Before the twentieth century the Pecos River was hard to cross almost anywhere. Its banks were steep and muddy, its currents unpredictable, its bed full of quicksand. Horsehead Crossing was one of the few places where it could be forded, and it drew nearly every road across the country. It also killed. Animals that reached it after long dry marches drank the briny water and were poisoned, or bogged in the quicksand. The banks were littered with the skeletons of horses, mules and cattle, and the story goes that horse skulls were set up in the mesquite trees nearby.
The first road
The Comanche Trail was probably the first route through the ford, according to the Handbook of Texas. On an 1857 map the trail ran north from Comanche Springs, at present Fort Stockton, to cross the Pecos at or near Horsehead and go on across the sand hills toward Big Spring. Comanche and Kiowa parties coming back from Mexico toward the Llano Estacado found there the first water in more than sixty miles, and the crossing became a favorite camp. In April 1849, when an expedition under John S. Ford and Robert S. Neighbors reached it looking for a wagon road to El Paso, a Comanche guide told Ford that the name came from the many horses that had died there.
Casks and coaches
The first recorded Anglo-American crossing was in 1839, when Dr. Henry Connelly passed on his way to Chihuahua. In July 1849 an Army survey crew floated its baggage over on empty water casks strapped to spare wagon tongues, and boundary commissioner John Russell Bartlett came through in 1850 looking for a road to California. Within a few years stagecoaches were using the ford. Henry Skillman drove the Butterfield Overland Mail through, and a station stood about a quarter mile above the crossing.
The trail herds
From the 1860s cattlemen drove their herds over the Pecos here. In 1866 Charles Pyron crossed with 10,000 cattle, and John Chisum drove 600 steers past it to Bosque Grande in New Mexico. That same year Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving brought their first herd from near Fort Belknap along the old mail road, by the Middle Concho and Castle Gap, to the ford. There they left the mail route and worked up the Pecos toward Fort Sumner, crossing and recrossing wherever the ground and the water allowed. They lost hundreds of cattle in the desert and in the river, and Goodnight called the Pecos the "graveyard of the cowman's hopes." Their route became one of the most heavily used cattle trails in the Southwest.
The end of the drives and the coming of the railroads in the early 1880s left the crossing quiet. The Texas Centennial Commission placed a marker at the site in 1936. Horsehead Crossing is told here without directions. The country of its first travelers can be seen at Comanche Springs in Fort Stockton, where the Comanche Trail's southern branches met, and the Castle Gap marker tells the pass the herds came through.