Comanche Springs rose from a fault in the limestone on the southeast side of what is now Fort Stockton and ran off as Comanche Creek. Lt. W. H. C. Whiting's party reached it in 1849 and recorded the name Awache, Comanche for white or wide water, clear and full of fish and soft-shelled turtles. That same year Lt. S. G. French described it as a campground on the Comanche Trail to Mexico. John C. Reid, passing in 1856, wrote that the water came out of the earth "like a sea monster."
Once the sixth largest spring in Texas, it watered the fort, the town and, after 1875, farms along the creek. In 1899 it ran about 1,900 liters a second, and in 1938 the county built a bathhouse, pool and pavilion beside it. In the early 1950s farmers west of town drilled irrigation wells into the same aquifer. The Pecos County Water District and 108 families who depended on the flow sued Clayton Williams Sr. and others, and on June 21, 1954 the Court of Civil Appeals ruled for the pumpers under the rule of capture, which lets a landowner take the water beneath his land. The Texas Supreme Court affirmed it. By March 1961 the springs had stopped, and the Comanche Springs pupfish was gone from them.
In the last decade the springs have run again in late winter, after the aquifer recovers from summer pumping. Texas State University's Meadows Center has mapped what year-round flow would take. The city pool now sits on the old spring site.
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