Glenn Springs was never much of a town. Located just south of Chilicotal Mountain, it centered around a small spring named for the first Anglo settler in the area, who had been killed by Comanches at the very site that now bore his name. About eighty people called Glenn Springs home in 1916, most of them Mexican-Americans employed by a candelilla wax factory owned by Captain C.D. Wood and W.K. Ellis. The Ellis family also ran the general store, managed by Compton and his family. The Mexican workers lived in a scattered neighborhood of about fifty jacales at one end of town. Twelve miles away, the even smaller settlement of Boquillas sat along the Rio Grande, across from the mining town of Del Carmen in Mexico. Nine soldiers from the 14th Cavalry guarded Boquillas. Glenn Springs had no military protection at all.

Lieutenant Colonel Natividad Alvarez led somewhere between sixty and eighty men toward Glenn Springs that night. Though Alvarez followed Pancho Villa, he had recruited both Villistas and Carrancistas on his march from Torreon to Texas. The timing was deliberate. Cinco de Mayo brought celebrations to the Mexican neighborhood, and the arriving strangers looked like visiting friends and family. No one noticed them taking positions. Alvarez divided his force, sending Rodriguez Ramirez against Glenn Springs while he led the attack on Boquillas. The raid came just fifty-seven days after Villa's infamous attack on Columbus, New Mexico, which had killed eighteen Americans and triggered the massive Pancho Villa Expedition under General John J. Pershing.

The nine-man cavalry squad under Sergeant Charles E. Smyth abandoned their tents and took up positions in an old adobe building when the shooting started. For nearly three hours they held off the attackers until the raiders set fire to the roof, which was thatched with candelilla leaves from the wax factory. The flames forced the soldiers to flee toward their horses. Three cavalrymen died in the attempt: William Cohen, Stephen J. Coloe, and Lawrence K. Rogers. At least four others suffered wounds or severe burns. Meanwhile, Compton had hidden his daughter with an elderly Mexican woman, but when he returned home he found his four-year-old son murdered. His ten-year-old boy survived, possibly because he was deaf and mute and the raiders spared him.

Captain Wood was at his ranch three miles away when he heard gunfire. Thinking it was celebration, he waited. When the shooting continued, he rode toward town with his friend Oscar de Montel, arriving just as the soldiers retreated. They dismounted and walked toward the burning general store, but fifty yards away they heard horses eating corn and men speaking Spanish. De Montel climbed a hill for a better look. Someone called out 'Quien vive?' De Montel answered 'Quien es?' and the shooting resumed. The two men ran, hit a wire fence, and tumbled to the ground. A bullet splintered a rock near Wood, fragments cutting his hand. They escaped into the desert and found the surviving cavalrymen. At Boquillas, the raiders took Jesse Deemer and his Black Seminole assistant Monroe Payne hostage and drove them into Mexico in a stolen truck.

The raid prompted President Woodrow Wilson to mobilize the Texas National Guard to reinforce federal forces along the border. The Army established a permanent cavalry camp at Glenn Springs in 1916, maintaining it until 1920 when border tensions finally eased. But the settlement never recovered. The wax factory, the Ellis store, and the adobe building where the soldiers made their stand all burned that night in May. Several houses were looted. The commercial center lay in ruins. Today Glenn Springs exists only as a historic site within Big Bend National Park, a few crumbling walls and the spring that still flows, marking where a small community briefly flourished and violently ended during the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution.