 |
 |
| Kerrick James (top); E.V.D. Brulle |
Face of the land: Creel vaquero, and top, Batopilas Canyon and the historic Lost Mission of Sateve
|
WHEN I PULLED into Chihuahua, a city of about 615,000, the sun was pounding down like a heavy fist. Chihuahua was Villa's command center when he served as general of the northern army in the 1910s. Today it's a beehive of speeding clunkers, honking horns, and people rushing off to ranching, mining, factory, and
timber-industry jobs. I dumped my gear at a motel and hopped a cab for the outskirts of town, looking for the car. When my cowboy friend visited all those years ago, Villa's widow had been alive. He had stood gazing at the old Dodge while she told the story from Villa's fateful final day. It was a clear morning in 1923, and Villa was driving from the bank
in Parral, 112 miles south of Chihuahua, to his ranch about an hour away. As he rounded a corner, seven gunmen opened fire, pumping the car and driver full of bullet holes. To this day, nobody knows who the gunmen were.
My cabbie knew exactly where to go. "Pancho Villa's car," he said. "Viva Villa! No?" As he dropped me off on the southeast side of town, I realized that the old house couldn't be the well-kept secret it had been 20 years earlier. The widow was long dead, and the government had renovated the house and turned it into a museum, complete with a gift shop
full of cheap-looking Villa memorabilia. I paid my 50 pesos and headed for the backyard, where the car sat, gathering dust. But something troubled me about the way it looked. Despite the well-worn (and non-bloodstained) upholstery, the paint sparkled like new and the wooden spokes were polished to a shine. More telling, there were only a handful of bullet
holes in the side of the car, not 150, as the museum's history books touted. I had driven 500 miles across deserts and over mountains to get a peek at this car, but now I wasn't even sure if it was the real thing. Then it struck me: The late great Pancho Villa had been Elvis-ized. 
Correspondent Brad Wetzler lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
|
