Was Tirzo de la Toba a hysterical product of the times? Was he an exaggerated caricature of a Mexican Bandito generated by American yellow journalism? Or was he an embarrassing post-mortem for the life and tragic times of a Mexican Icon, a man who today is remembered as a national hero and patriot?

 

The times, 1910 through 1915, were traumatic yet promising for San Diego County, Baja California, and the border they shared. In 1912, the Panama Canal was on the verge of being completed and San Diego, as the closest American harbor to the canal, saw a bright and profitable future. A mighty fair to celebrate and advertise San Diego was being readied in what is now called Balboa Park. A railroad line, overcoming fantastic physical hurdles, was being run from San Diego to Yuma, directly connecting the city to Eastern markets. It would ultimately be called 'The Impossible Railroad'. Semi-precious jewels, especially Kunzite, had been found in the county, and with the Dowager Empress of China being obsessed with the creamy pink stone, the market boomed. Tiffany's of New York bought up claims, and a handful of prospectors crawled across the back of the Laguna Mountains and the boulder hills along the border, looking for mineral wealth.

 

There was adventure, and desperation. The Labor Movement and Anarchists had somehow become intertwined, and were tearing at the fabric of the nations, and because of the border, settled on San Diego for their Free Speech Movement. Diaz, the dictator of Mexico, was finally being challenged by men like Madero and Magon, but in the sleepy border towns of Campo, Tecate and Tijuana, the small populations slumbered in quaint Old West oblivion, unaware and unprepared for the coming, very Twentieth Century, Mexican Revolution.

 

His name is spelt Turso, Tirso, Turzo, Tirze, and in one instance, Juan. His last name has been spelt de la Toba, Toba, Tobo, and Tabo. Spelling of names, of course, is subjective, but it does seem the journalists of the time were mocking the would-be revolutionario. The most common spelling appears to be Tirzo de la Toba.

 

Solid facts of Toba's life are spotty, and the newspapers are contradictory. The first time Tirzo de la Toba is mentioned is in a March 6, 1906 article in the San Diego Union, where Toba was arraigned for smuggling Chinese into the United States, crossing somewhere near Campo, California, possibly through Smugglers Cave, and captured in Temecula, nearly a hundred miles away. It would also be reported that Toba was forced to flee to the United States permanently after murdering a Chinese.

 

Smugglers Cave is only a short distance from the border-line, east of Jacumba in the treacherous and rugged In-Ko-Pah Mountains, also called La Rumarosa. The cave is close to the only accessible water source in the area. It reeks of history, both mythical and real, and one of its legends is that it was used to smuggle Chinese into the United States.

 

The smuggling of Chinese into the United States was the first incident of human contraband in California history. The hostility toward Asians as a whole, but especially the Chinese, was multi-faceted and complex. The industriousness of the 'Celestials' as they were called, undermined the Anglo-Saxon dogma of a superior work ethic, but also the Chinese practiced layers of female exploitation from First Wife, through concubines down to prostitutes. Having just ended slavery, many Americans simplistically perceived all Chinese women as slaves and prostitutes, and indeed, well into the 1880's there are posters of slave auctions of Chinese women in San Francisco. In the papers of 1912 the phrase "The Yellow Peril" is common and casual, the writers denouncing Asian culture with strident righteousness.

 

The Chinese Immigration Exclusion Act of 1882, which, while it was only supposed to last ten years, continued by various extensions and modification until 1928. Through its many incarnations, the Act severely limited the number of Chinese that could enter the country to work, made it almost impossible for Chinese to travel to their homeland and return, and denied all Chinese immigrants the opportunity to become citizens. In Southern California, Chinese were forced with violence and threats of violence to flee to Baja California, and then refused re-entry. One section of American culture championing the exclusion of Chinese were labor unions, who believed the 'coolies' were a Capitalist tool to keep labor costs down. The notable exception to this rule, however, was the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies.

 

Starting in 1911, Ricardo Flores Magon, banished to the United States, seeing revolution in his native Mexico, launched his Workers Revolution in hopes of setting a match to the powder keg of oppressed laborers throughout the world and cause an international uprising. With his Wobbly allies, his Liberal Army of Internationalists, soldiers of fortune, ne'er-do-wells and blood-thirsty murderers, with only an occasional Mexican thrown in, rose along the border of Baja California.

 

Toba might have been in the mix by then, but maybe not apart of the Magonistas. An article in the Imperial Valley Press, late May 1911, reports a 'bandit named Tobo', was leading a band of 'organized looters', operated just south of Campo, running off cattle at the Benton Ranch on the north side of the border, burning down the Abernathy ranch house on the south side. Another article had him as an officer under Pierce, Mosby, and Bernstein, all soldiers-of-fortune hired to bolster the Liberal Army's officer corps, and when they marched west to capture Tecate, where his Chinese smuggling routes would have existed six years earlier, Toba's knowledge of the terrain would have been invaluable.

 

Tecate and Tijuana ultimately fell to the Liberal Army, and its ranks swelled with Yankees. The Wobblies openly set up recruiting stations along the border, notably El Cajon, California. Would-be conscripts were offered two dollars a day to fight as 'Magonistas'. Workers on the railroad line deserted their jobs and joined the Liberal Army, one stating he joined simply so he 'wouldn't miss the fun'.

 

 

In his book 'Desert Revolution', Lowell Blaisdell describes nothing less than a carnival of pointless carnage not seen since William Walker. The largest part of the Magonistas, overwhelmingly non-Mexicans, settled down in Tijuana and spent their time posing for pictures and talking up the papers. There was a festive atmosphere as the town was looted. Finally, when pressed by the Mexican Army, and after a sharp three hour battle that left, according to one account, more than half of the Liberal Army dead or dying east of Tijuana, the Insurectos fled across the border and surrendered en mass to American forces to avoid Mexican justice.

 

But not all of the Magonistas fled. Some, the Mexican nationals that very well might have been deported back to Mexico for certain execution, slipped away, and Magon, the fiery revolutionary, appointed his last general, Tirzo de la Toba.

 

Toba's whereabouts when the Magonistas looted Tijuana are not known, what rank he held before his promotion to general of the Liberal Army mysterious as well, but according to the San Diego Union, in 1912 he was 35 years old, five foot four, 135 to 140 pounds, small eyes, which were slightly crossed. The paper finished their description of Toba as 'good looking with a small mustache'. In another article, he is described as 'the Indian outlaw' and another declares him Yaqui, but a picture of Toba from 1914 is of a dark man that has no physical features associated with Native Americans. One article contends that he was close friends with Ryce Price, another professional soldier that had been a real officer in the British Army and one of the many previous generals that the Liberal Army had in its short existence. Another article contends he was friends with Pancho Villa, although it also disparages Toba as a man not worth having as a friend.

 

With the collapse of the Liberal Army, and with at least its foreign members surrendering to American forces, Magon directed Tirzo in a letter dated June 11, 1911, to head south, deeper into Baja California, to gather new recruits to his small army, to open the silos of the wealthy to the poor, to take what he needed from the rich, to avoid contact with Federal forces until he was re-armed, and only then should he begin again the International Revolution.

 

It might have been that Toba did indeed head deeper down into Mexico to continue the fight, but if so, Regeneracion, the news organ of Magon's Mexican Liberal Party, gives him yet another first name, Florencio de la Toba. More than likely, within months of the Liberal Army's defeat at Tijuana, Toba had thrown in the towel and escaped back into the United States. Diaz was deposed, Madero was the provisional president. Magon was hamstrung by legal battles in American courts. While it may not have been the world-wide explosion Magon had wanted, to the average soldier in the field, it could have looked like the battle, if not the war, was over.

 

The next time Toba was mentioned in the papers, it was in the pages of Regeneracion, November 25th, 1911.

 

In a cornfield eight miles north of Holtville, roughly fifteen miles into the United States, Toba was helping to harvest a crop of corn, when the political boss of Mexicali, Mexico, Rodolfo Gallegos, seized Toba and two others, took them across the border, and on the 18th of November, 1911, Tirzo de la Toba was executed.

 

Miraculously, Toba rises from the dead. In December, Regeneracion begged its adherents in Imperial Valley to raise money for a lawyer for Toba, as he languished in prison in Mexicali.

 

By January 13th, 1912 the story got a whole lot better. The Imperial Valley I.W.W. local 439 reported that Toba had been abducted by two American officials, and without any extradition papers, had hustled the would-be general to Mexicali and had handed him off to the Rurales and Gallegos, a former Magonista turned Maderoista, who promptly began to move him down to Ensenada for execution. Almost there, de la Toba escaped, and according to the Wobblies, spent the next three days in the desert without food or water before arriving back at Holtville, in rags.

 

The article reporting also contended that the Madero regime had put a $100 reward on any man who had served with the Liberal Army, and $500 for any officers.

 

The January story needs to be parsed. The only real road to reach Ensenada from Mexicali runs along the border through Tecate and then down to Ensenada, at the time the capital of Baja California. Toba would have been in the desert a whole lot more than three days if he escaped only shortly before Ensenada. More than likely, if any of this story is true , when they reached the Rumarosa area, just east of Tecate, Toba saw his chance. This was his old stomping grounds. This is where he'd smuggled Chinese across in 1906, and this would be the area the Magonistas would have passed through on their march from Mexicali to Tecate and beyond. He might have survived without food, and Toba knew where the water holes were, at Bill Hill's Cave, another source near Smugglers Cave, then down in Pinto Wash, the last two across the border where the Rurales might have been unwilling to cross and run into American authorities. If he made it to Coyote Wells, he could have hitched a ride on a freight wagon and indeed made it back to Holtville in three days. As someone who has back-packed through Myer Valley, Moon Valley and Devils Canyon, with all the gear and tools necessary to accomplish this, I can attest that by the time he reached home, he would have been in rags.

 

Kidnapping was one of the more direct methods Diaz had used to suppress opposition north of the border to his regime, along with American law enforcement harassment and filing extradition papers. Out-right murder was best done in Mexican soil, if not Mexican prisons. Madero, for all his ideals, and having had these same tactics used against him, seemed to have immediately resorted to the same. In September of 1911, not three months after the Liberal Army had relinquished the field, Ambrosio D. Ruiz, a constable in El Cajon, twenty miles east of San Diego, was kidnapped at his residence in El Cajon, thirty miles north of the border by road to the Mexican border, and was spirited away. He escaped, identified his kidnappers, and the American Federal Attorney General set about filing extradition papers, sent to the appropriate Mexican authorities, with meaningless results. It turns out that Ruiz had been a Wobbly sympathizer that had worked to assist the Liberal Army earlier in the year.

 

The Maderistas in Mexicali scrambled to take credit for Toba's kidnapping. In a letter dated November 18th, 1911, Gallegos describes the whole incident to President Madero, bragging how the Imperial County Sheriff assisted in spiriting Toba across the border to Mexico, and then begs for more money for 'Secret Police'.

 

The bounty on his head could be why Toba took to the field again. If he was going to be hunted for the bounty, why not hunt back? His kidnapping by Maderistas might also explain why he hated Madero so. Although Magon and Madero had both fought against Diaz and are both considered patriots by Mexicans today, once Madero's forces triumphed over Diaz, Magon immediately denounced Madero, and declared him no better than the man they had both worked to depose. Madero was fighting for a very limited revolution, rule of law, more of Mexico for Mexicans, not seizure of the tools of capital to be distributed to the Workers, no land for peasants taken from the wealthy, no foreigners routed from the nation. There was a philosophical canyon between Madero and Magon.

 

It was not the best of circumstances for a renewed revolution in Baja California, though. After the travesty of the campaign the year before, Baja California, especially the people along the border, had turned rabidly against the Magonistas. The sheer number of foreigners butchering and looting made it easy to believe Diaz's propaganda that the whole affair was nothing but another Gringo filibuster adventure working to seize Baja California, and either annex it into the United States, or make it a separate Foreigners' Utopia, what one San Diegan enthused would be a 'Gaming Republic', Baja prostituted for the pleasures of occupying outsiders.

 

There was something to this. In these pre-Great War days in the still Wild West, considerable yearning existed among a lot of powerful people in the United States for Baja California, at least the northern part, to fall into U.S. control. In Imperial Valley, most of the dikes and canals built to get water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley, creating the agricultural Mecca that the Valley is today, lay on the southern side of the border. John D. Spreckel's Impossible Railroad, The San Diego Arizona and Eastern, that was being built in that year of 1912, shot due south from San Diego down into Tijuana, then ran, and still runs, thirty-four miles on the Mexican side before crossing back into the Unites States at Campo. These two points alone, besides natural resources that Baja possesses, made it seem natural to American interests that Manifest Destiny should once again justify expansion. That Mexico was in complete turmoil, and legitimate foreign enterprises were being threatened by all of the forces kicking around in Mainland Mexico, had both the San Diego Union, which just happened to be owned by Spreckels, along with the San Diego Evening Tribune, and Harrison Gray Otis's Los Angeles Times, drumming for 'intervention'. References to the glorious Spanish-American war were everywhere. They greeted American troop movements ,as Mexico fell deeper into bloody civil war, with glee. Would-be Rough-Riders drilled in the Square.

 

With Diaz run off and replaced with the moderate Madero, the thin population of Baja California, for the most part, couldn't understand why the talk of revolution continued.

 

Then too, strategically, Baja California in 1912 was not the most practical place to start a Mexican revolution. The population was so incredibly sparse, there was hardly enough people to round up to join a revolution. The peninsula was secluded from the rest of Mexico, economically and somewhat culturally. If the Magonistas were to take Baja California, anyone on the Mexican coast could cut them off from spreading, and opposing forces could be landed anywhere along the Baja Coast with a simple bunch of fishing boats.

 

Nonetheless, on March 23rd, 1912, Toba, leading an army of somewhere between seven and thirteen, attacked the ranch house of Pedro Arguelles in Canyon Verde, just west and south of Jacumba, California, killing the wealthy farmer, and wounding one of his employees. The New Revolution was on.

 

Toba had some real soldiers with him from the beginning. In March of 1912, Prospero Sainz, Pablo Leal and Jose Vasquez deserted the Mexican Federal army at Mexicali. Sainz was a drill master of the Third Troops of Volunteers, one newspaper saying he was an officer. The deserters left with three horses and saddles, three carbines, and 600 rounds of ammunition, valued at $250. An article in the San Diego Union reported all three men being members of Toba's gang. Also with Toba were seven others, a kid named Salazar, described as 'young, apparently has American blood in him, very thin beard, scar across nose to left cheek, light brown eyes', someone only known as 'Castro - Round face, brown eyes and hair, young and light colored, small mustache', 'Gonzales - Age 20, very dark, high cheek bones, no beard', 'Heraclio Romero, Indian, age 25-28, 5 feet 7 inches, slim build, has been shot through the ankle, has long hair and wears hat over one eye, has hump shoulders' , 'Yzable --- May have been with this party, if not he is the leader of another raiding party, stays around El Cajon', 'Nickname "El Mocho"Has one hand off, age 25, small and slim', 'Louis Marron - Age 24 or 25, 5 feet, light complexion, good looking, well built, dark brown hair cut in a particular shape at the back', and finally ' Crespin Banderas - Age 35, 5 feet 7 inches, dark, has peculiar left eye. Has to turn his head to look at anything. Black mustache, lower lip very thick, well built.' In Santiago Guerrrero's book 'La gente al pie del Cuchuma', Heraclio Romero and Toba are a team.

 

The San Diego Union reported that shortly after the murder of Arguelles in Valley Verde, just south and west of Jacumba, sporadic shots could be heard from San Jose, just east of Tecate. 

 

W.I Gascon, an American, thinking to get supplies to San Jose, loaded up his car and headed for the town, only to see 'skirmishers' spaced out along the ridge before him, firing rapidly, at what the article doesn't volunteer. Gascon chose to retreat instead of investigating further. Mexican citizens poured into Tecate from the outlying areas, many more fleeing across the border to Campo to take refuge there and prepare to repel the Insurectos. The Mexican Army pressed in with a force of a hundred and twenty-five. Toba and his men fled across the border, and thus violated the United States Neutrality Act. American troops were called up and ordered to the border.

 

From newspaper articles as far-flung as Ogden Utah, pieces of the month-long manhunt that ensued had de la Toba bouncing back and forth across the border. A clash between the U.S. forces and Toba in Valentin Valley had an exchange of fire between the two forces. Though no one on either side was hurt, now the American Army had a vested interest in the war.

 

There are references in several articles of 'depredations' committed on both side of the border by Toba's gang, but other than the ruthless murder of Arguelles, and two American prospectors working their trade south of the border being robbed, there seems to be no actual documented crimes. Although I have as yet to find all the facts to go with this last robbery, it's quite possible that the two prospectors were Bill Hill and E.A. Langland. Bill Hill's cave, which he lived in from 1906 to 1915, is a mile south of the border in a gorgeous pile of stone with a year-round spring. It's roughly two miles from Smugglers Cave.

 

Toba avoided direct contact with either American or Mexican forces. Reported on April 23rd, somewhere near Jacumba, 16 miles east of Campo, Wobblie re-enforcements joined the hard-pressed Liberal Army, swelling its ranks to somewhere between twenty and thirty men, described by the Ogden Utah newspaper as 'well-armed and well-mounted'.

 

In Lowell Blaisdell's book 'Desert Revolution', he quotes different newspapers describing the ferocity of the Liberal Army 'mostly Americans and non-Mexicans', when capturing Tijuana the year before. 'The attackers, it was reported, "Showed no quarter or mercy. They fought like demons, time and again rushing trenches or strongholds in the face of a veritable rain of lead.'

 

With the new recruits, not only did Toba's army triple in size, it also went from being a mostly Mexican force to being dominated by wild-eyed Americans, probably of the same berserker mentality as the Liberal Army from the year before.

 

Meanwhile, on the other side of San Diego County at San Onofre, a new confrontation was occurring.

 

For more than four years, there had been a Free Speech Movement. The idea that free speech is denied anyone is beyond my comprehension, but in 1912, the Wobblie's Free Speech rallies, where they advocated the end of all private property, the 'tools of production' to be handed over to the workers, with violence if necessary, were considered so incendiary that, especially in San Diego, they were out-right banned. There had been 'Free Speech Riots', which turned the average San Diegn against the Wobblies. One hundred and fifty Wobblie activists had been thrown out of Los Angeles and had marched as a body south along the railroad track with the idea of storming San Diego City proper, intimating they would begin their redistribution of wealth. They were stopped cold by the San Diego Sheriff at the County line. An army of guards was hired and placed on the tracks to prevent the Woblies' continued advance.

 

On April 24th, however, the whole encampment of the Wobblies disappeared. Many of them had been openly carrying rifles and wearing what was described as 'double bandoleers worn across their chests'. The San Diego Union postulated that the Wobblies were going to join up with Toba, and have a larger force than either the Americans or Mexicans had in the field. A day later the Wobblies were found encamped in a valley east of San Onofre, but the possibility that some of them had gone unaccounted for and had slipped through to the Mexican Border, that the bloody nightmare of the 1911 Liberal Insurrection would be re-enacted, had the county on edge.

 

The pendulum swung wildly now. On April 30th, and before more of recruits could reach him, it was reported that Tirzo's cat-and-mouse game had snapped a trap.

 

San Diego County was building a road from Mountain Springs, just north of Smuggler's Cave, down through Myer Valley to Coyote Well, a monumental task, dropping three thousand feet in as many miles, with thousands of pounds of dynamite used to blow through the rugged stone. While scouting around the area, Fred Rhodes, the young civil engineer who had worked out the route the road had to take, spotted smoke rising from above boulders to the south.

 

"Thinking he would find a few friendly campers, he climbed up the hill to reach them," the San Diego Union reported, What he found instead, "Snugly hidden away in a gorge he (Rhodes) spotted Turso de la Toba, the Mexican bandit with a heavily armed gang."

 

Rhodes immediately sent word to the American troops in Campo, and the next day a Sergeant Roper with a squad of Americans and at least some Mexican forces, fell on the gang. In the article, the Union reported that Toba escaped back into Mexico, but left behind his cache of supplies. In a 1940's Desert Magazine article, Sam Bryan reported that the authorities found large amounts of food and tack abandoned by Toba in Smuggler's Cave.

 

In other newspaper articles from May, almost immediately after this incident on the American side of the border, just south of Jacumba, the Mexican army caught up with the Insurrectos.

 

After a short, sharp battle, two of Toba's men were dead, and the Liberal Army was routed once again across the border and into the roughest parts of the In-Ko-Pah Mountains. It wasn't so much Cat-and-Mouse now as ping-pong.

 

There would be numerous reports of Toba's gang all along the border, with American troops deployed to Yuma to guard against Toba's forces that were on the outskirts of Mexicali, but his battles seemed aimless and unproductive. His revolution was not catching fire, and recruits were not reaching him.

 

The reports from the newspapers became wildly erratic. One LA Times article howled "Tortured As Madero Spy - Banditos string him up by thumbs in hills." William B. Arguello, an employee at a Los Angeles Hotel, had traveled to Baja in November of 1912, to visit family, but had made the mistake of wandering from Tecate to Mexicali on the Mexican side of the border, and had had his horse shot out from him at Picacho Pass. Hauled before de la Toba, he was declared a spy, and Toba's 'eyes lit with hatred'. After a long, harrowing adventure, Agruello escaped and managed to reach Tecate and the U.S. border.

 

In another newspaper's article, referring to this piece, it was opined that the Times reporter had been smoking cheap opium when he wrote the story. The piece expressed the opinion that calling Toba a general was 'ludicrous', and ended their rant with, "The picture of Tobo as a revolutionist is particularly ludicrous, unless the term is used solely to describe the lowest and most abandoned type of marauding criminal."

 

Toba's exploits faded from the pages of the newspapers, with only a sporadic report. In December 1912, Prospero Saenz was extradited from the United States to Mexico, as a deserter and a thief. Haracular Romero, captured at the same time, convinced the American courts that he was not involved in Toba's army, and was released in Los Angeles.

 

Ricardo Flores Magon was tried in the United States and found guilty, along with his brother and two others, of violating the American Neutrality Act. Sentenced to Leavenworth, he died there, with multiple theories of the circumstances of his sudden demise.

 

In September of 1914, General Tirzo de la Toba, Indian outlaw, Magonista Insurecto, was found asleep under a tree on a ranch of forty acres he had leased in Imperial Valley, and was arrested. No charges were brought against him, but word was sent to the Mexican consul that Toba had been captured, and that if they wanted the bandit, they need only file the appropriate papers for extradition.

 

The Mexican government, however, was in such disarray, no such papers were filed. In January 1915, Tirzo was handed over to the Immigration Department. They shipped him and other undesirables to New York, where he was put on a ship headed for either Vera Cruz or Tampico. He was never heard from again.

 

Today, there is a statue of Magon in Tijuana on Avenido Revolucion, the main road, a salute to his radical 'liberal' views seen as an important influence on the present Mexican Constitution, but Tirzo de la Toba, his last general, is forgotten to history.