Beale Road

Beale's 1857 survey carried an odd cargo. The Handbook of Texas tells how Secretary of War Jefferson Davis won $30,000 from Congress in 1855 to test camels, and how thirty-two arrived at Indianola, Texas, in 1856 and were quartered at Camp Verde, where they carried as much as 600 pounds. In 1857 Secretary John B. Floyd directed Beale to take twenty-five of them on his wagon-road survey along the thirty-fifth parallel to the Colorado River and on to Fort Tejon. The camels did well, but mules and handlers hated them.

What the plaque says

Edward Fitzgerald "Ned" Beale was a significant figure in 19th century America. In his long career, he was a naval officer, military general, explorer, diplomat, rancher and frontiersman. He fought in the U.S.-Mexico War, emerging as a hero of the Battle of San Pasqual in 1846. He also carried the first gold sample from California to the East, contributing to the gold rush. Under President Franklin Pierce, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis began the Pacific railroad surveys to determine possible routes for a proposed railroad. Under the following president, James Buchanan, Lieutenant Beale was appointed under Jefferson Davis to survey a southern route to Los Angeles, California. The Beale Wagon Road has been well documented and marked from Los Angeles through Arizona, New Mexico and the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. The upper counties of the Texas Panhandle were the connecting link that made this road possible to connect the east with the west and made the migration easier and safer with an established road. Two earlier roads passed through Hutchinson County, the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail blazed by Josiah Gregg in 1840 and the Marcy Trail established by Captain Randolph B. Marcy in 1849. It was logical for Edward Beale to use the trails that had already been established. During the 20th century these established trails became the famous Route 66 and later developed into Interstate 40. Today, there are still parts of the Beale Wagon Road which are visible, recalling thousands of pioneers who traveled the road in its early days. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 1.4 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 10 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 18 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 21 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.

More markers nearby

• Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail — steps away
• Site of John and Maggie Weatherly Half-Dugout Site — 0.2 mi
• First Methodist Church of Borger — 1.0 mi
• Grand Hotel and Grand Hardware Building — 1.4 mi