He was born Doroteo Arango in Durango in 1878, a sharecropper’s son bound to the hacienda system and its inherited debts. In 1894, at 16, he shot a landowner he said had assaulted his sister, stole a horse, and fled into the Sierra Madre. Years of cattle theft, arrests, and work as a mule skinner taught him the mountains and the movement of supplies. In 1910 Abraham Gonzalez recruited the outlaw now called Pancho Villa to Francisco Madero’s uprising against Porfirio Diaz, and within a year Villa had helped take Ciudad Juarez against Madero’s own orders.

This episode follows Villa from a firing squad wall and a Mexico City prison cell to command of the Division del Norte, the governorship of Chihuahua, and the occupation of Mexico City alongside Emiliano Zapata. It also follows the fall: Alvaro Obregon’s trenches and machine guns at Celaya in April 1915, the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, a year of evading John Pershing’s expedition, a government-funded retirement, and an ambush in Parral in July 1923.

• General Victoriano Huerta ordered Villa shot over a horse, and a last-second telegram from Madero’s brothers stopped the firing squad. In prison a Zapatista officer taught him to read and write properly.
• He escaped on Christmas Day 1912 and crossed back into Mexico in April 1913 with just seven men, who grew into the most feared army in the country.
• As governor he printed his own currency, threatened merchants who refused it, built more than 50 schools, and funded pensions for soldiers’ widows and orphans.
• The 1916 Columbus raid killed 18 Americans and brought 5,000 U.S. soldiers into Mexico, the first American expedition to use airplanes and motor trucks, and they never caught him.
• In 1926 his grave was opened and his head stolen. His remains were moved to the Monument to the Revolution only in 1976.