The General and the Jaguar: Pershing's Hunt for Pancho Villa, a True Story of Revolution and Revenge (review)

Eileen Welsome's flowing prose in her recounting of Pancho Villa's 1916 attack on Columbus, New Mexico and the U.S. response leaves little doubt why she earned a Pulitzer Prize for her 1993 investigative reports about the U.S. government's experimentation with plutonium on unsuspecting medical patients between 1945 and 1947 for The Albuquerque Tribune. This is the most engaging narrative of the events leading up to the Columbus incident and Pershing's Punitive Expedition that followed that I have read, but I recommend it with several caveats.

Welsome's work does not suffer from factual problems. She has consulted all of the obvious English language sources, including the works of Friedrich Katz, Charles Harris III, and Louis Sadler, extant documents in the U.S. National Archives, public and private collections in Columbus, Deming, El Paso, and Albuquerque as well as personal interviews. Welsome does miss some less well-known research on the Punitive Expedition. Had she read Linda B. Hall's work, Welsome would have known that after it became apparent to Pershing that he would be unable to catch Villa, Pershing shifted his purpose in Mexico to one of training his troops for their later entry into World War I. Instead, she focuses on Pershing's unhappiness at being ordered not to continue his search for Villa. Moreover, had Welsome read Ana María Alonso's work on Namiquipa, Chihuahua she would have known that Pershing successfully convinced the inhabitants of Mexico's "most revolutionary town," as Alonso describes it, to collaborate with U.S. troops against Villa and his forces. Welsome notes the retribution that Villistas doled out to the inhabitants of Namiquipa after U.S. forces left Mexico, but she blames this on their selling of supplies to the U.S. Army. This was true, but Namiquipans also formed an anti-Villa militia that continued the search for Villa and spied on behalf of the Americans even after Pershing was no longer able to use his own forces to do so.

Her book (or perhaps her publisher) claims that Villa was one of the "greatest military minds of all time" (back cover). Villa is rightly recognized for his 1913 surprise taking of Ciudad Juárez, but he was no military genius. As Welsome observes, Villa's own top general, Felipe Ángeles recommended that he focus on taking out Carranza's headquarters in Vera Cruz, but Villa instead focused on strategically unimportant Carrancista holdings in Guadalajara, Saltillo, and Monterrey. Furthermore, Villa had a penchant for charging (repeatedly) into well-prepared defensive positions (most famously at Celaya, but also at León), in effect destroying his own army. Nonetheless, these are minor quibbles.

More troubling is the way that Welsome depicts Villa (and other Mexicans) in the book. Welsome employs the literary device of using character's physical descriptions, especially their eyes, as indicators of their souls. For example, she describes Villa's eyes as "capable of expressing both a childlike innocence and a predator's unblinking cruelty" (p. 20). No one doubts that Villa and his men were violent, often ruthlessly so, especially during the time under study. Nonetheless, Villa was a much more complex character than Welsome portrays. Based on her description of him, one would be hard pressed to recognize Villa's charisma or understand why he was so popular. In fact, Welsome never explains how Villa rebuilt his army in the wake of the Punitive Expedition to some 5,000 plus men, choosing instead to focus on Villa's odious acts of retribution against Carrancistas and anti-Villistas.

In the end, Welsome's the General and the Jaguar reads like many of the more engaging military histories of the U.S. Civil War (especially in light of her use of the U.S. South as a comparative device for...