Where the Railroads Met

As you drive along the foot of the mountains here, let me tell you how sleepy little El Paso exploded into a real city — because it happened almost overnight, and it happened on steel rails. For most of its history, El Paso del Norte was a quiet farming settlement at the pass, a stop on the old Spanish road, a few hundred souls. And then, in 1881, the railroads arrived — and not just one. Because of this pass, this natural gateway through the mountains, El Paso became the place where the great rail lines of the West all wanted to converge. Within a couple of years, four different railroads met right here, crossing the continent and heading down into Mexico.

And a railroad town on a border, in the eighteen-eighties West, becomes exactly what you'd imagine: a wild, wide-open, roaring boomtown. Almost overnight, El Paso jumped from a village of a few hundred to a city of thousands, packed with railroad men, cattlemen, soldiers, gamblers, saloon-keepers, and gunfighters. They called it 'Hell Paso' — a rough, dangerous, anything-goes town where disputes were settled with six-guns in the street, and Boone will tell you about the two deadliest men who came to town. All of it built on this: the pass, and the rails that had to run through it. The mountains you're driving didn't just give El Paso a pretty view — they gave it its whole reason to exist, and its whole wild history. Roll on.