Note 9 — Chapter XVI · Governor Taft, 1903

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way region as “the affair of March 23d” (1903). In his annual report for 1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary’s guns, while they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town, and departed. But Mr. Taft’s report disposes of the whole incident in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country, hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements arrived. Governor Taft’s failure adequately to present the gravity of the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote provinces which he was anxious to keep on his “pacified list,” to say nothing of politically negligible native life therein.9 Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair, Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one hundred stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely taken away from them, and I held court there for a month trying the people who were captured and brought in, with Colonel Meyer, of the 11th Infantry, one of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regiment acting as deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the province was under “civil” government, nominally. Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark, and, upon due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was never taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoying “the peace and protection of a benign civil government.” The writ of habeas corpus was never suspended for a moment.