03/11/2002
By Leon Metz
I've reached the age where I read health columns, and I've come to realize that if you have high-blood pressure, salt can kill. Well, I have high-blood pressure, so salt for me is a no-no. Still, it didn't take high- blood pressure to realize that salt can be dangerous. Back in El Paso's mid-1800s, the need for salt probably led to more untimely deaths than any other product. And none of the funerals had anything to do with high-blood pressure.
Salt is one of the world's most necessary products. It seasons food, and back in the old days it helped distill silver out of dirt and rock, separating it from other elements. A gigantic silver trail extended out of Mexico into the El Paso region, forking off to the salt lakes on the present White Sands Missile Range as well the salt beds 70 miles east of El Paso on the Carlsbad Highway.
In 1854, a group of El Pasoans, incensed that New Mexicans from Doña Ana were stealing "our" salt, borrowed a howitzer from Fort Bliss and encountered the enemy near the present-day entry point to White Sands Missile Range off Highway 70.
The cannon went "boom," other shots were fired, and both sides scattered. No one was killed, but indictments for theft and intent to murder were handed down. It was years before several El Pasoans could re-enter New Mexico without being arrested.
Most local residents thereafter took their seasoning from the commonly called Salt Flats. Wagons, especially from San Elizario, made the trip into the middle of the shallow beds.
However, an El Paso Salt Ring was formed, composed of the community's staunchest leaders. It included Charles Howard, an attorney who laid claim to the land, forcing salt gatherers to pay a fee for every bushel removed. The ring members then had a falling out, a disruption leading to the anti-salt ring.
On Dec. 7, 1870, a street fight in front of today's Paso del Norte Hilton Hotel left two politicians dead and one wounded. The El Paso Salt War had commenced.
Down in San Elizario, Louis Cardis argued for the right to dig for and sell salt. The village priest, Father Antonio Borajo, supported him. Charles Howard then killed Cardis with a shotgun where the Downtown Museum of Art stands today.
Bishop Salpointe hurried over from Tucson and tried to mediate the dispute. Borajo called him a Protestant. Borajo was transferred to a church on the south bank of the Rio Grande.
The salt controversy shifted to San Elizario. The Texas Rangers arrived, and El Pasoan John Tays took command. But being insufficient in numbers, they signed on a group of civilian thugs from Silver City.
In December 1877, several men were murdered in San Elizario. A drunken mob executed Charles Howard by firing squad, although they had to reload and do it twice. The Texas Rangers surrendered, the only such incident in a proud history.
Except for a few murders, rapes and general assaults in the aftermath, plus a lot of U.S. citizens fleeing to Mexico, the Salt War, as El Paso historian C. L. Sonnichsen expressed it, proved only that good men can sometimes die bravely for a bad cause.
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