Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898

by W. W. Mills

Governor Davis had given El Paso a new District Judge, S. B. Newcomb, and a new District Attorney, J. P. Hague, neither of whom had ever been heard of on the frontier. These and two adventurers asked permission to join our party, which was granted, and these four “tenderfeet” made the journey with us in a wagon drawn by two little mules. Our ideas as to traveling over the plains were so different that we sometimes separated for a day or night. They fondly believed that a “station” was a place where warm meals and clean beds and forage for animals were to be had, and their greatest anxiety was to “get in.” We depended upon our mess chest for ourselves, and grassy camps for our animals, and fared much better.

Much depends upon selecting a good camp, and some of ours were very pleasant, and even beautiful, so that we had the appearance of a picnic party. I remember that sometimes we have made a long drive in order to reach some remembered nook where we had spent a night on former journeys, and we would drive into it with a feeling akin to coming home.

We reached the Pecos river at Horsehead crossing (where I had camped twelve years earlier with the Boundary Commission) at daybreak one morning. The river was swollen and the crossing dangerous. I first sent a man across on horseback, and then placing my wife and child in the ambulance I mounted the box and drove through the torrent, leading the way for the four adult male tenderfeet. Their cries to us when we had reached the western bank, “We can make it,” “We can make it,” were intended to cheer us, but really it was not a matter of the greatest importance to us whether they “made it” or not; and, could we have foreseen the future we might have felt still more indifferent. It is but fair to state that, later on Mr. Hayne forsook my enemies and became my friend and remained so till his death.

And now, arrived at my home, came the most trying days of my life. Up to this time the malignity of my enemies could affect only myself, but now my wife and child must suffer also. There were never more than a dozen of these enemies. They were composed of men of both political parties, each of whom aspired to be the political leader of El Paso. They were in full accord only in one aim—the political and personal ruin of W. W. Mills. The Republicans reasoned thus: “We cannot lead the Republican party until we down Mills.” The Democrats reasoned thus: “We cannot defeat the Republican party until we down Mills!” They called themselves the “Anti-Mills Party.”

In June, 1871, there appeared in all the Republican (radical) newspapers of Texas to which these parties could gain access a most slanderous and libelous publication against myself, purporting to be the resolutions of a Republican convention of El Paso County, declaring me to be of infamous character and “capable of all the crimes in the calendar.”

This document was signed by three Americans as “President” and “Secretary” of the convention, and purported to be signed by fifteen of the most prominent Mexicans of the county, all of whom were my friends and none of whom had ever attended any such “convention.”

I received written statements from all of these Mexican gentlemen declaring their friendship for me and denouncing the forgery of their names. This crime was severely punishable by the laws of Texas, and the punishment was double wherever the name of another person was used to give respectability to the libel, and I could have caused these men to have been arrested and carried to Austin and punished there, but now that so many years have elapsed and these vicious and guilty men have gone to their last account I do not regret that they escaped, and I omit their names.

Simultaneously with the publication of the libel mentioned above there appeared in all the accessible Democratic papers in the State a letter signed “Victor” (B. F. Williams), containing the same slanders but somewhat changed in form, showing concert of action.

Then Governor Hamilton wrote me a letter cautioning me against any resort to violence and bidding me bide my time.

Then our little boy sickened and died, and Mrs. Mills’ health began to fail, and as my enemies, nearly all of whom had received substantial favors from me, showed no sign of relenting, we went again to Austin, this time in the mail coach, carrying the remains of our first born in the “boot,” to be buried at the Capital of Texas, where we hope also to rest when life’s fitful fever is past.