During the national Bicentennial, a local Las Cruces savings and loan (which I don’t think is around anymore) produced this booklet. This area had had European settlers for hundreds of years before the United States came into being. The first “Thanksgiving” in North America actually happened in El Paso with Spanish colonists in 1598.
The booklet strangely doesn’t talk much about Las Cruces. Next door Mesilla was the larger settlement until they were passed over by the railroad for Las Cruces. Before the town was founded, this site was where a party of settlers was massacred here by Apaches. The crosses set up at their gravesite would give the city its name.
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