Yellow sunflowers blooming on a pale sand dune under a clear blue sky at Monahans Sandhills State Park.
Alexander Hatley / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Texas · Region

Monahans, Fort Stockton & the Pecos River

The Pecos River country: Comanche Springs and Historic Fort Stockton, Horsehead Crossing, the Monahans sandhills and Santa Rita No. 1, the well that opened the Permian Basin.

9 places to explore

Between the oil towns and the mountains the Pecos River crosses a dry plain, a road and a barrier for every traveler. The Comanche Trail into Mexico came down across it to the great springs at Fort Stockton. The Butterfield mail and the Goodnight-Loving cattle drives of 1866 crossed it at Horsehead Crossing, a ford Charles Goodnight called the graveyard of the cowman's hopes. It is private land, told here without directions.

Every road west depended on Comanche Springs. The army built Fort Stockton there in 1859, and after the Civil War it was a post of the Ninth Cavalry, a regiment of Black troops. Irrigation pumping lowered the aquifer, and by March 1961 the springs had stopped flowing. Historic Fort Stockton keeps the guardhouse and officers' row.

At Monahans, Pat Monahan dug a well in 1881 where the Texas and Pacific laid its tracks, and Monahans Sandhills State Park, opened in 1957, protects 3,840 acres of the dunes that stretch north into New Mexico. Visitors slide down them on rented sand disks.

On May 28, 1923, Santa Rita No. 1 came in on University of Texas land in Reagan County, proving the Permian Basin held oil, and its royalties still feed the Permanent University Fund. Iraan, Crane and McCamey followed, and Loving County, the least populous in the nation, sits on the Pecos.

What to See in Monahans, Fort Stockton & the Pecos River

9 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Comanche Springs

Fort Stockton

Once the sixth largest spring in Texas and a campground on the Comanche Trail to Mexico, pumped dry by 1961 under the rule of capture and now flowing again some winters.

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Tall dry grass bending over pale wind-rippled sand at Monahans Sandhills State Park in low evening light.

Monahans Sandhills State Park

Monahans

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.

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Historic Sites

Annie Riggs Memorial Museum

Fort Stockton

An 1899 adobe hotel on Main Street that a twice-married frontier woman bought with her gunfighter husband's estate and ran as a boarding house until she died in 1931.

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Historic Fort Stockton

Fort Stockton

The Ninth Cavalry's post at Comanche Springs from 1867 to 1886, with its 1868 stone guardhouse, three adobe officers' quarters and barracks rebuilt from the original plans.

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Mendoza Trail Museum

McCamey

A 1966 museum in a 1925 oil town, named for the Spanish officer who crossed this country in 1683 at the invitation of the Jumano, with a 1915 bungalow beside it.

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Rankin Museum (Yates Hotel)

Rankin

The fireproof hotel Ira Yates built beside the Orient railway depot months after oil came in on his ranch in 1926, kept as it was down to the wicker lobby furniture.

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Towns & Gateways

The small white storefront museum in Wink, painted with black and white murals of Roy Orbison and his guitar.

Roy Orbison Museum

Wink

A volunteer-run room in the oil town where Roy Orbison spent his high school years, opened on request, with a guitar he played and his tinted prescription sunglasses.

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Industry & Mining

The cracked concrete floor and sloping earthen walls of the Million Barrel oil tank in Monahans, with a water tower on the horizon.

Million Barrel Museum

Monahans

An oil reservoir that could not hold oil, then a water park that lasted one day, now a museum in Monahans with the story of the Pyote bomber base beside it.

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Roadside Stops

Alley Oop Park and Iraan Museum

Iraan

An oil-boom town named for Ira and Ann Yates, where the creator of the caveman comic Alley Oop once worked, and a park of giant cartoon figures beside the town museum.

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Monahans, Fort Stockton & the Pecos River rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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