It was the Mexican Revolutionary general known in legend as Pancho Villa who rode a favourite horse named "Seven Seas" (
Siete Laguas) or "Seven Leagues" (
Siete Leguas).
After the battle at Ojinaga, Chihuahua
Typically, his story works like history works:
- Born June 5, 1878, as José Doroteo Arango Arámbula
- Called Doroteo as a child
- In 1903, after killing an army officer (and stealing his horse), he no longer used Jose or Doroteo nor the first of his two surnames, Arango, but became known by the name Francisco ("Pancho", and don't ask me why that's the nickname for Francisco, or why the nickname for Jesus is often "Chuy".)
- and the surname Villa after his paternal grandfather, Jesus Villa.
- His friends supposedly called him La Cucaracha ("the cockroach").
- Different sources give different names for his horse, and the fact that some of them were in heavily accented (Texas) English probably doesn't help.
- He either had a child (that might not have been his) with one woman, or he had five women who claimed to be his wife, or he went through some form of (bigamous, therefore invalid in the eyes of the Church) marriage ceremony with 27 different women. Like Genghis Khan, he may very well be a direct male genetic ancestor of some small but easily found percentage of the men who now live in what used to be his 'territory'.
- He may or may not have been the last to see Ambrose Bierce alive.
All of this, and he lived in age of photography and distance communication by wire.
I think I brought this up before, somehow, in the discussion of how writing lore-history for a game should work (as I perceived it to work in Shadowbane)-- the fact that it sounds more real and can be more fun if there is arguable difference in it without actual discontinuity, and the difference between those things.