Guarding the Border: The Military Memoirs of the Ward Schrantz, 1912-1917

A Civilian Visits Mexico

my original interest in the Mexican wars had hinged in part on my sympathy for Francisco Madero in his successful revolt of 1910 and 1911 against President Porfirio Díaz. It seemed to me—quite ignorant of details as I was—that he had not dealt fairly with the leaders who had helped him to make that revolt successful. When Pascual Orozco raised the standard of revolt against him in 1912, Tracy Richardson who lived at Lamar, Mo., who once had been a member of the Second Missouri Infantry in which I had had my national guard experience, and who later had served under Lee Christmas in Nicaragua, gained a good deal of publicity as a machine gunner in Orozco’s army. This gave me a rather favorable impression of the Orozco effort.1 By the time I reached El Paso the Orozco revolt was broken and such of his former forces as remained were in the field only as bandits under the name of “Colorados” or, as Americans called them, “Red Flaggers.” It did not take much enquiry around El Paso to decide me that they were not the right side to be on anyhow. But I decided to go over to Juárez to take a look, although El Pasoans to whom I talked advised me that just then was a good time for all good Americans to stay on the American side of the line. In point of fact the only Americans I saw in El Paso that day was [sic] an old Iowa couple looking at the bullet-chipped statue of Benito Juárez, and an American post card salesman who told me that it was unwise to wander about Juárez alone.2 One of the first things I did in Juárez after looking at the monument 2 A Civilian Visits Mexico A Civilian Visits Mexico 21 and church was to wander down by the jail, garrisoned and loop-holed for rifle fire. This was interesting and I stopped to stare. In the Mexican army [in] those days the women constituted the commissary department, each man being paid daily and his wife, or the woman camp follower who served as such, getting and preparing food for him. It was lunch time and these women, some far gone in pregnancy and others with chilBenito Juárez Monument, Juárez, Mexico 22 Chapter 2 dren accompanying them, were bringing food to the soldiers. A stack of Mauser rifles inside the main entrance interested me also. My acquaintance with military rifles was limited to the 1903 Springfield and the obsolete 1872 [sic] single-shot Springfield. All this display of interest was no doubt indiscreet and the sentry studied me suspiciously. I decided it might be as well to walk on. Walking on past the jail about a block I found nothing but adobe houses and turned back. As I neared the jail on my return the sentry called out an officer. The two studied me closely as I passed. Despite an uneasy conscience caused by the fact I had come down there in expectation of bearing arms against their side, I ambled past, trying to look as innocent and unconcerned as possible. The officer apparently decided I appeared harmless and so I was not stopped. Otherwise it is possible my future might have been an unhappy [one], the Mexican custom of the time, according to reports, being either to shoot suspects or to put them in jail and forget about them. This little experience caused me to remember the old post card man and seek his counsel. He told me that the regular soldiers, clad in blue grey such as those at the jail[,] were a part of the army that President Madero had taken over from the Díaz regime. Many of them, he surmised, ought to feel at home garrisoning that jail since they had been recruited from jails in the first place. The rest of the soldiers in town, those wearing khaki, were Maderista volunteers—mounted troops who were largely ranch hands who had volunteered to help Madero, a good many of them English-speaking and from the Mexican population on the American side of the border. He suggested that if I was determined to look around the town that he get one of those—a good many of whom he knew—to show me about. To this I was agreeable. A...