El Paso

Duane's take

The way the marker reads it, here's the story of El Paso as the official record tells it. Now, some cities have a history. El Paso has a procession.

Think about everything that has ever needed to get through the mountains between two nations, and you start to understand why this place exists at all. It is the largest United States city on the Mexican border, and it got its name from the mountain pass itself. That pass was not just a feature on a map.

It was a corridor. Before there were maps worth trusting, Indians moved through it. Then came the priests.

Then the gold-seekers, eyes bright and boots wearing thin. Then traders hauling goods in both directions, then stagecoaches kicking up dust on a schedule. Every era had its travelers, and every one of them came through the same gap in the same mountains.

The pass did not care who you were. It just let you through. Or it didn't.

During the Civil War, federal troops occupied this area longer than any other location in the state of Texas. Longer than any other. Whatever was happening elsewhere in that war, El Paso held a particular kind of attention.

After the war, after the stages, after all of it, the city kept building itself into something more than a crossing point. It became an agricultural center, an industrial center, a military center. Spanish missions took root here.

Texas Western College stood here. El Paso is, in the end, the place where the continent funnels itself down to a single narrow possibility, and everything and everyone that ever needed to get through, came right through here.

What the marker says

Largest U.S. city on the Mexican border. Named for the mountain pass. Historic gateway for Indians, priests, gold-seekers, traders, stages. Federal troops occupied this area longer than any other in Texas during the Civil War. Agricultural, industrial and military center. Texas Western College, Spanish missions. (1964)