Tag: loretta mmiles tollefson

Texan Prisoners Reach El Paso!

Texan Prisoners Reach El Paso!

When the last of the men from the Texas Santa Fe Expedition reached El Paso del Norte (today’s Juarez) in early November 1841, they must have felt as if they’d come out of hell into paradise.


They had traveled roughly 1000 miles from Austin, Texas to New Mexico, starving a good deal of the way, then about 500 more, as prisoners, from eastern New Mexico to the Rio Grande, then south, a route that included the desert-like Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of the Dead Man. They had endured unbearable heat on the plains and snow and icy winds on the Jornada. Now, though they were still prisoners, life had become much easier.


The very weather had changed. George Wilkins Kendall noticed it the night before they arrived, when, he says, “the evening air was of a most wooing temperature mild and bland” (Kendall, II, 23). As the Texans reached the outskirts of El Paso, they saw that the very plant life was different. The valley, irrigated by a canal from the Rio Grande, boasted abundant wheat, onions up to four pounds in weight, fruit trees, and extensive vineyards (Timmons, 195).


Even Kendall, who spent almost all his time in Mexico complaining, liked El Paso del Norte. Although his report doesn’t mention its famous building, the mission of Guadalupe de los Mansos, he does rhapsodize about the city’s “delightful situation in a quiet and secluded valley, its rippling artificial brooks, its shady streets, its teeming and luxurious vineyards, its dry, pure air and mild climate, and, above all, its kind and hospitable inhabitants” (Kendall, II, 42).

The Guadalupe Mission was painted in 1850 by A. de Vauducourt.
Source: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misión_de_Guadalupe_de_los_Mansos_en_el_Paso_del_río_del_Norte Accessed 10/17/23


Part of the reason Kendall was so impressed by the hospitality was that he was one of several Texans hosted by Presidio Commander José María Elías González. And hosted lavishly. Kendall reports the afternoon hot chocolate, the evening wine in glasses the size of New England tumblers, the tasty blood puddings, and other details of the table with great glee.
But the party couldn’t go on forever. The Texan prisoners were on the road again on Tuesday, November 9, heading to Chihuahua en route to Mexico City, where life would again become difficult. The idyll of El Paso was over, and prison and the whims of President Santa Anna, who the Texans had humiliated at San Jacinto, waited ahead.

Partial Sources: Ruben Cobos, A Dictionary of New Mexico & Southern Colorado Spanish, Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press; George Wilkins Kendall, A Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, Vol. II, Harper and Brothers: New York, 1847; W.H. Timmons, El Paso, A Borderlands History, El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2004.

THE LOST SOUL

As Jorgé Ruibal wandered up the middle of the road toward Elizabethtown proper, the men outside the taberna watched him sympathetically. “El joven es como alma en pena,” Carlos Otero the jeweler said. “The young man is like a lost soul.”

“Si,” said the boy’s uncle. “He has lost his laborer job with Señor Bergmann. His papá is very angry with him.”

“I heard he was in love and that his love was unrequited,” Eduardo Suaso, the taberna’s musician, said.

María de la Luz, the boy’s cousin, appeared from around the corner of the building. She carried a basket of clean linens for delivery to Henri Lambert’s Etown restaurant and hotel. She gazed at Jorgé, who’d stopped to poke his foot at a stone in the road. “He wants to leave here, but his mamá is unwilling,” she said.

Jorgé, oblivious to these speculations, still stood in the dusty street, poking at the stone with his boot. It was so inert and yet so full of a kind of compressed energy. He looked east, toward the massive bulk of Baldy Mountain. The gullies that swung out from its sides were full of rocks and men scrambling through them looking for gold. Yet the mountain bulked there impassively, impervious to the miners who crawled over it. Jorgé crammed his hands in his pockets and stared upward, drinking in its stony greenness, its lack of engagement with the tiny men poking at its skin.

Outside the taberna, the americano miner called Hobart Mitchell came to the door with a drink in his hand and considered the staring boy. “He looks like’n idiot, standin’ there,” Mitchell said. “Touched in the head.”

The others all nodded noncommittally and continued to gaze sympathetically after Jorgé as he wandered on up the road.

from Valley of the Eagles