Crossing Rio Pecos

Chapter 3: Emigrant Crossing

It once flowed red with the blood of eighteen people massacred near its banks* Emigrant Crossing, splitting the Pecos River twelve miles southeast of present Barstow, long stood as both a threat and a doorway for wagoners trekking west along the Emigrant Road to California, The discovery of gold near Slitter's Mill in California in January 1848 set in motion this human stampede,1 intent not only on gold, but also on land ready for the taking in the West. The hopes of a big strike dwindled over the years, but the quest for land grew only stronger, bringing wagons creaking west along the trail to Emigrant Crossing as late as 1908.2 Opened in 1849, the Emigrant Road struck out from Fort Smith, Arkansas, and crossed the Red River into North Texas at Preston, south of Fort Washita. Bearing southwestward, it skirted Comanche and Kiowa water holes at present-day Big Spring and Mustang Springs, slashed through a sea of drifting sand, and, almost five hundred miles from Fort Washita, intersected the Pecos at Emigrant Crossing. Once across, emigrants either headed upstream to the Delaware River and pushed west through Guadalupe Pass or turned downstream and veered south and west for Monument Springs and the Davis Mountains.3 Among the intrepid forty-niners who challenged the Emigrant Road were the 101 men, nine women, and twenty-five children in the Strentzel wagon train that headed west from the Dallas vicinity in the spring of 1849. Louisiana Strentzel, in a TCU-Dearen.pdf 41 8/22/2012 11:58:13 PM 32 December 10, 1849, letter to her parents in Fannin County, Texas, spoke of the "hardships and privations" and "dangers and difficulties" with which the "wilderness of eighteen hundred miles" besieged them, "We had not even a guide to direct us the way," recalled her husband, John Theophil Strentzel, forty-one years later, "Nothing except a map and compass to go by. The country was entirely unknown to us, not one of the party even having been through it," No stretch of the road beleaguered the Strentzel group more than the plains and sand between modern-day Big Spring and Emigrant Crossing in late May, Seventy miles and three days of arid wasteland sapped water barrels and exhausted the teams. One man died of liver disease, and physician Strentzel held little hope for his wife, who suffered from diarrhea, severe fever, and fatigue, "Having only one quart of water left, I would give to her and the two little children each a spoonful at a time to moisten their throats," he related, "Late in the afternoon our teams became so exhausted that they began to reel and stagger, seeming ready to drop down, and we had almost given up in despair, [when] the water hunters , , , came riding up, waving their hats and shouting, Water! Water! Water!1 " In the sandhills, the advance riders had stumbled upon pure, cold pools. The argonauts camped there a week, recuperating, readying for the push on toward the Pecos, Still, by the time they reached Emigrant Crossing, the bodies of five more persons lay in lonely graves along the trail behind. Finding the Puerco, or Pecos, "a narrow, deep, muddy stream," wrote Louisiana, the party constructed boats from wagon beds and ferried across on June 3, pulling the wagons across with ropes and swimming the animals. Two miles upstream the next day, the wagon tires fell into the three-day-old tracks of an eight-family, one-hundred-man wagon train party heading west from San Antonio,4 Even the U.S. Army relied heavily on the trail-blazing exploits of argonauts such as the Strentzels, Captain Randolph B. Marcy, faced with crossing the Pecos country later in 1849 en route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Fort Smith, Arkansas, by way of El Paso, noted that "as several parties had reached El Paso from Texas, I was satisfied I could go through,"5 TCU-Dearen.pdf 42 8/22/2012 11:58:13 PM 33 In his 1849-1850 survey of the general route of the Emigrant Road, U.S. Army topographical engineer N. H. Michler, Jr., found the hundreds of miles from Fort Washita to present Big Spring "almost a perfect level, well watered the greater portion, and well timbered. • . • A more advantageous country for roads of any kind cannot be found."6 Brad Q Fowler, a member of...