Novels don’t usually need forewords but in this case it seems useful that the reader know the background of the events depicted herein.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century the Mexican government—in eternal social and financial turmoil—started selling off vast tracts of land in its desolate northern provinces on the notion that wealthy American entrepreneurs would exploit the land by building infrastructure that the government in Mexico City could not afford. Accordingly, the Guggenheims began to develop large mining operations in Northern Mexico, Harrimans built railroads, Morgans, Hearsts, and Whitneys developed enormous livestock ranches, and so on, employing thousands of Mexican citizens until, inevitably, the revolution moved northward.
The gist of this story—the kidnapping of children by the legendary revolutionary general Pancho Villa, and the manhunt through the Sierra Madre—was suggested to me by a dear friend, the late Edwin “Eddie” Morgan, of the New York Morgans, whose grandfather owned an immense cattle ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico, that in 1916 was attacked by Villa’s army and later confiscated by the Mexican government during the revolution. Eddie regaled friends with stories of his grandfather and entourage riding in his private railcar from New York down to Chihuahua, the purchase of the bear in Nashville, and the great cattle drive to El Paso. Pancho Villa actually strung up Morgan’s ranch manager and had him sabered to death—the same manager who, when once asked by a large Chicago meat packer if he could supply thirty thousand head of cattle, wired back: “Which color?”
