Publication: Index of Texas Archaeology Open Access Grey Literature from the Lone Star State
Author: Mark Cioc-Ortega
Date of Publication: 2015
PDF File: Cioc-Ortega-2015-First-Impressions-Anglo-Travelers-and-the-Origins.pdf
URL: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol2015/iss1/68/
Description
El Paso del Norte was a thriving agricultural region on the Santa Fe-Chihuahua trail when the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) and the 1849 gold rush turned it into a border town on the southern route to California. The diaries and letters of the Anglo-American soldiers, engineers, and gold seekers who passed through the area in the 1840s and 1850s document the emergence of a new political and economic landscape that helped define the pattern of Anglo-Mexican relations in the new town of El Paso, Texas (across the Rio Grande from El Paso del Norte), well into the next century.