1919, January – 1920, October 12: (Indiscriminate Killings: The Hinche Abuses, Catlin’s Investigation, and Barnett’s Shock): Remote, forbidding, wild, Hinche…

1919, January – 1920, October 12: (Indiscriminate Killings: The Hinche Abuses, Catlin’s Investigation, and Barnett’s Shock): Remote, forbidding, wild, Hinche lies far from Port-au-Prince — across the Cul-de-Sac, 3,000 feet up the face of Morne-à-Cabrit, past Mirebalais, over the headwaters of the Artibonite, through Lascahobas and the Montagnes Noires, thence to Thomonde and onto the Plateau Central wound the highway newly cut through by the corvée. In January 1919, teledjòl came to Port-au-Prince that all was not well in Hinche: the corvée, though officially halted the previous October, still continued, peasants bolted to the brush when a gendarme came in sight, and prisoners taken by the blan were openly shot or simply disappeared. General Catlin directed Colonel Williams and the district commander Major Clarke H. Wells to investigate, and also sent his trusted subordinate Lieutenant Colonel R. S. Hooker to Hinche. On Wells’s word, Williams told Catlin the charges were baseless — but when Hooker got back he brought a different story: he found corvée going on at both Maïssade and Hinche and the gendarmes had used the natives so brutally that many had left their gardens and either joined the bandits or come into the towns for safety. Catlin went to see for himself, painfully dragging his wounded, once magnificent frame over dirt roads and rough trails, visiting St. Michel, Maïssade, and Hinche, talking to the priests, the magistrats, and to trembling peasants. With evident sanction of Wells and local Haitian officials, the corvée was in full force, prisoners had been shot — escaping was always the excuse — and Wells, falsely reporting to higher headquarters that his district was quiet when in fact Caco resistance was mounting, had made clear to subordinates that he did not want to see or hear of prisoners. Catlin forthwith relieved Wells, shipped him home, transferred every Gendarmerie officer out of the affected towns and ultimately out of Haiti, replaced the local gendarme force with units from elsewhere, and put Marine garrisons with U.S. commissioned officers in each town — but believing the evidence would not sustain courts-martial, he ordered no trials. In Washington, however, in September 1919, while reviewing a court-martial from Haiti, Marine Major General Commandant George Barnett was jolted to note a passing assertion that practically indiscriminate killing of natives had gone on for some time. On September 27, Barnett wrote Russell a stern letter demanding that every case be sifted thoroughly and guilty parties brought to justice. Russell put the case in the hands of Hooker, backstopped by Major Thomas C. Turner, and based on their findings the Navy Department ordered Major General John A. Lejeune, accompanied by Smedley Butler now a brigadier general, to go to Haiti for further investigation — their report, filed October 12, 1920, disclosed little more than had already been discovered but unmistakably confirmed what Hooker had reported eighteen months earlier.