Fort Concho: Its Why and Wherefore

by James N. Gregory

Population movements in the United States have generally gone from East to West in parallel lines, once the Atlantic seaboard was settled. And so this great gold movement from East to West brought settlement of the intermediate lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean by the natural contrasting types of North-South peoples.

The great Oregon and Santa Fe Trails serviced the people of the more northerly parts of our country, but for those in the southern parts a newer trail had to be found and by simple geography it had to cross Texas. You could enter the State from the sea at Galveston, Indianola or Corpus Christi, or by way of the land through Fort Smith in Arkansas, thence across the Indian Territory to the Red River; or directly from Louisiana through the fairly well settled and organized counties of East Texas. But no matter how you entered, there was only one way to get out, and so all trails converged on the Paso del Norte (present El Paso). To get out of Texas south of El Paso would land you in Mexico. To get out north of El Paso would take you across the Llano Estacado which in those days was considered a vast treeless plain, unbroken by any topographic changes, and completely devoid of water holes.

The [accompanying map], published in 1856 in Yoakum’s History of Texas, shows clearly the political subdivisions and settlements of Texas in those times. A substantial part of the State, from the Panhandle to the upper Rio Grande, appears to be completely uninhabited and, therefore, politically unorganized. In a vague manner, this vast area might be assumed to be an unannexed portion of the counties of Bexar, El Paso, Presidio and Travis. This map does not speak approvingly of the Llano Estacado. Staked Plains, some called it.

From 1848 on to the recent past, various trail drivers, army officers and railroaders laid out trails from the settled parts of Texas to the Paso del Norte, always taking advantage of springs and water holes and avoiding the Llano Estacado and the great limestone canyons of the Rio Grande and its tributaries. That is, all did but the builders of the Southern Pacific Railroad. They came later, but yet too early to have the know-how of an Arthur Edward Stilwell. But that is another story.

A North-South trade route had existed for some two hundred years connecting Spanish Santa Fe, far north toward the headwaters of the Rio Grande, south through the Paso del Norte to the settlements in the mother country of Mexico. The Santa Fe Trail extended to California, would cross this trade route at Santa Fe, well up in the Rocky Mountains, while the route through Texas would cross it at El Paso. And so these two places became the supply dumps where the great wagon trains took on horses, mules, beef and other supplies that would see them across the final leg of the journey west. It was a great opportunity for traders who had the supplies to sell, and the procuring middle man, the one who contacted both producer and merchant, was a man with great savvy and ability known as the Comanche Indian.

The Comanche despised walking; it was not adaptable to his method of making a living. He was a plains Indian, and somewhere back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century had somehow accumulated his first mustangs from offsprings of those horses lost by the Conquistadores from Spain. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards in America, there were no horses, as we recognize them now, on either of the American continents. Now the Comanche as a mounted man probably roamed the great plains from present Wyoming to Durango, Mexico. It was easy to make a living on such a range. It abounded in buffalo; and the wise Comanche knew all the water holes. He drove the wily Apaches to the south until they crossed the Rio Grande and settled in a quasi-peaceful manner in Mexico, or later chose Arizona and New Mexico and preyed on the settlers, immigrants and prospectors.

From the records, the Comanche does not appear to have been a breeder of horses, cattle or sheep. But as a procurer of such livestock, he had no peer. Many years before Lewis and Clark were sent to evaluate the Northwestern part of the Louisiana Purchase lands that Mr. Jefferson had bought from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, the Comanche had learned to find his greatest pleasure and profit during his daring raids into the settlements of Mexico, raiding in great force as far south as the cities of Chihuahua and Durango.

The emotional inspiration for such forays on peaceful people was regarded as pure cussedness, but a more profound study shows that the trophies of such raids, excepting the scalps taken, were horses, cattle, sheep and slaves. Many of the stolen horses were for the Comanche’s personal use, because it took many animals to make the great raid during the Mexican Moon. The balance of the trophies was used for barter.