Revolutions - 9.16- The Legend of Pancho Villa

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

Was Pancho Villa an Avenging Angel, Robin Hood, or King of the Bandits? Yes.

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.16, The Legend of Pancho Villa. Last week, we kick-started the second phase of the Mexican Revolution, which began immediately after the ten tragic days consumed Francisco Madero. The constitutionalist revolt, led by Governor Venustiano Carranza, took up arms to avenge Madero and restore the Constitution. But they were also aiming for a very much. a more thorough-going purge of the old Porfurian order. So this next phase of the revolution

would be far bloodier, with no prisoners taken and no quarter given. The Mexican Revolution was now a Belivar-style war to the death. And no one came to personify this next phase of the revolution better than the man who, along with Emiliano Zapata, practically defined in his own person what the Mexican Revolution was all about, Pancho Villa. A Pancho Villa has been kicking around our story ever since Abraham Gonzalez recruited him to fight for Madero way back in November of 1910. And though Via was often frustrated with Senior Madero's delicate sensibilities, he never considered himself anything but a loyal Matarista. He did not follow Pasquale Orozco into revolt and instead joined the state militia as a colonel to fight for Madero and against

many of his old comrades. But we saw his reward for this loyalty in episode 9.13. He was busted by General Victoriano Huerta untrumped up charges in June of 1912 and sentenced to death, and it was while standing in front of the firing squad begging for his life that the stay of execution arrived from President Madero. Five minutes later, and Poncho Villa would have been dead, a forgotten footnote in history. But that stay of execution was not a pardon. Still in custody, and still accused of theft and insubordination, Villa was shuffled onto a train and sent to prison in Mexico City. And I should add, before we move on,

that there is good evidence that Werta ordered Via executed on the way, and the officers down the line either ignored the order or did not receive it. Via does have a knack for slipping the noose. Poncho Villa sat in jail for the next seven months. This stint in the big house helped transform him from merely a loyal soldier to a particular set of politicians to the fully realized revolutionary caudio that he would become. The Federal District Penitentiary was full of political prisoners from all over Mexico,

and Vio was introduced to leaders and ideas he might never have encountered had they not all been locked in the same box together. Among those Viamet was the Zapatista leader Ilardo Magagna, who we'll talk about more down the line, because Magagna is one of the men Zapata himself trusted above all others. Magana was the first to show Villa a copy of the plan, Manabiala, with its uncompromising call for land and justice for the people, an endless war against the corrupt Osandado bosses.

With nothing else to do, Via also had plenty of time for deeper reading. He read a long book on Mexican history and came to understand how things had come to be this way. He also knocked out Don Quixote and the Three Musketeers. So, even though Via would never tire of portraying himself as just a poor dumb boy, his alleged illiteracy was always an exaggerated pretense. Via also had a lot of time to stew. He wrote frequent letters to Madero being like,

okay, man, enough is enough, I'm your faithful servant, you can get me out of here any time now, which was true. Via had not only been one of Medero's first supporters, he had stayed loyal even after most of those first supporters had followed Orozco into rebellion. Via even stayed loyal with friends of Bernardo Reyes and Felix Diaz came around asking if maybe Vio would like to get out of jail if he supported their insurrection. But Via rebuffed their advances.

And for this, from Madero, who had the power to pardon and get Via out of jail, Via got nothing. Because unfortunately for Via, this was the heyday of Madero screwing over his friends to please his enemies. General Huerta insisted on Via's guilt, and Madero didn't feel like he could alienate Werta by letting Via go free. I mean, Huerta might like stage a coup or something. By the fall of 1912, Via was still sending letters to Madero, but he was also starting to realize that he might have to take care of things himself. A resourceful bandit with a knack for slipping the noose can surely stage a jailbreak. So, Via set about planning a jailbreak.

His first attempt involved bribing his way into possession of key molds for the cell doors. That part worked fine, and Via third. fashioned keys for himself and a few partners, at this point, including Maganya. But on the day they were supposed to escape, the room full of guards that Via believed he had made sure would be empty was, in fact, still full of guards. So the prisoners had to race back to their cells before they were discovered and executed. Via was then transferred to another lower security prison, and he dedicated himself fully to the task of escaping.

A gregarious and charming presence, with access to a little bit of money on the outside. side, Via befriended a clerk in the prison and started exchanging gifts for favors. Oh, your boots are terrible. I'll arrange to get you some new ones if you, you know, whatever, give me extra rations, that kind of thing. After a while, the clerk wasn't just friendly with Via, but he had decided he liked Via more than he liked his job. So the clerk worked out how to smuggle in a saw and the kind of business suit worn by lawyers who were constantly coming and going from the prison. On Christmas Day, 1912, Via finished sawing through the bars of his cell. He put on his new business suit, and then he met up with his buddy the clerk.

Then the two of them walked out, side by side, right out the front door, pretending to be engaged in a deep conversation with Via sort of covering his face with a handkerchief in case he was recognized. Outside, a car was waiting for them that drove them to Toluca. From there, they boarded a train to the Pacific port of Menzineo. From there, they got on a boat to Mazatlan, a trip which included bribing an officer to let them ditch off the ship in a boat when they suspected the authorities had been alerted and would be waiting for them at the docks. From there, they went overland up the coast to Armacio in Sonora, and then they went north, crossed the border, and finally wound up in El Paso, Texas. Via's daring jailbreak was not just a hair-raising adventure. It also could not have come a moment too soon. Just six weeks later, Bernardo Reyes and Felix Diaz staged their own jailbreak that, of course, ended after the ten tragic days, with General Huerta seizing power and murdering Madero.

There is a zero percent chance that Poncho Villa would not have been among the first up against the wall had he not made good his escape. But when he got to El Paso, the ten tragic days were still in the future, and Villa made contact with his old friend and mentor Abraham Gonzalez, telling the governor of Chihuahua, about his escape, and maybe now can we get working on a pardon. Unlike Madero, Gonzalez had spent Via's time in prison doing everything he could to get VIA out of jail. But even though Gonzalez was as inner circle a Matarista as it gets, even he could make no headway with the president. Left with practically no alternatives, Via was possibly flirting with the idea of going into open revolt, or at least he was threatening to, when word of the ten tragic days came. When Via heard about Madero's

death, whatever bitterness he had had about his treatment over the past year vanished. From this day forward, whenever Via talked about Madero, it was always with a sort of sorrowful fondness. Senior Madero was always remembered as a good man who had tried to do good things for Mexico. And now that Madero was dead, Via had a martyr he could fight for, a cause that transcended whatever Madero may have been in life. Gonzalez, of course, contacted Via immediately and said basically, you know, like, get your stuff together were going back into revolt against Huerta. But within days, Abraham

Gonzalez was also arrested. So, Via made contact with old Mataristas in El Paso, who gave him $1,000 to cover some expenses. Never a deadbeat. Via paid off all his debts in El Paso for like the hotel he was staying at and the food he had eaten, and then he put together a small crew to sneak back into Mexico. On March the 6th, 1913, Poncho Villa crossed back into Mexico. With him, were eight followers, including, I should mention the friendly prison clerk, who was now a deserter and a rebel. They had with them nine horses, nine rifles, four thousand cartridges, two pounds of coffee, two pounds of sugar, and one pound of salt. From these supremely humble origins, Via would build the Division del Norte, the single, strongest revolutionary army Mexico had ever

seen. Now, as we'll see, the revolutionary war. Via was about to wage, did have an ideological dimension to it. But for him, this was also deeply personal. Who had Via pledged his loyalty to all these years? Francisco Madero. And Madero had now been treacherously murdered. And who had treacherously murdered him? Victoriano Werta, the man who had tried to kill Via himself. And when that didn't work, made sure Via stayed locked up in prison for seven months. So Via was fighting for the saintly Madero and against the devil Huerta with equal passion. And then Via's personal drive for righteous vengeance was driven deeper still when he was given

news that broke his heart and upended his plans. Abraham Gonzalez had been executed. Via was never shy about saying Gonzales had plucked him out of useless and aimless violent obscurity and put him on a noble path. And had things gone differently, had Gonzalez not been arrested and killed, there's no doubt that Villa would have put himself at Gonzalez's disposal, and together they would have formed a powerful team. Gonzales as the political leader and via his greatest general. Together, they would have certainly become the center of revolutionary gravity in the north. I mean, if anyone was the

true heir of Madero, it was Abraham Gonzalez. But now Gonzalez was dead, and Villa was filled with an all-consuming drive to punish those responsible. And he didn't just mean Puerta. He meant the whole system. As he wrote in his memoirs about Gonzalez, who he always called that noble martyr for democracy, Via said that Gonzalez, quote, invited me to fight for the revolution, for the rights of the people that had been trampled on by tyranny. There, I understood for the first time that all the suffering, all the hatred, all the rebellions that had accumulated in my soul during so many years of fighting, had given me the strength of conviction and such clear will that I could offer my country to free her from the snakes that were devouring her entrails.

Via now found Chihuahua in a superficially similar state to what it had been when he first took up Revolutionary Arms back in November of 1910. Even though the ten tragic days was just three weeks in the rearview mirror, dozens of independent insurgent groups had declared themselves in rebellion. But many things had changed in the last two years. The rebels who had fought together in 1910 and 1911 had been deeply divided between those like Via who remained loyal to Madero's government, and those, like Orozco, whose resentful grudges and lust for riches had driven them back into

revolt. The fighting in 1912 had in many ways been a Matarista civil war, with Via fighting for the government and Orozco in rebellion against it. In 1913, that fratricidal war would continue. Only now Via was the rebel and Orozco was the one fighting for the government, as is ever the case in Mexican history, the difference between rebel and official forces, is defined by whoever was the last president to get assassinated. The situation in Chihuahua also contrasted sharply with the parallel revolts opening up in Sonora and Quaweila that we talked about last week. In Sonora and Kwahua, remember, the whole states had rebelled as sovereign units, the entire state government declaring the central government illegitimate. So those rebellions were organized from the top

down, elite leaders like Carranza recruiting armies to fight for him. But after the assassination of Abraham Gonzalez, the state government of Chihuahua had been broken and taken back over by the old Ascendado oligarchy who declared their support for Huerta. So the rebellion in Chihuahua was going to be built from the bottom up. As a result, it was marked by a distinctly more radical form of populism than the middle and upper class rebels currently forming under Obrugone and Carranza. Karanza, had no interest in overturning the social order. Via, on the other hand, gleefully rode into battle aiming to do just that. Though he entered Mexico with just a handful of followers, Poncho Villa's

name still had some cachet, and he started attracting recruits. With those recruits, he rode around deliberately adding new exploits to his growing legend. Via had always left politics to Madero and Gonzalez. But now that those men were dead, Via understood that it was up to him to now carry on not just the fighting, but the political work of revolution. But Via had no interest in issuing manifestos or proclamations or like his own plan of yada yada, for VIA actions always spoke louder than words. So he spent March and April 1913 riding around northwest Chihuahua with his little band performing acts that fell into two broad categories. And I get this, as I get a lot of stuff on V.A. from Friedrich Katz's definitive biography, the life in times of Poncho Villa, which is like

the only book about Via you need to read, it's a thousand pages long. Katz says that VIA engaged in performative acts of redistribution or retribution. On the redistribution front, Via basically turned himself into Mexican Robin Hood, and that was a comparison that was repeatedly mentioned in the press, the contemporary press, both in Mexico and the United States. Via would come into a town, he would be told about some corrupt merchant, he would go take over that guy's store and either give the inventory away to the poor or sell it at cut rate prices. When Via captured cash, he would often just hand it out to the poor. He would come to Osandata and force the owner at gunpoint to open up the granary and give it to the workers and the local villagers. So what Via is doing in these first months on campaign in the spring of 1913 is stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

But this was not just a cynical gambit to garner a popular following. This is kind of who Via was at heart. Back in his old bandit days, he had once robbed a bank and wound up with a small fortune of about 50,000 pesos. But a year later, he was broke again, having given most of the money away to families he knew who needed the money more than he did. Unlike many of his comrades, who were straight up in this to get rich, Via really did let cash and the spoils of war just pass through his hands without grasping it all for himself. One of his more greedy and unscrupulous generals later said, This revolution, do not mistake. It is the fight of the poor against the rich.

I was very poor before the revolution. Now I am very rich. It wasn't like that for Via. And for all the literally millions of dollars that would pass through his hands over the next few years, he himself wound up holding surprisingly little. everything else was either given away or spent on furthering the revolutionary cause. Like, for example, during these early days, Via and his men hijacked a train, and they discovered, to their delight, that it was loaded with silver.

Now, Via did not give this silver away to the poor, but he certainly did not keep it for himself. He used it to buy guns, ammunition, food, and supplies from American merchants on the border. Via's armies would always be among the best supplied and best armed of the war. He always took care of his men. Now, aside from this redistribution stuff, there was a hard edge, and that is the retribution. Via swept through Chihuahua like an avenging angel. He heard that a manager of Asienda was known to beat his workers and rape their wives. Via's band arrived at the Asienda, they tossed the manager against the wall, and they shot him dead.

A priest was accused of raping and impregnating a village girl. Via ordered him executed and only after others in the village interceded that Via settled for forcing the priest to stand at a pulpit in the town square and declare his crime openly. Via had no time or patience for corrupt bosses and police officers, for cruel assyenda managers, for rapacious merchants and bankers, and he also had no time for the formalities of the court system. Give him a few credible accusations and that was all he needed. Via's justice was swift, righteous, and permanent. And this combination of redistribution and retribution, Robin Hood and avenging angel, made Villa like a superhero to the people of Northern Mexico.

And he was as loved by those people as he was feared by the bosses and their lackeys. He added to his growing legend as defender of the honest Mexican by also not focusing his wrath just on the bosses, but also on truly criminal bandits who, no less than the honest Mexican, Oscendados terrorized and robbed the honest folks of Mexico. Via and his men relentlessly hunted down bandit gangs, and with the same ruthless avenging energy executed them whenever they were caught. Poncho Villa was turning himself into the bringer of righteous justice, and the people loved him for it.

The growing legend of Pancho Villa led both men and women to volunteer to join his little army. Mostly, Via drew from the lower middle classes and the peasantism. of the region. Cowboys from the ranches, artisans from the towns, mule tiers working the mountain trade routes, tenant farmers and miners. Via especially loved minors because they never got homesick. But contrary to his reputation as a wild outlaw king, these new recruits found that VIA was very strict about discipline in his ranks. Unlike the other rebel leaders, he did not allow his men to loot and pillage. Pillagers were publicly executed. If you abuse the local townspeople, you were shot. If you joined up with VIA thinking that you were going to run around smashing and

grabbing things, you were probably going to wind up dead. This, of course, only endeared him further to the population. It also increasingly endeared him to potential supporters in both Mexico and the United States. And speaking of the United States, when Vio went around playing avenging angel and Robin Hood, you know, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, he studiously avoided Americans and their property. Via was a smart guy and he had been around the block. The quickest way to ensure that the supply lines to the United States would be shut down would be to threaten American interests.

So he was very careful about avoiding the Americans. In Via's army, if you messed with the Americans, you were probably going to get shot. His men, meanwhile, seemed to accept these rules with a shrug of their shoulders. It wasn't like Villa was a hypocrite. He always paid them on time. He was a poor boy from the mountains just like most of them. And he did not steal for himself. gave it all away. If he can show restraint, so can I. And if you can't, well, then that's your

problem. But there was also a softer touch to Via that inspired loyalty and devotion among his followers. Though he was not in fact illiterate, Via had not exactly relied on the written word during his life. And so, being a smart guy but not using books, he had developed a kind of genius mislevel memory. He remembered names, faces, dates, numbers, events, down to the smallest detail. So Villa could walk up to some guy he hadn't seen in three years, greet him as an old friend, remember his name, the name of his children, remember some time they had shared together. Details that everyone just kind of expects to be forgotten. And when they're not forgotten, when you're not forgotten, it's enormously flattering. So there's that old question,

is it better to be loved or feared? Pancho Villa said, why not both? By June of 1913, he was leading a small army of about 700, well-trained, well-disciplined, highly-motivated soldiers. Although Poncho Villa's ambitions after returning to Mexico were probably at this point already quite grand, Via was smart enough to not try to set himself up as a leader independent of Carranza. Like I said, if Abraham Gonzalez had lived, then yes, Via and Gonzalez probably would have either forced Carranza to subordinate himself to them, or just muscled him out of the revolution altogether.

But as it stood, Via had no broader national allies and no clear links to the upper middle classes that Carranza could call on. So it was a no-brainer for Via to simply sign on to the plan of Guadalupe when it started being circulated in April. He recognized Carranzas, the first chief of the constitutional revolution. It's not like Carranza was giving him orders. But Via did have grander ambitions, and he did not really trust Carranza. But before he could challenge Carranza, he needed a much larger army, 700 guys that's not going to get the job done. So Via set himself to the task of getting

the other rebel leaders in Chihuahua to submit to his authority. Via was far from the only rebel leader in the state. I mean, he wasn't even leading the largest army. Guys like Manuel while Chow, a longtime Matarista, and Tomas Urbina, one of Via's former lieutenants, were leading their own armies in the south and scoring larger victories against the Federal Allied forces than Via could boast. Arbina, for example, had already sacked the capital of Durango. This array of uncoordinated rebel forces had so far been highly effective, and they had forced the Federal Army to withdraw from the wild country and concentrate their forces in the principal cities. So for the moment, there is no good way to tell one of these independent leaders,

hey, we need to unite, and not just unite, but unite under my authority. Because the response would be why, I'm doing great. Now, luckily for Via, at least Via's ambitions, things started going not so great for the rebels in July of 1913. Werta finally woke up to the fact that the rebellion in Chihuahua was every bit as dangerous as the rebellion in Sonora, and so he sent in reinforcements. Specifically, he sent in a man every rebel in Chihuahua knew, new personally, Pasquale Orozco. Orozco is now acting not as a revolutionary hero, but as the strong arm of a military dictatorship. But though he was now a turncoat, Orozco was still the best of them.

In July, he and about a thousand men departed the key city of Torreon and marched north towards the capital of Chihuahua City. Up until now, the rebels of southern Chihuahua had mostly been dealing with unenthusiastic federal armies composed of timid officers and sullen recruits who were more than happy to just hole up in their cities. But Orozco and his men were of an entirely different sort. They were well-tested and experienced fighters who had little pity or mercy. They were brave in battle and they were committed to winning, if only to gloat over their enemies and maybe plunder a nearby town.

Against this much more determined foe, the disorganized rebel armies were defeated in battle after battle, and for the next two weeks, Orozco cut a violent and bloody swath through the 300 miles separating Torreon and Chihuahua City. Playtime was over. Werta's hope was that this solid punch to the nose, or gunshot to the back, whichever, would cause the rebels to give up and disperse. Instead, it had the opposite effect. They decided they needed to unite. And among them, there was only one man with the name, the reputation, and frankly the unblemished record to unite them under one banner, Pancho Villa. Not that they liked the idea.

Every one of these guys fancied themselves a great caudio warlord, and they enjoyed their independence. I mean, part of the fun of leading a revolutionary army into insurrection is that no one gets to tell you what to do anymore. But they also realized that a more concerted and more attentive counteroffensive from the federal government, now strengthened by Roscoe's talent and veteran troops, meant that if they did not join together, they would be crushed separately one by one. A few of the smaller time leaders had already presented themselves to Via and agreed to follow his orders. After Arosco's campaign in July, the pace of Via's consolidation of power only quickened. Not that this was a frictionless transition.

A personal meeting between Villa and Manuel Chau got heated enough that Chow went to pull his gun on Via, only to find that Via was quicker and already had his gun pointed at Chow's head. And that's how Chow came to submit himself to Via's authority. But Via wasn't dumb, and he allowed these various leaders to continue leading their own men, mostly in their own way. But with Via ultimately calling the shots and directing a new and more organized revolutionary campaign. This was all formalized on September the 26th, 1913. when a large gathering of all the principal leaders in Chihuahua got together and elected VIA their leader. This was the official formation of what became Via's legendary Division

Del Norte. Having crossed into Mexico six months earlier with eight guys, some rifles, and some coffee, Poncho Via now commanded the largest single army in the whole of northern Mexico. While Via was organizing his new Division del Norte, he was sending regular dutiful reports back to Carranza, who was, of course, the first chief of the constitutionalist revolution. But Via recognized Carranza's authority only as a matter of political and military convenience. Neither man really trusted the other. Via tended to follow Madero's old wariness of Caranza, and Carranza, for his part, liked ruffian revolutionaries even less than Madero did. So this was absolutely a marriage of convenience, mostly made possible because they were operating in totally

separate geographic areas. So while Via recognized Carranza as the first chief, he always made sure to keep himself and the Division del Norte independent of Carranza's authority. This independence was actually one of the big reasons Via was able to convince the other rebel generals to follow him. Though he was happy to steal from the rich and give to the poor on a small scale, on a large scale, this is not really how he operated. If Via came around and decided to confiscate an ostienda on behalf of the people, he would not like break up its land and redistribute it. He would instead put the assyenda to work for the revolution. So if VSE's control of like a ranch or a farm, he would keep it running.

He would sell the cattle or the harvest to his American contacts and use the profits to keep his men paid, fed with shoes for their feet and bullets for their guns. This system of confiscation and control of property was a hugely important part of bringing the Chihuahua Revolution under his command. because Via might allow the other chiefs to keep leading their men in their own way, but he would always be the quartermaster and the paymaster. From time to time, he might give one of these confiscated assyendas to one of his generals as a gift, because let's face it, some of these guys were just in this to get rich, but mostly Vio was now controlling a large network of assyendas that he was putting to work for the general use of the Division del Norte.

Carranza responded to Via's growing army and total independence by forming, at least on paper, new constitutionalist armies. Supposedly, there would be seven regional armies covering all of Mexico, but in reality, only three of these armies ever took the field, and the zone commander for the Northwest Army would not be the bandit king, Poncho Villa, but instead the respectable jack-of-all-trades, Alvaro Obrugon. So when the Division del Norte was formed, it was technically operating under Obrugn's command, but that was an authority recognized in theory only.

practice, Villa was calling his own shots, and the shot he now planned to take was at Torillon. The city of Torreon sits in southern northern Mexico, or northern central Mexico, depending on which descriptors you'd like to use. It was the principal city of the Laguna region, which is a large fertile basin around where the states of Chihuahua, Quaulila, Durango, and Sakatecas all intersect. Torreon was the rich linchpin of the region and capturing it, which is a large, which is a large, be a huge boon to the fortunes of the revolution. Though large, the new division del Norte was not considered by most observers equal to the task of capturing a well-defended city because it had no artillery. Well, not no artillery. Via did have two small cannons, but I mean, how are you

planning on taking a city with two small cannons? But Via had a couple of big things going for him. First, he outnumbered the Federale's 8,000 to 3,000. Second, he was an audacious. commander bordering on reckless, and third, the federal garrison at Torreon was run by dummies. Within days of forming the Division del Norte, Via led them to Torreon and commenced his attack on September the 29th. And while Via could not be put in the same great general pantheon as like Caesar or Napoleon, he did have a knack for making astute observations and improvising a workable strategy on the fly. He had no artillery. The enemy had lots of artillery. It was stationed in the hills surrounding the city.

So how are you going to approach them? How are you going to dislodge them? And Via basically said, well, let's do it at night, when it's dark. Simple, right? Brilliant. So keeping their heads down during the daylight hours, Via's infantry charged up into the hills at night and went and captured all the guns. These attacks were ferocious and they induced terror in the ranks of the federal army

who were unable to counterattack or even know what they were aiming at. This went on for two days and two nights, and soon enough, the Division del Norte controlled the hills and captured all the guns. Inept leadership on the federal side soon gave way to cowardly leadership. The general in charge of the city ordered a counterattack on the third day, and then he hopped in his car and high-tailed it out of town. The other officers soon realized that they had been abandoned and organized what can only be described as a terror-stricken retreat. Via and the Division del Norte took Torreon on October 1st and the legend of Poncho Villa grew.

Once Via took the city, he continued to set himself apart from other revolutionary leaders. There was some looting in the first couple of hours of revolutionary occupation. I mean, for most of the men in the Division del Norte, this was behavior that was expected and encouraged. Take a city, sack a city.

Those are the rules of the spoils of war going back like 10,000 years. But that way, was not Via's way, and he was in charge now. So in no time, Via had guards posted at key civic buildings and in front of private homes and businesses to prevent further looting. By this point, Via was really growing into his role as a political as well as military leader. And you'll recall that he had probably learned this lesson well during the events that we covered back in episode 9.9 when Madero took Juarez, and it was important to demonstrate that revolutionary victory did not mean chaos and the breakdown of order. So when he took to,

Torreon, Via demonstrated clearly to the middle classes of Mexico who might be on the fence about whether to support him or stick with Werta, and also demonstrated to careful observers in the United States that he was not the king of the bandits, and he wasn't. The men under his command now denied an opportunity to pick the city clean could attest to that. So Via had captured Torion, but he was not interested in settling in and holding it. He had bigger plans. So after a month of occupation, he forced the banks to give him some loans, dutifully signing some IOUs, loaded up his newly captured artillery, and led the Division del Norte north to the capital of Chihuahua City. He chose this target over the warning of some of his advisors who pointed out that Chihuahua

City was far better defended, was run by a far more competent general, and still boasted the presence of Orozco and his men. Chihuahua City was not going to fall to mere bravery and night attacks, and it did not. For three days, Via flung his troops, still enthusiastic and loyal, against the artillery and machine guns of Chihuahua City, but it soon became clear that this was just a waste of men and bullets, and Via had to call it quits. This was the moment the federal forces had been waiting for. This was the big defeat that would scatter the northern rebels, who were supposed to be weak and feckless. Instead, Via and the Division del Norte followed up their failure to capture Chihuahua City with two victories that would not only become two of the

largest feathers in Via's increasingly legendary cap, but also paved the way for his capture of Chihuahua City. Poncho Villa started 1913 as a fugitive on the run from the law after a daring jail break. By the end of 1913, he's going to be the governor of Chihuahua. So, time to wrap this thing up. Without missing a beat and giving his forces no further time to dwell on their defeat, Via pulled out of Chihuahua City and pushed north. His intention now was to capture Juarez, which was still held by federal forces. His army surrounded the city and outnumbered the garrison. But Juarez was still very well defended, and the rebels had no clear path into the city. Tensions were beginning to fray the cohesion of the Division del Norte. I mean, was Via in fact up for this? But then a bit of the old

bandit cunning showed up. A train that regularly traveled between Juarez and Chihuahua City was located and followed. Via's men hijacked the train and they got a hold of the conductor before he could report said hijacking. Then the conductor was ordered to send a telegram back to Juarez that read something like, I've got credible reports, Via's forces are nearby. What should I do? As Via expected, the authorities in Juarez cabled the response. They said, come back. So the train started rolling back to Juarez. Now, of course, loaded with 2,000 handpicked rebel soldiers. At every station, Via's men got out first, got a hold of the local telegram man, and forced him at gunpoint to cable Juarez, that the train is coming and that there are no problems. So at about 2 a.m. on November the 15th,

this train rolled into Juarez, and no one suspected a thing. When it docked, those 2,000 men fanned out across the city and took control of Juarez practically without firing a shot. I mean, it was two in the morning. Most of the soldiers in town were either out carousing or fast asleep. When they woke up the next morning, they blinked through their hangovers and discovered that Poncho Villa and a huge rebel horde controlled the city. And the legend of Poncho Villa grew still larger. The minute he took Juarez, Villa started getting reports that the garrison in Chihuahua City was preparing to head north and confront him. Choosing to make his stand in an open battle rather than hunker down to endure a siege, via his army about 35 miles south of Juarez near the Tierra Blanca Railroad Station. There,

the Division del Norte waited for a battle that would decide the fate of Chihuahua. Via picked his ground well, it was on low hills overlooking sandy dunes that would bog down and infuriate his enemy. On November the 22nd, 11 federal troop trains rolled up from the south and the fight was joined. The Battle of Tierra Blanca lasted for three days. Both the Division del Norte and the Federal Army relentlessly attempted to outflank each other, but waves of infantry and cavalry running in both directions were, unable to break the entrenching stalemate. Though he now did have some artillery, Via and his men were not super adept at using it yet, so they endured far more pounding than they delivered.

On the third day, Via decided to launch an all-out attack. He sent his entire infantry right up the middle. Via was a clever general, but no one ever accused him of being a subtle one. While this full frontal assault was unfolding, he led his cavalry in a double envelopment that hit both sides of the federal forces at once. This coincided with some well-placed dynamite that blew up one of the federal trains, causing panic and confusion in the ranks. The federal army broke and fled, leaving a thousand men dead on the field. They retreated all the way back to Chihuahua City,

but they had been forced to abandon their artillery and most of their baggage. The commander of the federal forces concluded that the capital could not be held, and he evacuated his forces north. The capital of Chihuahua was now wide open. open. And on November the 28th, 1913, the Division del Norte occupied the city, and the generals voted to make Pancho Villa, governor of Chihuahua. Now, being governor, being a political leader, had never been VIA's real ambition, and he would at first attempt to resist this political office being foisted upon him. But in the end, he relented and embraced the possibilities this

new job presented. Carranza, of course, was not very happy to hear that Via had more or less declared himself governor, and tensions between Via and the first chief would only be exacerbated. But the time has not yet come for them to go their separate ways. No, the time has come for them to win the war. And next week, Via will join with the other constitutionalist armies in a coordinated push south to dislodge the usurper querta from Mexico City. And they would be joined in this endeavor by a powerful new ally, the United States of America. Thank you.