Saturday, March 15, 1924. Passing symbols and elections.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1924  The wreck of the six masted schooner Wyoming was located off of Pollock Rip, Massachusetts.  She went down with all 18 hands.

Maj. Gen. DeRosey Cabell, age 62, Chief of Staff during the Punitive Expedition under Pershing, died.  He had been retired since 1919.

Cabell.

Brig Gen. Richard Henry Pratt, former head of the Carlisle Indian School and advocate for cultural assimilation of Native Americans, died at age 83.  He coined the word "racism", but also advocated for the policy that he expressed as "Kill the Indian...save the man."

An election was held in the Dominican Republic for its president and Congress.

Kenya held a legislative election under its new constitution

King Fuad I opened the initial session of Egypt's first constitutional parliament.

Friday, July 20, 1923. Pancho Villa slain.

José Doroteo Arango, better known as Francisco "Pancho" Villa, was gunned down along with his assistant Daniel Tamayor, his unfortunate chauffeur Migel Trujillo and bodyguards Rafael Madreno and Claro Huertado in Hidalgo del Parral. Bodyguard Ramon Contreras survived the attack, killing one assailant.

The fatal trip into town in his Dodge sedan was to pick up payroll for his ranch employees. Details of the killings remain unclear, but it is widely suspected Plutarco Elías Calles and President Alvaro Obregón had a role in the killings, and that they were brought about by Villa's murmurings that he might reenter politics.  Jesús Salas Barraza took responsibility for the murder, with it being attributed to resentment over Villa whipping him in a feud over a woman, but it's generally felt that this was to divert attention from the plotters. Barraza served three months out of a twenty-year sentence for murder, and went on to become an officer in the Mexican Army.  Most of the surviving assassins also ended up in the Mexican army.

Telegraph service to Villa's hacienda of Canutillo was interrupted briefly, apparently in a move to cut communications lest his followers there start an uprising.

Villa left a complicated personal life in his wake.  His longest lasting spouse, Luz Corral, was not living with him at the time, and Austreberta Rentería was in residence at his hacienda as his wife.  Court challenges would uphold Corral as his legal spouse, and she would inherit his estate.  He had at least four living children at the time of his death.

Villa was an extremely odd character who had served brilliantly as a cavalry commander in the initial stages of the Mexican Revolution, but who was unable to adjust to the changes in military technology that had altered how cavalry had to be used.  He's the best remembered Mexican Revolutionary by far, although politically not a terribly effective one.  His decision to rail Columbus New Mexico in 1916, in retaliation for Woodrow Wilson allowing Carranza to transport his troops across Texas and back into Mexico, nearly lead the US into war, and provided an embarrassing episode in which a US expeditionary force was unable to run him down.  The Punitive Expedition, as it was known, did however serve to prepare the US for entry into World War One.

Perhaps Villa's violent life and death make the gathering of "prominent young girls" in a pageant in Seneca Falls depicting the progress of women, in which they were depicted as ancient warriors, a bit ironic.

 Warriors. Agnes Lester, Marjorie Follette, Emily Knight, Elizabeth Van Sickle, Carol Lester, prominent young girls of Seneca Falls, as warriors in the Drama depicting the Progress of Woman to be given at the reception at Seneca Falls, N.Y., on July 20, 1923.

The bodies of Villa and his men, laying dead in their Dodge, depicted the true face of war, which is not very glamorous. Women in liberal western societies, but only in liberal western societies, would "progress" into combat over the next century, but it's not an existential progress, but a retrograde trip into barbarity.

Casper's paper for the same day reported the end of the second dusk to dawn flying record attempt in Rock Springs.

Speaking of violence and women, the Casper paper was reporting a Cheyenne rancher was charged with violation of the Mann Act in the far western part of the state.

There were strikes in Port Arthur, Texas.

Lex Anteinternet: The Punitive Expedition: The Battle of Parral. Cpl. Tannous

Lex Anteinternet: The Punitive Expedition: The Battle of Parral. A...:       

The Punitive Expedition: The Battle of Parral. April 12, 1916

 Corporal Richard Tannous, 13th Cavalry, wounded at Parral.

More on Tannous:  Tannous.

Monday, March 6, 1922. The dawn of the cartoon magazine.

Maj. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, eccentric cavalryman, at that time, and founder of D C Comics was photographed.

Wheeler-Nicholson came from an unusual family, and he was an unusual character.  He achieved success very early as a cavalryman in the U.S. Army, and then went on to command infantry in the US military mission to Siberia during World War One.  He became an author in this time period but he seems to have struck people the wrong way and ended up in disputes inside the Army, one of which lead to his court marshal during this time frame. Adding to his problems, he was shot by an Army sentry shortly after this in an incident in which the sentry through he was trying to enter another officer's home, but which his family maintained was an Army sanctioned assassination attempt (which it surely was not).

In 1923 he'd leave the Army and become a pulp fiction writer.  Ultimately, he founded a franchise which essentially created the modern cartoon magazine.  Nonetheless, he never really profited from his efforts and lived in financial straights the rest of his life.

April 29, 1921. "16 Raiding Villistas Not Guilty"

News hit in Cheyenne that a jury in Deming had acquitted some accused of crimes during the Columbus raid. As noted yesterday, this wasn't the first trial, and in fact this one was remarkably late.  Indeed, so late that a person really has to wonder about the justice involved in holding prisoners for six years before going to trial.  And we learn from this article that these sixteen men had been tried and convicted previously, and then pardoned, and the rearrested on new charges.  A pretty questionable set of events.

It was news in other venues as well.

The long delay may have worked in these prisoners favor as well as obviously evolving views on their role in the raid. Those tried rapidly were tried in the heat of the immediate events, which as we know included these men, received much less favorable results.

President Harding had spoken the day prior and that was front page news everywhere, including on the USS Arizona.

On another note, grocery prices for this day in 1921.

April 28, 1921. Jury Acquits Defendants on the Columbus Raid

Jury Acquits 16 Mexicans of Columbus Raid Murders

So read the headlines of the New York Times on this day in 1921.

This is an aspect of the raid, which started off the day by day habit here, i.e., posts in "real time", a century removed, that we still haven't broken.  We probably should have considered it before.

Villa declared the raid a success in that his forces took over 300 longarms, 80 horses, and 30 mules, from Columbus and Camp Furlong by way of the raid.  While that may be so, he directly lost 90 to 170 dead, thereby paying a steep price for low returns it its considered that the raiding force had been made up of 484 men.  Sixty-three of his men were killed during the raid and the remainder died of their wounds thereafter, explaining the imprecise tally.

Some were captured and tried rapidly, with six being sentenced to death.

Other captured men, however were tried later on with differing result, but the overall results are, unfortunately, quite unclear to me.  It hadn't occurred to me that any were tried at all, as I would have regarded Villa's army as that, an army, albeit an irregular one.  Prisoners from armies aren't tried and aren't executed for simply participating in a military action, irrespective of the action itself being illegal.

Indeed, that logic later caused at least one prisoner to have a death sentence commuted to a life sentence. But there were at least three trials and many of the men tried were those who had been taken prisoner by the Army following the launching of its expedition into Mexico.  As far as I can tell, some death sentences were carried out.  A shocking number of the prisoners simply died in captivity due to the horrible condition, in part, of the county jail in which they were held.  We have to recall here that the 1918 Flu Epidemic was ongoing.  

As things moved along there came to be a fair amount of sympathy for the prisoners, some of whom  were in bad physical shape, and many of whom had only vague connections with what had occurred.  Soldier witnesses for the trial ended up being deployed to France so conducting the trials became difficult.  One defendant was only twelve years old and was released.  

Other than the citation to this headline, I can't find any evidence of trials occurring as late as 1921, but apparently they did.  By this time, it was probably too late to really convict many.  In this trial, apparently there were twenty defendants, and sixteen were found not guilty by the jury.

Should any have been tried at all?

Well, some appear to have been tried because of direct murders of civilians, something that's illegal in any war.  That's another matter. But the wisdom of trying soldiers, at least one of whom was a conscripted Carranzaista who was sent into action on that day without ammunition, is and was questionable.  What to do with them no doubt was also problematic, something we've learned again in recent years due to our wars with the Taliban and Al Queda.

On this same day President Harding, who seems to have been photographed with visitors nearly every day, posed with Pop Anson and Anson's daughters.  Adrian "Pop" Anson had been a professional baseball player and later a vaudeville performer.  In his vaudeville role, he performed with his two daughters depicted here, Adele and Dorothy.  Anson would have been about 68 at the time this photograph was taken, and both of his daughters were in their 30s.  Anson died the following April at age 69.

The dog was Laddie Boy, an Airedale.  He was the first White House dog to be followed by the press.  He wasn't even one year old when photographed here, and would outlive his master.

The Infantry Company over a Century. Part 1. The Old Army becomes the Great War Army.

A note about this entry.  Like most of the items posted on this blog that pertain to the 1890-1920 time frame, this information was gathered and posted here as part of a research project for a novel.  As such, it's a post that invites comment.  I.e., the comments are research in and of themselves and its more than a little possible that there's material here that might be in need of correction.

Company C, Wyoming National Guard (Powell Wyoming), 1916.  Note that seemingly nearly everyone in this photograph is a rifleman.  Also of note is that these Wyoming National Guardsmen, all of whom would have come from the Park County area (and therefore were probably of a fairly uniform background and ethnicity) are using bedrolls like Frontier infantrymen, rather than the M1910 haversack that was official issue at the time.

Infantry, we’re often told, is the most basic of all Army roles.  Every soldiers starts off, to some extent, as a rifleman.  But save for those who have been in the infantry, which granted is a fair number of people over time, we may very well have an wholly inaccurate concept of how an infantry company, the basic maneuver element, is made up, and what individual infantrymen do today. 

And if that's true, we certainly don't have very good idea of how that came to be.

And we’re also unlikely to appreciate how it’s changed, and changed substantially, over time.

So, we’re going to go back to our period of focus and come forward to take a look at that in a series of posts that are relevant to military history, as well as the specific focus of this blog.

Prior to the Great War, the Old Army.

U.S. Infantry in Texas early in the 20th Century.  I'm not sure of the date, but its a 20th Century photograph dating after 1903 as all of the infantrymen are carrying M1903 rifles.  It's prior to 1915, however, in that they're all wearing late 19th Century pattern campaign hats of the type that came into service in the 1880s and remained until 1911.

Much of this blog has focused on the Punitive Expedition/Border War which ran up to and continued on into World War One.  As we've noted before, that event, the Punitive Expedition, was one in which the Army began to see the introduction of a lot of new weaponry.  While that expanded the Army's capabilities, it also, at the same time, presented problems on how exactly to handle the new equipment and how its use should be organized.

Historians are fond of saying that the Punitive Expedition served the purpose of mobilizing and organizing an Army that was in now way ready to engage in a giant European war, and that is certainly true.  But the fact of the matter remains the infantry that served along the Mexican border in 1916 (the troops who went into Mexico were largely cavalry) did not serve in an Army that was organizationally similar at all to the one that went to France in 1917.

American infantrymen became riflemen with the introduction of M1855 Rifle Musket.  Prior to that, the normal long arm for a U.S. infantryman was a musket, that being a smoothbore, and accordingly short range, weapon.  Rifles had been issued before but they were normally the weapon of specialists.  Starting in 1841, however, the Army began to make use of rifle muskets which had large bores and shallow rifling, combining the best features of the rifle and the musket and addressing the shortcomings of both.  The advantages were clear and the rifle musket rapidly supplanted the musket

Civil War era drawling showing a rifleman in a pose familiar to generations of combat riflemen up to the present day.

For a long time, prior to the Great War, infantry companies were comprised entirely or nearly entirely of riflemen, with their officers and NCO's often being issued sidearms rather than longarms, depending upon their position in the company. As with the period following 1917, companies were made up of platoons, and platoons were made up of squads, so that part of it is completely familiar.  Much of the rest of it would strike a modern soldier, indeed any soldier after 1917 as odd, although it wouldn't a civilian, given as civilians have been schooled by movies to continue to think of infantry this way.  Even in movies showing modern combat, most infantrymen are shown to be riflemen.

Squads at the time, that is prior to 1917, were formed by lining men in a company up and counting them out into groups of eight men per squad.  Each squad would have a corporal in charge of it and consist of eight men, including the commanding corporal.  The corporal, in terms of authority, and in reality, was equivalent to a sergeant in the Army post 1921.  I.e., the corporal was equivalent to a modern sergeant in the Army.  He was, we'd note, a true Non Commissioned Officer.

There were usually six squads per platoon.  The squads were organized into two sections, with each section being commanded by a sergeant.  The sergeant, in that instance, held a rank that would be equivalent to the modern Staff Sergeant, although his authority may be more comparable to that of a Sergeant First Class.

The platoon was commanded by a lieutenant. One of the company's two platoons was commanded by a 1st lieutenant, who was second in command of the company, and the other by a 2nd lieutenant.  The company was commanded by a Captain, who was aided by the company Field Sergeant, who was like a First Sergeant in terms of duties and authority.  The company staff consisted of the Field Sergeant, a Staff Sergeant and a private.  The Staff Sergeant's rank is only semi comparable to that of the current Staff Sergeant, but he did outrank "buck" Sergeants.

Sergeants were, rather obviously, a really big deal.

Spanish American War volunteers carrying .45-70 trapdoor Springfield single shot rifles and wearing blue wool uniforms.

While this structure would more or less exist going far back into the 19th Century, the Army had undergone a reorganization following the Spanish American War which brought to an end some of the remnants of of the Frontier Army in some ways and which pointed to the future, while at the same time much of the Army in 1910 would have remained perfectly recognizable to an old soldier, on the verge of retirement, who had entered it thirty years earlier in 1880.*  This was reflected by an overhaul of enlisted ranks in 1902 which brought in new classifications and which did away with old ones, and as part of that insignia which we can recognize today, for enlisted troops, over 100 years later.  Gone were the huge inverted stripes of the Frontier era and, replacing them, were much smaller insignia whose stripes pointed skyward. The new insignia, reflecting the arrival of smokeless powder which had caused the Army to start to emphasize concealment in uniforms for the first time, were not only much smaller, but they blended in. . .somewhat, with the uniform itself.

New York National Guardsmen boarding trains for border service during the Punitive Expedition.  They are still carrying their equipment in bed rolls rather than the M1910 Haversack.

The basic enlisted pattern of ranks that came into existence in 1902 continued on through 1921, when thing were much reorganized.  But the basic structure of the Rifle Company itself was about to change dramatically, in part due to advancements in small arms which were impacting the nearly universal identify of the infantryman as a rifleman.

Colorado National Guardsman with M1895 machinegun in 1914, at Ludlow Colorado.

Automatic weapons were coming into service, but how to use and issue them wasn't clear at first.  The U.S. Army first encountered them in the Spanish American War, which coincidentally overlapped with the Boer War which is where the British Army first encountered and used them.  The US adopted its first machinegun in 1895.  The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, which fought as dismounted cavalry in Cuba during the Spanish American War, used them in support of their assault of Kettle Hill, although theirs were privately purchased by unit supporters who had donated them to the unit.   The Spanish American and and Boer Wars proved their utility however and various models came after that.  They were, however, not assigned out at the squad level, but were retained in a separate company and assigned out by higher headquarters as needed.  There was, in other words, no organic automatic weapon at the company level, and certainly not at the squad level.

African American infantryman in 1898, carrying the then new Krag M1986 rifle.  This soldiers is wearing the blue service uniform which, at that time, was being phased out in favor of a khaki service uniform.  Most of the Army had not received the new uniform at this time and, in combat in  Cuba, most wore cotton duck stable clothing that was purchased for the war.  Some soldiers did deploy, however, with blue wool uniforms.  In the field, this soldier would have worn leggings, which he is not in this photograph.

There also weren't a lot of them.  Running up to World War One the Army issued new tables of organization for National Guard units, anticipating large formations such as divisions.  Even at that point, however, there were no automatic weapons at the company level at all.  The infantry regiment table provided for a Machine Gun Company which had a grand total of four automatic rifles. 

M1909 "Machine Rifle".  It was a variant of the Hotchkiss machinegun of the period and was acquired by the Army in very low quantities.

Just four.

Most men in a Rifle Company were just that, riflemen.  Automatic weapons were issued to special sections as noted.  Rifle grenadiers didn't exist.  Most of the infantry, therefore that served along the border with Mexico was leg infantry, carrying M1903 Springfield rifles, and of generally low rank.**

New York National Guardsmen in Texas during the Punitive Expedition.

That was about to change.

Well, some of it was about to change.  Some of it, not so much.

So, in 1916, anyhow, where we we at.  A company had about 100 men, commanded by a captain who had a very small staff.  The entire company, for that matter, had an economy of staff.  Most of the men were privates, almost all of which were riflemen, and most of who's direct authority figure, if you will, was a corporal. There were few sergeants in the company, and those who were there were pretty powerful men, in context.  There were some men around with special skills as well, such as buglers, farriers, and cooks.  Cooks were a specialty and the cook was an NCO himself, showing how important he was.  Even infantry had a small number of horses for officers and potentially for messengers, which is why there were farriers.  And automatic weapons had started to show up, but not as weapons assigned to the company itself, and not in large numbers.

A career soldier could expect himself, irrespective of the accuracy of the expectation, to spend his entire career in this sort of organization, and many men in fact had.  Some men spent entire careers as privates. Sergeants were men who had really advanced in the Army, even if they retired with only three stripes.  Corporals had achieved a measure of success.  Most of the men lived in common with each other in barracks.  Only NCO's might expect a measure of privacy.  Only sergeants might hope to marry.

Machine gun troops of the Punitive Expedition equipped with M1904 Maxim machinegun and carrying M1911 sidearms.

That, of course, was the Regular Army.  The National Guard was organized in the same fashion, but there was more variance in it.  Guardsmen volunteered for their own reasons and had no hope of retirement, as it wasn't available to them.  Some were well heeled, some were not, but they were largely armed and equipped in the same manner, although they received new material only after the Army had received a full measure of it first. Their uniforms and weapons could lag behind those of the Regular Army's.  And some units who had sponsors could be surprisingly well equipped, some having automatic weapons that were privately purchased for the unit and which did not fit into any sort of regular TO&E.

And then came the Great War.

Footnotes:

*Thirty years was the Army retirement period at the time.

**We've dealt with the weapons of the period separately, but in the 1900 to 1916 time frame, the Army adopted a new rifle to replace a nearly new rifle, with the M1903 replacing the M1896 Krag-Jorgensen, which was only seven years old at the time.  While M1896 rifles remained in service inventories up into World War Two, to some degree, is field replacement was amazingly rapid and by World War One there were no Regular Army or National Guard units carrying them.  

In terms of handguns, of which the US used a lot, in 1916 the Army was acquiring a newly adopted automatic pistol, the M1911.  Sizable quantities had been acquired but stocks of M1909 double action .45 revolvers remained in use. The M1909, for that matter, had been pushed into service due to the inadequacies of the M1892, which was chambered in .38.  The M1892 had proven so inadequate in combat that old stocks of .45 M1873 revolvers were issued for field use until M1909s were adopted and fielded.  Given this confusion, and rapid replacement of one revolver by another in 1916, there weren't enough M1911s around, and some soldiers went into Mexico with M1909s.

Related threads:

The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition.

November 22, 1920: Violence and Echoes of Violence

An almost indescribable slate of violent events made the Monday morning headlines on this day in 1920. 

Of interest, and probably depending upon whether  you were receiving a morning or evening newspaper, the violence in Ireland may have focused on one side, or the other, in the strife going on there.

On the same day Woodrow Wilson, acting as the arbiter on where the boarder between Turkey and Armenia was to go, issued his decision.  It was a moot point, the Turks, who had prevailed in their war against Armenian, would dictate where that border would be to Armenia's detriment.

DuPont bought a giant share of General Motors.

Governor Octaviano Larrazola pardoned sixteen Mexicans who had been imprisoned for the March 9, 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico noting that they appeared to have no real connection with Villa and were press ganged by the Villista's at the time of the raid and forced to participate.

Governor Larrazola had been born in Mexico to then wealthy parents who had suffered under the French rule and who ultimately went bankrupt.  He entered the United States with a Catholic Bishop as a teenager intending to study theology, which he did do, and then become a Priest.  Ultimately, he determined he was not called to the Priesthood and became a teacher in El Paso, Texas.  In El Paso his focus turned to the law which he studied and then stood for the bar in Texas.  He moved to New Mexico in 1895 where he practiced law and entered politics, becoming the state's Governor in 1918.  He'd ultimately serve a term in Congress.  As he was highly independent and tended to anger his own party, his political career was intermittent.

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.

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.

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.