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EL
PASO HISTORY
El
Paso County, West Texas |
History
in a Pecan Shell
The History and Culture
of El Paso go back to 1598 and earlier. El Paso and Ciudad Juarez
are the largest border cities on the Texas/ Mexico border. The battles fought
for control of Juarez during the Mexican Revolution were observed with great interest
by El Pasoans who stood on freight cars to watch. The story is told that the victorious
Francisco "Pancho" Villa (after accepting the surrender of the Federal
troops) invited the defeated General to dinner in El Paso. The defeated general
accepted, but they started fighting again - this time over who would pay the check.
The El Paso of the 1870s and 80s also provided many chapters (many of
them final chapters) in the lives of some of the most well-known Texas gunfighters.
Dallas Stoudenmire, John Wesley Hardin, his assassin John Selman
and Bass Outlaw to mention a few. J. W. Hardin is buried in El Paso's Concordia
Cemetery.
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Paso aerial view
Old postcards |
El
Paso Texas History
Sal
del Rey by Delbert Trew
"This historic old salt lake... has been
providing 99 2/5 percent pure salt since before America was discovered. It covers
about 640 acres...
more "
Border
Patrol Shootout on the Rio Grande El Paso (1916)
from "Border Patrol:
With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary 1910-54" by Clifford
Alan Perkins 1918
Flu by Mike Cox
("Texas Tales" column)
" In El Paso, east-west railroad
traffic and the routine rotation of troops at Fort Bliss carried the disease to
the Southwestern desert, an area generally noted for its healthfulness. On September
30, 1918, El Paso papers casually noted that some people in the city had the flu,
but the situation worsened daily.... more"
Storm
of 1895 by Mike Cox ("Texas Tales" column)
"...
In a good year, which is to say an average year, the city at the Pass of the North
enjoys only nine inches of rain. But in the spring of 1895, what fell from the
sky was dust... more
"Bombsite
by Mike Cox ("Texas
Tales" column)
July 16, 1945 saw three dawns.
At 5:29.45 a.m. Mountain War Time, scientists
detonated the world’s first atomic bomb 171 miles north of El Paso at a site on
the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico.The
Lady in Blue by Bob Bowman ("All Things Historical" column)
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El Paso
Texas Forum
Nacogdoches
claims to be the oldest town in Texas, using 1716 as the date. Now, the Dallas
Morning News Texas Almanac and the Univ Texas Handbook of Texas, on line, say
it t'aint so. They say Ysleta and Socorro of ElPaso were est. ~ 1680-2,
which is an earlier date even using public school math. I suspect there's some
'school pride' in this Nacogdoches-ites claim, but is there a real, non-tall-tale
truth for claiming to be the oldest? Or maybe Mr.
Bowman has this covered somewhere? - J R Overton, May 04, 2004
You don't
know how glad I was to find this article...thanks so much. It is really a great
piece of history right in our backyard. - Joshua, 19/Jun/2002
On cemeteries,
a mention of Concordia cemetery in El Paso would be appropriate. From the
Chinese section to the poorest graves marked only by a cross made from two pieces
of rebar, a very strong feeling of the past is evoked, despite (or maybe because
of) its change into an urban setting with adjacent freeway overpasses. ... Best
wishes. - Chris Abbott.
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