Eagle Pass, Texas map

Eagle Pass sits on a bend of the Rio Grande in the southwest corner of the brush country, 56 miles southeast of Del Rio on US-277 and about 145 miles from San Antonio. There is no interstate anywhere near the town — the connection is US-57, which runs northeast across Zavala and Frio counties and meets I-35 at Moore, roughly 90 miles out. That single road carries most of the truck traffic that crosses here.

Maverick County covers 1,291 square miles and Eagle Pass is its only incorporated city, holding about half the county's 57,887 people. The county was created in 1856, organized in 1871, and named for Samuel Maverick, a rancher and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence whose unbranded cattle put a word into the language. Kinney County is north, Uvalde and Zavala northeast, Dimmit and Webb southeast, and Coahuila across the river.

Two bridges link Eagle Pass to Piedras Negras, Coahuila, a city several times its size. Bridge I runs from the foot of downtown and handles most pedestrians and passenger cars. Bridge II, the Camino Real crossing downstream, was built to take commercial traffic and is reached from US-57 by SH-131, so loaded trucks never have to work through the town center. The pair make Eagle Pass one of the busier freight ports on the Texas–Mexico border despite the small population on the U.S. side.

Fort Duncan, the 1849 army post that started the town, sits on the bluff above the river south of downtown and is now a city park and museum. Downstream from the city, on the Rio Grande, is the reservation of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, reached by FM-1021 — the only federally recognized reservation on the Texas border, with the tribe's casino beside it.

Maverick County is low, flat brush country at about 800 feet, hot and dry, with mesquite and blackbrush over most of it and mesquite-cleared pasture where the ranches have worked it. The exception is the strip along the Rio Grande north of town toward Quemado, where river water is pumped onto bottomland fields — pecans, onions, melons and hay grow there on ground that would otherwise carry nothing but brush. Away from the river the ranches run cattle and lease for deer and quail hunting in the winter, which is a real part of the local economy.

The garrison at Fort Duncan spent the 1870s patrolling this stretch of the river, and the Black Seminole Scouts who worked out of Fort Duncan and Fort Clark, 60 miles northeast at Brackettville, are buried at the Seminole scout cemetery near that post. North of Eagle Pass, US-277 crosses into Kinney County and the ground begins its slow climb toward the Edwards Plateau; south and east, US-277 and the farm roads run out into the Dimmit and Webb county brush, some of the emptiest ranch country in South Texas.