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 deliberate on several counts at once: the place lay on the road between Fort Clark and Fort Davis, on the surveyed route of the coming transcontinental railroad, and within supporting distance of Fort Stockton and Fort Davis both. It also sat on water, which in country this dry is the thing that fixes a route in place. Indians had camped at these springs for thousands of years and the site had been a major stop on the Comanche Trail into Mexico. The garrison's work was escort duty, scouting, and the pursuit of raiders crossing the border. From July 1884 until the summer of 1885 the post was garrisoned principally by units of the Tenth United States Cavalry, one of the regiments of Black soldiers who did much of the hardest and least acknowledged patrolling in the western borderlands. Before and after them came the Twenty fifth Infantry, the Twenty fourth, and the Third Cavalry. The Army abandoned the camp in January 1893, when the railroad and the end of the raiding had made it pointless, and nothing of the post buildings survives. In 1935 David St. Clair Combs, who had founded the Combs Cattle Company, gave the ground around the springs to Brewster County, and the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration made it the public park it still is.