William Wal­lace Mills, El Paso pio­neer, sec­ond son of James P. and Sarah (Ken­wor­thy) Mills, was born at Thorn­town, Indi­ana, on Feb­ru­ary 10, 1836. He received his early school­ing there, and although he later was appointed to West Point, he never attended. In Decem­ber 1858 he fol­lowed his brother Anson Mills to the town of Franklin, which Anson later renamed El Paso. Shortly after the elec­tion of Abra­ham Lin­coln in late 1860, eight South­ern states, includ­ing Texas, adopted ordi­nances of seces­sion. In El Paso the Anglo-Americans were almost unan­i­mously pro-Southern, and at a local elec­tion on the ques­tion of seces­sion, there were less than a half dozen oppo­si­tion votes. Two of these were the Mills broth­ers. Anson left for Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to serve the Union cause and later became a brigadier gen­eral; his brother went to New Mex­ico to join Union forces there. After Con­fed­er­ate forces occu­pied Fort Bliss in 1861, on one occa­sion they caught W. W. Mills in El Paso del Norte across the river and took him pris­oner. He even­tu­ally escaped to New Mex­ico but never for­got or for­gave Simeon Hart, whom he held respon­si­ble for his humil­i­a­tion. With the restora­tion of Union con­trol over New Mex­ico and El Paso in 1862 Mills, who had been named United States col­lec­tor of cus­toms at El Paso, gave full sup­port to the fed­eral dis­trict court at Mesilla, New Mex­ico, in the enforce­ment of the con­gres­sional law of July 1862, which pro­vided for the con­fis­ca­tion of prop­erty of any per­son who had aided rebel­lion against the United States. The law thus offered Mills an oppor­tu­nity to set­tle an old score with Hart, whose prop­erty was seized. The long strug­gle lasted for more than a decade, and even though Hart received a pres­i­den­tial par­don, it was not until 1873 that he finally recov­ered his property.

Dur­ing Recon­struc­tion Mills assumed the lead­er­ship of the local Repub­li­can party and formed the “cus­tom­house ring,” a vehi­cle for extend­ing favors to local mer­chants, con­trol­ling appoint­ments to office, and manip­u­lat­ing elec­tions. By 1868 the dom­i­nant rad­i­cal wing of the Repub­li­can party in Texas was receiv­ing strong oppo­si­tion from those seek­ing a more mod­er­ate pol­icy. Mills was named a del­e­gate to the Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion of 1868–69 in Austin, where the rad­i­cal major­ity selected Edmund J. Davis as pres­i­dent. Mills sup­ported the mod­er­ates, led by A. J. Hamil­ton, and as a diver­sion­ary attempt to weaken rad­i­cal strength in the con­ven­tion pro­posed to estab­lish Mon­tezuma Ter­ri­tory from El Paso County and Doña Ana County, New Mex­ico. The pro­posal was rejected by Hamil­ton, how­ever, who con­cluded that a divi­sion of the state would strengthen Gov­er­nor Davis’s hand. Yet Mills con­tin­ued to sup­port Hamil­ton, whose daugh­ter he mar­ried in early 1869. Mean­while, in El Paso the Repub­li­can lead­er­ship devolved upon Albert J. Foun­tain, who gave his full sup­port to the rad­i­cal wing. The rad­i­cal vic­tory in the governor’s race in 1869 brought Mills’s removal from his post as col­lec­tor of cus­toms, thus sharply cur­tail­ing his local power and influ­ence. By 1872 rad­i­cal rule in Texas had run its course with the defeat of Gov­er­nor Davis, and in El Paso the Repub­li­can party was in ruins, shat­tered by the Fountain-Mills feud. Mills’s polit­i­cal career had come to an end, although he did serve as United States con­sul in Chi­huahua from 1897 to 1907. His mem­oirs, Forty Years at El Paso, remain the most com­plete account of that city dur­ing its for­ma­tive years. Mills and his wife, Mary, moved to Austin in 1910, where they spent their last years. Mills died on Feb­ru­ary 10, 1913.