History

The name is Spanish for “the crosses”. The earliest settlers reported three crosses just north of the town; the crosses were thought to be either marked graves or roadside memorials called descansos [1]. The town itself was surveyed by the US Army in 1849, after the land passed to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 [1].

During the Mexican-American War, a column under Colonel Alexander Doniphan marched south along the Camino Real and fought a Mexican detachment at El Brazito, in the area south of what is now Las Cruces, on December 25, 1846 [2][3]. A historian writing in 1912 recorded that the American side counted the Mexican losses at about seventy killed, while Mexican historians called it a skirmish and said their commander withdrew in good order [3]. Doniphan marched on to El Paso del Norte two days later [3].

Before the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 the Mesilla Valley sat on the border between Mexico and the United States [4]. After it, Mesilla was the larger town: in 1860 it had more than 2,000 residents, more than twice as many as Las Cruces [1]. A federal official who rode down the Rio Grande in the 1850s to hold court at Las Cruces found “a modern-built Mexican village” of about a thousand people on one broad street, and was not convinced by the glowing accounts of the valley’s fertility [5].

When the Santa Fe railway reached the area, Mesilla’s landowners refused to sell it rights-of-way. Residents of Las Cruces donated the rights-of-way and the land for a depot instead [1]. The first train arrived in 1881, and the town was incorporated in 1907 [1]. The city’s Railroad Museum now sits in the historic Santa Fe Railroad station [1].

By 1895 a publisher’s history of the territory could call the Mesilla Valley “the Happy Valley”, praising its alfalfa, orchards and vineyards, and noting that Las Cruces was the county seat, the home of the Territorial Agricultural College and “quite a winter resort for invalids” [6].

New Mexico State University began as Las Cruces College, which opened on September 17, 1888, founded by Hiram Hadley, an Indiana teacher [7]. In 1889 the Rodey Act placed the territory’s agricultural college “at or near the town of Las Cruces” [7]. Out of its fields came the modern New Mexico chile: horticulturist Fabian Garcia began his work in 1894 and released the New Mexico No. 9 chile in 1913 [8].

Pat Garrett, best known for the death of Billy the Kid, served as sheriff of Dona Ana County. He worked in Las Cruces on the disappearance of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-year-old son in January 1896, a case never solved [1][9]. Garrett himself was killed in February 1908 on the road out of Las Cruces; who fired the shot is still argued [9].

In the 1960s an urban-renewal project cleared much of the old downtown, including St. Genevieve’s Catholic Church of 1859, for a pedestrian mall [1]. Six blocks of Main Street were closed to traffic in 1973 and reopened to cars in 2012; the farmers’ market on the downtown mall runs on Wednesday and Saturday mornings [1]. The former Branigan Memorial Library of 1935 is now the Branigan Cultural Center, on the National Register of Historic Places [1].

The Organ Mountains, ten miles east of the city, take their name from granite needles that look like organ pipes; their highest point, Organ Needle, is 8,982 feet [10]. On May 21, 2014 President Obama designated the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, protecting 496,330 acres around Las Cruces [11]. Las Cruces counted 111,385 people in the 2020 census, the second-largest city in New Mexico [1].

An Illustrated History of New Mexico, Lewis Publishing Company (1895) — public domain, free to read online

El Gringo, or, New Mexico and Her People, W. W. H. Davis (1857) — public domain, free to read online

Illustrated History of New Mexico, Benjamin M. Read (1912) — public domain, free to read online

The Conquest of New Mexico and California: An Historical and Personal Narrative, Philip St. George Cooke (1878)

Wonderland: The Story of Ancient and Modern New Mexico, Albert R. Greene (1883)