It has been 100 years since the first act of terror on U.S. soil was committed by revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. On March 9, 1916, Villa and more than 400 heavily-armed mounted bandits crossed the Mexican border and attacked Columbus, New Mexico. The Villistas caught the town of 350 inhabitants, plus a garrison of 553 troops from the 13th U.S. Cavalry, completely by surprise. “I was awake, they were asleep,” he later bragged, “and it took them too long to wake up.”
For almost two hours Villa’s men ransacked the town’s hotel, its few stores, and adobe houses before the cavalry chased them back across the border. Left behind on Columbus’s dusty streets lay eight dead civilians and 10 American soldiers, and several others wounded. The Villistas took greater losses, between one and two hundred men, some killed during a cavalry skirmish 30 miles deep into Mexico.
