In The Rain, To Hunt For Pancho
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 COURTESY OF DAN KERLEE THEN: On a rainy Sunday morning in June, 1916, troops march north on Railroad Avenue (later renamed Alaskan Way), where it still turns slightly at Union Street. They are preparing to ride the train, on the left, first to a boot camp at American Lake and then, it was thought, to the Mexican border.
PAUL DORPAT NOW: Most of the old railroad piers, including Pier 57 on the right, survive as landmarks on Seattle's central waterfront. |
Between the umbrellas and the railroad coaches, far left, four lines of uniformed men march north shoulder-to-shoulder, stomping the rough planks of Railroad Avenue. The commercial photographer John Cress has managed to raise his camera a foot or two above it all. Most helpfully he has also added a caption that reads "Washington National Guard Leaving Seattle June 25, 1916."
Since the draft law for World War I was then still 10 months away, I confess I was at first puzzled by the evident earnestness of these men with rifles preparing to board a train. A reading of The Sunday Seattle Times for this damp summer morning soon reveals why they march and where they are headed, or thought they were. It is not Europe but Mexico.
Many readers will know of the dangerous melodrama of Pancho Villa, the Mexican populist bandit who early in 1916 killed a large handful of Americans in raids across the border and avoided capture by the American expedition sent into Mexico to take him dead or alive. In this hide-and-seek, the U.S. troops, perhaps inevitably, began to clash with regulars of the Mexican army, and it was this series of incidents that in June of 1916 almost led to another war between the U.S. and Mexico.
On the 18th of June, President Woodrow Wilson called out the National Guard. On the 4th of July, Mexican president Venustiano Carranza apologized. Continuing to search through northern Mexico, the expedition eventually abandoned trying to catch the bandit and returned north of the border. The general in charge, John J. Pershing, spinned that it had all been a "learning experience." Most likely some of these men marching on the Seattle waterfront wound up a year later fighting in Europe with Pershing.
Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography. His new book is "Washington: Then & Now."
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