1915, November 17: (The Assault on Fort Rivière: The Bricked-Up Sally Port, General Josephette in His Plug Hat, and the End of the First Caco War): On a whis…

1915, November 17: (The Assault on Fort Rivière: The Bricked-Up Sally Port, General Josephette in His Plug Hat, and the End of the First Caco War): On a whistle signal from Butler the assault commenced. To their consternation, on reaching the dead space under the walls, the twenty-four men in the storming party found the sally port bricked up — the Caco entrance was a slippery masonry drain four feet high, three feet wide, and fifteen feet long, with a Caco sentry shooting at all and sundry just inside. Three Marines, including Major Butler, scrambled up as the Caco pumped shots down the tunnel — miraculously they reached the other end unscathed. Iams, Gross, and Butler tumbled out as some seventy Cacos rushed them, and covered by the three Marines fighting hand-to-hand at the tunnel mouth, the remainder of the storming party scrambled into Fort Rivière. The Cacos fought with machetes, sticks, and stones. General Josephette, the Caco leader — perhaps a devotee of Bawon Samdi — was killed in his habitual garb of black frock coat, plug hat, and brass watch chain. Within a quarter hour, fifty Cacos lay dead in Fort Rivière and the Caco movement in the North was dead with them. A ton of dynamite subsequently demolished the fort. Caperton wrote Benson on November 21 that Cacos were bandits alike against the Haitian peasantry and Haitian government, simple ignorant people led by vicious chiefs who did not pretend they were fighting for their country but were fighting for revenue only — the peasantry were beginning to till their fields and begging the Americans for protection against the Cacos. Even one of the bitterest opponents of the Americans, Pierre-Paul, in retrospect wrote that the Cacos had made a veritable industry out of insurrection and guerrilla war, creating and demolishing government after ephemeral government — the vandalism they made reign throughout the towns and countryside provided the pretext for the Yankee imperialists of 1915.