1920, May 19: (The Death of Batraville: Morne Ti Bois Pin, Muth’s Binoculars, and the End of Armed Caco Resistance): Only forty-five days remained to Batravi…

1920, May 19: (The Death of Batraville: Morne Ti Bois Pin, Muth’s Binoculars, and the End of Armed Caco Resistance): Only forty-five days remained to Batraville. At daybreak on May 19, on a peasant’s tip, patrols closed in on his bivouac in the huge rocks atop Morne Ti Bois Pin, five miles southeast of Lascahobas. When the Cacos opened fire, Batraville — still carrying Muth’s binoculars — was cut down by a Marine automatic rifle, and as he struggled to rise and draw his revolver, a sergeant finished him with a pistol shot. Thus ended the career of Benoît Batraville and with it not merely the last armed Caco resistance but the hopes of the redheaded mulâtre doctor for whose ambitions so many Cacos unknowingly had paid. In fighting the Cacos, Marines and Gendarmerie sustained 98 killed and wounded. Claims for Caco casualties varied greatly: conservative estimates of casualties from 1915 through 1920 placed Caco dead at 2,250; Hans Schmidt estimated 3,250; Roger Gaillard asked whether total battle victims and casualties of repression and consequences of the war might not have reached somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 persons, adding that the war in many instances must have resembled a massacre. The active Caco Resistance at most involved no more than one quarter of Haiti and a fifth of its population — though never so recognized by the Americans, it was in some ways a traditional revolt of noirs of the North and Artibonite against a mulâtre regime of the South and West, typically abetted and manipulated by that regime’s opponents in Port-au-Prince and in exile, but overlaying this well-worn template was a new component: a rallying cry to oppose a common foreign foe. While the anti-blan, doctrinaire nationalist coloration originated in the literature of elite resistance groups of Port-au-Prince, it was unquestionably fueled by the corvée and serious abuses in the Plateau Central and Upper Artibonite, and these sentiments were credible on a gut level to a peasantry being subjected to forced labor. The revolt was never national — not a shot was fired or piquet banner raised south of the Cul-de-Sac — but its staying power was substantial, and only the assassination of its chief and his second-in-command brought an end to the guerrilla war.