Brownsville raid A unit of African-American soldiers, known as Buffalo Soldiers, was stationed at Fort Brown. White residents of town resented the presence of the Black soldiers, and tensions rose. On August 13 and 14, 1906, unknown persons "raided" Brownsville, indiscriminately shooting bystanders. They wounded one White man and killed White resident Frank Natus. The townspeople of Brownsville quickly blamed the Black soldiers for the incident. The Army investigated the matter and concluded that the Black soldiers were guilty, although their supervising officers supported them and said they had been at the fort. William H. Taft, then President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War and soon to be elected as president, ordered all 168 Black soldiers to be discharged "without honor". In 1972, the Army conducted another investigation, led by Lt. Col. William Baker. The government concluded that the Black soldiers had not been responsible. They were given posthumous honorable discharges, but by then, only two of the original 168 men were still alive. The two men received compensation, but the Army did not restore the dead soldiers' pensions, to which their descendants would have been entitled. Since the late 20th century, historians have speculated about the incident. The History Channel's program History's Mysteries attributed the incident to Brownsville residents' shooting up the town with rifles using the same caliber ammunition (.45-70 ?) as the soldiers and then framing the soldiers. (Academic press books about the Brownsville Raid include The Brownsville Raid (1970/1992) and The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son: Exoneration of the Brownsville Soldiers (1997) by John D. Weaver, and Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (2010) by James Leiker.) First airplane to be attacked by hostile fire On April 20, 1915, U.S. Signal Corps Officers Byron Q. Jones and Thomas Millings flew a Martin T over the fort to spot movements of Mexican Revolutionary leader Francisco "Pancho" Villa. The plane reached an altitude of 2,600 ft. and was up for 20 minutes. It did not cross the border into Mexico, although it was fired upon by machine guns and small arms. These frequent patrols lasted for 6 weeks and were used more effectively in 1916. 124th Cavalry The troopers stationed at Fort Brown from 1929–45 were from the 124th Cavalry Regiment, Texas National Guard, which was one of the last mounted cavalry regiments in the United States Army. On November 18, 1940, they went into active military