Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Draftees and volunteers from Nevada answered the call 100 years ago when President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to enter “the war to end all wars.”
Calac cousins illustrate the role Nevadans, Wild West division played during World War I
The stories of the Calac cousins and other Nevadans who fought in World War I echo very faintly today.
Only shorthand accounts of their heroism, sacrifice and accomplishments are etched in stone or handed down in family stories from generation to generation.
But approaching the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into the “war to end all wars,” the improbable tale of the Calacs and the Army’s 91st “Wild West” Division — a ragtag legion of shopkeepers, cowboys, farmers, miners, Native Americans and immigrant railroad workers who helped change the course of history — demands one more telling.
“The 91st was a group of young, inexperienced kids from the West who became valiant soldiers in this new army,” said Bryan Woodcock, a retired Army helicopter pilot and historian who wrote his military college thesis on the 91st. “With the spirit of true cowboys, as many of them were, these frontiersmen were repeatedly bucked off and kicked in the face. Yet they always stood back up, dusted themselves off and continued to ride forward.”
The Calacs, Alfonso and Philip, were Native Americans who in some ways typified the roughly 20,000 soldiers of the 91st Division dispatched to France in the summer of 1918.
Members of the Rincon Band of Mission Indians near San Diego, they had no intention of joining the Army when they left the reservation to work for the railroad in Las Vegas. It was 1917, and the war in Europe seemed worlds away from the town of about 2,000 residents with no paved streets.
Alfonso Calac, 26, was an “educated and trustworthy blacksmith helper” for the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad Co., military records say.
Philip Calac, a tall, 21-year-old with dark brown eyes and thick black hair, was a boilermaker’s helper at the railroad shop in Las Vegas.
The cousins were among the 4.8 million young men whose lives were upended when President Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned on a pledge to keep the U.S. out of the war, reversed course and asked Congress to declare war on Germany on April 2, 1917. His reason: The empire’s submarines were sinking U.S. ships, and Germany was attempting to strike an alliance with Mexico in return for help “reconquering” Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Congress complied four days later.
Heeding Uncle Sam
When they registered for the draft in Las Vegas on June 5, 1917 — initially required of all able-bodied men in their 20s – the Calacs likely did so beneath a poster of finger-pointing Uncle Sam saying “I Want You,” an iconic call to arms in
wide circulation at the time.
They may have had a powerful inducement to enlist: the promise of U.S. citizenship.
William Bauer, a UNLV expert on Native American affairs, said many American Indians “volunteered for the Army during World War I because they were not United States citizens” and were guaranteed citizenship if they enlisted. (Congress didn’t guarantee citizenship to all Native Americans until 1924.)
Because citizenship was granted to individuals and some tribes and also could be obtained through marriage and other means, it’s not clear whether the Calacs volunteered or were drafted.
That’s also true of everyone else on Nevada’s draft registration list from the time, including Shoshone Joe Jackson, a Native American farmer from Belmont, now a Nye County ghost town, who wrote that he didn’t know the month or day he was born, though it was in the spring of 1888.
Patriotism did fuel many signups.
Among them were Gus Pappas and his brother, John, both of whom had emigrated from Greece as boys. John came first, arriving in Las Vegas in 1902 and finding work delivering water to rail line workers. Gus followed and ended up in Ogden, Utah, where the brothers met up and decided to join the Army.
“They wanted to fight for America even though they were basically Greek,” said Harry Pappas, 63, John’s son and a longtime Las Vegas resident. “They were both patriotic. They were both rah rah, America.’”
Other recent immigrants heeded the call for reasons that are lost to history, including German-Americans and a Japan-born railroad laborer from Caliente in Lincoln County named Itakka Takahara.
The draft list also included miners and hotel clerks and cowboys – in high demand because of their ability to train and ride horses still widely used to haul supplies and artillery — from places like Virginia City, Carson, Reno and Elko.
Horace Greely Bliss, a farmer from White Pine County in east-central Nevada, became a machine gunner and was shot and killed by a sniper in France a month before the war ended.
Others like Navy Seaman 1st Class William K. Lamb, son of former sheriff Selah Lamb of Winnemucca, never even made it overseas. He died of influenza at Mare