Mesilla: Where Nations Changed Hands and Billy the Kid Was Sentenced

The little plaza town of Mesilla, just west of Las Cruces, witnessed more history in a single generation than most places see in centuries. In the span of about thirty years, it changed national flags twice, hosted one of the most famous criminal trials in the American West, and served briefly as the capital of a Confederate territory.

Mesilla was established in eighteen forty-eight by Mexican settlers who had crossed the Rio Grande specifically to remain on Mexican soil after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the new border. They did not expect what came next. In eighteen fifty-four, as a result of the Gadsden Purchase, the United States paid Mexico ten million dollars for this strip of land stretching from the Texas border west to Yuma. The American flag was raised over Mesilla's plaza on November sixteenth, eighteen fifty-four. The settlers had been absorbed into the United States without moving an inch.

Four years later, the Butterfield Overland Mail began its run through Mesilla, making the town a key stop on the twenty-five-day stagecoach route between Saint Louis and San Francisco. By around eighteen eighty, Mesilla had grown to about two thousand residents, making it the largest town between San Antonio and San Diego.

Then came the Civil War. In eighteen sixty-one, Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Baylor declared Mesilla the capital of the Confederate Territory of Arizona, a phantom political entity that claimed everything south of the thirty-fourth parallel. Confederate troops held the town until Union forces pushed them out in eighteen sixty-two.

And in eighteen eighty-one, a young outlaw named William Bonney stood trial in the Mesilla courthouse. Billy the Kid was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. He escaped before the sentence could be carried out. The courthouse where he was sentenced still stands on the plaza today.