Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

45. The West Texas Town of El Paso

✥ 45 ✥ The West Texas Town of El Paso In t h e su m m er of 1879, a forty-six-year-old ex-Confederate colonel named George Wythe Baylor started out from San Antonio on horseback to take a new job in El Paso. The job, which paid $75 a month, was a lieutenancy in the Texas Rangers. Baylor later wrote that as he had a family and “had been about two years on scant rations and no pay,” he was glad to get it. Baylor made the 638-mile trip in style. While he rode horseback , his wife, his two daughters (one fourteen and one four), and his sister-in-law traveled in a hack drawn by two mules, followed by a wagon packed with a piano, a cookstove, household furnishings, trunks, and a coop of fighting chickens. Behind that wagon was a second wagon loaded with groceries for the trip and forage for the animals. A two-wheeled cart, carrying two men who were bound for New Mexico and did not want to travel alone, brought up the rear. Five mounted rangers escorted the group. Tom Lea’s luminous painting “Ranger Escort West of the Pecos” depicts Baylor’s caravan traversing the desert west of the Quitman Mountains. It was used by the University of Texas Press on the jacket of the 1965 edition of Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers. Baylor’s party spent six weeks on the journey, following the old military road from San Antonio to El Paso. At Howard’s Wells, near present-day Ozona, they saw the remains of a government wagon train that had been looted and burned by Apaches. That night, Baylor recalled, they were especially vigilant in camp. He told his wife, “If a row comes off tonight, don’t scream. Put Mary (the ✥ 177 youngest girl) in the oven of the cooking stove. Lie down with Kate and Helen and remain quiet.” Fortunately the Apaches, seeing that they were outnumbered by Baylor’s party, bypassed it. The Baylors went on through Wild Rose Pass, up Limpia Canyon and through Fort Davis, past El Muerto Springs and Van Horn Wells, where they again saw signs of Apaches, and finally reached the tree-shaded plaza of Ysleta, their destination, in safety. Twenty years later Baylor wrote an account of this trip to the “far, wild country,” as he called it, for the El Paso Herald. By then El Paso, which had a population of several hundred when Baylor arrived, had grown into a city of sixteen thousand people. Today El Paso has a population of eight hundred thousand. I have been replicating the western end of Baylor’s trip for nearly ten years now, driving from Fort Davis to El Paso and back once every couple of months, and recently it has seemed like half of those eight hundred thousand people are out on Interstate 10 every day. It took Baylor about two weeks to get from Fort Davis to El Paso. It takes me about three hours, but it seems like most of the other folks on the interstate are trying to cut my time in half. I put the cruise control at the legal speed limit of eighty, but other drivers constantly breeze around me at ninety or even a hundred. The worst offenders are Californians, who not only hit three-digit speeds but have enormous bundles flapping in the wind on the tops of their SUVs. Like Baylor, they travel with a lot of baggage. My earliest memory of El Paso is of changing trains there on a trip to California when I was seven, in 1947. My mother and I had an hour between trains and we spent it walking along a street near the station, looking in shop windows. One window had an entire miniature frontier town in it, populated by live white mice, who scurried in and out of the buildings on a bed of wood shavings. Something had agitated the mice just as we approached the window , and they were madly racing around the little village, ricochet178 ✥ ing off buildings and off of each other. It made a lasting impression on my seven-year-old mind and is a perfect metaphor for El Paso today. I find El Paso almost impossible to drive in. The city is squeezed between Mount Franklin, Fort Bliss, a huge railroad yard, and the Rio...