“A wall will be erected along the frontier,” wrote a journalist along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Posting large bodies of men . . . might serve the double purpose of keeping the Indians in check and protecting the mail.” It was 1858, and he was riding west through Texas with a mule-pulled coach of Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company. The “wall” he envisioned was a chain of fort-like postal stations, transporting mail but also facilitating the transit of settlers and curtailing Indigenous and Mexicano movement. The legacy of that project is made plain on the landscape today.
While volunteering in El Paso at an immigration detention center adjacent to the air mail facility, I noticed how crucial the post was to the administration of the center. The address required for asylum claims, the letters sent to lawyers from inside the detention center, the money orders drawn at the post office to pay bail bonds—all relied on the mail. Curious to follow the connections, earlier this year I traveled part of the historic mail route with a friend who directs migrant shelters in the region.
Driving between El Paso and Fort Davis, we pass pecan groves and cotton fields in the Lower Valley of the Rio Grande. We fill gas in Fabens and turn southbound on a road undulating through washes near Fort Quitman, a historic post stop. Arroyos are pinned with barbed wire, and we cross tracks of off-roaders, flanked by craggy rims in the wide valley. Our cell signal fades as we pass sparse RV clusters and a yellow dividing line pinched into the distance by an unseen inset river.
Outside a closed ranch gate, we pause by a flood gauge. The first auto tourists of the Texas mail had photographed the dilapidated adobe of Fort Quitman in the 1930s. In the wash beside us, the sand is smoothed by chain-pulled tires dragged by Border Patrol trucks to facilitate footprint surveillance. A Border Patrol horse trailer speeds by, and three sets of beady equine eyes stare back. When we return to the highway and cross the Border Patrol checkpoint, my friend receives WhatsApp audio messages: requests from two women for shelter in Juárez, dogs barking in the background. It would be cold that night, and so many people still needed a place to sleep.
The postal service was the largest federal presence on the Western frontier in the decades after the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1848. Many assume the post system is simply a mechanism for delivering mail, but that effort both requires and justifies a host of other behaviors. In 1850s West Texas, proslavery politicians wanted to secure a southern transcontinental route by constructing militarized post roads and postal stations. Their federally subsidized construction limited Indigenous access to water sites and led to bids for military protection, while contractors imported guns to arm mercenary-like mail coaches. The post was a conduit of capital generated by extractive industries like mining and ranching, and it helped administer land offices that validated private claims to Indigenous land. The infrastructure and relationships fixed by the mail facilitated railroad construction decades later.
Today former employees, descendants of mail carriers, and mail enthusiasts often travel along the historic routes, which now cross fortified private ranches. In 1994, one Texas journalist traced the route that delivered Euro-American settlers to west Texas, to “repeat, if possible, some of the quotidian jolts, jars, hungers, and thirsts . . . which those nineteenth-century passengers endured.” That same year, Operation Gatekeeper initiated a new phase of border militarization through a lethal policy forcing migrants into these remote desert regions.
In 2023, an act of Congress designated the Butterfield Overland National Historic Trail, a 3,292-mile route running from the Mississippi River to San Francisco through the southernmost states, one of twenty-one National Historic Trails. Working toward plans for building interpretive sites and roadside signs by 2026, staff from the Santa Fe–based National Trails Office are conducting public meetings along the route. They came through El Paso shortly after I returned from the road trip to Fort Davis in January 2024, and I decided to attend.
To get to the meeting, I take the on-ramp to the Border Highway at the railway bridge at Hart’s Mill, an early army post and flour contract site. The dam below the highway diverts water from the Rio Grande into the American Canal. Beyond a red stoplight lies the rocky skirt of Sierra del Cristo Rey, where migrants cross trestles from Juárez. The privately funded border wall at the American Eagle Brick Company is already rusted, posts thorning the slope succumbing to cliff.
I turn onto the freight-laden interstate, elevated on pillars. A WELLS FARGO sign, marking the corporation that would purchase Butterfield’s Overland Mail at the start of the Civil War, glows yellow from an office building in downtown El Paso. The Border Highway follows the wall and is already lined with Camino Real National Historic Trail signs. Construction traffic message boards euphemistically display “Watch for Unexpected Pedestrians.” The next day, I read news reports that the Border Patrol detained migrants in storm drains along this stretch.
Before turning into Ascarate Park, I am passed by Border Patrol, El Paso Police, and Texas Highway Patrol vehicles. Once inside the Pavilion, I sit down with fifteen attendees in front of a PowerPoint presentation, sheltering from the dust storm that had occluded the nearby oil refinery and infilled lake.
The goal of a historic trail, the staff begin, is to highlight “events along a path that shaped us as a nation.” Having come from a public meeting in Fort Davis dominated by private landowners wary of Historic Trail tourists on their land, the Parks staff emphasize their role in administering historical interpretation, not in managing any land. Here in El Paso, the meeting draws a less hostile crowd: representatives of community foundations, park rangers from local National Park Service sites, members of nearby trail associations with intersecting routes. The Park Service historian attests to the Overland Mail’s legacy as a “huge logistical undertaking” akin to early space exploration, prompting a significant infusion of cash to settlers through postal contracts and an “unprecedented extension of federal power.” The triumphalist view inherent in the premise of this Historic Trail limits whose story can be told here.
Despite the Butterfield journalist’s prophecy, the colonial projects of the post did not have inevitable outcomes and were contested at every stage. Apache mule raids on postal stations led to continuous postal property losses and the termination of postal contracts in 1861. Regular cross-continental mail service would not run through West Texas again until mail by rail in 1881, when the federal government was perpetrating Apache and Comanche displacement as a matter of official policy. While the period of Indigenous sovereignty in this region lasted far longer than the fleeting years during which the Butterfield route occupied a contested corridor (1858 to 1861), plans to monumentalize the historic route focus only one moment and direction of movement. Postal projects were part of a trajectory of accreting colonial uses of space, but that project remains incomplete.
The Historic Trails team share their contact information with us, eager for partnerships and to ensure that there is something for people to “see” along the route. The National Park Service is now tasked with making the historic post visible to tourists, even while state power to detain migrants, contingent on this postal history, is hidden in plain sight.
At the end of the road trip, I meet a local historian at the Butterfield Trail Golf Club, near a Texas Historical Commission marker for the Overland Mail at the club entrance. He walks me out past the westernmost holes and points to the rutted swale supposed to have been Butterfield’s route. Ideally oriented toward the slope of the mountains into the Pass of the North, wind-swept sand ruts catch the lowering sun. Beyond the golf course perimeter, dimly visible, lie an airport runway and, along the historic postal route, the ICE detention center.
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