James Wiley Magoffin, born in 1799 into a family of substance and status in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, left the confines of his birthplace in the early 1820s in favor of a flatboat trip down the Mississippi River to seek his fortune. From New Orleans, Magoffin struck out by sea to the port city of Matamoros, quickly established himself as a leader in the Mexican sea trade, and later became one of the principal traders on the Chihuahua Trail. After the war with Mexico and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Magoffin founded Magoffinsville, a settlement across from El Paso del Norte that would eventually become El Paso, Texas, establishing Magoffin as El Paso's most important pioneer.
Despite his commanding role in the history of El Paso and the American Southwest, Magoffin has been in large part neglected by historians until now. Discoveries of important sources, including the Magoffin-Cordero financial records and significant personal correspondence in the Glasgow Collection at the Magoffin Home, allow the author to tell the story at last of Magoffin's Mexican years as El Paso celebrates the two-hundreth birthday of its most significant forebare.
W. H. Timmons is professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is known as "Mr. History" in the El Paso Southwest for his fifty years of research, writing, and teaching on the history of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
ISBN
0-87404-282-8 Paperback $18.00
6x9,
130 pp., biblio 1999
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