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Local History
Northern Mexico, especially Chihuahua State, provided the spark which touched off the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This led to a very convoluted series of events lasting from 1910 - 1920 in which revolutions started and ended, revolution evolved into civil war, and became revolution again as the victors and losers repeatedly took up arms and ideologies against each other. The root causes were many but land reform was fundamental. In 1776, the Spanish government established five militarily fortified settlements known as “free villages” in northern Mexico and gave them each a large tract of land for their use. Spain’s military was stretched thin and the safety created by the villages was an inducement for people to stay while allowing Spain to retain control. Casas Grandes was one of these villages. It possessed approximately 277,000 acres of land as did each of the other villages. After Mexico’s victory over the French at Puebla on May 5, 1862 (Mexico’s Cinco de Mayo holiday), Chihuahua had a large number of military colonists and wartime veterans who settled in the state and added to the small and very self-reliant population. These people had the military training and experience needed to fend off the constant Apache raids coming south from the U.S. The raids had persisted for generations and kept land prices depressed. Although both free villagers and landowners with conflicting interests existed in the same areas, the need to stay united against the common Apache enemy tended to suppress any internal dissention among themselves. Geronimo’s capture by the U.S. in 1885 effectively ended the Apache problems. Just before then, the federal government under President Díaz began a series of land transfers away from the five free villages originally established by the Spanish. That same year, railroads connected Chihuahua to the U.S., the economy suddenly boomed, and foreign capital flowed in. Land prices rose and the U.S. market opened to Mexican ranches and mines. With the Apache raids ended, the need for the military colonists as a protective force ended. Everyone wanted land and a large part of Chihuahua consisted of unclaimed land belonging to the federal government. Chihuahua State had to be surveyed. As payment, the government allotted one-third of lands surveyed to the surveying companies doing the work. This hit the free villages hard as the surveyors appropriated large parts of their holdings by refusing to recognize the original Spanish grants. The remaining two-thirds of public land was sold in large parcels to those who could afford it, typically hacienda owners and businessmen. Lands previously held in the public domain suddenly were off limits. The ability to gather wood, hunt game, and graze cattle was gone. The peasants and small settlers were shut out from what they previously had available to them and were now landless and powerless.
By 1910, president Porfirio Díaz had ruled Mexico with absolute power for over thirty years. Mostly vilified by historians, in his defense, Díaz maintained peace and worked to reduce the smothering influence of the Catholic Church in Mexico in the late 1800s. Up to then, the Church had extensive land holdings which Díaz partially liberated. But Díaz also had
other ideas - when it came to business, Mexico’s natural resources were for sale to the highest bidder. With presidential blessing, mostly American and European (including British) capital bought Mexican resources. Oil, timber, railroads, banking, and agriculture were dominated by foreign companies and a small inner circle of very wealthy Mexicans. At the start of the Revolution, approximately 40% of the Mexican economy was controlled by foreigners. Within Mexico it was worse as wealth was concentrated into a very small percentage of the population. Land ownership meant wealth and power. Some 95% of Mexico’s titled land was owned by 5% of the population and there was no middle class. Hacienda San Diego south of Casas Grandes is an example of the disparity of those times. For everyone else, conditions were very tough. In the north, peasants worked land owned by wealthy “hacendados” (hacienda owners) and themselves owned little beyond their clothes. Haciendas created conditions similar to mediaeval Europe in which serfs were held in economic bondage by their feudal king. Hacendados frequently paid their laborers in “currency” usable only at the store operated by the landowner. The peasants were kept perpetually in debt and by law this debt was inherited by their sons when the debtor died. Many peasants lived out their lives and never traveled more then a few miles from the hacienda where they lived. In the south, large agricultural companies commanded the land and displaced peasants were compelled to work for the company’s benefit. Both situations were unsustainable and resentments grew.
Francisco Madero came from a wealthy family. Although privileged by birth, he aspired to return Mexico to the rule of law after thirty-plus years of autocracy by Díaz. His popular reformist views caught the attention of Díaz. In 1910, Madero ran for president against Díaz. Under pressure and anxious to secure his re-election one last time, Díaz simply jailed Madero in June, declared victory in July, and released him in October. Madero fled to the United States and drafted a manifesto (the Plan of San Luis Potosi) claiming the election was a fraud, declared himself interim president until new elections could be held, and called for an uprising when the document was published on November 20, 1910. A few months later, the first battle of the Revolution took place in Casas Grandes when Madero and a small army of supporters attacked government troops on March 6, 1911. Madero almost won the fight but government reinforcements arrived in time to save the day. Madero was wounded in the fight and retreated to Bustillos to regroup and heal his injured arm. As the Revolution gained strength, the upper-class rebels who started the insurgency quickly lost control of it. This was the beginning of Mexico’s descent into chaos - a decade-long violent and bloody struggle which consumed the country and cost the lives of over 800,000 Mexicans - a greater number of deaths than occurred in the American Civil War. And it all started here in Casas Grandes.
By the end of 1910, American engineer and financier Dr. Fredrick Stark Pearson was beginning to see his investments in Mexico paying off. He had invested heavily in Mexico looking to profit from the extensive forests in the Sierra Madre mountains. His group owned in excess of 2.6 million acres of timberland. Pearson constructed the town of Madera to operate a lumber mill (hence the name). Further north another sawmill was constructed and the town of Pearson (present-day Mata Ortiz) originated. Both towns were along his railroad line making lumber shipments to El Paso easy. Pearson’s holdings included the Mexico Northwest Railroad (NorOeste de México). To complete his route, he had constructed a rail line from Juarez to Casas Grandes, Pearson, and south over the mountains to Madera where it swung east to Chihuahua City and joined the Nacionál de México line returning north to Juarez. Although no longer in use, the original rail bed south from Casas Grandes is clearly visible today and much of it serves as a one-lane road. In Mata Ortiz, one building shows the faint outline of the town’s original name while the original train station building still stands and is in use today.
Pearson’s business timing was terrible as the Mexican Revolution started in 1911. The Mexico Northwest Railroad tried desperately to stay out of the conflict but this proved impossible. As the lines separating government-held and revolutionary-held territories moved back and forth, the railroad was forced to serve whomever ruled at that time. Naturally the opposing side did its best to undermine that advantage. The result was an on-going series of
burned or dynamited bridges and destroyed rolling stock. Losses mounted and after the Revolution ended, there were no reparations. In the end, Pearson abandoned Mexico. He and his wife died in the sinking of the British steamship Lusitania in 1915.
After the Mexican Revolution ended and with foreigners gone, national pride prevailed and the government extensively renamed most locations possessing foreign names. The revolution had effectively destroyed the Mexico Northwest Railroad and the sawmill at Pearson could no longer access easily available timber and was defunct. The community of Pearson was renamed Juan Mata Ortiz for a local military hero. Juan Mata Ortiz was a Captain under Colonel Joaquín Terrazas (cousin of governor Luis Terrazas) in the Chihuahua State Militia. Both were experienced Indian fighters and in 1880, they were on the trail of the Apache warrior Victorio. On October 15, 1880 Victorio’s fighting band, some seventy-two men, was surrounded and killed. The Apache raiding decreased but did not end. Two years later in November 1882, the Apache chief Juh, a cousin of Geronimo, claimed some more victims including Juan Mata Ortiz. Enraged over the killing of Victorio, Juh slowly burned Ortiz to death at the Chocolate Pass just north of Galeana, southeast of Nuevo Casas Grandes. It was not until 1885 and the capture of Geronimo that Apache raiding in Mexico diminished. Today, a plaque honoring Juan Mata Ortiz can be seen in the center of Galeana while the town bearing his name is now famous for its pottery.
