Glenn Springs rises on Glenn Draw in southern Big Bend. Comanche parties watered there on the trail to and from Mexico. It took its present name from W. J. Glenn, who surveyed the country in 1881. In August 1914 Benito Solís, whose family had owned the spring for a decade, sold it to W. K. Ellis, who built a factory there to boil wax from the candelilla plant. By 1916 the place had nine Anglo residents and forty to sixty Hispanic workers and their families, most of them in adobe huts strung half a mile along the draw.
A border on edge
The Mexican Revolution had the Rio Grande country on edge. In June 1915 Governor James Ferguson asked President Woodrow Wilson for troops in the Big Bend, and Gen. Frederick Funston turned him down, calling banditry a state matter. Then in January 1916 Villista soldiers shot eighteen American mining engineers taken from a train in Chihuahua, and on March 9 rebels attacked Columbus, New Mexico, and killed seventeen Americans. Wilson sent Gen. John J. Pershing into Mexico after Villa. By May, nine men of Troop A, Fourteenth Cavalry, were camped at Glenn Springs to guard against just such an attack.
The night of May 5
Late on May 5, 1916, two groups of raiders under Rodríguez Ramírez and Natividad Álvarez struck Glenn Springs and Boquillas, twelve miles east. The nine troopers left their tents for an adobe building and traded fire for hours until the raiders set its roof alight. Three soldiers were killed as they ran from the fire and four were wounded. The young son of storekeeper C. G. Compton was also killed. At Boquillas, Álvarez was captured, but his men robbed the Puerto Rico Mining Company's payroll and carried storekeeper Jesse Deemer and his helper, Monroe Payne, across the river.
The Cadillac and the camps
Col. Frederick Sibley and Col. George Langhorne left Marathon on May 8 and gathered at Deemer's store on May 11. That night Langhorne crossed into Coahuila with eighty men, two wagons and his chauffeur-driven Cadillac touring car. When the raiders offered to trade the hostages for Álvarez, Langhorne loaded twelve sharpshooters into the Cadillac and drove for El Pino. The raiders scattered and left Deemer and Payne with a local rancher, and the troops came home on May 21 with both men and no prisoners. Some neighbors came to believe Deemer had been in league with the raiders.
By the end of July an estimated 116,957 National Guardsmen were posted along the border, and cavalry camps went up across the Big Bend, Glenn Springs among them. Its barracks were never finished. A former Army muleteer, W. D. Smithers, remembered little to do after 1916 but watch for bandits and play baseball, and the camps were abandoned in 1920. The land passed to the National Park Service in 1942.
Glenn Springs lies inside Big Bend National Park. The river village of the hostages is reached today through the Boquillas crossing, and the Castolon Historic District keeps the buildings of the cavalry years.