The Raid on the Norias Division of the King Ranch was an attack August 8, 1915 by a large band of disaffected Mexicans and Tejanos in southern Texas. It was one of the many small battles of the Mexican Revolution that spilled over into United States soil and resulted in an increased effort by the United States Army to defend the international border. Five to fifteen attackers were killed in the raid and more among the wounded may have died shortly afterwards.
When Mexico ceded its claim on Texas to the United States, the treaty protected the rights of Tejanos who became U. S. citizens. There was never any official policy to force them off their land, but banking practices at the time made it difficult for people of color to obtain credit from banks. With each drought and economic depression during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tejanos would lose land which Anglos would then buy up, increasing the size of their holdings. Hispanics on both sides of the border between Texas and Mexico came to hate the ranches as they saw businesses like the King Ranch increase their land in the hard times when Tejanos were losing theirs. The rapid expansion of railroads into south Texas in the late nineteenth century also brought a flood of Anglo Americans wanting land when these large ranches then subdivided. This drove up property prices as well as taxes, increasing Hispanic animosity against the United States and Anglos in general. Into this tense situation the infighting and turmoil of the Mexican Revolution sent waves of refugees north across the border, rapidly increasing demand for goods, services and competition for land and jobs.
In January 1915 the Plan of San Diego was drafted by Mexican political prisoners in Monterrey, Mexico which called for Hispanics, Blacks and Japanese in the U. S. border states to rebel against the government and kill all white male inhabitants more than sixteen years old as a first step in creating their own republic. The Plan came to light when one its signatories entered the U. S. to gather support for Venustiano Carranza, leader of one of the factions in the revolution, but was arrested by officials in Texas who supported Pancho Villa. It was found in his belongings and he was taken to Brownsville where he was questioned by Immigration Service inspectors there. Scholars believe the Plan was supported by Carranza as a means of gathering favor for his faction in the revolution. During the years of this strife, though, it was believed that Germany had a hand in the border friction, hoping to distract the United States from involvement in the First World War by destabilizing relations between the U.S. and its southern neighbor. But relations between Carranza himself and Germany at the time made this impossible. In any case, the overall plan was so unrealistic that it changed many times and resulted in only a few small raids into Texas from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The raid on Norias Division was one of these.
The frontier period of the American West (roughly 1865–1900) was defined by cattle drives, mining booms, railroad construction, and the violent suppression of Indigenous resistance. Texas longhorn cattle drives north along the Chisholm Trail to railheads in Kansas brought beef to eastern markets from the 1860s through the 1880s. Mining rushes to the Black Hills (1874), Colorado (1858–1859), and the Comstock Lode in Nevada attracted tens of thousands of prospectors and boom towns that rose and collapsed within years. The range wars between cattle ranchers and homesteaders, vigilante justice, and the careers of figures like Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid became mythologized in dime novels and later in film. The Dawes Act (1887) and the opening of Oklahoma Territory to homesteading (1889) completed the legal dismantling of Indigenous land tenure in the West. By 1890 the US Census declared the frontier effectively closed, and the era of open-range cattle drives ended with the introduction of barbed wire fencing across the plains.
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