The Salt War of 1877

For generations, the Tejano and Mexican families of the El Paso valley had traveled east to the salt lakes at the base of the Guadalupe Mountains and harvested salt. It was communal property, or so they understood it to be, under traditions that predated Texas statehood and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Salt preserved food. Salt was a trade good. The lakes were part of the economic foundation of the borderlands community.

In the eighteen seventies, a series of Anglo-American lawyers and politicians began maneuvering to acquire private title to the salt lakes. The leading figure was Charles Howard, who in eighteen seventy-seven filed a legal claim to three hundred twenty acres encompassing the most productive lake deposits. Under American property law, the filing was legally sound. Under the communal traditions the local population had relied on for generations, it was an act of theft.

In October of eighteen seventy-seven, Howard killed Louis Cardis, an Italian-born community leader who opposed the monopolization of the salt lakes, shooting him in a store in El Paso. The Texas Rangers were sent to restore order. They were not a neutral force; they were aligned with Anglo property interests. A militia led by a leader named Chico Barela besieged the Rangers, disarmed them, and forced them to surrender. The Rangers signed a written agreement promising to leave and not return. Howard was subsequently killed.

The Army arrived and imposed order by force. Anglo property claims to the salt lakes were ultimately enforced. About a dozen people died in the siege. No one was successfully prosecuted.

What the Salt War demonstrated was something the borderlands communities already knew: that American property law, applied to land and resources that communities had used communally for generations, was a mechanism for dispossession. The Rangers who were supposed to enforce the law were driven out. The Army enforced it instead. The salt lakes that had sustained a regional economy for centuries became private property, and the community that had depended on them had no recourse.