Ojinaga, across the river from Presidio, was the last town in northern Mexico still held by federal troops. Pancho Villa opened his final assault on the evening of 10 January 1914, the federals broke overnight, and the town was his on the eleventh. What crossed the Rio Grande over the following days was less an army in retreat than a town in flight: several thousand people, federal soldiers with their wives and children, more than a thousand horses and mules, and some seven hundred wounded who were handed to the Red Cross at Presidio. The column that formed on the American bank was reported to stretch twelve miles.
The nearest railhead was Marfa, sixty seven miles away, and the column took four days over the Casa Piedra Road on horseback, muleback and foot in January weather, under escort of Major Michael McNamee and the Fifteenth Cavalry. Rations went ahead by wagon to each night's camp. From Marfa they went by train to the internment camp at Fort Bliss in El Paso, on to Fort Wingate in New Mexico in May, and most were released back across the border that September. The Texas Historical Commission puts the number eventually moved up to Marfa at about six thousand.
Marfa's response is preserved in the record, and it was divided. The Home Missionary Society and the chamber of commerce raised a hundred and eighteen dollars in relief, while other townspeople wired the governor asking for protection from indigent refugees and organised extra night watchmen. The war kept sending people north regardless. Presidio County's population reached 12,202 by 1920, the highest it has ever been, and 4,524 of them had been born in Mexico.
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29.5636, -104.3715
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