San Elizario: The Town That Saw Everything First

San Elizario is where the history of the El Paso borderlands comes into sharpest focus. This small town at the southern end of the Mission Valley was the first organized Spanish settlement in what is now Texas. It was the site of Oñate's La Toma ceremony in fifteen ninety-eight, the formal Spanish claim to the Rio Grande basin. It was where the first Thanksgiving celebration in North America some scholars argue predated Plymouth by twenty-three years took place, when Oñate's expedition, having survived the brutal crossing of the Jornada del Muerto desert, reached the river and held a Mass and feast with local Manso people. The Thanksgiving claim is disputed by historians; the feast is documented, the interpretation of its significance is not settled.

San Elizario was established as a presidio, a military fort, in seventeen eighty-nine. The soldiers stationed here were supposed to protect the Mission Valley from Apache raids. They had mixed success. The mission chapel they built was damaged repeatedly by Rio Grande floods over the decades. The structure that stands near the plaza today is a later rebuilding, completed in eighteen eighty-two.

The town was the site of the most dramatic episode of the Salt War of eighteen seventy-seven, when Tejano militia forces besieged the Texas Rangers here, disarmed them, and forced them to sign surrender terms. The Rangers left San Elizario in humiliation. The Army arrived later and restored what the government defined as order.

In the mid eighteen seventies, in a courtyard somewhere in San Elizario, Billy the Kid is said to have worked his way out of a jail, escaping from a cell where he had been held on a horse-theft charge. The account is attributed to his own later testimony. No jail-era record has been found to confirm or deny it.

San Elizario today is a quiet town with a beautiful plaza. Its buildings hold four hundred years of layered history in relatively unprocessed form.