“I presume you thought I was either sick or dead, but I am not,” wrote Charles R. Brown to his family in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in November 1899. “I am here at a Camp Naco, Arizona, on the Mexican border, helping tan Mexicans who have gone on the war path.”

Brown was among thousands of U.S. soldiers who, from the late 19th to the early 20th century, would find themselves quartered in this turbulent town ducking bullets, artillery shells and an occasional aerial bomb from Mexican revolutionaries.

Neither Naco, Arizona, nor its Mexican twin were major cities, but the customs house — the compact building with the hexagonal roof seen in the center background of this 1916 photo — was an attractive target for Mexican rebels. Revenues seized by them bought ammunition, fed troop and lined the pockets of greedy officers.

Consequently, this tiny town played a significant role in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and again during the 1929 uprising, when the town fell victim to stray bombs.

Naco was hardly a tourist destination, but when fighting was intense sightseers from Bisbee and other outlying communities flocked to the border to observe the action. Packing lunches and hip flasks, folks climbed atop idle boxcars at the railroad siding and settled in for a day’s entertainment.

In 1916, Arizona mining man Harry B. Chamberlain took a room at Hotel Naco — shown in the left foreground of this photo. In good humor, he told a reporter that “Hotels have advertised strictly fire-proof structures [and] they have boasted of sound-proof rooms to shut out the noise of shooting craps and fights in the alley below… But it remains for a hotel proprietor in Naco to advertise bullet-proof boudoirs for timid guests who thought they might get their anatomies punctured by Mexican bullets.”

Chamberlain went on to say, “This Naco hotel proprietor, with the safety-first chambers, told me he thought it cheaper to safeguard guests than to pay undertakers, doctors or settle damage suits growing out of the poor aim of Mexican snipers swooping around the neighborhood… [He] said he wanted the public to know that a visit to Naco these days of turbulent times was not a suicidal act.”

Some years later, Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” which ran as a national feature on newspaper comic pages, featured Hotel Naco as “the hotel with bullet proof rooms.” In fact, as entertaining as Chamberlains and Ripley’s stories were, Hotel Naco was nothing more than a well-constructed adobe building with walls three feet thick. Like other Naco buildings, however, its windows were glass and certainly not bullet proof. Nor was its front porch.

“Mexican revolutions may be comic opera affairs in many ways, but citizens of [Naco] are inclined to take them seriously,” opined a reporter in 1929. “It seems the rebel gunners didn’t always have their weapons trained on the enemy. Miss Guadalupe Sosa was witnessing the battle from a vantage point on the front porch of Hotel Naco, where she is employed, when a stray bullet zipped only a few feet from where she was standing.”

Light hearted as these reports were, rebel engagements fought along the Arizona/Mexico border were not “comic opera affairs,” but volatile acts of war in which men lost their lives. Defending Naco against hostile incursion was deadly serious military business.

— W. Lane Rogers. Photo courtesy Fort Huachuca Museum.