The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 61, July 1957 - April, 1958 Page: 13
591 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Butterfield Overland Mail Road across Texas
doubt, proved by newspaper items current during the time of
the Overland Mail that the man-made and man-supplied oasis
was a link in the Butterfield chain of stage stands." The station
was undoubtedly established in answer to the urgent need for
water on this seventy-five mile stretch of waterless stage road.
Ben Ficklin's answer to the same problem on his mail road,
which came after the Civil War, was the establishment of Cen-
tralia Station.
The General Land Office draftsmen did not map the Butter-
field (or westward) branch of these two mail roads even as far
as Llano Estacado Station, but they showed it again at China
Ponds in central Upton County (called China Lake on some
present-day maps) and from there they showed it all the way
across the west half of Upton County.45 These stage station ruins
discovered by the Conklings were eighteen and one-half miles
from the point where the mail road skirted the north side of
China Ponds. It was thirteen and one-half miles from these ponds
to the east end of the historic little mountain pass that is known
as Castle Gap, which zigzagged a full one and one-fourth miles
in a southwesterly direction. Finally, it is twelve miles a little
south of n est to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos.4" The total
of all these miles from the station at the head of the Concho
to this crossing on the Pecos River amounts to seventy-four and
one-half miles.
Land records establish the route of the road at the Concho
Station; land records again establish the route at and near Cen-
tralia Station; and again land records chart the course from China
Ponds all the way through Castle Gap near the western edge of
Upton County. The land maps at Austin locate Horsehead
Crossing at the west end of the Houston and Texas Central Rail-
way Survey No. 37, some twelve miles northwest of present-day
McCamey in Crane County."
Thus, by land records almost alone, aided only by the known
44Conkling, The Overland Mail, I, 366-369. J. Evetts Haley, Fort Concho, and the
Texas Frontier (San Angelo, 1952), gon, discovered authenticity of Llano Estacado
name.
45General Land Office Map of Upton County, dated 1918.
6oTom Green County Surveyors Records (MS., County Clerk's Office, San An-
gelo), D, 123-125. J. W. Armstrong of Tom Green County made the survey in 1884.
47General Land Office Map of Crane County, dated 1902.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 61, July 1957 - April, 1958, periodical, 1958; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101164/m1/33/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.