Pancho Villa's Border and the 1916 Crisis

On March ninth, nineteen sixteen, Pancho Villa's División del Norte forces crossed into New Mexico and attacked the town of Columbus, killing eighteen Americans and destroying much of the downtown. It is often described as the only ground invasion of the continental United States by a foreign force between the War of eighteen twelve and the September eleventh attacks of two thousand one, though Japanese forces also shelled and dropped bombs on the Oregon coast during the Second World War. The American response was immediate and substantial.

General John Pershing led a Punitive Expedition that grew to about ten thousand troops into northern Mexico in pursuit of Villa. Cavalry patrols swept the Big Bend border region. The towns and crossings along the Rio Grande in Brewster and Presidio counties became a militarized zone. Villa's forces had already crossed the river on multiple occasions in the months around the Columbus raid, attacking ranches on the Texas side, and the border panic that followed made life on both banks of the river dangerous and uncertain.

Mexican civilians fled north across the Rio Grande as the fighting between Constitutionalist Mexican federal forces and Villa's Villista forces destabilized northern Chihuahua. American ranchers and settlers relocated south from the immediate border zone. The Castolon area, where the Rio Grande crossings were most accessible, became a hub of this movement in both directions.

The Punitive Expedition failed to capture Villa. Pershing withdrew in early nineteen seventeen when the United States entered the first World War. Villa was not caught; he was eventually assassinated in nineteen twenty-three, in Parral, Chihuahua. The border geography that the nineteen sixteen crisis created, the patrol zones, the crossing points, the surveillance infrastructure, is the ancestor of the border geography that exists today.