At the head of El Paso street, near the little plaza, where the main acequia ran, there were several large ash and cottonwood trees, in the shade of which was a little market where fruit, and vegetables, and fowls, and mutton, and venison, and other articles were sold. We had no regular meat market.
To one of these trees some enterprising citizen had nailed a plank, which for years served as a bulletin board where people were wont to tack signed manuscripts giving their opinions of each other. Here Mrs. Gillock, who kept the hotel where the Mills building now stands, notified the “Publick” when her boarders refused to pay their bills, and here, in 1859, I saw my brother Anson nail the information that three certain citizens were liars, etc., and here, just ten years later, I gave the same information regarding B. F. Williams. Foolish? Perhaps.
The flouring mill of Simeon Hart, about a mile above the village, was the chief individual industrial enterprise in the valley, and ground the entire wheat crop from both sides of the river, and supplied flour to all the people and the military posts.
The proprietor, a man of wealth and influence, staked all and lost all in the Confederate cause.
The dam which supplied water to this mill had been constructed two hundred years ago by the people of the Mexican side of the river, who kept it in repair for all these years without asking any assistance from the people of the Texas side, although they generously divided the water with us.
The patience and industry displayed by this people in repairing and rebuilding this dam, when washed away by annual floods, can only be compared to that of beavers.
The Texas bank of the Rio Grande was then (1858) only a short distance south of where the Santa Fe depot now stands, but just how far south it is impossible for me or any one else, I believe, to tell, though I have been often asked to testify as to where the river bed was then, and in later years. It found its present bed more or less gradually by erosion and revulsion during these years, and left very few landmarks.
The bed of the river was narrower then than now, and many cottonwood trees grew upon each bank.
At the end of El Paso street was the ferry, where pedestrians crossed in small canoes, and vehicles and wagon trains in larger boats.
Sometimes, when the spring floods came, it was impossible for any one to cross for several days.