San Antonio-California Trail

Duane's take

Here's the story as the official marker tells it, three miles south of where you're rolling right now. Now, Texas has got no shortage of storied roads, but this one, the San Antonio-California Trail, might just be one of the originals. We're talking about one of Texas' first cross-country wagon trails, and the San Antonio to El Paso section of it was surveyed in 1848 by a party under a man named Jack Hays.

The marker calls him, and I love this, an intrepid Indian fighter. You don't get a word like intrepid attached to your name without earning it the hard way. First came the emigrants and the gold-seekers, rolling west with everything they owned rattling around in the back of a wagon, chasing whatever it was that California promised.

But then, in 1857, this trail got folded into something bigger: the San Antonio to San Diego mail line, one of America's pioneer mail services. Now here's where the story gets real interesting. You wanted a seat on that line, you paid two hundred dollars.

One way. That bought you a spot in a swaying Concord coach, where you'd be riding shoulder to shoulder with six hundred pounds of mail. Six hundred pounds.

And in exchange for that two hundred dollars and that considerable company, you got to spend twenty-seven days covering fifteen hundred miles. Through bandits. Through dust.

Through floods. Through all of it. Twenty-seven days of the American frontier at its most unfiltered, just to get from one end of the line to the other.

And then 1861 rolled around. The Civil War broke out, and just like that, service ended. The trail that had carried gold-seekers and mail sacks and bone-weary passengers across the hardest miles in Texas went quiet.

Some roads don't close; they just stop being used. And this one out here in Culberson County is proof that the ground remembers.

What the marker says

(Three miles south) One of Texas' first cross-country wagon trails. The San Antonio-El Paso section of this route was surveyed in 1848 by a party under the intrepid Indian fighter Jack Hays. Used first by emigrants and gold-seekers, it became part of the San Antonio-San Diego mail line (1857), one of America's pioneer mail services. Passengers on the line paid $200 (one-way) to share a swaying Concord coach with 600 pounds of mail and braved bandits, dust, floods, and Indians to spend 27 days traveling 1,500 miles. Service ended in 1861 at the outbreak of the Civil War.