How Smuggler's Pass earned its name — the frontier cattle rustlers who drove stolen herds through these mountains, and the Texas Ranger who died in a canyon here chasing them.
You're climbing toward a place called Smuggler's Pass — and friend, that name has real blood and cattle-dust and spilled tequila in it, not just a bit of color on a map. Let me tell you how this crossing earned it, because it's a story that runs across a hundred years.
Go back to the rough frontier days, before there was any fine paved road up here. These Franklin Mountains were a wild, rugged wall between the settled country and the open range and the border beyond — and that made them perfect for one particular breed of frontier criminal: the cattle rustler. Here's the game. A band of them would steal a herd — cattle or horses, maybe down across the border, maybe up in the New Mexico range — and then they had to move that stolen stock quiet, out of sight of the law, to sell it far away. And how do you move a herd of stolen cattle without being seen crossing open desert? You take them over the mountain, up through the hidden canyons of the Franklins, where no posse would ever spot you. This high crossing was one of their moonlit routes. Hence the name.
And stopping them was deadly work. There's a canyon in these mountains named for a young Texas Ranger, Charles Fusselman, who in eighteen ninety rode up into these very rocks chasing a band of thieves — and was ambushed and shot dead, one more lawman who gave his life trying to bring a little order to this hard border country.
But the mountain wasn't done earning its name. Come nineteen twenty, the whole country went dry — Prohibition — and overnight the thirstiest business on earth was running liquor across this border. They called the men who did it the tequileros: mostly poor Mexican men who'd load burros and horses with tequila and mescal and sotol and slip them north over these same wild passes in the dark of the moon — a fortune in bottles riding on the backs of donkeys. And waiting for them in the rocks were the lawmen: the mounted inspectors, and soon the brand-new Border Patrol. The two sides fought a shadow war up here that got men killed on both sides — one immigration inspector named Childress was shot dead in a gun-battle with a pack of tequila smugglers. For thirteen dry years the burro trains and the ambushes went on, right across the ground you're driving.
So as you roll up this smooth modern road, spare a thought for what it truly was — a smugglers' trail through wild mountains, fought over for generations by rustlers and Rangers, tequileros and the Border Patrol, where stolen herds and contraband liquor moved by moonlight and more than one man died in the rocks. The road is easy now. The name remembers when it wasn't. Roll on up to the pass.
Photo: Susan Barnum · CC BY-SA 4.0
