The Raid on the Norias Division of the King Ranch was an attack August 8, 1915 by a large band of disaffected Mexicans and Tejanos in southern Texas.

[1] With each drought and economic depression during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tejanos would lose land which Anglos would then buy up, increasing the size of their holdings.

The rapid expansion of railroads into south Texas in the late nineteenth century also brought a flood of Anglo Americans wanting land when these large ranches then subdivided.

Into this tense situation the infighting and turmoil of the Mexican Revolution sent waves of refugees north across the border, rapidly increasing demand for goods, services and competition for land and jobs.

[2] In January 1915 the Plan of San Diego was drafted by Mexican political prisoners in Monterrey, Mexico which called for Hispanics, Blacks and Japanese in the U. S. border states to rebel against the government and kill all white male inhabitants more than sixteen years old as a first step in creating their own republic.

[5] During the years of this strife, though, it was believed that Germany had a hand in the border friction, hoping to distract the United States from involvement in the First World War by destabilizing relations between the U.S. and its southern neighbor.

[6] In any case, the overall plan was so unrealistic that it changed many times and resulted in only a few small raids into Texas from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

[11] Kleberg immediately telephoned the U. S. Army commander at Fort Brown near Brownsville who informed the head of the Texas Rangers, Adjutant General Henry Hutchings.

He also commandeered a special train to leave at two pm, ninety minutes earlier than usual, go to the Norias Division to investigate.

Immigration inspector D. P. Gay, whose department had investigated the Plan of San Diego, was at the Brownsville station and saw the train leave early.

Shortly eating, they were on the porches and in the yard when Inspector Hinds noticed a group of men on horseback approaching from the south.

But when they were about a quarter of a mile away, Taylor noticed their sombreros and the white flag they carried, a Sediciosos banner, and warned of a Mexican attack.

Seeing bullets fly through the walls of the house, they then ran outside to draw fire away from it and took cover, preparing to shoot from behind a water trough and rolls of fencing wire.

[13] The losses in the first attack left the defenders with thirteen able-bodied gunmen to fight off about seventy-eight bandits who were firing at them from the east, the south, the tool shed, the piled railway ties and the section house.

[13] Kleberg told Edmonds that a train in Kingsville was ready to leave, loaded with armed men, supplies, and medical people, but no one was willing to operate it to Norias.

The Sediciosos then made a charge on foot that Joe Taylor stopped by killing the leader from forty yards' distance.

Repeated phone calls to Sarita, Kingsville and Brownsville had been made and one must have been underway at this moment because newspapers reported that the bandits returned.

The rangers were utterly ignorant of gun the battle they had missed and the party of Sediciosos they had passed three times, once on the train and twice on horseback.

Captain Fox ran up the railway line to the section house where he found Manuela Flores dead and the rest of the terrified rail workers and their families huddled together.

Sheriff Hill also lost his temper and invited the rangers to track the bandits in the dark brush themselves if they were as brave as they thought the defenders should have been.

[11]The rangers chose to reconnoiter the vicinity of the ranch compound and found the dead bandits and one badly injured one, as well as the white flag of the rebels.

The injured man claimed he had been forced to join the bandits and said they planned to win back the Rio Grande region for Mexico.

Near the Rio Grande they had run into United States Army troops and another company of Texas Rangers and lost another dozen or so men.

The postcards made from that, and other photographs, sold all through the American South and Mexico and caused a lot of outrage in northern states.

The Americans reported that they had killed five of the Mexicans but only four appear in pictures taken of the dead on the following morning of August 9 when Hutchings and the Texas Rangers returned.