The town was founded as a border crossing and rail stop on the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad. It was named after Columbus, the very same Italian fortune hunter who in 1492 first laid eyes on the American continent, imagining he was in India. The word "Columbus” has since come to be synonymous with discovery, and it was no doubt the hope of the town promoters and developers that an increasing number of folks would "discover” the benefits of moving to such a fine little town.

"Town property in Columbus is one of the best possible investments,” asserted a McClughlan & Dexter Realty ad. "See Columbus before going elsewhere!”

"Elsewhere,” in the first two decades of the 20th Century, is a world apart. While you sit under the stars, surrounded by what appears to be a vast and incorruptible emptiness, greater society is remaking itself faster than ever before. Cultural traditions and technological innovations that used to take hundreds of years are now transformed in a single generation. This is the year that kids who are nostalgic for the disappearing frontier, got to play with a new toy called "Lincoln Logs,” and some guy named Albert Einstein will publish what he refers to as his "Theory of Relativity.” Jazz is hot in New Orleans, back east Margaret Sanger has been jailed for giving out pamphlets on birth control, and race driver Gil Anderson has just set a new automobile speed record by going an amazing 102.6 m.p.h. in a souped-up Stutz. In Europe Germany is using helium filled Zeppelins from which to firebomb historic French cities. America’s involvement in World War I is only a year away. General John Taliaferro Thompson has just invented a hand held fully automatic weapon that will in time be called the "Tommy Gun....” but in out of the way places like Arizona and New Mexico the Old West lives on.

You’re part of a Southwestern subculture, wherein folks still pack around "Western” arms and are more likely to settle disagreements personally rather than resort to the insular objectivity of the law. On into the 1920’s there will still be more horses than cars in the borderlands where you were born, more cowboys than tourists, more deer than registered voters. Outside of trendy Phoenix or Albuquerque folks still dress much as their grandparents had, in wide brimmed hats and dusty chaps. They continue to believe in the same standards of hard work and hearty play, of necessity and right. They’ve flourished like cactus in even the harshest environments, unconcerned with modernity, and generally seeking no one’s help but their own. Some are resilient "whites,” homesteading land and working on huge lowland ranches. Many are Mexican or Mexican-American, recent immigrants in search of better paying work. Other Latinos are the descendants of families that had already lived here for hundreds of years.

If people in this part of the country were anything, it was scarce. Columbus never had more than a few hundred permanent and temporary civilian residents, and most of the 600 man army detachment was likely to be gone on leave to El Paso at any given time. Tonight there are only a handful of electric lights or oil lamps burning. The only sign of activity in the army camp is a single small campfire in one of the ditches, around which a few sleepy sentries huddle to stay warm.

It’s then that you see what first appear to be shadows, weaving through the brush below. The whippoorwills are quiet all of a sudden, as you hear what you figure are a bunch of spike-jawed javalina spooked by the unexpected passage of serape-clad men.