Butler maps the Caco forts and finds Haiti a crumpled piece of paper

Colonel Littleton Waller took the north in hand. He paid off the Haitian garrison at Ouanaminthe, most of whom claimed the rank of brigadier general at the pay table, and put a Marine company on the Dominican border in their place. More companies went into Grande Rivière du Nord and Fort Liberté, giving him a triangle of garrisons to patrol from. Butler took forty men to locate the Caco strongholds, crossing country no foreigner had entered since the French, and afterwards said Haiti looked like a crumpled sheet of paper. On the afternoon of 24 October 1915 he came within sight of Fort Capois, a cone of rock a thousand feet above him ringed with stone walls and trenches, seven miles south of Saint Suzanne. He turned back toward Grande Rivière and spent the night surrounded and under fire from 400 Cacos. From 1 November the Marines swept west from the Dominican frontier, taking the strongholds one after another, nearly all of them old French forts. The last was Fort Rivière, on the peak of the Montagne Noire, 4,000 feet up.

United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 28 July 1915, hours after a crowd had killed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The last of them left in 1934. Washington gave two reasons, the collapse of order in the capital and the strategic value of the Windward Passage in the second year of the European war. Nobody met the landing party at the waterfront with a rifle. Parts of the capital received the marines with relief. Syrian traders whose shops had been looted in every recent revolution wanted troops in the streets. Members of the mulatto elite, who had just buried relatives killed in the prison yard, feared what Bobo and his Caco army would do if he reached the palace, and preferred American marines to him. That preference was stated in private and almost never in public, because saying it aloud was dangerous. Nineteen years of foreign administration began on an afternoon when the Haitians best placed to object had their own reasons for silence.

On 12 August 1915 American Marines stood inside the Haitian National Assembly with fixed bayonets until the members confirmed Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave as president. Dartiguenave, born on 6 April 1863 into a wealthy light skinned family, had been president of the Senate when Sam was killed. The Americans refused Rosalvo Bobo, the man most likely to win, and settled on Dartiguenave as someone who would cooperate. He was the first light skinned southerner to hold the office since 1879, and he governed as a proxy for American officials who ran the money, the armed forces and foreign policy. He signed a treaty giving the occupation legal form and placing Haitian finances under American control. The Haitian army was dissolved and replaced by a national guard armed, trained and commanded by the United States. That guard administered the corvée, which required peasants to work without pay on the national roads, a compulsory labour system imposed on the grandchildren of people who had fought a revolution to end compulsory labour.

Caperton had 400 men ashore in a city holding at least 1,500 of Rosalvo Bobo's Cacos, the remnants of the Reforme faction and what was left of the army. The Comite Revolutionnaire belonged to Bobo and was pressing the National Assembly to elect him. When the deputies asked whether they might proceed to an election, the admiral put them off. On 2 August he reported to Washington that the Cacos were professional soldiers under chiefs who sold their services to whoever offered most, that all Haitians feared them, that they effectively decided who governed, and that Congress had been about to elect Bobo out of fear until he stopped it. The Comite went on as though nothing had changed. It jailed a senator named Joseph Dessources for criticising it, and the Americans ordered him released. It took over the telegraph offices and filled the wires with messages for Bobo, and Caperton took charge of communications. It began drawing government money, and Caperton moved every gourde into a blocked account.