Horsehead Crossing

 

 

 

Horsehead Crossing looking northeast with Castle Gap in the distance (another historic spot on the Comanche Trail into Mexico )

 

 

Perhaps the most infamous and feared river crossing in Texas history, today it is little more than a trickle of a stream.  Only ford for many miles where animals could enter, drink and leave Pecos River safely.  Elsewhere deep banks would trap them.  Was the primary Pecos river crossing of the Comanche trail from Llano Estacado down into Mexico.

Ford mapped 1849 by Capt. R. B. Marcy, head of army escort for parties on way to California gold rush.  Became a major landmark on the trail west, as it provided the first water for about 75 miles on the route from the east. Emigrants arriving here either turned northwest along the river or crossed and continued southwest to Comanche Springs at Fort Stockton. 

Source of the name "Horsehead" a bit unclear.   Once story says that in 1850 John R. Bartlett while surveying the Mexican boundary found the crossing marker by skulls of horses; hence the name "Horse Head".  Many water-starved animals, stolen in Mexico by Indians and driven along the Comanche war trail, died after drinking too deeply from the river.  Comanches may have also intentionally marked the crossing for easier location.

1858, the crossing became an important stop on the Butterfield Overland Mail route from St. Louis to San Francisco. An adobe stage stand was built and a ferry put into operation, but both were abandoned in 1861, when mail service was terminated. 

In late 1862, during the Civil War, federal forces kept a close watch at the crossing in reaction to a threatened confederate invasion. Cattle began to be trailed across the Pecos in 1864.  During the Civil War, 1861-1865, used by wagons hauling highly valuable salt scooped from bed of nearby Juan Cordona Lake, to meet Texas scarcities.

1866, Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving blazed their famous trail, which came to this point and turned upriver.  Goodnight and Loving were the inspiration for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.  Completion of two railroads across west Texas in the early 1880s caused abandonment of the crossing.

For more information, Patrick Dearen's Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier is a good read.  Also see The Handbook of Texas Online.

A photo from 1998

TerraServer

Interestingly enough, the "precise" location of Horsehead Crossing was "forgotten" after its use was discontinued as a Pecos river crossing.  Debate on whether the state got the historic marker located at the actual site goes on.  Aerial photos such as the one below form Terra Server are being used by historians to make cases for alternate sites. Yellow marks the location of the official state historical marker.  Red one of several alternate crossings that have been proposed [Breaux].  Blue arrow indicates trail probably coming in from Castle Gap.

Click on image to go to TerraServer