Monahans, Texas

In eighteen eighty-one a man named Monahan dug a water well in the desert between the Pecos River and Big Spring, a vital water source in that parched stretch of West Texas. When the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived at the site that same year, a ranch supply point grew up around the well. They called it Monahan's Well.

For four decades it was a modest ranching community. Then the Hendrick oilfield opened nearby in nineteen twenty-six and everything changed. Monahans incorporated in nineteen twenty-eight. In nineteen thirty-eight it became the Ward County seat. The well mattered because it produced roughly two hundred fifty thousand gallons a day, which helped the railroad's construction, and until then water for this stretch had been hauled from Big Spring. People have used these dunes for about twelve thousand years. Apache and Comanche groups camped here and gathered acorns and mesquite beans, and Spanish records of the sand hills go back to the early seventeen seventies, where they were called Los Medanos. The sand is nearly pure quartz, blown in by west and northwest winds during cold, dry stretches of the ice age and trapped against the Caprock Escarpment. The tallest dunes in the park reach seventy feet, and the park opened to the public in nineteen fifty-seven. What keeps the dunes from blowing away is the Havard oak, a shrubby oak that often grows only about four feet tall, and oil pumpjacks still work in and around the park. Today it is also home to Monahans Sandhills State Park, nearly four thousand acres of wind-sculpted dunes rising from the Permian Basin floor, where families rent plastic discs to sled down sand that predates any oil well by thousands of years.