San Simon, The Butterfield Stage in the Desert Valley

San Simon Valley is one of the longest and flattest grassland corridors in the Borderlands, stretching many miles from the Peloncillo Mountains into the Sulphur Springs Valley. The Butterfield Overland Mail established a relay station here in the late eighteen fifties, roughly three miles from the present town site, where mules and horses were swapped and passengers could briefly eat. The station was little more than a stone corral and a rough adobe, but it was an essential link in the twenty-four-day mail run from Saint Louis to San Francisco.

The Southern Pacific laid tracks through the same corridor in eighteen eighty because the valley had almost no grade to climb. Today San Simon is a quiet hamlet of a few hundred people, known mostly to birders who come for the migratory species that funnel through the valley's grasslands each spring and fall.