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These hard to find books are perfect for anyone interested in the history, people and places of El Paso County Texas.

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Over sixty years after leaving Nauvoo, the Mormons were once again forced to flee for their lives. Discover this incredible story for the first time in this one-of-a-kind book and DVD set, detailing the events of the Mormon Exodus from Mexico in July 1912. . . . Read more

Manhattan Heights Historic District can trace its beginnings to June 9, 1899, when paperwork was filed by El Paso and New York investors to begin the process of opening the Federal Copper Company. By 1912, however, the smelter was closed and demolished. Shortly thereafter, four of the five parcels of land originally owned by the smelter were purchased to build what many considered to be El Paso's first suburban neighborhood. The first house was built in 1914, with many more to follow . . . Read more

Moments In Time" consist of two primary sections and each section is laid out in a chronological timeline format. As an example: "May 25, 1904 - The founders of this city met at the City Hall on this date and established The Pioneer Society of El Paso. Joseph Magoffin, the dean of all members was elected as president . . . . . " Section one deals exclusively with the birth and evolution of the El Paso Police Department up through 2016. Section two, on the other hand, deals with all other non-police related items. Readers will find great interest in the historical content of  . . . Read more

"On Wednesday, January 16, 2008, a vehicle loaded with 985 kilos of marijuana rolled out of Juárez and across the Bridge of the Americas into El Paso, Texas. The prior day, a man named Saulo Reyes had paid an individual posing as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent $4,250 in cash as a down payment to ensure the passage of the load. Reyes had been introduced to the man in November and for almost two months they had been negotiating the deal. Once safely across, the shipment had been delivered to a home in Horizon City, a suburb of El Paso. The following day, Saulo Reyes and the would-be ICE agent met again, this time in an El Paso parking lot, Reyes paid the man an additional $15,000, which was ..." Read more Look inside

"It was after midnight on Saturday, January 3, 1920, when Captain Claude T. Smith and Detectives Antonio Varela and Elmer Reynolds arrived at the end of Raynor Street in El Paso. Smith was a former Texas Ranger and a career lawman who had only recently been promoted to Captain. Varel and Reynolds were also seasoned officer, tough men who were familiar with the nightlife in the border city. Just five months earlier, a knife-wielding burglar had slashed Varela when the detective tried to arrest him for breaking into a house. Despite his injury, Varela shot the man in the leg . . . " Read more Look inside

Long before the Pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving at Plymouth in 1621, a similar feast of thanks was shared in the New World. In the 1500s, Mexican conquistador Juan de Oñate led an expedition north of the Rio Grande into an area now known as Texas. . . . Read more

Mildred Clark Cusey was a whore, a madam, an entrepreneur, and above all, a survivor. The story of Silver City Millie, as she referred to herself, is the story of one woman's personal tragedies and triumphs as an orphan, a Harvey Girl waitress on the Santa Fe railroad, a prostitute with innumerable paramours, and a highly successful bordello businesswoman. "It was late 1933 when Millie made her next move. She bought the Mint Bar on Mill Street in El Paso and hired twin brothers, Floyd and Lloyd Brown to run it. " ... Read more Look inside

"... Mogollons began building partially underground pit houses, which kept them cool in summer and warm in winter. Their search for reliable water led some to Hueco Tanks near El Paso, where they built a small village of pit houses that lasted from 1150 to about 1350. Eventually the Mogollons acquired . . .  Read more Look inside

 In 1938, Hazel Frome, the wife of a powerful executive at Atlas Powder Company, a San Francisco explosives manufacturer, set out on a cross-country motor trip with her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Nancy. When their car broke down in El Paso, Texas, they made the most of being stranded by staying at a posh hotel and crossing the border to Juarez for shopping, dining, and drinking. A week later, their near-nude bodies were found in the Chihuahuan Desert . . . Read more

The Mexican Revolution took place along the entire length of the border between the United States and Mexico. Most of the intense battles and revolutionary intrigue, however, were concentrated in the border region of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. For 20 years, the U.S. and Mexico border communities dealt with revolution, beginning before the 1909 Taft-Díaz visit and ending with the Escobar Revolution of 1929. In between were battles, assassinations . . . Read more

"He ended up, evidently in the company of another Ranger, at 307 South Utah Street, the location of Tillie Howard's Sporting House. The term "sporting house" back then had nothing to do with baseball or boxing. In her mid-twenties, Tillie came to El Paso in 1890 after being dumped by Willie Sells, owner of the famous Sells Circus. Soon she was El Paso's premier madam . . . . " Read more Look inside

Spanning a thirty-year period, from the late 1800s until the 1920s, Hell Paso is the true story of the desperate men and notorious women that made El Paso, Texas the Old West’s most dangerous town. Supported by official court documents, government records, oral histories and period newspaper accounts, this book offers a bird’s eye view of the one-time “murder metropolis” of the Southwest . . .  Read more Look inside

"Gillett found he had little time for romance as the detachment, and indeed El Paso County itself, were still dealing with the aftermath of the Salt War. The authorized strength for Baylor's outfit was twenty men, and nine were held over from the previous commander's . . . Read more Look inside

Deadly Dozen tells the story of twelve infamous gunfighters, feared in their own times but almost forgotten today.

Found Inside: " To provide assistance, Texas governor Richard Hubbard authorized El Paso County sheriff Charles Kerber to raise a posse of fighting men. Not-too-distant Silver City, New Mexico, was known to be well stocked with tough adventurers who would welcome an opportunity to do battle with Mexicans for forty dollars a month and forage, and it was there that Kerber turned for enlistees. ... " Read more Look inside

by Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb was born and raised in Los Angeles and spent as many years in El Paso. He now lives in Austin. When he first started writing, Dagoberto Gilb was struggling to survive as a journeyman high-rise carpenter. Years later, he has won widespread acclaim as a crucial and compelling voice in contemporary American letters. Gilb's essays and his popular commentaries for NPR's Fresh Air, offering a startling portrait of an artist-and a Mexican-American- working to find his place in both the cloistered literary world and the world at large, to say nothing of his strange and beloved borderland of Texas . . . Read more Look inside

Featuring a side of Tejano history too often neglected, author Arnoldo De León shows that people of Spanish-Mexican descent were not passive players in or, worse, absent from West Texas history but instead were active agents at the center of it . . . Read more Look inside

The Society had its beginnings at the A&M-Texas football game in 1909. The announced purpose of the society was to collect and make known to the public songs and ballads, superstitions, signs and omens, cures and peculiar customs, legends, dialects, games, plays, and dances, and riddles and proverbs. Found Inside: Tales from San Elizario --- Josefina Escajeda

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A fascinating book in a most unusual way, at El Paso, Texas and its environs. With this his 12th book, Leon Metz has put his adopted town into perspective, date by date, from the time it was covered by shallow seas 570 million years before Christ and up to the present.  . . . Read more

John Wesley Hardin is the most famous gunfighter of the American Wild West. The subject of conversations from the Mexican border to the rowdy saloons of Kansas, he was the greatest celebrity of the age. He wrote an autobiography, but he only told what he wanted known, and few have researched beyond that. Today, Hardin is an enigma. Part of the mystery is his disastrous relationship with Helen Beulah Mrose, yet she has not been researched at all. Until now. The author lists El Paso County courthouse records as a primary source for this book . . .   . . . Read more Look inside

Found Inside: "And now they rushed on, past the Cottonwoods, past that pillar which marks the corner where join Mexico, New Mexico and Texas, past Hart's Mills, until The Kid draw rein in front of Ben Dowell's saloon, in El Paso, then Franklin, Texas. It was now a quarter past ten o'clock, and the gray had covered fifty-six miles. The bold rider took time to swallow a glass of Peter Den's Whiskey and feed his horse a handful of crackers . . . Read more Look inside

"As you turn the pages of this book you will experience the events from the primordial beginnings of the Rio Grande to the evolution of an international city..."- from the inside flap . . . Read more

"The cause of this cowboy outlaw stamped was the arrival of E. W. Parker -- now a respected citizen of El Paso, Texas and his large, well armed crew of Government Star-route mail surveyors. But they kept their mission a secret, hence the boys had them spotted as Texas Rangers in disguise " . . . Read more Look inside

A compilation of information on Adventists establishing the Church in these areas ... Conference Heritage Series) (Volume 2) This second volume of the Texico Conference Heritage Series is a continuation of the courage, dedication, and sacrifices made by the early SDA workers who brought the Texico Conference into existence. They provided the foundation for where it is today - from small informal groups to the growth of churches and schools with buildings. Reliance on railroad travel is still primary, but the automobile is just  . . . Read more . . . for more like this please see Texas Church History

The best of El Paso, Texas is a collectible book that you can personalize! You will want to keep it forever. Perfect for date night, the family, independent fun, the adventurer, the traveler, or anyone else looking for something to do in El Paso, Texas. This little collectible book has some of the best things to do in El Paso, Texas. . . . Read more

We all have a little angel in us. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time. This collection reveals the “Ordinary Angels” of El Paso, Texas, in real-life stories of help, healing, and comfort. . . . Read more

 The First Fifty Years . . . for more like this please see Texas Church History

Explores the relationship of class, race, and labor in El Paso, documenting the evolution of work, housing, education, politics, and culture in the Mexican community. Desert Immigrants makes a significant contribution not only to Chicano and Mexican history, but to the history of immigration and labor and urban studies as well . . . Read more

Mexican American Baseball in El Paso chronicles the vibrant and colorful history of baseball in the El Paso-Juárez border region. For more than a century, baseball along the border has served as a means of bringing together people of all backgrounds, races, and nationalities, from the fly-by-night teams of the Pancho Villa era to the fabled semiprofessional clubs of the Lower Valley League. For the area's Mexican and Mexican American citizens, storied teams like the Juárez Indios, Fabens Merchants . . . Read more

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. . . . Read more

El Paso boasts a rich history. . . . Read more

A muckraking newspaperman who was once nationally known as a historian of the West, Owen Payne White (1879-1946) brought local history to center stage, intrigued readers nationally with tales of the Old West, and spotlighted corruption in high and low places. This long-overdue biography restores this overlooked writer to the forefront of western history and journalism. White spent his early writing career as a newspaper columnist until his history of El Paso, Out of the Desert: The Historical Romance of El Paso, catapulted him into the major leagues of journalism . . . Read more

In this newest installment of this award winning series, the authors look at what they like to call School Spirits! Find Haunted Texas schools in Alpine, Alvin, Amarillo, Arlington, Austin, Beaumont, Belton, Big Sandy, Big Spring, Brownsville, Bryan/College Station, Caldwell, Carrollton, Clint, Coahoma, Commerce, Corpus Christi, Corsicana, Cotulla, Dallas, Denton, Duncanville, East Bernard, Edinburg, El Paso, Elgin, Eola, Fabens . . . Read more

". . . put on the popular reading list of all types and ages of readers, as it is biography, adventure, romance, and history enacted upon the large, colorful stage of Texas, written in an aggressive, smooth flow of language packed with western action."--Joseph Dixon Matlock, Southwestern Historical Quarterly . . . Read more

The central event is the contract murder of Thomas Lyons, the owner of the largest ranch in the United States in 1917. Lyons’ ranch was in Grant County, New Mexico, and he was lured to EL Paso on business and murdered there. Only the hit man was convicted, although his co-conspirators were identified and obviously guilty. A motive for the crime was never asserted. After the hit man was convicted, the case was officially closed as unsolved. It was quickly forgotten and for nearly 100 years no one realized what had actually happened and who the . . . Read more

Located at the far western tip of Texas, the city of El Paso is bordered on the north by New Mexico and on the south by the city of Juarez, Mexico. The area's recorded history dates back more than 400 years when Spanish missionaries gave the region its name: El Paso del Norte, or The Pass of the North. Between 1850 and 1950, El Paso's growth was influenced by a variety of people and events. The "four dead in five seconds" shootout in 1881 gave El Paso the short-lived nickname "Six-Shooter Capital" until the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, happened later that year. When the railroad  . . . Read more

This memoir of growing up in El Paso in the 1940s and 1950s creates an entire city: the way a barrio awakens in the early morning sun, the thrill of a rare desert snow, the taste of fruit-flavored raspadas on summer afternoons, the "money boys" who beg from commuters passing back and forth to Juárez, and the mischief of children entertaining themselves in the streets. López-Stafford shows readers El Paso through the eyes of Yoya--short for Gloria--the high-spirited narrator, who is five years old when the book begins . . . Read more

The Mexican Revolution could not have succeeded without the use of American territory as a secret base of operations, a source of munitions, money, and volunteers, a refuge for personnel, an arena for propaganda, and a market for revolutionary loot. El Paso, the largest and most important American city on the Mexican border during this time, was the scene of many clandestine operations as American businesses and the U.S. federal government sought to maintain their influences in Mexico and protect national interest while keeping an eye on key  . . . Read more

Beginning with drawings and woodcuts depicting the days before photography, this book follows the story of life at the Pass of the North, documenting change as El Paso took shape and grew from a dirt-street frontier town into a modern city in the 1970s. Each era is fascinating, from the arrival of the conquistadores, through the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, the turn of the century with the establishment of more businesses and the move toward permanent residences, the Mexican Revolution, the war years, the rapid changes of the fifties and, finally, the sophistication of the seventies. Many of the photographs, especially those of the Mexican Revolution, are extremely rare  . . . Read more

An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893-1923

El Paso/Juárez served as the tinderbox of the Mexican Revolution and the tumultuous years to follow. In essays and archival photographs, David Romo tells the surreal stories at the roots of the greatest Latin American revolution: The sainted beauty queen Teresita inspires revolutionary fervor and is rumored to have blessed the first rifles of the revolutionaries; anarchists publish newspapers and hatch plots against the hated Porfirio Diaz regime; Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa eats ice cream cones and rides his Indian motorcycle happily through downtown; El Paso’s  . . . Read more

"As a result, from 1848-1890, whites and Mexican Americans in El Paso, Presidio, and Pecos counties shared elected offices and conducted business transactions. Additionally, many of the white men moving to the Trans-Pecos during this period were single, and since there were few white women in the area, a number of Anglo American men married Tejano women . . . " Read more Look inside

From DJ flap: In this meticulously researched book the professor of history author focuses on the uniqueness of life of the US-Mexico border. Central to the work art the two cultural traditions, - the Spanish Mexican North and the comparatively new Anglo-American Southwest . . . Read more

Recollections of War, Politics, Adventure, Events, Narratives, Sketches, Etc. (Illustrated)

The Amazing Story of God's Work among the Poor of El Paso-Juarez

This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Paso-Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. From the badlands--the historically notorious eastern Valle de Juárez--to the Puerto Palomas port of entry at Columbus, New Mexico, this area has become more militarized and politicized than ever before. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law . . . Read more

The drug war that has turned Juárez, Mexico, into a killing field that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since 2008 captures headlines almost daily. But few accounts go all the way down to the streets to investigate the lives of individual drug users. One of those users, Scott Comar, survived years of heroin addiction and failed attempts at detox and finally cleaned up in 2003. Now a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso in the history department's borderlands doctoral program, Comar has  . . . Read more

Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2011

Thousands of people die in drug-related violence every year in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, adjacent to El Paso, Texas, has become the most violent city in the Mexican drug war. Much of the cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine consumed in the United States is imported across the Mexican border, making El Paso/Juárez one of the major drug-trafficking venues in the world. . . . Read more

From a small settlement along the Rio Grande to a major metropolitan area at the crossroads of three states and two nations, El Paso has grown immensely. Known as the "Sun City," the region has always attracted individuals and families from around the world who were looking to establish roots and make their mark. In the early days, pioneers such as Zach White, Anson Mills, and Joseph Magoffin helped lay a solid foundation on which the city was built. Gunfighters like John Wesley Hardin walked the  . . . Read more

Found Inside: "Before Major Jones arrived in El Paso, Howard had written General Steele that El Paso County Coty as quiet because nobody opposed the mob and that  the Americans were afraid to open their mouths. He did not wish to see general punishment visited on the rioters who were ignorant as mules and misled, but thought that the leaders should be punished and made to  " . . . Read more Look inside

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In 1881, the railroads came to the dusty West Texas town of El Paso bringing drummers, lawmen, gunmen, gamblers, ladies of the evening, miners, and untold others. They did not all have horses or buggies and the town fathers soon recognized the need for a mule-powered streetcar system. This is the story of how those mule cars carried the colorful characters of El Paso around town and across the Rio Grande to Mexico. It is also the story of the spoiled town pet, Mandy the Mule, and the remarkable  . . . Read more

Spanish explorers traveling north from Mexico in 1581 crossed the Rio Grande at present-day El Paso and called the area El Paso Del Norte, or "the pass of the north." Two cities were linked together: Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. In 1881, the railroad brought even more people to El Paso. What had been a sleepy adobe town became a vibrant, bustling city. Public transportation was established with a mule-car system in 1882 and ran for 20 years. The first electric cars were introduced in 1902 and were also very successful, serving all parts of the city . . . Read more

The El Paso Operation that Remade Immigration Enforcement

To understand border enforcement and the shape it has taken, it is imperative to examine a groundbreaking Border Patrol operation begun in 1993 in El Paso, Texas, "Operation Blockade." The El Paso Border Patrol designed and implemented this radical new strategy, posting 400 agents directly on the banks of the Rio Grande in highly visible positions to deter unauthorized border crossings into the urban areas of El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juárez—a marked departure from the traditional strategy  . . . Read more

El Paso is a city with an international history and culture that is tied to the Rio Grande. Native Americans followed the river and traded with other groups that lived near it. With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, the Rio Grande became the international boundary between the United States and Mexico. Historic Photos of El Paso is a gorgeous photographic history of  . . . Read more

The exciting story of El Paso, 1536 to the present

El Paso’s African American community can trace its origins back to the 16th century, when the black Moor known as Esteban roamed the southwest and, more significantly, those Africans in the party of conquistador Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande in 1598. The modern El Paso African American community began to take shape in the 1880s, as the railroad industry, military establishment, and agricultural community all had black Americans in their ranks. Black leaders and their followers  . . . Read more  . . . for more like this please see Black Texans in History

The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Stories by J. Reeder Archuleta, author of the novel Rio Sonora, are about coming of age in rural, far West Texas. The short stories are about the people who have come to stay in a remote part of Texas with a climate that can be harsh and unpredictable and a land that is demanding and unforgiving. For these folks, there is no place they would rather live.
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