The town on the American side was simply a ranch owned by "Uncle Billy" Smith, an illiterate Kentuckian. One Franklin Coontz asked to be made postmaster, and when the Post Office Department informed him he would first have to name the office, he named it after himself, "Franklin." Mr. Smith was generous, but unbusiness-like. He had given or sold small parcels of land to many who built without any survey having been made. Two or three hundred people lived here, mostly Mexicans and their families, engaged in cultivating the ranch. There were three wholesale stores which sold goods brought up by mule trains from Kansas City via Santa Fe to supply the needs of Paso del Norte, Chihuahua City and other towns in Chihuahua. The Butterfield Overland Mail established a headquarters with many employees and made Franklin somewhat of a money center. The Mexican disposition to gamble and the wild and lawless character of the times brought perhaps twenty professional gamblers to Franklin. The Texan war with Mexico for independence, in 1836, and the war between the United States and Mexico, in 1847, together with the hostile Indians on the north of the Rio Grande during the early Spanish settlement, forced most of the population and wealth to the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Few towns on the American side were of any importance. The county seat of El Paso County was then San Elisario, twenty miles below Franklin, with about twelve hundred inhabitants. When I arrived in El Paso it was dangerous to go far from the village. Mesquite root gatherers were attacked, the men killed and the animals driven off within a half-mile from the village. But on the Mexican side were large, wealthy towns, with good society and well ordered governments. After the Doniphan expedition to Chihuahua, our government had established Fort Bliss, a mile and a half below El Paso, with seven companies of infantry and mounted rifles. I made the acquaintance of the officers, finding several who had been cadets with me at the academy, among them a classmate, Will Jones, the adjutant. Through them I got an earlier standing among the people than would otherwise have been possible for me to do. The act of annexation of Texas to the United States provided that Texas retain her public lands. The El Paso and Presidio land district included all territory west of the Pecos River (El Paso and Presidio Counties), an area larger than New Jersey. With the recommendation of the army officers and Judge Crosby of that judicial district, I was appointed surveyor for that district by the State government. Immediately I had plenty of work on pending locations for two hundred miles below Franklin, many tracts embracing five thousand acres each, and also the reservations leased by the War Department for the posts of Quitman, Davis, Stockton, and Fort Bliss. All of them I surveyed within the next year. The Overland Mail Company also employed me to build a station covering almost an entire block.