On September 20, 1851, Henry Skillman won a government contract to carry the mail from San Antonio to Santa Fe by way of El Paso. He sent his first mail west on November 3, and by December he was carrying passengers too. Over the next thirty years one contractor after another ran the line. It rarely turned a profit for any of them.
Through two flags
In October 1854 Skillman took a partner, the San Antonio merchant and freighter George H. Giddings, and for three years they kept the coaches running against mounting losses. In July 1857 Giddings joined James Birch to carry the mail all the way to San Diego, a line the Cooke's Wagon Road marker in New Mexico remembers. The 1,476-mile trip averaged twenty-seven days, and the fare, meals included, was $200. Birch died at sea that October, and Giddings kept going by borrowing deeply. When the Butterfield Overland Mail began running west from El Paso in 1858, the Post Office cut Giddings's pay route by route, and by May 1860 it paid him only as far as Fort Stockton. He ran to El Paso anyway, at a loss.
After Texas left the Union, Giddings took a Confederate contract, but by August 1862 he had stopped all service west of Fort Clark. Skillman ran a secret courier service between San Antonio and Confederate sympathizers in El Paso until federal troops killed him in an ambush near Presidio del Norte in April 1864.
Ficklin's road
Bethel Coopwood revived the line in April 1866, and by that November the firm of Sawyer, Risher and Hall had control. Its superintendent was Benjamin F. Ficklin, a former Confederate officer and government surveyor who had helped organize the Pony Express. Ficklin sent the coaches up to the Middle Concho River before turning west to Fort Stockton, and opened branch lines into northwest Texas, Arkansas and the Indian Territory.
When Ficklin died in 1871, his assistant, Francis C. Taylor, enlarged the company headquarters on the Middle Concho and named the village Benficklin after his friend. Taylor helped organize Tom Green County in March 1874, and in January 1875 Benficklin became its county seat. After Taylor's death in June 1879 Charles Bain ran the line through falling revenues and raids until the Texas and Pacific Railroad reached El Paso on January 1, 1882 and put the stages out of business.
The skirmish line
The line's real value was not in its ledgers. Its coaches and fortified relay stations encouraged travel and settlement, and in the 1850s Texans backed it as a forerunner of a railroad across the state. After the war it gave frontier garrisons valuable word of Indian movements. Gen. William T. Sherman called it "the skirmish line of civilization." In 1880 Col. Benjamin Grierson made one of its stage stops, Eagle Spring, his headquarters against Victorio.
The line's story runs through Fort Clark in Brackettville, Historic Fort Stockton and the Concho country around Fort Concho in San Angelo. In Val Verde County the Dead Man's Pass marker tells the dangers of the road's lower route.