Say the words “September 11” and every American instantly knows what you are referring to. The same is true for “Pearl Harbor.” Most Americans vaguely know that during the War of 1812 the British shelled Fort McHenry and burned down the White House. But mention the words “Columbus, New Mexico” and you will draw blank stares. Yet on March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary leader José Doroteo Arango Arámbula—better known to history as Pancho Villa—led a surprise attack on Columbus that left eighteen Americans and eighty Mexicans dead. Within days, nearly 7,000 U.S. soldiers crossed the border into Mexico in search of Villa in what would become one of the more dismal chapters in U.S. military history: the Punitive Expedition.

The events in Columbus, New Mexico had a back story. In 1911, a popular uprising had ousted Porfirio Díaz as president (more accurately, dictator) of Mexico after thirty-five years in power. (Díaz is credited with uttering the line, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”) His overthrow ushered in a decade of political instability known as the Mexican Revolution. Mexico saw several leaders come to power as conflict wracked the country.

The first person to succeed Díaz was Francisco Madero. The son of a wealthy landowner in northeastern Mexico, Madero studied in the United States and France and became a democracy advocate. He was also, to say the least, odd. As the historian Robert Ferrell tells it: 

At one meeting with the American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, the president of Mexico placed a third chair in the circle and announced to the ambassador that a friend was sitting there. The friend was invisible, Madero explained, but there nonetheless.

In February, after holding power for less than two years, Madero was shunted aside by his leading military officer, General Victoriano Huerta. The general drank, and drank often; brandy was his preferred drink. (He died in 1916 from cirrhosis of the liver.) He had Madero and his vice president shot, possibly at the behest of Ambassador Wilson. Huerta had suggested to Ambassador Wilson that perhaps he should exile Madero or send him to an insane asylum. The ambassador responded ambiguously; Huerta “ought to do that which was best for the peace of the country.”

Madero’s murder outraged the incoming U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, who was not related to Ambassador Wilson and who was inaugurated on March 4, 1913. (The tradition of inaugurating presidents on January 20 did not begin until after the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933.) Once in office, Wilson refused to recognize Huerta’s legitimacy, saying the Mexican general led a “government of butchers.” Ever the moralist, Wilson told the British ambassador to the United States: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Wilson’s efforts to influence who would lead Mexico included using the Tampico Incident in April 1914 to order the U.S. invasion of Veracruz, Mexico. U.S. troops would remain there until that November.

President Wilson got his wish for a new Mexican government in August 1914 when Huerta was ousted by Venustiano Carranza. Another son of a wealthy landowner and a Madero follower, Carranza was a former governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila. He quickly found his rule challenged by his former ally, Francisco (Pancho) Villa, who had led the “Division of the North” in fighting against Huerta loyalists.

Villa at first had Carranza on the defensive. In December 1914, Villa’s forces briefly took control of Mexico City before being driven back north. Wilson thought that Villa might be friendly to U.S. interests, so he withheld formal recognition of the Carranza government. Villa in turn hoped that Wilson’s refusal to recognize the Carranza government would help his cause. He was soon disappointed, however. The war in Europe increasingly consumed Wilson’s time, and he wanted a way out of his confrontational policies toward Mexico. Carranza, as he put it, “will somehow have to be digested.” In October 1915, the United States did just that, formally recognizing his government. 

Villa viewed Wilson’s decision as a betrayal, especially after Washington allowed Carranza’s troops to travel on U.S. railroads through New Mexico and Arizona to pursue Villa and his men rather than cross the harsh northern Mexican desert by horseback. German agents also urged Villa to turn on the United States. They hoped to bog the United States down in a war with Mexico that would prevent a U.S. entry into World War I.

With events having shifted against him, Villa devised a new strategy. He would seek to provoke the United States into attacking Mexico, thereby discrediting Carranza as a pawn of the United States. Villa put his plan into effect in January 1916. As Ferrell tells the story, Villa’s troops:

Met a Mexican Northwestern train at Santa Ysabel on January 11, 1916, carrying seventeen young American college graduates who had just come into Mexico from California under a safe conduct from Carranza to open a mine. Villa killed sixteen of them on the spot.

Villa spared one of the young Americans so he could tell his countrymen what happened. 

The news of the Santa Ysabel massacre did not trigger the U.S. retaliation that Villa expected. So, he turned to something even more audacious. In the predawn hours of March 9, 1916, Villa’s men raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, three miles north of the border. A regiment of the U.S. Army’s 13th Cavalry was encamped at the town, and its munitions depot was a target of the raid. Despite being caught off guard, the U.S. troops quickly regrouped and returned fire—at one point setting up a machine gun in front of the town’s lone hotel. The fighting, as well as the fires Villa’s men set, left the town in ruins.

By the end of the day on March 9, Wilson had ordered General John J. Pershing to cross into Mexico to hunt down Villa. The incursion would have been an act of war, except that Carranza had reluctantly consented to it; he essentially had no other choice. He did, however, extract one face-saving concession: Mexico had the right, at least in theory, to pursue bandits across the border into the United States.

The Punitive Expedition began with much enthusiasm and moral righteousness in Washington. It proved in practice, like most of Wilson’s policies toward Mexico, to be a political and diplomatic blunder. Pershing’s troops trekked more than 300 miles through northern Mexico without setting eyes on Villa, who knew the unfriendly terrain and was a hero to the local people. Critics back in the United States began to call the incursion as the “Perishing Expedition.”

Rather than cut his losses, Wilson surged more troops into Mexico. Soon more than 12,000 U.S. soldiers had crossed the border. Carranza understandably wanted them all to go home. Even though General Pershing assured Washington that “the natives are not generally arming to oppose us,” in June 1916 U.S. forces clashed with the Mexican army, leaving a dozen Americans and forty Mexicans dead. Within days, Wilson had ordered nearly 150,000 National Guard troops to the border. War seemed likely. 

Wilson’s stubbornness and self-righteousness partly explain why he continued to dig his hole deeper in Mexico rather than stop shoveling. Politics also played a part—1916 was a presidential election year. Like many presidents who would follow him, Wilson did not want to hand an election issue to his opponent by looking “weak” in his dealing with Mexico.

Events on the other side of the Atlantic eventually forced Wilson’s hand. With relations with Germany worsening, and the likelihood of a U.S. entry into World War I growing, he ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops in early January 1917. The last U.S. soldiers left Mexico on February 5, 1917. Less than four weeks later, the American public would learn about the  Zimmermann Telegram.

Today Columbus, New Mexico, is home to about 1,800 people. It lies thirty five miles south of Deming, New Mexico, and sixty-five miles west of El Paso, Texas. You can find it by taking New Mexico State Highway 11 south from I-10 or New Mexico State Highway 9 from El Paso. Should you ever visit Columbus, be sure to check out Pancho Villa State Park. 

The United States celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026. To mark that milestone, I am resurfacing essays I have written over the years about major events in U.S. foreign policy. A version of this essay was published on March 9, 2011. 

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.