Crossing Rio Pecos

Chapter 2: Pope's Crossing

Guided by a lonely fist of rock, the lawless and the upright trailed to Pope's Crossing on the Pecos for three quarters of a centuryDown from present New Mexico the river came, a moat of brine and mud on a snake-track course bound for the creosote flats and wind-hewn sands of West Texas. Just below the border, it hesitated , as if unsure of the desert ahead. Hooking back to within a mile of New Mexico, it finally surrendered, turning southward to slither reluctantly through an unforgiving land. Just downstream of that decisive bend and sunrise bluff, the riverbed hardened before a submerged outcrop of sandstone and limestone.1 That outcrop may have borne up long-ago Indians afoot or on horseback as they crossed between a large camp on the west bank2 and a hollow of fresh, cool water in a bouldered gulch on the east.3 "There's a spring there," remembered early settler Clay Slack in 1968. "The water ran off of the rocks, and there was a pothole . . . [with] soft water."4 Doubtless, early peoples coveted the spring, for it constituted the only source of good water on the east side of the Pecos for hundreds of miles.5 Equally rare along this canal of a river—with sharp, bare banks and vicious currents—were practicable crossings. The ruling Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches of the mid-1800s apparently disdained even Pope's as a potential ford, for no such Indian crossing caught the attention of emigrant or U.S. Army parties skirting the site between 1849 and the mid-1850s. In March 1854, even its namesake, Brevet Captain John Pope, chose instead to cross TCU-Dearen.pdf 19 8/22/2012 11:58:11 PM New York newspapers of the day,15 but it nevertheless opened up a crucial point of passage across the Pecos for emigrants and stages. From 1849 on, wagoners trekking west along the Upper Road had forded the Pecos at Horsehead Crossing and forged far upstream to the vicinity of the fist of rock before veering west for the Guadalupe Mountains and El Paso, Now the preferred course of action upon striking treacherous Horsehead was to turn upstream along the river's east bank and delay fording until Pope's Crossing. It was just that route over which the first westbound Butterfield Overland Mail stage rumbled in September 1858. But stumps and scrub brush burdened "Pope's new road," recorded passenger Waterman Ormsby, who described the jolting of the stage as "almost interminable and insufferable." Wrote Ormsby: "We . . . pursued our weary course along the edge of the plain, thumping and bumping at a rate which threatened not to leave a whole bone in my body. What with the dust and the sun pouring directly on our heads . . . I found that day's ride quite unpleasant." Ormsby and stage driver Henry Skillman, both "inhaling constant clouds of dust and jolting along almost at snail's pace," reached Pope's Camp on the night of September 27. In bold relief against the western sky, the distant Guadalupe Mountains rose fortress-like. In front of the men, meanwhile, the moonlight played eerily along walls of the camp, now converted into a stage station. After downing a quick supper and acquiring a fresh four-mule team, they descended a gentle hill to the river flat and forded the waters of Pope's Crossing, which Ormsby described as "quite rapid and nearly covering the hubs of our wagon."16 For the next eleven months, Butterfield stages splashed across Pope's Crossing twice a week on their 2,795-mile, twenty-fiveday blitzes between Tipton, Missouri, and San Francisco.17 Then in August 1859, Butterfield officials—in consideration of the military presence at forts Stockton and Davis—ordered a route change that required stage drivers to cross Horsehead and push west to the two posts and through the Davis Mountains.18 With beef in demand at an Indian reservation at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, (far upstream from Pope's) in 1864,19 dust clouds billowed as cattle herds moved north along the Pecos. As with the Butterfield route, Pope's Crossing proved crucial to the trail, which came to be known as the Goodnight-Loving, named for the two men whose 1866 drive fired the imaginations of cattlemen TCU-Dearen.pdf 21 8/22/2012 11:58:11 PM on the Pecos River with...