Pulitzer Prize winner Welsome's gripping, panoramic story reveals a vicious surprise attack on the United States and America's hunt for the perpetrator, Pancho Villa.
On March 9, 1916, troops under the command of Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico and its local detachment of the US 13th Cavalry Regiment, killing 18 people and burning the town. Six days later, on orders from President Woodrow Wilson, General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing led an expeditionary force of 4,800 men into Mexico to capture Villa. What followed was a series of skirmishes, battles, and chases through the wild and uncharted Mexican countryside. While the Americans failed in their ultimate purpose of catching Villa, they did kill two of his top lieutenants. This book charts the progress of the entire enterprise, covering the dusty marches and the bitter gunfights in the streets of small border towns, analyzing the successes and failures of this unique military expedition.
This is a tale that might be told around a campfire, night after night in the midst of a military campaign. The kinetic and garrulous Pancho Villa talking on and on about battles and men; bursting out with hearty, masculine laughter; weeping unashamed for fallen comrades; casually mentioning his hotheadedness—"one of my violent outbursts"—which sent one, two, or a dozen men before the firing squad; recounting amours; and always, always protesting dedication to the Revolutionary cause and the interests of "the people." Villa saw himself as the champion, eventually almost the sole champion, of the Mexican people. He fought for them, he said, and opponents who called him bandit and murderer were hypocrites. This is his story, his account of how it all began when as a peasant boy of sixteen he shot a rich landowner threatening the honor of his sister. This lone, starved refugee hiding out in the mountains became the scourge of the Mexican Revolution, the leader of thousands of men, and the hero of the masses of the poor. Great battles of the Revolution are described, sometimes as broad sweeps of strategy, sometimes as they developed half hour by half hour. Long, dusty horseback forays and cold nights spent pinned down under enemy fire on a mountainside are made vivid and gripping. The assault on Ciudad Juárez in 1911, the battles of Tierra Blanca, of Torreón, of Zacatecas, of Celaya, all are here, told with a feeling of great immediacy. This volume ends as Villa and Obregón prepare to engage each other in the war between victorious generals into which the Revolution degenerated before it finally ended. Martín Luis Guzmán, eminent historian of Mexico, knew and traveled with Pancho Villa at various times during the Revolution. General Villa offered young Martín Luis a position as his secretary, but he declined. When many years later some of Villa's private papers, records, and what was apparently the beginning of an autobiography came into Guzmán's hands, he was ideally suited to blend all these into an authentic account of the Revolution as Pancho Villa saw it, and of the General's life as known only to Villa himself. The Memoirs were first published in Mexico in 1951, where they were extremely popular; this volume was the first English publication. Virginia H. Taylor, translator in the Spanish Archives of the State of Texas Land Office, has accurately captured in English the flavor of the narrative.
Discover the remarkable life of Pancho Villa... Pancho Villa was many things to many people. To some, he was a freedom fighter and revolutionary; to others, he was nothing more than a bloodthirsty bandit and killer. Villa's life did indeed take many twists and turns, and some of the decisions he made would undoubtedly make many of us question his motives. This book seeks to cut through all of the moral ambiguity and deliver a testament of his life as it really was. Here you will find the life and legacy of Pancho Villa in full. Discover a plethora of topics such as Early Life as a Sharecropper From Bandit to Revolutionary The Revolutionaries Turn on Each Other Villa's Attack on America From Guerrilla Leader to Hacienda Owner Retirement and Assassination And much more! So if you want a concise and informative book on Pancho Villa, simply scroll up and click the "Buy now" button for instant access!
Based on archival research, this study of Pancho Villa aims to separate myth from history. It looks at Villa's early life as an outlaw and his emergence as a national leader, and at the special considerations that transformed the state of Chihuahua into a leading centre of revolution.
"Gleaming, spellbinding fiction . . . Terrifying and abruptly beautiful, the new novel gleams with a masculine intensity; it is hard to read and hard to put down."—The Cleveland Plain Dealer The year is 1916. The enemy, Pancho Villa, is elusive. Terrain is unforgiving. Through the mountains and across the long dry stretches of Mexico, Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, leads an expedition of inexperienced horse soldiers on seemingly fruitless searches. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong, and his patrol is suddenly at the mercy of an enemy intent on their destruction. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert. Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, has created a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.
The Mexican Revolution (1910-19) was the first seismic social convulsion of the twentieth century, superseded in historical importance only by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Tierra y Libertad (land and liberty) was the watchword of the revolutionaries who fought a succession of autocrats in Mexico City. But the revolution was fired by a confusing multiplicity of issues- local, national, international, cultural, racial and economic. The two greatest rebel leaders were Francisco (Pancho) Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and Frank McLynn here tells the story of the Revolution through a dual biography of these legendary heroes.The great ten-year struggle that devastated Mexico was essentially a war on two fronts- in the north waged by Villa and a mobile army of ex-cowboys and ranchers; and in the south carried on by Zapata and an infantry army recruited from the peons of the sugar plantations. Villa was the Revolution's great military hero, but Zapata was its soul and the only rebel whose revolt was aimed at a genuine root-and-branch transformation of Mexican society. The two men reached the peak of their careers in 1914 when they met briefly in triumph in Mexico City. Failing to make common cause, over the next five years they gradually fell victim to their great rivals.
Bestseller • Southern Independent Booksellers Association Bestseller • Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Three decades after the first publication of Forrest Gump, Winston Groom returns to fiction with this sweeping American epic. Long fascinated with the Mexican Revolution and the vicious border wars of the early twentieth century, Winston Groom brings to life a much-forgotten period of history in this sprawling saga of heroism, injustice, and love. El Paso pits the legendary Pancho Villa against a thrill-seeking railroad tycoon known only as the Colonel—whose fading fortune is tied up in a colossal ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico. But when Villa kidnaps the Colonel’s grandchildren and absconds into the Sierra Madre, the aging New England patriarch and his son head to El Paso, hoping to find a group of cowboys brave enough to hunt down the Generalissimo. Replete with gunfights, daring escapes, and an unforgettable bullfight, El Paso becomes an indelible portrait of the American Southwest in the waning days of the frontier, one that is “sure to entertain” (Jackson Clarion-Ledger).
From the New York Times bestselling author of War Letters and Behind the Lines, Andrew Carroll’s My Fellow Soldiers draws on a rich trove of both little-known and newly uncovered letters and diaries to create a marvelously vivid and moving account of the American experience in World War I, with General John Pershing featured prominently in the foreground. Andrew Carroll’s intimate portrait of General Pershing, who led all of the American troops in Europe during World War I, is a revelation. Given a military force that on the eve of its entry into the war was downright primitive compared to the European combatants, the general surmounted enormous obstacles to build an army and ultimately command millions of U.S. soldiers. But Pershing himself—often perceived as a harsh, humorless, and wooden leader—concealed inner agony from those around him: almost two years before the United States entered the war, Pershing suffered a personal tragedy so catastrophic that he almost went insane with grief and remained haunted by the loss for the rest of his life, as private and previously unpublished letters he wrote to family members now reveal. Before leaving for Europe, Pershing also had a passionate romance with George Patton’s sister, Anne. But once he was in France, Pershing fell madly in love with a young painter named Micheline Resco, whom he later married in secret. Woven throughout Pershing’s story are the experiences of a remarkable group of American men and women, both the famous and unheralded, including Harry Truman, Douglas Macarthur, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Teddy Roosevelt, and his youngest son Quentin. The chorus of these voices, which begins with the first Americans who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion 1914 as well as those who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, make the high stakes of this epic American saga piercingly real and demonstrates the war’s profound impact on the individuals who served—during and in the years after the conflict—with extraordinary humanity and emotional force.