900 Miles on the Butterfield Trail

Part IV. Modern Travelers on the Butterfield Trail—The Past Is Not Past: The Trail's Still Down There

PART FOUR cJ\IIodern Travelers on the Butterfield Trail. The Past Is Not Past: The Trail's Still Down There IF you fly over Mountain Pass in Taylor County, Texas, you can see in the chalky earth below two faint white tracks which follow the north edge of the hills, climbing toward the low summit of the pass. And if your imagination and your sense of history are as good as your eyesight, you should hear the clatter of hooves and wheels, the pop of a whip, or the faint cries of a brass bugle heralding the approach of the stagecoach, for this is one of the few visible traces of the actual road of John Butterfield's Southern Overland Mail through Texas: the Butterfield Trail. Most of the remainder of the trail has been plowed under, paved over, overgrown by mesquite and scrub oak, or lost midst the maze of mechanical tracks created when an oil well is drilled and sustained. There is a challenge to the modem traveler trying to follow in any fashion-foot, horse, or auto-the old Butterfield Trail. But arduous as the effort becomes, my wife and I found the job not just rewarding but exhilarating when we traced the trail in the 1990S. In much ofTexas crossed by the Butterfield stage, you could have found more people along the road in 1858 and 1859 than might be found today. It was a lonely passage, and it remains a lonely passage when you depart the main-traveled roads-and if you go where the Butterfield went, you usually depart any significant highways. Because of local legends; many Texans believe the Butterfield stage ran through their town when, in fact, it came nowhere near. Usually the stage line in question was one that merely carried mail to or from the actual Butterfield line. So powerful has been the popular image ofthe Butterfield stage that even today western stage lines tend to be referred to as "Butterfield" and any stage as "the Butterfield stage." Butterfield's Overland Mail Company, first of the true overland systems, also inspired the subsequent use of "Overland" in a number of stage line names that had no connection with Butter- field Overland Mail and were not "overland" (reaching to the West Coast) at aiL' When the Butterfield Overland Trail was being constructed through the state of Texas, there was no thought of real estate development along the way such as would be practiced later by the railroads. Sherman, Gainesville, Jacksboro, and Franklin City (EI Paso) were the only towns the original route traversed. A year later the Butterfield stage passed through Decatur and Bridgeport. On its very last trips, it stopped in Denton and Pilot Point. In West Texas the trail missed even the sites that would later be chosen for building up towns and cities. Starting at Fort Belknap in Young County, the old trail misses Woodson by one mile, passes Albany by ten, and skirts where the town of Fort Griffin would rise in 1867. The stage line cuts a mile north and northwest of where Abilene now sits, misses even the suburb ofTye by a few hundred yards, goes well below Merkel, and fails to touch Bronte on the way south. San Angelo wouldn't be established until 1868, across the river from Fort Concho. The old Butterfield stage road misses both locations by two miles to the northwest, and passes a few miles above such later towns as Big Lake, Rankin, and McCamey. A routing change in 1859 did put the line through Fort Stockton, but it was more military post than town at the time. The same was true of Fort Davis on the 1859 route. Some measure of the remoteness of the Butterfield route can be imagined by knowing that on the entire transcontinental line, excluding the terminal cities, there were only four towns with newspapers: Fort Smith, Arkansas; Sherman , Texas; and Los Angeles and San Jose, California. The stage, moving across Texas in 1858, was not bound by most of the same things that control highways and roads today. It was able to go as straight from Point A to Point B, in most of its running, as the terrain allowed. Once past some frontier edge such as Fort Belknap , there were no private property lines to observe and drive around, no fences or walls to impede the dire·ct passage. Only...