Literary El Paso

Nancy Hamilton

57 Nancy Hamilton Native El Pasoan Nancy Miller Hamilton received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso. Following a career in newspaper reporting for both the El Paso Times and the El Paso Herald-Post, she was the first head of the media relations department of the El Paso Independent School District. She retired in 1990 from her position as associate director of Texas Western Press. Hamilton edited and wrote for the university’s magazine Nova, and for Roundup, the magazine of Western Writers of America. She is the author of Ben Dowell: El Paso’s First Mayor and UTEP: A Pictorial History, as well as many articles for journals and other publications, and is a past president of Western Writers of America. “El Paso’s Pioneer Women” was chosen by the El Paso County Historical Society for the 2007 Eugene O. Porter Award, and her article on Alexander Daguerre won the Porter Award in 2003. From El Paso’s Pioneer Women When she came to El Paso from Austin as a bride in 1869, Mrs. W. W. Mills rode overland in an ambulance outfitted with a berth for sleeping, making the seven-hundred mile trip in twenty-three days. Her husband had arranged for an escort of soldiers and a wagon filled with baggage, as well as having a driver and a Mexican servant.“We were in constant fear of Indians,” she told the Association of Pioneer Women of El Paso in 1922. On the fifth night out, at Kickapoo Springs, a band of Indians wanted to steal the animals, but the soldiers fired at them and they left. Her husband teased her by pointing at a primitive Mexican hut, a jacal, along the way, telling her that was the kind of home she would have. But upon arriving in El Paso, he took her along one of the few established streets, to his home at 312 San Antonio. He proudly showed her that it had plank flooring, the first in the town, and trees in the front yard. 58 Mrs. Mills learned to keep her butter and water cool by using glazed earthen vessels. “Every yard had an acequia with water cold as snow, as it was melted snow,” she explained. She would let the water settle in a jar, put it into a porous vessel, then place it at night in a sand bank under a cottonwood tree with greens surrounding it. Glazed vessels with lids were used for butter, and an open vessel for grapes, the fruit being covered with water. Her most frightening experience in the early days occurred when three Indians from Ysleta came to see her husband about government business. “One Indian wanted to see the squaw,” she recalled. “He looked at my fingers, my arm, turned me around, looked at my hair, and talked in Spanish.” Mr. Mills went to his office and one of the Indians came back to their home, drunk and riding a Mexican pony. He called to her in Spanish and pounded on the door, but she locked it and sat on the floor in fear that the man would kill her, crying until her husband finally returned. She did not know that the Indians from Ysleta were not hostile. At the time Mrs. Mills related these adventures, she was living in Austin, where she and her husband had moved after he left the position of consul in Chihuahua City in 1907. Although she had not made her home in El Paso since his appointment as consul in 1897, she often returned to visit her many friends and kept in touch with several women’s organizations, among them the Association of Pioneer Women of El Paso, which made her an honorary member. She also had been a founder of the Woman’s Club of El Paso and its first president.1 Her lecture for the Pioneer Women was one of several recorded in the minutes of their meetings in the 1920s, when women who were true pioneers were still available to tell their stories. They shared many common experiences —living in adobe houses with dirt floors, packing mud into holes in the walls and ceilings, letting water from the Rio Grande settle in large jars, and relying on soldiers to protect the town from Indian raids on livestock. The Pioneer Women had organized only a year before Mrs. Mills came to speak to them. Some of their group had been members...