How Pancho Villa Helped Create the 13th Engineers
In the late summer of 1914, the war engulfing Europe seemed a distant concern to most Americans. Yet for many recent immigrants — the Italians, Irish, and Slovenians who had arrived in great waves at the turn of the century to work Colorado’s mines and steel mills — the conflict struck close to home. Their families were caught up in the fighting between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and Russia, and the war in Europe was anything but abstract to them.
For most Americans, however, the more pressing military concern lay much closer — just across the southern border. A revolution in Mexico had toppled the dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911, and the country had been in turmoil ever since. The newly elected president, Francisco Madero, was murdered following a military coup in early 1913. President Taft responded by sending a large military force to Texas to protect American citizens along the Rio Grande, but this show of force backfired, redirecting Mexican militant anger toward Americans rather than their own countrymen.
When Woodrow Wilson took office in March 1913, he refused to recognize the new government of Victoriano Huerta and threw his support behind the rebels seeking to overthrow him. U.S. troops landed at Veracruz in April 1914, the Huerta government collapsed by July, and American forces withdrew in November. But the rebel factions could not agree among themselves, and fighting continued through the following year. When Venustiano Carranza’s faction emerged victorious by the end of 1915, Wilson recognized his government — a decision that would have serious consequences.
The recognition of Carranza enraged his principal rival, a bandit-turned-revolutionary named Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Villa had watched the Americans use their railroad system to transport Carranza’s troops to critical battles, turning the tide against him. On March 9, 1916, he struck back: Villa led nearly 500 men across the border and raided the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, burning buildings and looting weapons and horses before being driven back by the 13th U.S. Cavalry. Eighteen Americans were killed — eight soldiers and ten civilians — making it one of the few armed attacks on U.S. soil in the nation’s history.
The response was swift. President Wilson ordered Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing to lead a punitive expedition into Mexico to find Villa and disperse his forces. Within a week, Pershing and more than 6,000 troops crossed the border. The Mexican government denounced the incursion, and while Villa himself was never captured, the expedition fought a disastrous engagement with the regular Mexican army on June 21, 1916, at Carrizal, Chihuahua. Two American officers and ten enlisted men were killed, and 24 soldiers were taken prisoner. War between the two nations was narrowly avoided, largely because Wilson had no desire to fight on two fronts with the situation in Europe deteriorating rapidly.
By the time the expedition wound down, virtually the entire regular U.S. Army had been involved, and most of the National Guard had been federalized and concentrated along the border.
It was this Mexican crisis that directly gave rise to what would become the 13th Engineers. As Pershing prepared his expedition, military planners grappled with a serious logistical challenge: how to keep supplies moving with an army advancing into Mexico, especially if the Mexicans destroyed the railroads ahead of them. Samuel Morse Felton, president of the Chicago Great Western Railway, was called upon to help organize the railroad effort and was later appointed Director General of Military Railways. American railroads quickly agreed to contribute locomotives, cars, rail, and track materials for the Mexican campaign.
As it turned out, patient diplomacy between the two governments averted a full-scale war, and the railway equipment stockpiled for Mexico was never used there. Instead, it was redirected to a far larger conflict — the war in Europe. The regiment organized for Mexico would become the 13th Engineers (Railway), and its men would soon find themselves not on the dusty plains of Chihuahua, but in the mud and destruction of the Western Front.
