24 October to 17 November 1915 · Haitianspan
Butler maps the Caco forts and finds Haiti a crumpled piece of paper
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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.
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