Bullets-Bottles and Gardenias

How Lou Carpentier helped win the Battle of Juárez (and didn't even know it)

Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa generally get credit for Francisco Madero’s victory in the battle of Juárez.  It wasn't always so.    They launched the attack against orders, and their irregulars showed remarkable initiative,  tunneling through the walls of houses as they advanced, and raining improvised hand grenades on the surprised federal troops, defeating the federal garrison in three days.

How General Juan Navarro survived the battle of Juárez

The rebel prisoners from the battle of Cierro Prieto were bayonetted to death on the orders of General Juan Navarro, so you might imagine the mood among the insurrectos when Navarro was finally captured in Juárez, 5 months later.   

Friedrich Katz provides an excellent account the caos after the fall of Juárez in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, although it was journalist Timothy Turner who really had the inside scoop:

“When I returned to Juárez after my sleep, a good solid twelve hours of it, I ran right into a lot of excitement.  Orozco’s and Villa’s men were running around yelling “¡Muera Navarro!” and it was sure that if they had found the old federal commander they would have killed him then and there.  They had been drinking and were worked up into a fury, paying no attention to those insurrecto officers who tried to calm them”

“I figured that to be in at the kill, if there was to be one, I had better find Navarro first and wait where he was”. --Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias

Warfare in Waltz Time

The Second Battle of Bauche.

Pascual Orozco

Pascual Orozco

From the whole timeline of the Mexican Revolution, most narratives punt when it comes to the breakdown between the Orozquistas and the Maderistas.    After all, the historian still has to explain why Carranza couldn’t reconcile with Zapata and why Obregon eventually mowed down Villa’s Dorados with heavy caliber machine guns.   Or why Obregon felt he had to take out Carranza and then, about those who felt it was their Christian duty to put a bullet into Obregon's head.   So it seems a small affair in the big picture, that the gente de Orozoquo felt that they had to trade shells with the gente de Madero.

He turned out to be a fine fellow...

Journalist Timothy Turner tells this account of meeting Ivor Thord-Gray:

"One day Weeks and I were in the bar when a tall, fine-looking Britisher arrived and ordered a split of champagne with aristocratic simplicity. We got acquainted and, after that English diffidence with which he was enshrouded wore off, he turned out to be a fine fellow.

On the Road to Casas Grandes

How ironic that the most painful physical suffering of one’s life might also be the most enjoyable as well. This is how journalist Timothy Turner related the circumstances of his meeting with Francisco Madero. Turner had worked hard to gain the confidence of the Mexican Revolutionaries in El Paso, and was angling to ask some questions of the great idealist, Madero:

Timothy Turner, gypsy love and "dynamite" Oscar Creighton

Journalist Timothy G. Turner was nursed in a newsroom and when he grew up, found that the only smell he liked better than printer’s ink was the sawdust and spit of a barroom. His father, Willis Hall Turner, “my pal” as Tim called him, died in March 1906 when Tim was a teen, after which he “was obliged to go to work in earnest” as a reporter, for the Grand Rapids Herald. His role as a cub reporter on the prowl for stories landed him in a gypsy camp where he was smitten by a young gypsy queen who taught him some of her Canaries Island Spanish.

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