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- History·Brewster County
Albion Shepard
Marathon was named by a retired sea captain who thought the country looked Greek. Albion E. Shepard came to the Trans Pecos in the early 1880s as a surveyor laying out the railroad between El Paso and…
- History·Terrell County
Baxter's Curve
Baxter's Curve is a bend in the railway roughly midway between Dryden and Sanderson, and it is where one of the last major train robberies in West Texas went wrong for the men attempting it. Just afte…
- Military·Brewster County
Camp Peña Colorado
The United States Army put a post at the springs on Peña Colorada Creek in August 1879, about four miles southwest of where Marathon would later stand, and kept it for thirteen years. The siting was d…
- Entertainment & Sports·Harris County
Diamond Glenn
On St Patrick's Day 1949 the wildcatter Glenn McCarthy opened the Shamrock, an eighteen storey hotel of eleven hundred rooms decorated throughout in sixty three shades of green, on what was then the e…
- History·Terrell County
Dryden
Dryden began in 1882 as a section house, which is the smallest thing a railroad builds that people can live in, and it was named for Eugene E. Dryden, the chief engineer of the line being pushed west …
- Nature·Val Verde County
Eagle Nest Canyon
Eagle Nest Canyon, which runs up from the Rio Grande along the eastern edge of Langtry, holds one of the most important archaeological sites in North America. It is called Bonfire Shelter, and it lies…
- History·Val Verde County
Fate Bell Shelter
Fate Bell Shelter, in the canyon that gives Seminole Canyon State Park its name, is one of the largest rock shelters in the Lower Pecos, and its back wall carries some of the best preserved painting o…
- History·Pecos County
Longfellow
Longfellow, in the extreme southern corner of Pecos County, is the third of the railroad water stops along this line to have emptied out for the same reason, and its dates tell the story almost withou…
- History·Val Verde County
Pumpville
Pumpville exists because steam locomotives drink. In 1882 the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, building the line that became the Southern Pacific, put a water stop on a stretch of West T…
- History·Val Verde County
Sotol City
Comstock, in western Val Verde County, is a town on its second site and its second name. It was platted as Sotol City, east of where it stands now, presumably after the spiky desert plant that covers …
- History·Terrell County
Strawbridge
Sanderson was called Strawbridge first, and not after the man who founded it. Charlie Wilson, an ex soldier and saloon keeper, set up where the Southern Pacific surveyors had marked a division point i…
- History·Val Verde County
The 1954 Pecos Flood
The highway bridge that carries US 90 over the Pecos River replaced one the river destroyed. In late June 1954 the remains of Hurricane Alice stalled over the Pecos drainage and dropped as much as twe…
- History·Terrell County
The 1965 Flood
Sanderson is built in the mouth of a canyon, which is convenient for a railroad and dangerous for everything else. On the morning of 11 June 1965, after as much as nine inches of rain had fallen on th…
- History·Harris County
The Allen Brothers' Ad
Houston began as advertising copy. In August 1836, four months after the battle of San Jacinto, two brothers from New York, Augustus and John Kirby Allen, bought three quarters of an old Mexican land …
- History·Val Verde County
The Border Blaster
John Romulus Brinkley made a fortune implanting goat glands in men who wanted their youth back. The operation cured nothing and killed people: by 1930 he had signed death certificates for dozens of pa…
- History·Harris County
The Crooked E
The glass tower at 1400 Smith Street was built as the headquarters of Enron, the Houston pipeline company that remade itself into an energy trader and was celebrated in the business press as the futur…
- Nature·Val Verde County
The Drowned Canyons
Amistad Dam, finished in 1969 by the United States and Mexico together, holds back the Rio Grande a dozen miles above Del Rio. The water it raised backed up the Rio Grande, the Pecos and the Devils ri…
- History·Harris County
The Fifty Fifty Plan
Houston is a great port fifty miles from the sea, and the fact was bought with a piece of financial engineering as important to the city as any oil well. Dredging Buffalo Bayou had been the local ambi…
- Architecture·Brewster County
The Gage Hotel
Alfred S. Gage was a Vermonter who came to Texas in 1878 to help his brother survey and sell land, and who ended up with one of the great ranching operations of the Trans Pecos. He was living in San A…
- History·Val Verde County
The Jersey Lilly
Roy Bean kept a saloon in Langtry and held court in it, and called himself the Law West of the Pecos, which for a while he genuinely was. The appointment was real: justice of the peace from August 188…
- Transport·Val Verde County
The Loop Line
When the railroad first reached the Pecos in 1882 it did not cross where it crosses now. There was no way to carry a track straight over a canyon this deep with the money and the methods available, so…
- Industry & Science·Terrell County
The Mohair Country
Almost nothing grows on this country that a person can eat, and for most of the twentieth century that fact made Terrell County a place for sheep and Angora goats. The Angora is the animal that made t…
- Industry & Science·Harris County
The Petrochemical Corridor
For twenty five miles east of Houston's Turning Basin, past Pasadena and Deer Park, across from Channelview and on to Baytown and Galveston Bay, runs the largest petrochemical complex in the United St…
- Entertainment & Sports·Val Verde County
The Sandbar Prizefight
On 21 February 1896 the heavyweight fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher was held on a sandbar in the Rio Grande, at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon below Langtry. It had taken four years to f…
- History·Val Verde County
The Seminole Scouts
Seminole Canyon is not named for anyone who lived in it. It takes its name from the Black Seminole Indian Scouts, descendants of people who had escaped slavery in the American South and found refuge a…
- History·Val Verde County
The Silver Spike
On 12 January 1883, about three miles west of the Pecos River, a rail gang working east from El Paso met a rail gang working west from San Antonio, and Thomas Wentworth Peirce, president of the Galves…
- Museums & Art·Val Verde County
The White Shaman Mural
On a shelter wall above the Pecos River, about a mile up from where it joins the Rio Grande, there is a painting twenty six feet long and thirteen feet high holding more than a hundred figures. It is …
- History·Val Verde County
Vinegarroon
Where the Pecos River runs into the Rio Grande there was a town for a year or two. In 1882 the railroad was boring its second tunnel through the canyon wall on the west side of the Pecos, and the camp…