As much as DH enjoyed San Antonio, I really liked El Paso. I had always conjured up images of the border town of El Paso, Texas as a rough and tough gunfighter town which personified the old wild west days. The city’s lawlessness in the late 1800’s had earned it the moniker of “Six Shooter Capital” and the city’s first and oldest street was the scene of the infamous Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight. And when we found out that a local pawn shop had the trigger finger of an infamous Mexican bandito on display (and for sale) we knew this could be fun visit. There's a natural link to a colourful piece of history in that Pancho Villa was a Mexican Revolutionary general, provisional governor of the state of Chihuahua, and was the subject of bandit activity stories that had Villa confiscating cattle, corn, and bullion and redistributing them to the poor in Robin Hood fashion. Then it gets weird- after his assassination in 1923 someone raided Villa's tomb and scurried away with the famed general's three-years-dead head and sold it to a businessman in Chicago. His trigger finger (fingernail included), is currently for sale at Dave’s pawn shop in El Paso for the measly sum of $9,500. Who steals body parts from a grave, who buys those body parts, and how does the trigger finger of a notorious bad guy end up in a pawn shop in El Paso??

And if a well-worn pawn shop selling someone’s trigger finger doesn’t strike you as an indicator of a tough grizzled wild west town, we also stopped to visit the grave of John Harden, the most prolific bad guy gunfighter in the old west. When he was sent to prison, Hardin claimed to have killed 42 men, but newspapers of the day attributed only (?) 27 murders to him (by way of contrast, the more well-known Billy The Kid killed 8 men during his 'career’). Apparently Harden shot one of the men for snoring too loud, a crime that DH had an enormous and surprising amount of sympathy for. There’s a big cage around the gravesite, presumably to ensure that his body parts don’t end up in a jar in a local pawn shop. Don’t tell me El Paso isn’t the wild west.  

And just to give DH her policing fix, we dropped in to visit the Border Patrol (soon to become the Trump Wall Police?) Museum. Most of this museum talks to a modern day wild west with people and drugs being smuggled across the border at a speed that would put Usain Bolt to shame. In addition to a detailed history, the museum houses many of the contraptions and vehicles seized from bad guys who got caught but in reality the only way the Border Patrol is going to send a strong enough warning is to start a large display of dried up smuggler body parts. Or they can wait for Donald to build that giant wall paid for by Mexico??

Fun El Paso fact:
Francisco “Pancho” Morales was supposedly responsible for inventing Margarita, the tequila-based drink, at Tommy’s place Bar in 1945.