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.  Madero’s legion of foreign mercenaries joined in the fighting so as to not be left behind, under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi .   At the time, the American press credited Garibaldi for the victory, which nearly got him killed by Villa.

There was one member of Madero’s foreign legion who deserves special recognition for his role in defeating General Navarro in Juarez: Lou Carpentier, an American of French extraction.   Carpentier custom built a breech-loading solid-shot cannon, described by journalist Timothy Turner as a

“mammoth early American squirrel rifle mounted on a pair of small locomotive wheels”.     

Turner described Carpentier as

“an almost dainty little chap who wore a pair of new kid gloves, I recall.  He was proud as punch of this curious cannon”.

On the first day of the battle, Carpentier dragged his gun to the outskirts of Juárez and got ready to lay siege. With great celebration, his first shot when way high, disappearing far into the American desert.    Lowering the barrel, the second shot was still cleared Juárez, but on its international trajectory, put a clean hole through a wooden water tank on a tower, a tank containing the federal garrison’s only drinking water supply.     

“Examining [the blown out breech-block, Carpentier shook his head dolorously and sitting down on a large rock, wept bitter tears of grief and exasperation.”

Poor Carpentier couldn’t have known of his great success when the gun exploded on the next shot.