Emigrant Trail

Pope, the second Army surveyor of this road, went on to a Civil War career of sudden rise and fall. A Kentuckian and 1842 West Point graduate, he won brevets at Monterrey and Buena Vista. In 1862, after opening the upper Mississippi almost to Memphis, he was made a major general and given the new Army of Virginia, but Robert E. Lee routed him at Second Manassas on August 28-30, 1862. He was sent to command the Department of the Northwest at St. Paul, Minnesota, where he dealt with the Dakota war, then the Department of the Missouri.

What the plaque says

Emigrant Trail Road of stubborn seekers of 1849 California gold fields and better life. Bringing the old, infant, the yet unborn and all worldly goods, family wagons entered Texas at Preston, on Red River, to go southwest via springs (including some now in Monahans Sandhills Park) to Emigrants' Crossing on the Pecos, then upriver and west through Guadalupe Pass to El Paso. Old wagon parts by the trail tell of some disasters. Capt. R. B. Marcy in 1849 and Capt. John Pope in 1854 made Army surveys of the trail. It passed near this spot. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 5.2 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 — 11 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.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 12 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.
• Museum of the Southwest — 19 mi
  Midland's art and science museum in the 1937 house of oilman Fred Turner and his wife Juliette, with added galleries, a children's museum and a planetarium on the grounds.

More markers nearby

• El Paso Natural Gas Company's First Compressor Transmission Engine — 1.9 mi
• The Cable Tool Rig — 1.9 mi
• Prairie Dog — 2.0 mi
• Permian Basin — 2.1 mi