Las Cruces: The Crosses and the Founding

Las Cruces became an American town in eighteen forty-nine, but the name it carries is older and darker than its founding. The story most often told is this: a party of travelers moving up the Camino Real was attacked by Apache raiders near the crossing of the Rio Grande in eighteen thirty, and the dead were buried on the spot, their graves marked with wooden crosses. When American Army surveyors came through in eighteen forty-eight and forty-nine, they saw the cluster of crosses in the desert scrub and wrote the place down as Las Cruces: the crosses.

A competing account places the massacre in eighteen thirty-two and names a different set of victims, a group including a Catholic priest and a local justice of the peace. The details vary, but the essential shape of the story is consistent: violence on the road, markers in the ground, a name that carries its history in every syllable.

The formal American settlement of Las Cruces was authorized by the United States Army in eighteen forty-nine, a year after the Mexican-American War transferred this territory to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Army Lieutenant Delos Sackett laid out the town's grid, and the first lots were distributed by lottery in late eighteen forty-nine. The population was overwhelmingly Hispanic, descended from families who had lived in the Mesilla Valley for generations under Spanish and then Mexican rule, and who now found themselves in a new country without having moved an inch.

The town grew as a supply point for military posts, a stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail route after eighteen fifty-eight, and eventually a railroad junction when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived in eighteen eighty-one. That railroad connection ended Las Cruces's isolation and began its transformation from dusty outpost to regional commercial center. Today it is the second-largest city in New Mexico, with a population approaching one hundred fifteen thousand.