The Perils of the Pecos: Where Cattlemen Lost Their Nerve

Cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving set out on June 6, 1866, from north-central Texas with their combined herds — some 2,000 head of Longhorns — bound for Fort Sumner in New Mexico Territory. 

After crossing the arid southern Plains into west Texas, they threaded Castle Gap and then dropped down to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River. There the cattle, which had gone three days without water in the summer heat, ran wild-eyed into the water.

“Those behind pushed the ones in the lead right on across before they had time to stop and drink,” Goodnight told biographer J. Evetts Haley. 

Riding point, Goodnight turned the leaders around, and they plunged back into the water, drinking as they swam. There were so many cattle in the river, they impeded its flow, and the water rose halfway up its banks. By the time drovers brought up the remaining 500 head, the wind had shifted, and the cattle could smell the water. 

The unmanageable beasts poured over the river’s east bank, taking the spare horses with them. For two days the cowhands tried to pull animals from the river, but quicksand and the shifting current claimed more than 100 head.

In his memoirs the cattleman recalled somberly the 13 graves that later popped up in a small cemetery at the crossing: “I shall never forget the impression made upon me by those lonely graves, where rested cowboys killed in battle with one another after having fallen out while crossing the long stretch without water.”

Goodnight and Loving’s 1866 passage was typical of the infamous Horsehead, one of few fords on the Pecos. Cowhands, emigrants and soldiers might cheer the sight of water, but not for long. If their cattle hadn’t perished on the 79-mile waterless stretch from the Middle Concho, or succumbed on its salt playas, they might be trampled amid the stampede to the merciless river, die from drinking too fast too soon, poison themselves with brackish water or become trapped in quicksand. 

Making matters worse, Horsehead was on the warpath of roving bands of Apaches and Comanches, who found easy pickings among travelers at the crossing.

Goodnight ultimately pushed a quarter-million cattle across Horsehead, though he came to hate the Pecos, calling it “the graveyard of the cowman’s hopes.” Haley described Horsehead as “the most noted ford along 600 miles of the sinuous Pecos; a river less than 100 feet wide and always swimming; a treacherous stream that squirmed and fought its way through a vast arid world loath to let it flow.”

The Pecos snaked across the desert without betraying its presence with a single tree or bush, never failing to surprise travelers who suddenly caught themselves staring down its steep banks at swift, reddish brown water that was more canal than river.

FIRST PEOPLE AT THE SITE

The first people to use the crossing may have been the Jumanos, who inhabited the region for centuries before being displaced by the Apaches in the late 18th century. Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca is known to have passed through Castle Gap, a mile-long break in the Castle Mountains a dozen miles northeast of the river, and he may have forded Horsehead Crossing in his rambling 1530s journey from the Gulf Coast through what would become west Texas down into Mexico. 

The first American to use the ford may have been Texas merchant Dr. Henry Connelly, who in 1839 sought a trade route between Austin and Chihuahua.

Ten years later Robert S. Neighbors mounted an expedition to open a wagon road between San Antonio and El Paso. On April 17, 1849, the party reached Horsehead Crossing, its banks strewn with horse skulls. Their Comanche guide explained that over the years Indian raiders returning from Chihuahua with stolen horses would drive them hard to the ford, where many would plunge into the water, drink too fast and die.

“The banks are low, bottom firm and hard, and the water more shallow than at any point touched by the road,” Neighbors wrote, “yet the depth is too great for fording, and a good ferry boat will be requisite.” Expedition member John S. “Rip” Ford noted the water had an agreeable taste but suggested adding a pinch of roasted prickly pear to settle the sediment and clarify the water.

During the following year’s survey U.S. Boundary Commissioner John Russell Bartlett was nearly swept away in the churning waters. “As we approached, we looked in vain for the usual indications of a stream,” he recalled, “for, owing to the want of trees or bushes, it was not seen until we were within a few yards of it.” The channel, he wrote, ran between “high perpendicular banks, cut through various strata of clay and sand. 

On both sides is a vast open prairie, entirely destitute of trees, though scantily covered with mezquit [sic], and other plants of the desert.” At Horsehead the land dipped to meet the Pecos, enabling easy entry and egress. In an ominous note Bartlett also mentioned the horse and mule skulls lining its banks.

NIGHTMARISH CURRENTS

By loading their supplies into high-clearance spring-mounted ambulances, most of the party was able to ford the river, which ran about 4 feet deep at the crossing. But as Neighbors tried to cross, the current either swept his team into deeper water or they lost their footing, and the lead mules turned downstream. The teamsters tried to bring the leaders around, but they balked and spread their panic to the rest of the team. 

Adding to the confusion, the driver of the last wagon attempted to pass, but his swamped vehicle collided with Neighbors’ ambulance, and Bartlett fully expected to be swept away. At that moment a man who had already crossed jumped into the river, half waded and swam out and attached a picket rope to the lead mules. With men ashore tugging the rope to turn the lead mules, horsemen in the river urging the animals forward, and the teamsters applying the lash, the two wagons finally reached the far bank.

In 1857, as increasing numbers of emigrants headed for California, the government appropriated $200,000 and sent road builder James B. Leach and crew to improve the southern route west of the Rio Grande. At Horsehead Crossing on Sept. 29, 1857, Leach recorded “a swift and turbid stream about 100 feet wide, flowing between abrupt precipitous banks.” By cleverly inverting two wagon beds atop eight barrels to form a raft, the party crossed their provisions with no losses.

Using the improved road, the first Butterfield Overland stage rolled toward Horsehead Crossing on Sept. 26, 1858. The sole passenger was Waterman L. Ormsby Jr., a 23-year-old correspondent for The New York Herald, who noted the skeletal remains of livestock as far as the eye could see. A stage station with fresh horses operated a quarter-mile north of Horsehead. The driver didn’t ford there, instead continuing to a safer crossing farther north. “If our driver had not been on the lookout,” Ormsby recalled, “we might have been wallowing in its muddy depth.” 

To better service forts along the lower route, in June 1859 the Butterfield Overland opened a ferry, described as a wagon body attached to ropes, which carried passengers and mail across Horsehead to waiting coaches. But the faltering company abandoned the ferry in March 1861. The next month when emigrant Noah Smithwick and family—fleeing secessionist Texas for California—arrived to use the ferry, they found someone had destroyed it.

Soon Horsehead witnessed an episode of Civil War intrigue. In November 1862 Union Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commanding the Department of New Mexico, sent El Paso scout Brad Daily and former Army Captain Washington L. Parvin to watch the crossing. At the ford Daily found the tracks of wagons and men headed toward recently abandoned Fort Stockton. 

The scout soon caught sight of a party of men, some two-dozen Texans led by his friend and fellow frontiersman Henry Skillman. Skillman’s scouts in turn discovered Daily’s tracks and began trailing him. Daily managed to elude them. On hearing of the enemy scouting party, Carleton, expecting a large force to march up the Pecos, ordered delaying actions, but the Confederates never did attack New Mexico from the southern Plains.

After the war other cattle drives tested the crossing on the trail Goodnight and Loving had blazed in the summer of 1866. That fall John Chisum joined Goodnight on a follow-up drive to Fort Sumner to feed thousands of starving Navajos and Mescaleros at nearby Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. Chisum led the drive on his mule, wrote biographer Clifford Caldwell, with the herd stretched out behind him. 

As the cattle entered Castle Gap, they picked up the smell of the Pecos and made for it at a dead run, plunging in at Horsehead Crossing. This time the hands kept them moving across the swollen river, and they delivered their cattle to Fort Sumner. In 1872 Chisum moved his operation to the Bosque Grande, a forested stretch on the Pecos just south of Bosque Redondo.

NEGOTIATING HAZARDS

Despite its hazards, it was possible to safely negotiate Horsehead, as eight Texans driving a six-wagon train demonstrated in 1866. After watering their oxen at the head of the Middle Concho, they set out for the Pecos on a trail littered with animal bones, wagon parts and discarded household goods. Long before the oxen could smell the water, the men lashed each yoke to a wagon wheel to keep the creatures from stampeding. 

As the train approached Horsehead Crossing, captain Pearson Carlile recalled, “one could have jumped from one carcass to another without touching a foot to the ground.” After tying ropes around their oxen, the men allowed each animal to drink a bit before again securing it to a wagon wheel. Once they made camp, they released the teams to drink their fill. Their strategy worked, but a pack of wolves entered camp and killed their dog.

Andy M. Adams may hold the record for the worst luck of anyone seeking to ford Horsehead Crossing. In 1867 the cattleman had a contract to drive steers from Texas to Fort Sumner, and he gathered four separate herds. Of his first herd Comanches drove off 365 of 656 head during a mid-April ambush at Horsehead. His cowhands recovered 38 steers, but a follow-up raid netted the Comanches 15 horses.

 In early May raiding Kickapoos drove off Adams’ entire second herd. Later that month trail boss Joel D. Hoy set out with Adams’ third herd, numbering 1,014 head. Hoy and his men reached Horsehead largely without incident. The next afternoon, however, a raiding party ambushed them at the ford and drove their livestock across the river. Three cowhands were wounded, along with Hoy’s wife, who loaded guns and tended to the wounded until collapsing with an arrow wound to the thigh. 

Lacking horses, Hoy and the other able-bodied drovers dragged a wagonload of the wounded upstream to the abandoned Butterfield Overland station, where the Indians besieged them. One man tried to escape by swimming the river only to drown. They held out for three days before a 100-man party of California-bound prospectors led by Jacob Schnively and Colonel William Dalrymple happened by and scared off the raiders. The gold seekers gave Hoy working stock and supplies, and the drovers managed to recover 60 steers, but they had lost a staggering 954 steers, 23 horses and mules and four oxen. 

At month’s end, again at the cursed ford, Comanches and Kiowas took Adams’ fourth herd of 800 cattle and 15 horses and mules and torched two wagons containing $2,650 in supplies. Taking refuge in a sinkhole, the drovers survived only because they found a steer wounded by an arrow and butchered it for meat.

Horsehead Crossing eventually supported a small settlement—mostly a place for cowhands to rest up—with a cemetery on the west bank.

GUTSY WOMEN ON THE SCENE

Over the years women also proved their mettle at the ford. In 1869 Ellen Eveline Casey saved her flock of sheep at the crossing after husband Robert Casey lost most of his 1,700 cattle, his work oxen, 16 saddle horses and his mule team to Apache raiders. When the Apaches tried to drive off the sheep, Mrs. Casey ran out from cover rattling corn kernels in a tin pan and calling her sheep by name. The racket meant salt and shelled corn to the woolies, and they turned back.

Another gutsy woman was with an 1871 drive of 3,000 Longhorns and 40 horses led by G.F. Banowsky, who had cowboyed for John Chisum. On reaching Horsehead Crossing, the cowhands turned the cattle and horses loose and then pitched camp beside an adobe wall of the abandoned stage station. 

“Shortly after the noon meal,” Banowsky recalled, “when we were taking our ease, half of us asleep, we were startled by an Apache war whoop. We ran for the wall, firing as we went, and found ourselves opposed by about 100 Indians, whose plan evidently was to entertain us while another 100 of their number ran our cattle and horses off.”

The unnamed woman took a bullet to the hip, which so unnerved her husband that he threw down his gun and stopped fighting. “But it only enraged the woman,” Banowsky said, “who fired faster than ever and abused the Indians for everything she could lay her tongue to, and there is no doubt that she got several of them.”

The Apaches persisted until the party was left with but a yoke of oxen, two wagons and scant provisions. After treating the woman’s wounds, the men loaded her and the supplies into one of the wagons, hitched up the oxen and walked them to Fort Concho, 140 miles to the east.

In the wake of the Red River War of 1874 Comanches and Kiowas agreed to stay on their reservations. 

But the Apaches—Mescaleros, Lipans and other bands—retained their haunts along the Pecos and moved around, from the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation near Fort Stanton, New Mexico Territory, to the mountains of Mexico and the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico and Texas, sometimes raiding, other times just trying to reach safety. During a typical patrol in early 1879 U.S. soldiers and their scouts engaged in a frustrating pursuit of a band traveling with women and children. 

They traced a wide loop, from Independence Creek on the Pecos northeast to Castle Gap and on to the White Sand Hills, Horsehead Crossing, Antelope Wells in present-day Presidio County and the Guadalupes. Journey’s end was the Mescalero reservation.

After 1882, with the Apaches either dispersed or contained on reservations, settlement finally came to the trans-Pecos. Three years earlier Robert K. Wylie had established the first ranch in Horsehead country, but he’d since moved on to New Mexico Territory. Among the earliest permanent ranches near the ford was the TX Ranch, run by partners John Dawson, Henry Byler and J.T. Word.

DANGERS FINALLY EASE

By the 1890s the big cattle drives in the West were a memory, but local ranchers used Horsehead Crossing into the 1920s —and still it took the lives of humans and cattle. Eventually, however, a cycle of floods, followed by dams and irrigation projects, followed by drought erased Horsehead from the banks of the Pecos.

Locals remembered, and in the 1930s they agitated for a historical marker. But where was Horsehead? In 1936 the Texas Centennial Commission made an educated guess and placed a commemorative marker in the area. Sixty years later Joe Allen, who grew up in nearby Crane, and friend Bill Boyd pinpointed the site using old maps, written accounts, aerial photos and metal detectors. 

A trove of iron arrowheads, bullets and buckshot, military buttons, insignia and horseshoe nails bore out their findings. The historical marker was a quarter-mile off.

Western novelist Elmer Kelton grew up in the region. “It was the last part of the state to be settled,” he recalled in his biography Sandhills Boy, “and then only because nothing else was left.” Now little is left of the ford on the Pecos.WW

“Today Horsehead Crossing is but a phantom,” writes West Texas native Patrick Dearen, an award-winning author and authority on the region. “The waters which once raged between its banks are slow, sullen, green with moss, and polluted with oilfield residue.…The skulls of Horsehead have disappeared into dust and legend.” 

Longtime journalist Sherry Robinson of New Mexico is  the author of the award-winning “I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches” (2013). Suggested for further reading: “Crossing Rio Pecos,” by Patrick Dearen; “The U.S. Army & the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845–1900,” by Thomas T. Smith; and “The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail,” 1848–1861, by Glen Sample Ely.