Captain Randolph B. Marcy's Southern Route Expedition

Black Beaver's people called themselves Lenni Lenape, the "common people." Their homeland was the Delaware River basin, from what is now southern New York to Delaware Bay, where they lived in small independent villages of bark wigwams and grew corn, beans, pumpkins, squash and tobacco. English colonists named them Delawares after the bay. Dutch and Swedish land purchases in the 1620s and 1630s began their removal, and war, alcohol and epidemics followed; by the 1740s survivors were moving west to the Susquehanna and the Ohio, a migration that eventually carried some to Texas.

What the plaque says

Captain Randolph B. Marcy's Southern Route Expedition The California Gold Rush in 1849 prompted the U.S. government to appoint army captains to escort prospective gold seekers to California. Captain Randolph B. Marcy was one of these captains appointed by the Secretary of War to escort and protect the "Forty-Niners" on their journey as far as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Captain Marcy brought with him the famed Delaware Scout Black Beaver and topographical engineer Lieutenant James H. Simpson to map a wagon road from Ft. Smith to Santa Fe. This route was mapped for future gold seekers and other emigrants moving west. Captain Marcy and his detachment left Ft. Smith in 1849. Their expedition opened the Fort Smith-Santa Fe road which ran across the Texas panhandle, through north central New Mexico and ended in Santa fee. Once successfully reaching Santa Fe with the party of "Forty-Niners," Captain Marcy decided to escort a wagon train traveling to El Paso. He escorted the wagon train to Dona Ana, sixty miles north of El Paso. His detachment then turned east with intent to survey and construct a route back to Ft. Smith from west Texas. Marcy employed Manuel, a famed Comanche guide. This new route linked El Paso with a wagon road via the Toyah Basin, the Trans-Pecos Region and the southern Llano Estacado. Manuel guided the party southward toward the Pecos River to what became known as emigrant crossing, about 20 miles below present day Pecos. After crossing the Pecos Captain Marcy's party spent four days crossing the "sandy hills of the Monahan's" and followed an old Comanche trail between Goldsmith and Odessa in Ector County, continuing northeast to Ft. Smith. The Marcy expedition forged a shorter, southern route from Ft. Smith to Dona Ana. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Odessa Meteor Crater — 11 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• White-Pool House — 12 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 21 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Monahans Sandhills State Park — 24 mi
  A small corner of a 200-mile dune field east of the Pecos, where fresh water lies just under the sand and a forest of shin oak grows no higher than your knee.

More markers nearby

• Goldsmith — 6.6 mi
• The Caprock — 9.8 mi
• Emigrant Trail — 9.9 mi
• The Cable Tool Rig — 10 mi