August 15, 1919. The Motor Transport Convoy reaches Ft. Bridger and tensions rise on the border.

The Motor Transport Convoy left Green River and made 63 miles to Ft. Bridger, opting to stay on the location of that former post. The post had been occupied intermittently since the 1840s, but had been last abandoned by the Army in 1890.

The entry that day was the longest to date because of the diarist interest in a significant engineering project the party undertook.

The trip made the local papers retrospectively.

At the same time, it looked like the tensions on the border with Mexico were about to erupt into war once again.  The Cheyenne, Casper and Laramie newspapers took note of the renewed tensions and didn't take note of the Motor Convoy at all.

Closer to that border, an item for today?

Friday, July 18, 1919. Motor Transport Convoy, Carburetor problems. Ft. Wayne Indiana to South Bend, Indiana. 803d Pioneer Infantry boards for home. Army crossing into Mexico. Sacramental Wine survives prohibition.

On this day in 1919, it seems the gasoline problems experienced yesterday manifested themselves, perhaps in the form of carburetor problems.

Ah, it's now the case that entire leagues of drivers have never driven a vehicle with a carburetor, let alone a temperamental one, where as prior generations of drivers who started off with less than new vehicles learned the temperamental intricacies of a device that was, quite frankly, rather primitive.

I like old vehicles, but I don't miss carburetors at all.  I've noticed recently that if you look at an older truck, you'll almost never find one that features the original carburetor.  Edelbrock's seem to be the standard replacement now, probably replacing the two barrel carburetors that were so common as stock items.

The Edelbrock's are massive compared to the originals.  I wonder what these very early ones were like?

Also on this day in 1919 the 803d Pioneer Infantry Battalion boarded the USS Philippines at the French port of Brest for their return voyage to the United States.

I don't know anything about this unit and indeed had never heard of it until now, but pioneer infantry were infantry units trained in some engineering, which the name "pioneer" usually indicates. This was obviously an all black unit.

Also on this day, news hit that there'd been frequent U.S. border crossings into Mexico during the past six months.

At the same time, the Press reported that conditions were being worked out to allow for the production of sacramental wine, showing how the law of unintended results can operate in areas that weren't expected.

So you were a Wyoming National Guardsmen (or one from anywhere else) and now it's Monday July 7, 1919.

What now?

My M1911 Campaign Hat, which serves as my fishing and hunting hat, hanging by the stampeded string on the chair where I type out a lot of this stuff.  Probably a lot of M1911s were seeing similar storage about this time in 1919.

You might have joined a pre war National Guard unit in your hometown, if it had one, or you might have enlisted when the call came, which was quite common. If you lived in a small town like Casper, and Casper was very small in 1916, you would likely have done the latter, as Casper didn't have a Guard unit until 1917.

And that call for Guardsmen came on June 19, 1916 for Guardsmen.

So you became a Wyoming National Guardsmen in the infantry branch.  All Wyoming Guardsmen were infantrymen.

From there, it was some training locally, briefly, before you went with  your unit to Ft. D. A. Russell in Cheyenne, where you received more training and you were equipped, if you weren't already.  Or, actually, you expected to be sent there, but the Army, quixotically, refused to allow the Guard to train there and you therefore ended up at a camp at Frontier Park in Cheyenne.*

You learned how to fire a bolt action rifle, perhaps for the first time in your life even if you were familiar with firearms (and if you were from Wyoming, you were), as this was the age of the lever action, before bolt actions became a popular sporting arm.**  If you were an officer, or an NCO, you might have learned the ins and outs of the brand new M1911 pistol, just introduced into service, and quite a bit different from revolvers that may have otherwise been familiar with.***  And then there were automatic weapons, which you certainly weren't familiar with.

And you marched and drilled and marched and drilled.

By and large things went pretty well, but at least one of your fellow Guardsmen, Pvt. Dilley, disappeared under mysterious circumstances, never to return.  He was an exception to the rule, however.

Just after that you entrained at the railroad station in Cheyenne and shipped out to New Mexico, following a celebrated departure from the residents of Cheyenne.

The Union Pacific Railroad station in Cheyenne.

On September 30, 1916, you were arriving in Deming, New Mexico, where you were to be encamped while receiving additional training.  By October 1, 1916, you were on the border and you were placed under the command of a Regular Army officer.

And there  you remained for the next several months, a bulwark with other Guardsmen against Mexican incursions that didn't come. the Regular Army, of course, was now far down into Mexico, and truth be known very soon the Wilson Administration would be struggling for a way to disengage from that mission and pull them out.  In the mean time, you patrolled the border, which was not a safe job, and you trained.

National Guard infantry (9th Infantry, Massachusetts National Guard)  on the border in 1916.

You got back in the state on March 4, 1917.  You were mustered out of service on March 9, but the way things worked at the time, you wouldn't have made it home right away.  You had to process out, and wait for arrangements for train travel to whatever station was last on your route.  If you were lucky, that train ran right to your hometown. But for quite a few, that station was quite distant, and that meant that hopefully somebody was waiting for you with a wagon, or at least a horse, at that station.

On March 15, 1917, you likely made it home, if you lived in Central Wyoming.  So if you were from Douglas, or remote, small, but booming, Casper, you arrived home on this middle of March day.

You had just made it home, when you were called back into service on March 27, 1917.  Just twelve days later.

So it was back into service.

Once again you mustered and went to Cheyenne, this time fleshed out with new troops who were signing up to be part of the country's effort in the Great War. The belief was that for the most part it would be the Navy, not the Army, that did the heavy lifting, and in fact a few of your colleagues who had served on the Mexican border, preferring not to miss the action again, joined the Navy.  War was declared in April.  In May the state was still raising troops.

Shortly thereafter you shipped out with your fellow Wyomingites to North Carolina, where you were to be trained, you supposed, on trench warfare.  On August 15, 1917, due to a curious legal oddity, you were officially conscripted into the Army.

It was not to be.

In early September the news came that your unit was being busted up.  Some of you were going into machine-gun companies, some into transport companies, and some into the field artillery.  No infantry, although a machine-gun company would be pretty darned close.  The machine-gun companies didn't' seem to come about, but the transport and artillery units did.  We'll say for our story here that you were one of the men who became an artilleryman.  If so, you made it to France later than your transport colleagues, and it'd take you additional months after the Armistice to make it back home as well.  Those Guardsmen you knew who went into transport were home months ago now.

Howitzer of the type used by the 148th Field Artillery, of which many Wyoming National Guardsmen became a part.

You would have made it to France on February 10, 1918, and you went to the front on July 9.  Soon thereafter you were firing missions in support of the American effort at Château-Thierry.

Your unit, unlike the 115th Ammunition Train that your fellow Wyoming Guardsmen were in, was kept on in the Army of Occupation after the Armistice.  This gave you a little time to see some parts of France and some of Germany while they were not at war, if not in good shape.

Finally, in June your unit was ordered home.  You boarded the ship in France.  At Camp Mills, New York the unit was released from the Army rolls.  You were still in, however, and went to Ft. D. A. Russell out of Cheyenne with those Guardsmen from the West, men from Wyoming, Idaho and Colorado.

There you were discharged from the Army on June 26. You stayed at Ft. Russell for a couple of days, however, while your paperwork was processed.

And then you boarded a train in Cheyenne that, in a bit of a roundabout route, and a series of transfers, took you all the way home to Casper a couple of days later.  Your service was celebrated everywhere you stopped.  By the 29th, you were back home in Casper.

Not the Casper you left, however. That Casper was gone.  The war had changed it forever.  It was much larger now.  And it was a refinery town in a major way, with a giant refinery on the west edge of town that operated night and day, as all refineries do, in an unyielding fashion.  It dominated the town.

So now you were home, but that home was much different than the one you left.  And just after you came home a couple of notable events happened.

The first was that state prohibition arrived.  That may not seem significant, but with you just arriving home on the 29th, and state prohibition going into effect on July 1, you or your friends probably planned for a night downtown at the bars, and there were a lot of them, on the 30th.  One last night where the beer flowed freely.  It had flowed very freely in Casper before you left, and certainly wine had made an appearance in France. So a night on the town.

That probably meant that you slept in on July 1.  Not a day to go looking for work.  July 2 might be, but it's only two days away from the big July 4 celebration, and this year that celebration was to kick in on July 3.  So you probably  held off on July 3, 4, and 5.  The 6th was a Sunday and you probably went to church with your family.

And then, on Monday July 7, it was out to find a job.

But where and doing what?

The options in the town were plenty in 1919, but they were all dominated by oil production now.  That no doubt would have figured in your reasoning to some extent.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*There's no rational basis for the Army's decision, but in this period there was a fair amount of tension between the Regular Army and the National Guard.  Indeed, that tension would last as long as the Vietnam War.

**Which isn't to say that bolt actions weren't around and in use.  For American civilians the bolt action that was by far the most common was the Krag Jorgensen, surplus from the U.S. Army where it had been briefly the standard rifle prior to the M1903.  Surplus bolt action Navy Lees were also around but much less common.  Sporting bolt actions, mostly of European manufacture, were available but rare.

***Semi automatic pistols were also a recent innovation for most civilians, with revolvers being far more common.

June 18, 1919. Aftermaths

President Wilson toured Belgium.

While in the U.S., the aftermath of the fighting in Juarez was still in the headlines.  The Mexican government was regarding the incident as closed, the U.S. Senate, now in GOP hands, was considering investigating U.S. relations with Mexico since the onset of the Revolution, and Americans in Chickasaw were advised to get out.

Meanwhile, the Germans were reported to be considering what would occur if they rejected the Paris Peace Treaty.

The Mexican Border War: The Third Battle of Ciudad Juarez. June 15-16, 1919 Part 3.

The Juarez racetrack on June 16, 1919.  The large hole in the cupola was caused by it being hit by American artillery.

And with this, the story of the United States and the Mexican Revolution, which we started following nearly daily with the 1916 Columbus Raid, and which became as story which bled into World War One, while not definitively over, is significantly over.

As we saw first on June 14, the Villistas launched their anticipated attack on Juarez very late in the night of June 14.  That attack first met with success, but by morning the Villistas had been pushed back.  American forces that had moved up in anticipation of crossing the Rio Grande accordingly went back into Ft. Bliss.

Those troops were soon back out.  Villa's renewed attack was proving successful and the troops reassembled to cross the Rio Grande.  This time they also brought up two armored gun trucks, the first time they'd been used by the U.S. Army in this locality.  Searchlights were also deployed to illuminate Juarez's streets and buildings in the night.

As the battle raged in Juarez shots inevitably began landing in El Paso, wounding and killing American civilians.  At first the Americans held their fire, but ultimately after taking a few casualties the U.S. Army intervened.  The final blow for the U.S. Army was when Pvt. Salvatore Fusco was killed by Villista sniper fire and Pvt. Burchard F. Casey was wounded.  With that, the American troops were ordered across the border to restore order.  The armored gun trucks crossed the Santa Fe Bridge followed by the 24th Infantry Regiment.  The 5th and 7th Cavalry, under Col. Tommy Tomkins, crossed the Rio Grande directly and moved to the western part of the city with the goal of creating a pincer movement in which Villa would be caught.  Near the Juarez racetrack the infantry encountered withdrawing Constitutionalist who informed them that the Villistas were dug in at the racetrack, which the 82nd Artillery then shelled.  Cavalry advanced from the east on the racetrack but encountered no Villista forces.

 Pvt. Salvatore Fusco.

At daybreak, the Cavalry returned to the river to water their horses and then moved south into Mexico in hopes of assaulting Villa's base.

They did in fact locate it, shell it and then assault it.  However, the Villistas, while at first surprised while eating breakfast, rapidly abandoned the camp, leaving their wounded as well as horses, mules and equipment.

The American infantry remained in Juarez itself while this was going on and received a protest from the Constitutionalist forces for entering the country without invitation, which was ironic under the situation as they were outnumbered and well on their way to defeat at the time that the Americans intervened.  Indeed, they speant the rest of the battle in their barracks.  The Americans soon  nonetheless withdrew, deeming their mission accomplished.   Three Americans were killed in the battle, Pvt. Fusco, Pvt. Anthony Cunningham of the 24th Infantry and Sgt. Pete Chigas of the 7th Cavalry.

Col. Tommy Tomkins in Juarez, whose brother Frank Tomkins had led American cavalry across the border following the Columbus Raid, and who lead the U.S. Cavalry contingent across the border in the Battle of Juarez. The Tomkins effectively bookended the Border War.

The battle was not only the last battle of the Border War, it was the last battle to be fought by Pancho Villa.  He did not retire thereafter, but instead actually conducted areal warfare through an air corps formed in his service. Although he remained very resentful against the US intervention in the battle, as well as of course earlier American intervention in the Mexican Revolution, he never participated in another battle against American troops and he was not really capable of doing so after the Battle of Juarez.  Villistas may have raided in Arizona as late as 1920, when some Mexican forces attacked Ruby Arizona, but the loyalty of those troops is not known.

Funeral procession for Pvt. Fusco.

While the battle didn't result in Villa's capture and it didn't fully end his activities, for all practical purposes he was done for.  So in a way, the 1919 battle achieved what the 1916 intervention had not.  Villa was effectively destroyed as a force in the field.  Once again, the U.S. Army was frustrated in a desire to capture Villa, but it didn't really matter.  Villa, while sufficiently resurgent to have mounted such a campaign, was not the force he had been earlier in the Mexican Revolution even if the Constituionalist forces in Juarez proved inadequate to contest him.  The American reaction to his presence in Juarez, justified by American troops being in harm's way, ended his career as a serious contender in the Mexican Revolution.

The Mexican Border War: The Third Battle of Ciudad Juarez. June 15-16, 1919 Part 2.

And so the day by day, so to speak (with a lot of non posts in between) entries on the Mexican Border War, which commenced with the threads on the attack of Columbus New Mexico in 1916, which I posted in 2016, start to come to an end.

And that's because this was the last battle of the Border War.

The battle commenced very late on the night of June 14 (approximately 11:35) when Villa attempted to take Juarez from the Constitutionalist army, putting the city in contest for at least the third time since 1911 and oddly reprising some of the events that had sent the US into Mexico in in 1916.

The attack was not any kind of a surprise and had been expected for days.  Indeed, the presumption that the attack was going to be launched on June 14, which ultimately it was but only very late at night, resulted in newspaper headlines regarding its delay.  Whatever the source of that delay actually was, it would have done speculators well to recall that Villa liked to attack at night.

The attack on the night of the 14th spread into the next day with the Constitutionalist forces withdrawing towards the city center.  But during the day they recovered and forced Villa back to the eastern part of the city.  In the meantime, the U.S. Army ordered up troops from the 24th Infantry, the 2nd Cavalry, the 82nd Field Artillery and the 8th Engineers to a location near a ford across the Rio Grande in case an American intervention proved necessary.  By daybreak it appeared it would not be, so the troops were ordered back to Ft. Bliss.

The battle was not yet over however.  The Villistas would launch another nighttime assault that night.

June 13, 1919. Misleading Headlines

American troops had not been sent into Mexico.

They were taking up positions near Columbus, New Mexico, however.  As well as standing ready in El Paso.  It was clear by this day that Villa was going to attempt to move north. . . maybe to Juarez, and less likely on Columbus.

And it was unlikely that he was going to try to cross the border.  But being on guard was well warranted.

Vladivostok was also a location where a lot of troops, and refugees, were in evidence on this day in 1919.  In this case, White Russian troops, and refugees fleeing the Reds as the lines changed every day.

June 7, 1919. Shades of 1916.

The news was beginning to read like it had in 1916 once again.  Border tensions were rising, and Texas was hoping that the President would federalize the wartime State Guard to provide border security in light of increased concerns about border incursions.

Oddly, the Laramie Boomerang was running a story expressing concern over developments on the border but praising Felipe Ángeles, whom was conceived of as the putative head of state in the areas that Villa controlled.

Elsewhere, in Germany more precisely, Russian POWS were being repatriated.  Of course, they'd be repatriated right into a country in the midst of a civil war.

In other news of the day, Governor Carey wasn't in a big hurry to deal with the 19th Amendment and wasn't going to convene a special session to deal with it. The Amendment, which had just passed the Senate, provided for female suffrage, but that had always been a feature of Wyoming's law and Carey commented to the effect that the amendment didn't impact Wyoming in any fashion, and therefore the cost of a special session wasn't worthwhile.

May 31, 1919. Villa Resurgent, NC4 Victorious, the Indianapolis 500 Resumed.

On this day in 1919, Pancho Villa was fully in the headlines once again, if at the bottom of the page.

The U.S. had pulled out of Mexico in early 1917, at which time Villa was clearly on the rebound.  Just a few months earlier it appeared that U.S. forces might run him to ground in Mexico, and he himself had been recovering from wounds.  After that, things hadn't gone so well for the U.S. expedition.

Now things weren't gong that well for Carranza, who in early 1917 was close to committing to action against the U.S.  Now he was fully back in action against Villa, although Zapata was no longer a concern due to his assassination earlier this year.

In other news, the NC4 made it to Plymouth England. And in other things mechanical, the seventh Indianapolis 500 resumed after a hiatus due to World War One.  It featured extreme hazards, as the headline made plain.

May 29, 1919. It's all relative

On this day in 1919 Woodrow Wilson, showing that he did indeed learn from history, did what he should have done back in 1916 and denied permission to Carranza to transport Mexican troops across American soil so that they could go into action against Pancho Villa.

That failure in 1915 had lead to Villa's cross border raid into the U.S. on March 9, 1916, which in turn launched the U.S. into its expedition into Mexico. That expedition failed to run Villa to ground, although for a time it looked like he'd been essentially defeated.  It nearly brought the U.S. and Carranza's government into war with each other, as while Carranza was dedicated to Villa's defeat, he also couldn't stand the through of Americans in arms on Mexican soil and he basically detested the American government in general.

None of which kept him from asking him to repeat the practice and bring troops by rail into the area near Juarez so that they could be ready to engage a resurgent Villa. This time Wilson refused.

A long solar eclipse lasting over six minutes occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.  It was the longest solar eclipse since May 27, 1416.  A longer one would occur on June 8, 1937.

This event was significant in that Astronomers were able to detect the bending of light from stars during the event, confirming Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

April 4, 1919. Spring fashions, European Bison, and American Horses.

The Casper Daily Tribune published two editions on Friday, April 4, 1919.  The first one was all news, and with a Communist seizure of Bavaria on this day, the ongoing crisis with Hungary, and Lenin attempting to dictate terms to the Allies, a lot of that news was distressing, to say the least.

The second, edition, however, was on new spring fashions, now that the war was over.

The 1919 fashions didn't look much different than the 1910 fashions actually.

But as we'll soon show all that was about to change, at least for women.

What is claimed by Bavarian radio to be the last finding of a wild wisent, the European bison, was made on this day in 1919.  You can read and listen to the story here:

4. April 1919Der letzte Wisent gefunden, Ur-RindBuckel nach oben, Hörner gesenkt. Einem Wisent will man nicht unbedingt in freier Wildbahn begegnen. Wird man auch nicht, weil Wisente so selten sind. Am 4. April 1919 galt das freilebende Ur-Rind sogar als ausgestorben.

FWIW, the "last" claim here is disputed.  Others say that Polish wisents were still in the wild in the very early 1920s.  There are wild wisents today, actually, in Poland.  Their story is similar in a way to that of American bison in that they are in a national park where their numbers have increased, although not to the extent that they have in the United States to where there are so many, they're a bit of a problem where they are. That's why, in the U.S., buffalo hunting has returned.

In Europe the last wisents, if that's what they were, were the victims of the German army like so many other things in Europe.  German soldiers at the end of the war killed most of them for food prior to pulling out of Poland.

Closer to home, the Wilson administration was showing its odd predilection for favoring the Carranza regime in Mexico again.

The entire episode of the United States going into Mexico in 1916 arose due the Wilson Administration allowing the transportation of Carranza's troops across southern Texas so that they could go into battle against Villa's forces in northern Mexico.  That, as we've already dealt with, lead to the frustrating and inconclusive American campaign against Villa that nearly ended up with the United States and Mexico going to war.

Now, in 1919, the Wilson Administration was at it again as it sold 1,000 cavalry mounts and, according to this article, 5,000 rifles to Carranza's government.  Mexico was still in revolution at this point and would continue to be for quite some time thereafter.  By providing these military resources, no doubt now surplus to American needs in light of World War One having ended, the US was effectively favoring one side against another.

John Berryman cartoon from April 4, 1919.

That side was questionable at best, being a heavily leftist regime headed by a man, Carranza, who had a strong distaste for the United States itself.  This may have all passed by Wilson, who had favored Carranza before, as no doubt our main threat from Mexico probably seemed to be the resurgent Villistas.  That being said, less than two years prior the United States had been seriously worried about the Mexican federal government of Carranza's declaring war against the U.S. and siding with the Germans.

Mexico never seriously considered that move, although Carranza did have it studied (governments tend to study everything) and a vague, and very ineffective Mexican fifth column formed in anticipation of such an event along the southern U.S. border with Mexico.  Even the heavy handed treatment Mexican civilians and Mexican Americans along the border had received by American law enforcement didn't inspire very many to look at that however.  At this point, perhaps Wilson saw U.S. military aid to Mexico as a reward for not acting rashly during World War One, or perhaps he was fixated on Villa, or perhaps he was simply wanting to do something to get the Mexican Revolution over with once and for all.  At any rate, it can be questioned how wise that move was.