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Chapter 6:
Into Yaqui Country
Free the river
drive out the whites.
-- Yaqui battle cry
Back in Juarez, Holmdahl met General Benjamin Viljoen,
who was to be his commanding officer in his next adven-
ture. Viljoen was a handsome, soft-spoken man, of above
average height, muscular in appearance, with cool blue eyes and a
heavy brown mustache. He was born in South Africa, the son of
proud Boer pioneers. He first worked as a policeman and later
became an editor of an anti-British, pro-nacionalist newspaper in
Johannesburg. [1]
When the British and the Boers came to blows in South Africa
in 1899, Viljoen, then thirty-two years old, turned into a defiant hot-
spur urging his countrymen to battle. In a memorable article he
wrote, it was time to "Put trust in your God and your Mauser."
Many did, and for two years Viljoen led Boer Commandos in vicious
fighting against the forces of good Queen Victoria.
At the battle of Vaalkrantz, Viljoen
with eighty militiamen held
off a British force of three thousand regulars for more than seven
hours, inflicting heavy casualties. As British numbers began to over-
whelm the Boers, he turned to guerrilla warfare and as the head of
the Johannesburg Commandos he raided army bases, cut off supply
trains, ambushed patrols and generally raised hell with the British
invaders.
Soon he was promoted to Assistant Commandant-General for
all the Boer forces in the Transvaal. As the war was ending, in
January 1902, he was taken prisoner following a British ambush.
Along with the most dangerous and recalcitrant enemies of the
British, he was transported to St. Helena, Napoleon's desolate island
of imprisonment, until the war ended in May.
Refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to the British conquerors,
Viljoen, along with a number of Boers, journeyed to America in
1903. After surveying various sites in the United States and Mexico,
Viljoen settled in the Mesilla Valley in the territory of New Mexico,
close to the border of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. From a
bold and daring guerrilla leader, Viljoen made the difficult transition
to a peaceable farmer, cultivating a seven-hundred and fifty-acre
tract he called "Hope Harvest" near the small border town of
Chamberino.
In 1908, Viljoen became an American citizen and later was
named a member of the delegation to Washington D.C. requesting
statehood for New Mexico. He was appointed an aide-de-camp to
the governor of that state with the rank of colonel and later was
commissioned a major in the 1st Infantry Regiment of the New
Mexico National Guard.
There still must have been a
wild streak of adventure in the 43-
year-old farmer. When in November 1910, the Madero revolution
broke out, Viljoen left his farm and volunteered as a military advi-
sor to the rebels. Madero's forces were clustered near the U.S. bor-
der close to the Chihuahuan city' of Casas Grandes and later on the
western outskirts of Juarez. Viljoen and a brother-in-arms from the
Boer War, Captain Jack Malan, organized fast-moving rebel com-
mando units which harried the forces of the dictator.
In May 1911, General Pascual Orozco overruled a timid Madero
and attacked Juarez. After several days of bitter fighting the feder-
al commander, General Juan Navarro, hoisted the white flag.
Madero ordered Navarro to surrender the garrison to his two mer-
cenary soldier advisors, General Benjamin J. Viljoen and Colonel
Giuseppe Garibaldi, the grandson of the famous liberator of Italy.
They made a strange twosome since they hated one another. The
thiry-one-year-old Garibaldi had fought in three previous wars
before joining Madero. He campaigned with the Greeks against the
Turks, joined a Venezuelan rebel army in a revolt against their gov-
ernment, and during the Boer War volunteered in a British regiment
fighting against Viljoen's commandos.
Aside from the smoldering resentments forged during the South
African campaigns, the two were an unlikely looking pair of soldiers.
Viljoen looked bulky in the rough clothes of a Mesilla Valley farmer,
while Garibaldi, to say the least, had flair. Wearing a green Alpine
hat with a bright feather in the hatband, whipcord riding breeches, a
Norfolk jacket and cravat, he looked like he was about to join a
British lord's grouse hunt.
To hear Garibaldi tell it, he was the brains of Madero's army and
he dismissed Viljoen in his book A Toast to Rebellion, stating tartly,
A General Viljoen, a Boer from the Transvaal and a veteran
of the
South African War arrived ... and declared he was military advisor to
the
president. In this imaginary capacity he gave out a number of
interviews,
but we regarded him as a harmless crank. [2]
In written accounts and verbal interviews about his Mexican service,
Viljoen pretended that Garibaldi never existed.
When the Diaz regime fell and the aging dictator fled to Spain,
most Mexicans celebrated, thinking the revolution was over. They
could not have been more wrong. There was, as usual, a Yaqui prob-
lem. In the late summer of 1911, Holmdahl, still a captain of rurales,
was ordered to accompany General Viljoen to Guaymas, Sonora.
Their mission was to try to convince the fierce Yaqui natives of that
region to make peace and cooperate with the Madero government.
The Yaquis were an anomaly among Mexican tribes in that they
had never bent their heads and accepted the yoke of the Spanish
overlords. They were equally rebellious against every Mexican
regime. The result was intermittent guerrilla warfare against both
Mexico City and the Sonoran governments that had gone on for
more than 400 years. By all odds, by the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, the tribe should have been exhausted.
Their most recent ordeals began in the 1880s under the Diaz
dictatorship. Then rich hacendados and politicians fomented plans to
steal the rich Yaqui lands in southern Sonora through legal chicanery
backed by brute force. [3] As usual the tribesmen resisted. The Yaqui
men were a hardy lot, according to John Kenneth Turner, who in his
seminal work on pre-revolutionary conditions in Mexico, Barbarous
Mexico described them as broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with
sinewy legs and much taller than average Mexicans. [4]
Rarely armed with modern rifles, the Yaqui warrior went into
battle with a very lethal bow, a quiver of arrows, and a machete.
Primitive though these weapons were, the)' were not taken lightly by
the Mexican regulars and rurales who faced them. The Yaqui's bow
was four and a half to five feet in length and their arrows were three-
feet long with razor sharp points that could gut a soldier as handily
as a slug from a .30-.30. They fired their arrows with a high trajec-
tory, so they came raining down almost vertically making it almost
impossible to spot the position of the bowman. At night and up
close, a machete in the hands of a Yaqui was every soldier's night-
mare. Sometimes they fought clothed only in a breech-cloth, but
often wore shirts and knee-length pants of light cotton. Some had
white dots painted on their foreheads, while others wore a colored
headband to hold back their shoulder-length black hair.
They attacked day or night to the eerie beat of a shallow wood-
en drum over which goat hide or sheepskin was stretched. If the
bagpipes of the Scottish Regiments of Her Majesty's Britannic
armies sent shivers down the spines of enemy troops, the deep
thumping of the Yaqui drum echoing through the jungle or down a
mountain arroyo created no less a feeling of near panic in their
opponents. A British soldier of fortune serving in the Mexican
army, I. Thord-Gray, recalled that they chanted war songs as they
went into battle and "moved like ghosts as they disappeared into the
brush ... country of Sonora, Sinaloa and Tepic." Thord-Gray con-
tinued, "There, the bow was supreme ... and Federals with modern
rifles and machine-guns were often forced to evacuate their posi
tions." [5]
After twenty-five years of warfare with the armies of Diaz, how-
ever, the Yaquis had suffered atrocities on a par with those of the
Holocaust. In 1892 an army general, frustrated by the Yaqui guer-
rilla tactics, entered the little town of Navajo, and, according to a
Mexican historian, hung so many men, women, and children that he
ran out of rope. It was necessary to cut down the dangling corpses
and reuse the rope five or six times until the general's ire was satiat-
ed.
In another incident, a colonel roped together dozens of men,
women, and children, loaded them on the gunboat El Democrata and
sailed out of the mouth of the Yaqui River into the Pacific Ocean.
At sea, he tied a heavy weight to the end of the rope, and, while the
bound Yaquis were clustered on the deck, the weight was tossed
overboard. Like a row of dominos, the doomed tribesmen toppled
into the shark-infested waters. There were many such reports. [6]
But perhaps they were the lucky ones. By the turn of the cen-
tury, when the Mexican army became equipped with excellent
German Mauser rifles, the tide of battle turned. After a Yaqui army
was decimated by mass firepower, thousands of the tribesmen were
transported to the Yucatan Peninsula on the southeast coast of
Mexico. There, they were worked in slave labor conditions on the
henequen plantations until they died of disease, malnutrition, and
overwork.
Yaqui lands were seized and many of the remaining tribesmen
were scattered throughout Sonora to work as laborers for the local
Some, called broncos, escaped into the Bacetete Mountains,
where they carried on intermittent raids, swooping down on small
army or police patrols and exacting a terrible revenge on those not
fortunate enough to be killed instantly In 1904 one of the Yaqui
chiefs, Luis Buli, and a band of followers were recruited, or dra-
gooned, into federal service as auxiliaries to the local rurales. When
the revolution broke out, they half-heartedly fought on the side of
Diaz; the majority, however, sided with the forces of Madero.
Hailing the egalitarian rhetoric of Madero and his adherents, in
the early days of the revolution Yaquis served the cause faithfully
and with great heroism. When Diaz fled and Madero seized the
reins of government, they expected the immediate return of all the
land stolen from them over the previous decades. This, however,
was not to be.
A Yaqui delegation journeyed to Mexico City demanding the
return of their land and the immediate freedom and transportation
back to Sonora of their brothers still surviving in the hell of the
Yucatan plantations. The stalling of the ultra-legalistic functionaries
of the Madero regime soon frustrated the tribesmen, while legal
double talk and requests for non-existent title deeds and other doc-
uments brought them to a fine fury.
Returning to Sonora in disgust, they began seizing their former
lands by armed force. Roaming the Yaqui River valleys of their
homeland, they raided Mestizo haciendas, sliot up towns, and rus-
tled cattle under the cry: " Rio libre yjuera blancos", ("Free the river
and
drive out the whites"). Madero, a compassionate man, sympathized
with the tribesmen and attempted a reconciliation, Trying to explain
the complications arising from title deeds now held by Mexican and
foreign investors, he pleaded for time to straighten out complex
land-holding problems.
To talk reason with his disgruntled former allies he appointed
General Viljoen as "Commissioner to the Yaqui Tribe."
Accompanied by Mexican army troops and Capitan Primero Emil
Holmdahl, commanding a column of rurales, the General trekked to
Guaymas on the Pacific coast. Arriving at that tropical seaport,
Viljoen had an unsatisfactory meeting with the Yaquis who refused
to disarm. After a series of negotiations some land was returned to
them and several hundred tribesmen were repatriated from the
Yucatan. But it was not enough, and the tribesmen continued to
raid the Mexican and American-owned farms and ranches through-
out the area.
Holmdahl with his
rurales, a few Pima Indian scouts, and regular
units of the old Diaz, now the Madero army, patrolled the rugged
terrain of the Yaqui Valley in a vain effort to stop the spreading vio-
lence. But as one Mexican general complained, "They [the Yaqul
fighting men] do just as they please." Under their tough war chiefs,
parties of as many as a thousand warriors carried on the fight, hit-
ting the valleys and then running to refuge in the mountains before
the frustrated Madero forces could reach them. Viljoen, coming
under heavy criticism from other Mexican generals, soon resigned
and left the country.
During an interlude in the fighting, Holmdahl had occasion to
play Good Samaritan. In February 1912, apparently oblivious to the
fact that there was a revolution raging in Mexico, the Cadillac
Automobile Company came up with a plan to garner publicity for
their new model. The plan called for a 3,OOO-mile drive from Los
Angeles over the rough, almost non-existent Mexican roads all the
way to Mexico City .An internationally known race driver, T.J.
Beaudit, and a mechanic were assigned to make the trek.
They drove to San Diego, crossed into Baja California, then
started down the west coast of Mexico. The)! managed to cross part
of the Sonoran desert and somehow avoided being scalped by tl1e
warring Yaquis. In Sinaloa they were nearly shot by marauding
rebels and were robbed by bandidos. They reached Tepic exhausted.
There the mechanic drank some bad water and collapsed with fever.
Distraught, Beaudit was about to abandon the project and ship him-
self and the Cadillac back to Los Angeles. Enter Holmdahl. At the
head of his mounted men, Holmdahl rode up to the discouraged
race driver, and after Beaudit recounted his tale of woe, Holmdahl
secured leave and agreed to accompany the driver as guide and
mechanic.
With the proper military passes, the two drove through the
rugged country another 500 miles to Mexico City. When the two
arrived in the capitol, newspaper photographers' flashbulbs
recorded the historic event, and both American and Mexican news
journals wrote extensively of the daring driver and his soldier guide.
On March 1, a massive luncheon was held for Beaudit and
Holmdahl at Mexico City's St. Francis Hotel. The Mexico City
English language newspaper The Daily Mexican wrote, "The honored
guest was E.I. Holmdahl, the young machinist and guide who pilot-
ed Mr. Beaudit through the jungles and mountains from Tepic to
this city." [8]
Festivities over, Holmdahl returned to Yaqui country to contin-
ue the routine business of hunting and killing Indians. He was
probably happy when his command was ordered south to quell a
more serious revolt. A slightly built Indian, who wore a hat almost
as wide as he was tall, had roused the countryside in the state of
Morelos into a flaming rebellion against the fumbling Madero gov-
ernment. His name was Emiliano Zapata. For Holmdahl it would
be a trip from the frying pan to the fire.
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