The raid on Glenn Springs occurred on the night of May 5–6, 1916, when Mexican Villistas and Carrancistas attacked the towns of Boquillas and Glenn Springs, Texas. In Glenn Springs, the raiders burned several buildings and fought a three-hour battle with a small force of American soldiers who were stationed there. At the same time, a second party of rebels robbed a general store and a silver mine in Boquillas. Four Americans were killed and the rebels took two hostages to Coahuila. In response to the attack, the United States Army launched a short punitive expedition into Mexico, fought with the rebels, and rescued the captives.
Following the Mexican federal victory at the Battle of Celaya in April 1915, Mexican rebel Pancho Villa led the remnants of his once large army back to northern Mexico. By 1916, Villa and his men were in desperate need of food and provisions to continue their revolution, so they devised a plan to raid the American border town of Columbus, New Mexico. On the early morning of March 9, 1916, approximately 500 mounted Villistas attacked and burned the town, though not long after that they were encountered by some 300 American troops. After a pitched battle, the Villistas were defeated and pursued back into Mexico, having lost nearly 200 killed, wounded, or captured. Eighteen Americans died in the engagement, including ten civilians and eight soldiers, an outrage that incited President Woodrow Wilson to authorize a punitive expedition into Mexico to capture or kill Villa. The Pancho Villa Expedition, as it became known, was under the command of Gen. John J. Pershing and it lasted from March 14, 1916, to February 7, 1917. Starting from various camps and forts along the border, Pershing headed into Chihuahua where his men engaged the Villistas on multiple occasions. Pershing was able to capture or kill several rebel commanders but Pancho Villa got away, and his rebels continued to launch raids on U.S. territory while American troops were in Mexico. Tension along the international border between Texas and Mexico was high during the Mexican Revolution. Raids into southern Texas were very common, so to help protect the Big Bend region, President Wilson allowed troops to occupy the area in June 1915.
Boquillas and Glenn Springs were just small settlements at the time, about 12 miles apart, and only nine soldiers from the 14th Cavalry guarded at the former and none at the latter. Glenn Springs was located just south of Chilicotal Mountain and centered around a small spring named after the first settler in the area who was killed at the site by Comanches. The town was home to some 80 people, who were employed mainly by a candelilla wax factory, owned by "Captain" C.D. Wood and W.K. Ellis. The Ellis family also owned the general store, which was managed by C.G. Compton and his family. The inhabitants, who were mostly Mexican-Americans, lived in a "scattered" neighborhood of about 50 jacales concentrated at one end of town. Boquillas was even smaller than Glenn Springs. Located along the Rio Grande, across from the mining town of Del Carmen, Boquillas had a general store, owned by Jesse Deemer, and several jacales.
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.
This page covers Glenn Springs and Boquillas Raids 1916. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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