More than 1,100 West Virginia National Guard soldiers converged on Kanawha City 100 years ago this week, preparing to help secure the Mexican border after a bloody raid by revolutionary leader and former bandit Pancho Villa.
The soldiers gathered in a tent city in Kanawha City - then a sleepy, sparsely populated suburb of the state's capital city - after U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, a Martinsburg native, federalized the National Guard across the country in response to Villa's excursion across the New Mexico border.
Villa was a key figure in the revolution that toppled the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in 1910 and then booted out the next two presidents who replaced him. When Venustiano Carranza declared himself president of Mexico in 1914, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at first supported Villa's efforts to overthrown Carranza, but later changed his mind and backed the president.
Retaliation was swift. In January 1916, Villa's followers killed 18 American mining engineers on a train in northern Mexico. Less than two months later, Villa and 500 soldiers raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and an adjacent U.S. Army outpost. Eight soldiers and 10 civilians, including one woman, were killed in the raid. The town was looted and torched. U.S. soldiers killed more than 100 of Villa's fighters during the raid and immediately after as they pursued the Mexicans back across the border.
Villa's attack, which generated howls of outrage in Congress and a deluge of newspaper accounts examining the lurid details of the raid, prompted Wilson to order Gen. John Pershing to lead 4,800 cavalry troops into Mexico to capture or kill Villa. Four more Americans were killed by May on raids into two small Texas border towns. More than 10,000 regular U.S. Army troops were committed to what would ultimately be a fruitless search to hunt down Villa.
To protect the 1,200-mile border from future raids, Baker called 110,000 National Guard soldiers to active duty. The West Virginia National Guard had only two regiments of infantry troops available at the time of the call-up. Only one of them, the 2nd West Virginia Infantry, was close to fully staffed.
Although the War Department ordered the regiment to report to Terra Alta in Preston County for pre-deployment training, state Adjutant General John C. Bond asked to change the site to Camp Kanawha in Kanawha City.
Bond chose Kanawha City over Terra Alta "on account of more favorable climatic conditions and better transportation facilities," according to a 1916 interview that appeared in the Charleston Gazette. "It was not considered practicable to mobilize at an altitude of 2,500 feet for service in a hot climate," Bond said. (Also, the state had built a new tuberculosis hospital, now Hopemont Hospital, on the Terra Alta tract.)
Word of the change had apparently not reached the War Department, which sent a shipment of clothing and supplies for the newly mobilized troops to Preston County. State funds were used to buy new socks and underwear for the National Guard troops until the War Department shipment could be rerouted.
Despite the glitch, "60 hours after receiving mobilization orders we were under canvas," Bond said in a Gazette interview. Connections to water and natural gas sources were hooked up soon thereafter, and the soldiers began settling into a routine that began with reveille at 5:55 a.m. and ended with taps at 9 p.m. and lights-out at 9:30.
On West Virginia Statehood Day in 1916, "a corps of men worked all day getting Camp Kanawha in shape for the troops and getting a water main to the campsite," according to a Charleston Gazette account. Co. L from Bluefield and Co. K from Welch arrived at the camp by train that day, and that night, President Woodrow Wilson spoke through a telephone hookup to a crowd of 2,000 people attending a West Virginia Day dinner at the Charleston National Guard Armory.
Wilson was introduced to the crowd by U.S. Sen. William E. Chilton, speaking by phone from the White House in the company of the president.
"I feel great enthusiasm for the serious work which is ahead for us for Americanism and for the part I hope we will be able to play for international peace and greater security," Wilson told the Charleston diners during his brief address.
"West Virginia yields to no state in our loyalty," Gov. Henry Hatfield told Wilson in response to the president's remarks. "You can with absolute certainty depend on every ounce of brawn and muscle her manhood possesses" to join in the effort to stop Mexican border raids.
Precisely where Camp Kanawha was located in Kanawha City is unclear.
In 1898, the Guard operated a Kanawha City training facility called Camp Lee, in the vicinity of the current CAMC Cancer Center, that prepared soldiers for service in the Spanish-American War, according to descriptions contained in a history of the Guard's 1st Infantry Regiment.
In a 1910 report to the governor, a Camp Kanawha was cited as the locale for a National Guard rifle range, and was described as being "one and a half miles southeast of Charleston," putting it in the same ballpark as Camp Lee. Camp Kanawha was mentioned in two subsequent biennial reports, but its location was never listed as anything more specific than Kanawha City.
A 1925 photo of a National Guard camp located between present-day 35th and 40th Streets in Kanawha City appeared in the 1976 pictorial history "Kanawha County Images" by Stan Cohen and Richard Andre. At that time, the facility had been named Camp Charnock in honor of newly appointed Adjutant General John Charnock. It seems at least possible that all three camps occupied the same ground, under different names.
Wherever the camp was exactly, Guardsmen swam in the Kanawha River, played baseball and had tug-of-war competitions and boxing matches when not marching, drilling or handling chores around the camp, according to the Gazette, which carried daily reports of camp events.
On June 25, 1916, the men of the 2nd West Virginia Infantry held their first dress parade, which drew 5,000 Charleston residents and family members to Camp Kanawha to observe, according to press accounts. In July, the Guard troops marched to and from Spring Hill, including an overnight bivouac. They planned to make a 40-mile trek to Clendenin, but that was canceled because the War Department would not pay to rent horses for officers to ride as the enlisted men marched.
For 20 days in August, soldiers at Camp Kanawha took part in an activity that would be repeated by West Virginia National Guard soldiers dozens of times in the decades to come: flood recovery duty.
Heavy rains caused Cabin Creek to surge out of its banks, killing 71 people, destroying nearly 900 homes, washing out all roads and nearly 18 miles of railroad track. The Guardsman lugged in 4,500 ration kits and helped set up tents, disinfect wells and distribute donated clothes.
It wasn't until mid-October that the troops at the Kanawha City encampment learned they would be shipping out for Texas in a matter of days. Before leaving, according to an article in the Charleston Post, the West Virginia Guardsmen were issued what were later known as dog-tags. The newspaper described them as "identification discs, each bearing the number of regiment, the designation of company and other data which will result in complete identification to avoid 'unknown dead' tragedies from other wars."
On Oct. 17, after a morning spent picking up and burning litter from their camp, the regiment of Guardsmen marched in review past a large crowd of friends, relatives and well-wishers, listened to a long program of speeches, had a final dinner of ham and mashed potatoes and waited until 1 a.m. for the first of three trains to arrive to carry them southward.
After a stop in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they visited the Lookout Mountain Civil War battlefield, the West Virginia troops arrived on March 21 at Camp Wilson in San Antonio, Texas, where they would spend most of the next five months as part of the 1st Brigade of the 12th Infantry Division.
None of the 110,000 National Guard troops mobilized for duty along the border as part of the Mexican Punitive Expedition crossed the international boundary to take on Villa's army. Theirs was a defensive role, which mainly involved being part of a show of force to discourage Villa's army and its supporters from making more incursions. (Villa escaped Pershing's attempts to capture him, won a pardon from the Mexican government in 1920, and returned to ranching before he was assassinated in 1923.)
While in Texas, the West Virginia troops battled boredom, dust and flies, took part in a two-day march to test the endurance of Guard troops from across the nation in the hot, dry climate, beat the District of Columbia National Guard's football team 6-0, and won Camp Wilson's marksmanship trophy.
According to "The Great Call Up: The Guard, the Border and the Mexican Revolution," some of the West Virginia soldiers dug out an elaborate complex of entrenchments at Camp Wilson under the direction of a young Army lieutenant named Dwight D. Eisenhower. Once the Guardsmen completed the excavation work, the future Allied supreme commander and U.S. president gave them instruction on the basics of trench warfare, which would prove useful in the months to come.
In March 1917, after five months of training at Camp Kanawha and another five months in Texas, the West Virginia troops became the last non-Texas National Guard unit to leave Camp Wilson, arriving back in Huntington on March 24, where a mustering-out ceremony was held.
Their return to civilian life was short-lived. On April 10, they were ordered back to Camp Kanawha, where they were mobilized for service in World War I.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer @wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169, or follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.