Gen. Lee the last Confederate statue removed in New Orleans
They were among the city’s oldest landmarks, as cemented to the landscape of New Orleans as the Superdome and St. Louis Cathedral: a stone obelisk heralding white supremacy and three statues of Confederate stalwarts.
But after decades standing sentinel over this Southern city, the Confederate monuments are gone, amid a controversy that at times harked back to the divisiveness of the Civil War they commemorated.
January 11, 1916: Pancho Villa’s Troops Murder 18 Americans
On January 11, 1916, a group of bandits associated with the Mexican guerrilla leader Pancho Villa stopped a train at Santa Ysabel in Chihuahua state, forced nineteen mining engineers from the American Smelting and Refining Company to get off, and then shot them all, with just one man surviving by playing dead. The sole survivor, Thomas B. Holmes, recalled:
Just after alighting, I heard a volley of rifle shots from a point on the other side of the cut and just above the train. Looking around, I could see a bunch of about 12 or 15 men standing in a solid line, shoulder to shoulder, shooting directly at us… Watson kept running, and they were still shooting at him when I turned and ran down grade, where I fell in some brush… I saw that they were not shooting at me, and thinking they believed me already dead, I took a chance and crawled into some thicker bushes. I crawled through the bushes until I reached the bank of the stream… There I lay under the bank for half an hour and heard shots by ones, twos and threes.
A Mexican miner who was present told a correspondent for the New York Sun:
No sooner had the train been brought to a standstill by the wreck the bandits had caused than they began to board the coaches. They swarmed into our car, poked Mausers into our sides, and told us to throw up our hands or they would kill us. Then Col. Pablo Lopez, in charge of the looting in our car, said: “If you want to see some fun watch us kill these gringoes. Come on, boys!” he shouted to his followers… I heard a volley of rifle shots and looked out the window… Colonel Lopez ordered the “tiro de gracia” given to those who were still alive, and the soldiers placed the ends of their rifles at their victims’ heads and fired, putting the wounded out of misery.