Juana Pedraza's Fort

Fort Leaton is named for Ben Leaton, a freighter on the Chihuahua road, the wagon route from the Gulf at Indianola to Presidio del Norte and on to Chihuahua City. In 1848 he bought an adobe compound at La Junta from Juan Bustillos, who had lived in it since 1830, and made it a private fortress and trading post: an L about two hundred feet along its river side, walls a foot and a half thick, a crenellated parapet around some forty rooms. Leaton was dead by 1851. The person who held the place through the next quarter century was his widow, Juana Pedraza, and it changed hands over her head twice by murder.

It was the only fortification on the American bank between Eagle Pass and El Paso. The army used it as an unofficial headquarters before Fort Davis was built, and it was the county's first seat of government in 1850. Emilio Langberg, the Mexican inspector of the military colonies at El Paso del Norte, accused him of trading guns to raiders for stolen Mexican horses. The building has long been called the site of a Spanish mission of 1684 and of the presidio of 1760, but archaeology puts the earliest occupation of the ground in the 1820s.

Pedraza had never legally married Leaton, and a ceremony was staged after his death so that she could inherit; by one account the land had been granted to her in her own name in 1833. She married Edward Hall, who mortgaged the property to John Burgess, defaulted, and was shot dead at his own dinner table in 1864. Burgess took the fort, and in 1875 Leaton's son Bill killed him. The Burgess family kept the trading post going into the 1920s. The adobe was partly restored in 1934 and 1935, and the state bought five acres in 1967. Fort Leaton is a state historic site today, on FM 170 below Presidio.