On The Death of Oscar Creighton

The First Battle of Bauche

Oscar  Creighton took a mauser bullet to the back of the head and so ended his filibustering career.    Having left behind the pleasures of clerking for a New York brokerage firm, due to certain inconveniences, he went on to the greater joys of stealing federal trains and blowing up bridges in the name of Francisco Madero.  He was a hell-raiser for the Mexican revolutionaries and a holy terror for the Díaz’ frontier commander, Gen. Navarro.   Once he stole one of Navarro's trains and used it to tear up the rails behind him as ran it down the line, hooting and blowing the whistle.   The thing is, Navarro never got a crack at Creighton: he was felled from behind while facing the federals; presumably by a rival among the rebels.

Journalist Timothy Turner writes about the death of Creighton at the battle of Bauche, (now a suburb of Juarez.) Turner was enjoying a fine muscatel in a little bar in El Paso, waiting for a break in the stand-off between Francisco Madero and President Porfirio Díaz, when he was invited by a Dutch doctor to join him on a little expedition to Bauche, where some fighting was reported.

"When we came within sight of the Bauche cut we were sure we had been misinformed. All was quiet, no man or animal was in sight. The driver stopped the car. We had been driving down the road on a flat stretch of country, you could see several miles around except due south where the hills about Bauche rose against the sky. The engine of the car had stopped.

"We were about to turn back when we got the hottest rifle fire I have ever been in, echoing from the hills with the balls zowing and zizzing on all sides of us. When one popped into the sheet steel of the side of the car the driver jumped out and tried to crank up but he was too excited. I felt sure they were shooting at us and so they were. They had also resumed the fire between the two lines. We merely had arrived in a lull of it.

"I did not know it but my friend Creighton was in the rebel lines at this little battle of Bauche and about the time of our arrival he had fallen with a bullet in the back of his head. He had not been facing the rear, and how he got this slug for a long time was the cause of a lot of speculation and considerable ill feeling. —Bullets, Bottles and Gardenias