The San Elizario Salt War, also known as the Salinero Revolt or the El Paso Salt War, was a range war of the mid-19th century centered on control of salt lakes at the base of the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas. The conflict began in 1866 as a political and legal struggle among Anglo-Texan politicians and capitalists over ownership of these valuable salt resources. By 1877, this initial dispute had escalated into armed conflict involving ethnic Mexican and Tejano inhabitants living on both sides of the Rio Grande near El Paso, who rose up against a leading politician supported by the Texas Rangers.
The armed struggle reached its climax when a popular army of perhaps 500 men besieged and forced the surrender of 20 Texas Rangers in the town of San Elizario, Texas. This siege represented a significant moment of armed resistance by the Tejano and Mexican population against Anglo control of the region's resources and political power. The conflict demonstrated how a localized dispute over salt ownership had grown into a broader struggle with ethnic and political dimensions.
The arrival of the African-American 9th Cavalry and a sheriff's posse of New Mexico mercenaries marked a turning point that dispersed the Tejano forces. Hundreds of Tejanos fled to Mexico, some entering permanent exile as a result of this federal and state military intervention. The ultimate outcome established the right of individuals to own the salt lakes through force of arms, replacing the previous system in which these resources had been held as a community asset. The conflict came to occupy the attention of both the Texas and federal governments, demonstrating its significance as a regional dispute with national implications.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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