporting him militarily. One story is that he felt he had been sold bad ammunition by a Columbus merchant and sought revenge. He himself may not have entered Columbus but directed the assault from Palomas on the Mexican side.

Villa had been in the good graces of US government prior to this event and, with a color guard of US infantrymen, had even toured the border cities of the Southwest by train, stopping in Deming in August 27, 1914. He was treated to a laudatory celebration, feted with martial music by a 90-piece military band, dined with the mayor and other local dignitaries, and gave a speech from the train, urging ex-pats to return to Mexico now that victory for the Revolution was imminent.

All dressed up for his stateside visit in 1914...

Soon after, with the breakdown of alliances with his old comrades, Obregan, Carraza, etc., he reverted to the gangster ways of his past: theft, rape, unprovoked attacks, forced recruitment, and indiscriminate killings, such as the slaughter of over 300 Chinese civilian inhabitants of Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico. After the Columbus raid, US President Wilson sent General John J. Pershing with 12,000 troops into Mexico with the intent of capturing or at least punishing Villa for the incursion. The so-called "Punitive Expedition"ended eight months later without the desired result; Pershing's army languished in the Chihuahua Desert while the US and Mexico wrangled over the legality of this undeclared invasion.

Pershing's return to Columbus in February was met with great victory parades and other demonstration of patriotism, however. The town of 400 residents quickly but briefly grew to 2,100 as a result of the economy generated by the increased number of troops stationed in Columbus. Interest generated by journalists also contributed to an increase in the number of tourists, who flocked to the area to partake of the excitement. In the 1920s it reverted to the sleepy, dusty, little town it is today.

Pancho Villa remains a kind of romantic Robin Hood figure and icon of Mexico's revolution. His image is to be found in just about every Mexican restaurant in Deming -- and home, I presume. His life ended violently on July 20, 1923 in a gangland-style hail of bullets in Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico. Seven Mexican men had formed a society specifically for this purpose, seeking revenge on behalf of female relatives who had been raped or otherwise dishonored by Villa. The image of his bloody and bullet-riddled cadaver, which I decline to post here, was and is available on a postcard that was published immediately after the event. 

Better this picture... as hero of the Revolution!

* History is slippery and hard to pin down. Numbers vary according source and reputation of historian or carelessness of history buff. The figure for the number of Villistas attacking Columbus ranges up to 1,000; equally the number of Mexican dead, mostly Yaqui recruits according to one source, has been as high as 225. I tend to like the liquid nature of historical research, the eking out of what is mostly likely the case.

Don't take my word for it.