Young patron: America's storied general began his fighting career in an Old West shootout with Pancho Villa's riders.

It was May 14, 1916. A bold 31-year-old second lieutenant, George S. Patton, Jr., was scouting the Mexican countryside for maize for the U.S. Army, which was pursuing Pancho Villa in the Punitive Expedition. He returned from the mission to purchase corn, however, with something other than a few ears of the Mexican staple. Strapped to the hood of his band's Dodge touring cars were the bodies of three Mexican bandits. One of them was General Julio Cardenas, leader of the Dorados, Villa's bodyguard. Patton's commander, Gen. John J. Pershing, had the singular experience of receiving the corpses of an enemy.

But something, Patton's biographer Carle D'Este writes in Patton: A Genius For War, had to be done about the bodies, which were quickly decomposing under the blistering Mexican sun. The Americans put on a quick funeral, and a crusty sergeant offered a prayer: "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,/If Villa won't bury you, Uncle Sam must."

Thus was Patton, the storied general of World War II, whose name ranks with the greatest of American war heroes, blooded for the first time in battle. When most Americans think of Patton, they think of the gravelly voiced George C. Scott, who played the general on film, not the real flesh-and-blood man, who had a high-pitched voice and whose physical courage was well established not only in Mexico, but also in World War I, and before that, in the 1912 Olympics at Stockholm, Sweden. What most Americans know of Patton is limited to this fine film, which does not explore the general's early years.

Childhood and Early Career

Just as one must understand the Scottish warriors, such as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, to understand Andrew Jackson, one must plow into Patton's past, his childhood and early education, to understand what made the man.

Patton was born November 11, 1885, in California, the grandson of storied Americans on both sides, paternal and maternal. An early ancestor, the Scotsman General Hugh Mercer, died heroically at the Battle of Princeton in 1777. Patron's paternal grandfather, George Smith Patton, was "a gallant and efficient officer," Confederate General Jubal Early said, and died of wounds after a clash with Union General Phil Sheridan's cavalry at the Third Battle of Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864. His granduncle, Waller Tazewell Patton, died of wounds suffered during Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.

Patron's maternal grandfather was Don Benito Wilson, who was, D'Este writes, a "pioneer, beaver trapper and trader, grizzly bear hunter, Indian fighter, justice of the peace, farmer, rancher, politician, horticulturalist, vintner, real estate entrepreneur and one of the great landholders in Southern California, ... one of the unique breed of hardy trappers and traders known as Mountain Men, who were among the first to break through the mountains and cross the desert." So courageous a man was Wilson that after a grizzly bear mauled him, and as soon as he recuperated from his wounds, he set upon the beast and killed it.

These were the dauntless clans that spawned one of America's greatest warriors. Home-schooled until he was 11, Patton suffered from dyslexia, experts believe, which inhibited his learning to read. Thus did his parents and aunt read to him aloud from classics such as "Pilgrim's Progress, Plutarch's Lives, The March of Xenophon, Alexander the Great, and 'anything and everything about Napoleon,'" D'Este writes.

Patton was steeped in the history and lore of Western Civilization. His heroes included Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and Patton knew the stories of outstanding Confederates not only from hearing them second-hand, but also from listening to veterans of the butternut and gray. When the storied Rebel cavalry commander John Singleton Mosby visited Patton's home in California, Patton sat at his knee while Mosby regaled him with tales of derringdo during the War Between the States.

Aside from becoming a skilled hunter, fisherman, and horseman at an early age, D'Este writes, Patton was "indoctrinated in the classics: Shakespeare, Homer, Sir Walter Scott, and Kipling," and he absorbed the stories of history's "heroes, kings, villains, gods, explorers and adventurers." He was fascinated with and adored the great soldiers of the past, such as Scipio and Hannibal.

Thus was Patron's mettle fired in the crucible of a classical education, and by the time he entered school at age 11, though he still couldn't read and write, he could recite Shakespeare and the Bible at length from memory. Patton became a remarkable scholar of the Bible, and later in life, such was his vast repository of scriptural knowledge that he bested Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman in a discussion of the Good Book.

Patton graduated from West Point, a tough academic challenge given his poor reading ability, but not without repeating his first year. He graduated in 1909, and in 1912, he participated in the Modern Pentathlon in the Olympics. There, we glimpse Patton the warrior in his approach to training and in his participation in the competition.

Patton hated swimming as a sport, but on the cruise liner to Europe, he prepared for the competition by swimming in a canvas pool on deck with a rope tied around his waist. While competing in Stockholm, he collapsed and nearly died after completing the 4,000-meter footrace, which he ran full-speed until he could run no more and slowed to a walk, finishing third. He defeated 20 of 29 opponents in the fencing competition, an unsurprising feat given that Patton designed an Army saber in 1913 and eventually became a master of the sword in 1914. An expert horseman, Patton placed third in the 5,000-meter steeplechase on a borrowed horse. He placed fifth in the overall competition, but emerged from it a credible athlete with a deserved reputation of never giving up.

Patton's Famous Gunfight

A year before Patton's heroics against Pancho Villa's subordinates that day in May 1916, the young commander had exchanged his army issue Colt .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol for an 1873 Colt .45 revolver, known in the lore of the American West as "The Peacemaker."

The confrontation in Mexico occurred in a small town called San Miguelito, where Cardenas, a top Villista (Pancho Villa supporter), lived in a hacienda with his family. Patton's small unit approached the hacienda in their cars, with the untested commander placing men at the northwest and southwest corners of the place.

Taking his rifle, Patton hopped from his car and made his way to the east side of the hacienda to its entrance. Patton ran toward the hacienda. When he was a short distance away, three horsemen armed with rifles and pistols galloped out of the front gate for the southwest corner, only to run into the soldiers Patton had stationed there to trap them. Seeing their escape route cut off, they turned and rode toward Patton. The three men fired, spraying the lieutenant with gravel as their bullets hit the ground. Patton returned fire with five shots from his Peacemaker. wounding one of his mounted foes. He then ducked behind a wall to reload.

Depending on which account of the battle one reads, either one or two riders charged Patton after he reloaded, and he downed one of them by shooting his horse. Patton "did not fire on the Mexican who was down," he claimed, "until he had disentangled himself and rose to fire." In permitting the man to rise and shoot, Patton wrote that he was "impelled by misplaced notions of chivalry," dispatching the desperado in a reprise of an Old West showdown at high noon--which, oddly enough, took place at that mythic hour.

"During the confusion," D'Este writes, "a second Mexican had somehow eluded the Americans." He was fleeing to the east when Patton and his men killed him with a shower of rifle bullets from about 100 yards away. One Mexican was left. A former Villista named Holmdahl, helping guide the American unit, saw him running away. The soldiers downed him at about 200 yards. He pretended to hold up his hands as if to surrender, but pulled his weapon and shot at the pursuing Holmdahl, who killed him. The dead man was Cardenas, wounded four times, D'Este writes, before Holmdahl administered the coup de grace.

The action in Mexico has stirred dispute because varying accounts of the story attribute the dead villains to various shooters For instance, the story at The Patton Society website says Cardenas, the last man killed, was the first horseman wounded by Patton's original five shots. "It was found upon examination," the website says, "that he had been hit only once. Patton's Colt .45 had put a bullet through his left forearm and into his chest. He was the first one shot, the last to die, and he was identified as Cardenas."

A documentary on the History Channel said Cardenas simply dropped dead after pretending to surrender to his American foes. And "whether or not Patton actually killed anyone has never been clearly established," D'Este writes, questioning whether Patton killed the first Mexican after killing the horse. "What seems indisputable." however, "is that he was responsible for wounding Cardenas before he was killed by Holmdahl.... What is certain is that Patton's quick thinking and sound plan of attack prevented all three Villistas from escaping into the sanctuary of the nearby hills."

Nine days after the action at San Miguelito, which was the first time automobiles were used in warfare, the army promoted Patton to first lieutenant. He then inaugurated and guided the American army in using a new weapon, the tank. He fought courageously as a colonel in World War I.

In that war, Patton knew palpable fear, but it didn't keep him from his duty. In one attack on a German machine-gun position during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in September 1918, as windrows of machine-gun bullets rent the air and ground around him, he took cover and lay with his "hands sweating and his mouth dry." He was scared. But as he lay there, he looked up into the clouds and believed he saw the ghosts of his warrior ancestors gazing down, as if warning him of the fate that befalls a coward. And then he moved forward. Patton took a machine-gun bullet in his upper left thigh, D'Este writes, that left a hole the size of a silver dollar in his rear end.

How Patton Was Made

Most Americans ought to be familiar with the rest of his story, including his brilliantly executed campaign across France and into Germany in 1944. Few actions in the annals of warfare compare with Patton's moving his men and materials 100 miles in 48 hours to relieve the "battered bastards of Bastogne," the fabled 101st Airborne Division that was protecting the crossroads sought by Germany in its final major offensive of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge.

Just a year later, one of America's most flamboyant military leaders, who survived action against Pancho Villa in 1916, and the Germans in World War I and World War II, met an ironic demise. On December 9, 1945, Patton joined his aide, Major General Hobart "Hap" Gay, to go pheasant hunting. "How awful war is," he remarked in passing some abandoned military vehicles just outside Mannheim, as D'Este records the scene. "Think of the waste." In the next instant, their Cadillac limousine collided with a 2.5-ton truck, and the four-star general was thrown headfirst into the steel frame that held the glass panel separating chauffeur from passengers. "This is a helluva way to die," he told Gay. Twelve days later, on the afternoon of December 21, Patton told his nurse, "I am going to die. Today." He did, at 5:55 p.m.

For George S. Patton, his aide Dick Codman wrote, "bravery is the highest virtue, cowardice the deadliest sin." But a man who believes and behaves as Patton isn't merely born; he is made, by his parents, by his culture, by the world around him. As Patron's daughter wrote, the general was the sum of how he was raised and his life experiences; what is past is prologue:

   George Patton was the result of his
   life-long training, sitting beside his
   Aunt Nannie at the fire ... hearing
   of the fearless trek of his grandfather
   across the plains to California ... hearing
   from his own father how he was
   taken in front of his father's saddle to
   see the body of the great Confederate
   hero, Jeb Stuart, lying on the billiard
   table at the Yellow Tavern ... hearing
   in his mind the dying words of
   General Mercer at Princeton, and of
   Tazewell Patton at Gettysburg--and
   behind them the parade of mighty heroes,
   Alexander and Achilles, Hannibal
   ... Harold at Hastings, Napoleon,
   Nathan Hale. All this combined in
   George S. Patton Jr. to make him the
   man he was. He always wanted to be
   among the heroes.

George Patton got what he wanted. He was among the heroes, and he was well on his way to proving it long before his exploits in World War II made him a household name. In young Patton, we find a boy who was raised up to do what he did that day when the bullets flew at San Miguelito, and the scion of two of America's greatest families strapped his foes to the hood of his car, then rode away victorious.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia.