Chapter V - Exodus from Mexico

In a memorable interview with a magazine writer,' President Porfirio Díaz, who had ruled Mexico so long, said he would not seek re-election in 1910. Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy young idealist, became a candidate. But Díaz ran again despite his eighty years and jailed Madero. The latter escaped, and with the aid of adventurers from the United States and many other countries, began a revolution in which most of the fighting took place in Chihuahua.

When Madero and his men attacked Casas Grandes on March 5, 1911, the firing was heard in Colonia Dublan, six miles away, and several of the defeated rebels, heavily draped with belts of cartridges, rode through the colony. Nevertheless, Miss Amy Pratt, a schoolteacher, sister of Mrs. Romney, and other instructors taught classes as usual that day and the older Romney boys attended. The area was held first by rebels, then federals, then rebels again. Madero emerged victorious after capturing Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, on May 10, 1911, and traveled triumphantly by way of the Northwestern Railroad southward to be inaugurated as president.

The Romney family was in the crowd that gathered at the station to see the little man who had just overthrown what had seemed an impregnable regime. Madero responded with a speech and patted the heads of George Romney and other children. Peace was restored but not for long. Pascual Orozco, a dissatisfied follower of Madero, led a counterrevolution in February, 1912, adopted a red flag as his emblem and soon held most of Chihuahua. "Red Flaggers" confiscated from the Mormons supplies, cattle and horses, including the Romneys' Monte. There were robberies and murders on outlying farms, nine Mormons in all, eventually being killed. To safeguard lives, President Junius Romney had rifles and ammunition smuggled to the colonies. 2

Anti-American feeling flared in the area when President William Howard Taft on March 2, 1912 proclaimed an embargo on shipments of arms from the United States, thus cutting off rebel supplies. Two days later the State Department urged all American citizens to leave Chihuahua "without delay." With the exception of a dozen who had become naturalized, all four thousand of the Mormon colonists were American citizens but their only homes were in Mexico and they remained.

Junius Romney pledged their neutrality and obtained from General Jose Inez Salazar, the rebel commander at Casas Grandes, assurances of protection. These promises were ignored increasingly after the Red Flaggers lost battles and the federals occupied Chihuahua City on July 9, 1912. Salazar asked for a list of arms in the hands of the colonists.

1871-1955

While George and the other children slept, a conference took place at the Gaskell Romney house in Colonia Dublan, the night of July 12. A messenger had ridden sixty miles with word that a rebel colonel at La Ascension had looted a Mormon grist mill and announced he would attack Colonia Diaz next day unless the colonists there surrendered their arms to him by 10 A.M. Informed by telephone at 9:30 P.M. in Colonia Juárez, Junius Romney and his counselor, Hyrum S. Harris, rushed ten miles by buckboard to Casas Grandes.

Though it was nearly midnight, Junius Romney with the plea that it was "a matter of life or death" induced guards to awaken Salazar. The sleepy general cursed the colonel, said he was not supposed to demand the arms and, apparently involuntarily, added "todavia no," ("not yet" in Spanish, which Romney understood). Junius Romney and Harris drove on six miles to Colonia Dublan with Salazar's written message countermanding the La Ascension order. The messenger from Colonia Diaz, who had been put to bed, set off with it at 3 A.M. and the colony leaders spent the remainder of the night debating what to do.

Salazar's "todavia no" sent a cold chill up Junius Romney's spine. To the council, which lasted until dawn in the front room of the Gaskell Romney home, Bishop Albert Daniel Thurber of Colonia Dublan brought another alarming message. A friendly Mexican, who had been in the councils of the rebels, warned they were planning to loot the colonies. When he made a quick trip to the border to consult Church officials about the situation, Junius Romney encountered Salazar on the train. He threatened vengeance for the arms embargo, saying the United States was killing his men without risking its own, and boasted that the rebels could defeat all of the United States, "except maybe Texas."

"To attempt to retain our arms and ammunition," Junius Romney advised Church authorities, "means to engage in an armed conflict with the rebels with odds of twenty to one against us; and to surrender our arms means to have our families at the mercy of demons." Depredations increased. More cattle and horses were seized. Rebels walked streets begging and looting. Events came to a climax on July 27,1912, a Saturday, when Salazar ordered Henry Bowman, the storekeeper, to bring Junius Romriey to rebel headquarters at Casas Grandes.

In a stormy interview, the general demanded that Romney order the colonists to surrender their guns, saying previous promises were "words carried away by the wind." When Romney objected that he lacked authority, Salazar said his men would search the Mormon homes and take the arms by force if they were not surrendered. Romney agreed to discuss with colony leaders surrender of the arms at a central point, if Salazar would allow the women and children to be evacuated and would not invade the Mormon homes. Salazar agreed and a guard of soldiers accompanied Rom­ney, Orson P. Brown, and those with him to Colonia Dublan.

There they found rebels looting a store, cavalry on three sides of the town and four cannon and seven machine guns trained on it from the cattle yards to the northeast. Armed rebels surrounded Bishop Thurber's house as Junius and Gaskell Romney and other leaders discussed their plight. There was no alternative but to appear to comply with the demands. Keeping their forty-seven new long-range rifles concealed, the colonists yielded pistols, shot­guns, hunting rifles and rusting old weapons of many kinds to the rebels at the schoolhouse. Other colonies followed the same procedure.

Preparations began to send women and children to the border. Money in the local bank was divided among the families. Some took the Mexico Northwestern train that night. One man went with every ten families while the others remained. Colonists, some of whom lived seventy-five miles away in the mountains, began to stream afoot and in wagons and buggies toward stations on the railroad. Some on the way to Pearson were held up and robbed by drunken soldiers. Every train north was crowded.

The Gaskell Romney family and other women and children of the colony were scheduled to leave Colonia Dublan Sunday evening on a special train. Several hundred persons gathered in a drizzling summer rain at the station and in front of the Bowman store but a damaged bridge to the south delayed the train. The Romneys returned home and slept. When the train pulled in early Monday its passenger and freight cars were jammed already with refugees and additional cars had to be added.

As an expectant mother, Mrs. Romney was given a seat in a coach. With her were Miles, young George, who had just celebrated his fifth birthday, and Lawrence, his two-year-old brother; two of her sisters, Miss Amy Pratt, the schoolteacher, and Mrs. Verde Pratt Cardon, wife of Clarence Cardon, then a missionary in Paris, France. Ahead in a freight car were the older Romney boys, Maurice and Douglas. They were cheerful as they arrived in El Paso that afternoon.

In all 2,300 Mormon refugees reached El Paso within three days, to become, in the later words of George Romney, "the first displaced persons of the twentieth century." Half a dozen babies were born en route and the El Paso Herald compared their flight to the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the hegira of the early Mormons from Nauvoo to Utah sixty-five years earlier. Those unable to pay were carried without tickets by the railroad and their fares billed to the Church.

The Romney family crowded into a taxicab and, after being turned away by several places, found temporary quarters in a small hotel. They had just twenty-five dollars, two suitcases and three bedrolls. Many families were installed in vacant tenements and several hundred were quartered in huge empty lumber sheds on Magoffin Avenue which the Long Lumber Company made available. The U.S. Army supplied rations and loaned tents from Fort Bliss. Mayor C. E. Kelly and city officials joined Church leaders in finding homes and jobs for the refugees. Congress voted $100,000 for their transportation and relief.

Looting and abuse of Americans, meanwhile, increased in the colonies and Junius Romney ordered the Mormon men to rendezvous with their guns and horses at "The Stairs," a hidden mountain spot seven miles from Colonia Juárez. Gaskell Romney buried some valuables beneath the floor of his home. He brought away his wife's hard-used sewing machine but had to abandon it when the rebels pursued and opened fire. A young man named William Smith was hit in the leg by a bullet. When the colonists returned the fire, the pursuers turned back. A military organization was formed with Gaskell Romney as quartermaster, Orson P. Brown as captain, and the party of 235 men, 500 horses and a commissary wagon started north between a federal force to the west and the rebels to the east. marching under a blazing sun, the Mormons covered the 150 miles to the border in two days and entered New Mexico at Dog Springs, southeast of Hachita.

With a beard of several days still on his face, Gaskell Romney rejoined his family in El Paso that night and moved them to better quarters in a house near Fort Bliss owned by an absent friend of Helaman Pratt. A big Army truck delivered the government rations of bread, Post Toasties, peanut butter and similar items.

There Charles Wilcken Romney, the family's sixth son, was born, on August 26, 1912, with Aunt Aggie Thurber, the Colonia Dublan midwife, again in attendance. Charles grew up to be a Salt Lake City attorney, businessman, director of the Salt Lake Baseball Corporation, member of the Utah Legislature and, unlike most of his family, a member of the Democratic party.

Foreseeing no early peace in Mexico, Gaskell Romney sold his brick home in Colonia Dublan to one of his brothers-in-law, Wilford Farnsworth, the husband of Eleanor Romney, and saw it only once more years later. The colonists eventually in 1938 received from Mexico $2.65 for each $100 of loss during the revolutionary disorders. Gaskell Romney's losses were so great that he received enough to purchase a comfortable house in Salt Lake City in which he lived his last years.

In the meantime, Colonia Díaz was burned to the ground. Several tides of revolution swept over Colonia Dublan and it was headquarters for General John J. Pershing's expedition in pursuit of Pancho Villa, most famous of the bandits of the region. Paradoxically that genial killer favored the colonies and spared Colonia Dublan both before and after his 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico.

Even General Salazar, who caused the exodus, eventually regarded the colonists with friendship. A Villista in his last years, he camped in 1917 on the river above Colonia Juárez and was invited by young women of the Mutual Improvement Association to a picnic lunch. He accepted and enjoyed himself. A few weeks later he was ambushed and slain near Nogales 4

To support his family in El Paso, Gaskell Romney obtained tools and returned to his old trade of carpenter. Maurice Romney, the eldest son, became a Western Union messenger. Douglas Romney obtained a newspaper route and even Miles Romney went to work at $2.50 a week as a department store cashboy. But the city was crowded and work limited.

Gaskell and his brother, George Samuel Romney, a refugee from Colonia Juárez, that fall moved their families to Los Angeles in the hope of greater opportunities. Grandmother Hannah Hood Hill Romney, then seventy years old, accompanied the two families. In all, five of her sons had come out of Mexico in the exodus and she had gone from Arizona, where she had been living, to El Paso to help care for new babies and those who had become ill because of the hardships. They arrived in Los Angeles in time for nine-year-old Miles to sell newspaper extras announcing the election of President Woodrow Wilson.

The two families were so large that they had difficulty in finding houses within their means and landlords willing to rent to them. With the birth of young Charles Romney, there were six sons in the Gaskell Romney family. His brother, George Samuel Romney, then had two sons and five daughters. A sixth girl, Maurine Romney, was born in Los Angeles December 12, 1912.

After promising to repair any damage their children might do, the families rented houses a block apart. The fathers at once went to work as carpenters. Gaskell's eldest son, Maurice, and George Samuel's son, Marion, went to work also as carpenter's helpers. The younger children attended school.

To get to school from the Gaskell Romney home at Twenty-first and Main, they had to walk through abandoned Luna Park and were a little frightened by mysterious-appearing Japanese boys who frequented the place. Sensing this, one pushed young George. Miles came to his aid and knocked down the other youth. This ended the Oriental menace in the neighborhood. About this time young George rode in an automobile for the first time.

Charles Henry Wilcken, the colorful 6 feet 4 inch great-grandfather of the boys, paid Los Angeles a visit and took them to their first vaudeville show. For the first time they saw trained ponies and dogs. As the Romneys were not used to such entertainment, it was a memorable occasion. Wilcken also fascinated the youngsters with recollections of his life in Germany, how he served in both the German and American armies and how he had been a personal bodyguard for the Kaiser in Germany and for Brigham Young in Utah.

Besides his carpentry, George Samuel Romney had been a science teacher in Mexico. When he had a chance to return to teaching in the fall of 1913 in the Oakley Academy, a Church school at Oakley, Idaho, he accepted and moved his family there. The Gaskell Romneys followed, stopping for a short stay in the old Wilcken home in Salt Lake City, and the brothers were reunited in Oakley, a town of six hundred in the southern part of the state near the Utah border. They bought a farm in an area that was to be benefited by water from a dam being constructed on Goose Creek and Gaskell Romney built a frame house in Oakley.

NOTES:

1- James Creelman for Pearson's Magazine, March, 1908.
2- Junius Romney's account of these events, as told September 22, 1912, in El Paso, Texas, to Senator A.B. Fall and his Senate Subcommittee, was published in Investigation of Mexican Affairs (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), Vol. 2 pp. 2574-2590/ When 81 years of age, he confirmed this for Tom Mahoney in Salt Lake City, Utah on June 4, 1959. Thomas Cottam Romney, a brother of Junius, and also in the Exodus, described it in The Mormon Colonies in Mexico ( Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, Utah 1938), pages 149-248.
3- El Paso Herald, July 31, 1912, in a dispatch from Pearson, Chihuahua, by George H. Clements. This newspaper is now the El Paso Herald-Post.
4- Nelle Spilsbury Hatch, Colonia Juarez (Deseret Book Company, 1954, Salt Lake City, Utah), Pages 216-221.

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