Avenue should be Renamed to the Filipino Killer of Lawton

 By Mortz C. Ortigoza

I was lately reading the 493 pages' hardbound IN OUR IMAGE: America’s Empire in Philippines by Stanley Karnow ((February 4, 1925 – January 27, 2013)) - a well-researched American writer with six Emmys, Peabody and Polk awards to boot. I was hooked with it because of the writer’s impeccable command of the English language that made me reminisce the scintillating pens of Free Press Editor Teodoro Locsin, Sr. (the take-no-prisoner writer father of Teddy Boy), Op-Ed Writer Max Soliven and former PhilStar Columnist Teodoro “Teddy Man” Benigno.

TIRRADORE DELA MUERTE (Shooter of Death). Filipino sniper Bonifacio Mariano (left photo and played by Dr. Cesar Martinez) who shot to death American Major General Henry Ware Lawton in the Battle of San Mateo, Rizal in December 19, 1899.

Karnow book was riveting because I did not encounter many of what he wrote on the 391 pages' History of the Filipino People by Teodoro A. Agoncillo when I taught Philippines History in college from years 1990 to 2002 in various universities in Dagupan and Urdaneta Cities and Metro Manila.

Here are some of the excerpts on pages 149 to 159 of Karnow’s opus for those who want to have a peek of our history during the American Colonization:

“Orphaned as a child, (Major General Henry Ware) Lawton was raised by an uncle in Indiana. He left college at the start of the Civil War to enlist in the Union forces as Private, displaying such courage that by the age of twenty-one he had soared to the rank of Brevet Colonel, with a regiment under his command,” wrote by the author who was known for his famous writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War.

Karnow added that Lawton eventually won an award-of-all-awards the Congressional Medal of Honor for a daring attack against a Confederate bastion at Atlanta. Later, he entered the prestigious Harvard Law School but soon dropped out to join the regular army as a Second Lieutenant in charge of a black infantry unit.

APACHE CHIEF GERONIMO

“A decade of monotonous garrison duty followed before he was again fighting this time against Indians. He spent ten years combing the vast and rugged West, tracking different tribes and learning their distinctive customs. The education was to serve him well when, in 1886, he accepted a new assignment”.

The Americans were out for the scalp of that famous elusive Chiricahua Apache religious and military chief Geronimo. General Nelson Miles handled the mission to Lawton - whose light cavalry pursued the Indians for the next six months - riding some two thousand miles through the Arizona territory and into Mexico.

It caught me by surprise that Lawton used a technology that could be an equivalent of our mobile phone nowadays to get intel for the whereabouts of the intrepid and evasive Apache Leader. Lawton and his men used on that time the most modern techno’s heliograph (a solar telegraph system that signals by flashes of sunlight - generally by using a Morse Code (Yes Virginia, Morse Code not Mortz Code!) - reflected by a mirror).

Lawton finally trapped and captured Geronimo in August 1886.

PHILIPPINES

“Eventually promoted to the rank of Major General, Lawton again distinguished himself in Cuba, where he was appointed military governor of Santiago following Spain’s capitulation. But his addiction to alcohol hastened his transfer home on the pretext of poor health. Detailed to a presidential trip, he attracted the attention of (U.S President William ) McKinley (Fort Bonifacio in the Philippines was named to the latter – emphasis mine), who heard of his exploits and offered him the Philippines job”.

But before packing his things to the present Pinoyland, President Mckinley – a vacillating Republican who detest first the colonization of the Philippines because unlike the European countries whose wealth came from the blood of their colonized people, the U.S had a burgeoning industrial juggernaut – privately advice Lawton to control his temperance.

“Lawton had launched his first action early in April (1898), three weeks after arriving. He drove south of Manila against the town of Santa Cruz (Manila), situated at the easternmost side of Laguna de Bay – a region razed by (General Loyd) Wheaton before. He captured the town with only a few casualties in three days, and was preparing to set up a garrison there when (Major General Elwell Stephen) Otis instructed him to withdraw. The Filipinos, who had prudently retreated in the face of the American push, thereupon reoccupied the area”.

Scorned by Otis when he told the former that he could capture Aguinaldo in sixty days, he told American journalists in Manila about Otis complacency. Lawton said that it needs one hundred thousand Yankees to attain victory in the first and only colony of the United States.

“When Lawton went to the town of San Mateo (Rizal), eighteen miles northeast of Manila, a nationalist stronghold since the outbreak of the war. Accompanied by William Dinwiddie, a correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, he rode overnight by horseback through a steady drizzle, dismounting at dawn on a bluff overlooking the site”.

The towering Lawton who sported a pith helmet (with a long yellow slicker hanging like a mandarin’s gown to his feet) made him a conspicuous target as he peered through his binocular or telescope and issued orders to his adjutants warning them to disperse to avoid enemy first.

“Soon an aide standing next to him whirled and fell, struck by a bullet. “I am afraid this isn’t a good place for a general,” Lawton remarked casually, and apologizing for leaving the line, strode across a nearby rice field, stopping from time to time to survey the scene,” Karnow wrote.

Suddenly, swatting his chest as if an insect had strung him, Lawton spat a clot of blood and muttered: “God!”

Two officers immediately rushed to his side asking him where he had been hit. “In the lungs,” he replied, then sank into their arms dead.

TIRRADORE DELA MUERTE (SHOOTER OF DEATH) BONIFACIO MARIANO

 Bonifacio Mariano, the Filipino sharpshooter who killed the decorated brave U.S two-star general, belonged to a unit commanded by a Filipino general whose surname, by coincidence susmariosep, was General Licerio Geronimo.

Geronimo was remembered in Philippine–American War annals as the general who led the truculent Filipino soldiers that defeated General Lawton and the American troops in the Battle of San Mateo in December 19, 1899.

My vigorous poser now! Who’s that nincompoop or nincompoops that sponsored a bill in Congress to make that stretches of highway at Fort Bonifacio and Nichols Field in Taguig City, Metro Manila as LAWTON AVENUE?!!!

Why name a street to a swashbuckling U.S General who killed countless of our countrymen - they called as Indios, Nigers, Gugus and other derogatory monikers - whose only desire was for independence from foreign interlopers like Spain and America?

Our Congress should rename Lawton to Mariano. Mariano shot fatally Lawton probably through a German-designed Mauser rifle ransacked by the Pinoys from the Spanish armories or those brought to Aguinaldo by thousands of Filipino auxiliary force and defectors from the Spanish Army who left hastily the withering strength of the latter against the more than 40, 000 forces of the Filipinos.