Anson Mills, sur­veyor, builder, army offi­cer, engi­neer, Amer­i­can bound­ary com­mis­sioner, diplo­mat, and inven­tor, was born at Thorn­town, Indi­ana, on August 31, 1834, the son of James P. and Sarah (Ken­wor­thy) Mills. He attended school in Indi­ana and New York and accepted an appoint­ment to the United States Mil­i­tary Acad­emy in 1855. After flunk­ing out at West Point in 1857, he rode the But­ter­field Over­land Mail stage to El Paso, where he arrived on May 8, 1858. He was appointed dis­trict sur­veyor and sur­veyed forts Quit­man, Davis, Stock­ton, and Bliss, all in West Texas. He also built the Over­land Build­ing, for three decades the largest struc­ture in El Paso.

On Feb­ru­ary 28, 1859, Mills sub­mit­ted a street map of a set­tle­ment called var­i­ously Ponce’s Ran­cho, Franklin, and Smithsville. He called the lit­tle com­mu­nity El Paso, and the name stuck. The down­town is still prac­ti­cally as he plat­ted it. Mills encour­aged his broth­ers Emmett and William Wal­lace Mills to set­tle in El Paso. Anson laid out the vil­lage of Pinos Altos in New Mex­ico, feuded with almost every­one of impor­tance in El Paso, and voted against seces­sion. After fail­ing to talk the com­man­der at Fort Bliss out of sur­ren­der­ing the fed­eral fort to Con­fed­er­ate forces, he accepted a Wash­ing­ton com­mis­sion in the Union Army. His brother W. W. remained in the South­west as a Union spy. Emmett caught the last stage out of El Paso and was killed in New Mex­ico when Man­gas Col­orado and his Apaches ambushed the coach.

Mil­i­tary career

After an undis­tin­guished Civil War career, Anson Mills remained in the army dur­ing the Indian cam­paigns. After the Lit­tle Big Horn deba­cle (see CUSTER, GEORGE ARMSTRONG), he took part in the “horse­meat march” dur­ing Gen. George Crook’s Big Horn and Yel­low­stone expedition.

As the starv­ing army began eat­ing its own horses, Mills led a sup­ply detach­ment and encoun­tered Indi­ans. For his role in the result­ing fight at Slim Buttes, Mills always believed he deserved the Medal of Honor, though he never received it.

Dur­ing his mil­i­tary years he designed and patented the woven ammu­ni­tion belt. The inven­tion made him wealthy. On Octo­ber 13, 1868, he mar­ried Han­nah Casser, and they had two children.

Bound­ary commissioner

By 1894 Mills had been trans­ferred to El Paso, retired as a brigadier gen­eral, and was sworn in as the Amer­i­can bound­ary com­mis­sioner. Dur­ing the next few years he reestab­lished the Mex­i­can bor­der on the island of San Elizario and was respon­si­ble for straight­en­ing the Rio Grande by sev­er­ing the Cór­dova banco, an improve­ment that relieved seri­ous flood­ing at El Paso. Mills advo­cated a major inter­na­tional dam at El Paso, which even­tu­ally went to Ele­phant Butte in New Mex­ico, 120 miles north. He prac­ti­cally wrote the Mex­i­can treaty, “An Equi­table Dis­tri­b­u­tion of the Waters of the Rio Grande,” which promised Mex­ico an annual 60,000 acre-feet of water. He also wrote the 1905 treaty for the elim­i­na­tion of ban­cos (see BANCOS OF THE RIO GRANDE).

Mills is best remem­bered, how­ever, for the bound­ary dis­pute with Mex­ico over the Chamizal tract (see CHAMIZAL DISPUTE) and for the Mills Build­ing in El Paso. As the Amer­i­can bound­ary com­mis­sioner he refused to accept the 1911 arbi­tra­tion agree­ment that gave the El Paso Chamizal to Mex­ico. The Mills Build­ing began as the Grand Cen­tral Hotel, which Mills con­structed in 1883. When the hotel burned, he replaced it with the Mills Build­ing in 1911, at that time the largest con­crete mono­lith in the world. Today it is no longer the high­est build­ing in El Paso, but it remains a major El Paso land­mark. At the age of eighty-seven Mills wrote his auto­bi­og­ra­phy,My Story (1918). He retired from the bound­ary com­mis­sion in 1914 and died in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., on Novem­ber 5, 1924. He was buried with hon­ors in Arling­ton National Cemetery.

Bib­li­og­ra­phy

Jerome A. Greene, Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode of the Great Sioux War (Nor­man: Uni­ver­sity of Okla­homa Press, 1982).

Leon C. Metz, Turn­ing Points in El Paso Texas (El Paso: Man­gan, 1985).

William Wal­lace Mills, Forty Years at El Paso (El Paso?, 1901; 2d ed., El Paso: Hert­zog, 1962).

C. L. Son­nich­sen, Pass of the North: Four Cen­turies on the Rio Grande (2 vols., El Paso: Texas West­ern Press, 1968, 1980).