The Camino Real de los Tejas, which led from Saltillo, the state capital of Coahuila, to Villa de Béjar (San Antonio), crossed the Rio Grande at a ford at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Río Escondido. Spanish explorers in the seventeenth century, noting eagles flying near the ford, named it El Paso del Aguila, Eagle Pass. In 1849, following conclusion of the Mexican-American War and the establishment of the Rio Grande as the border between the two nations, the U.S. Army founded a post, first named Camp Eagle Pass and later Fort Duncan (EL5), north of the ford and east of the Rio Grande to guard the east–west route from Texas to California. In 1850, San Antonio merchants and land speculators William L. Cazneau and John Twohig platted a town site north of the fort that became Eagle Pass.
In 1871, Eagle Pass was designated the seat of Maverick County, which was established in 1856 and named for lawyer and cattle baron Samuel A. Maverick of San Antonio, whose surname came to mean “unbranded calf.” Eagle Pass was the county’s first settlement. During the Civil War it was a shipping center for Confederate cotton exported to Mexico for shipment downriver to Matamoros after Union forces took Galveston. Confederate forces abandoned Fort Duncan late in the war, leading to attacks by Apaches and Comanches in the area until 1877, when they were driven from the region. In 1882, the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway built a thirty-five-mile-long spur from its main line between San Antonio and El Paso to connect to Eagle Pass and the rich reserves of coal on both sides of the river. The Mexican International Railway completed the line to Mexico City in 1888. Oil, agribusiness, government services, and tourism support the Eagle Pass economy today.
Director John Sayles constructed his film Lone Star (1996), shot in Eagle Pass, around themes of national, ethnic, and class prejudice that still resonate in the borderlands. A generation earlier Orson Welles drew from the same tensions for his Texas–Mexico border town thriller Touch of Evil (1958).
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