Fort Bliss: From Frontier Post to Cold War Arsenal
Near El Paso, Texas
The Army established a post near El Paso in eighteen forty-nine, three years after the Mexican-American War gave the United States formal control of the region. The original purpose was simple: protect the road, protect the settlers, and project enough military authority along the border to prevent the kind of raiding that had characterized the previous decade. The post moved several times in its early years and did not settle at its current location until eighteen ninety-three. By then it had been renamed Fort Bliss, in honor of Lieutenant Colonel William Bliss, an officer who had served in the Mexican-American War.
For the first half of its existence, Fort Bliss was a frontier cavalry post, participating in the campaigns against Apache and Comanche bands that reshaped the Southwest in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. It was the staging point for the Pershing expedition into Mexico in nineteen sixteen. When the United States entered the First World War, the post expanded rapidly, training cavalry and artillery units. During the Second World War, it housed German and Italian prisoners of war while simultaneously serving as an anti-aircraft artillery training center.
After nineteen forty-five, Fort Bliss was transformed by the Cold War. The German rocket scientists of Operation Paperclip worked here until nineteen fifty. The Army developed its first surface-to-air missile programs at White Sands, just over the mountains to the east, with Fort Bliss as the administrative and housing center. Through the nineteen fifties and sixties, successive generations of air-defense missiles, from Nike-Ajax through Nike-Hercules through Hawk, were tested and trained here. Fort Bliss became the center of American air-defense artillery, a role it retains today.
It is one of the largest military installations in the United States, encompassing more than a million acres of range and desert. The city of El Paso grew up around it, dependent on it economically, shaped by its presence in ways that a purely civilian border city would not have been. Fort Bliss is not the background of El Paso's history. In many ways, it is the foreground.
