Shafter's Trail

Shafter was a Michigan farm boy and schoolteacher who rose in the Civil War, survived months in a Confederate prison and led the Seventeenth United States Colored Infantry at Nashville in 1864. In Texas he commanded the Twenty-fourth Infantry, a Black regiment. For the Llano Estacado campaign of 1875 he combined two of its companies with men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, the Tenth Cavalry and a company of Seminole scouts, and drove them more than 2,500 miles between June and December, crossing the Staked Plains three times, often exhausted and short of water.

What the plaque says

Shafter's Trail In 1875, Col. Wm. R. Shafter and a company of soldiers traveled from Fort Concho (where San Angelo is today) to Monument Springs, N. Mex., charting the arid plains, mapping all the vital watering places. This marker is in the only town of today through which Shafter's Trail passes. Here Col. Shafter, defending his party, chased Indians who ran 12 miles to the northwest. Thus he found the salt lake known ever after by his name. His expedition's maps of this formerly unknown land opened the Permian Basin to settlement. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bush Family Home State Historic Site — 34 mi
  The small 1939 frame house on West Ohio Avenue where George and Barbara Bush raised their young family in Midland's 1950s oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site.
• Museum of the Southwest — 35 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

• Billionth Barrel — 0.4 mi
• Means Methodist Church — 0.6 mi
• Original Townsite of Andrews — 0.6 mi
• Early Settlers of Andrews County — 0.6 mi