Persimmon Gap: The Comanche Door

This low pass through the Santiago Mountains is Persimmon Gap, named for the persimmon trees that grow in the draws here. It is the northern entrance to Big Bend National Park, and the highway you just drove through it follows a route that is far older than any road. For generations, this gap was a key passage on the Great Comanche War Trail, the branching network of paths that Comanche and allied warriors rode south into Mexico each autumn to raid for horses and livestock, returning north in spring.

The route threaded through Big Bend country because the mountains here channeled movement through a handful of passes, and Persimmon Gap was the most practical. The rocks themselves tell an older story: the walls of the gap expose a Laramide-era thrust fault where ancient limestone has been pushed up over younger rock, evidence of the same mountain-building forces that shaped the Rockies. Persimmon Gap is also where the park's visitor center now sits, forty miles south of Marathon.

From the gap it is twenty-eight miles to Panther Junction, the park headquarters and main visitor center. Congress authorized land purchases for the park in nineteen thirty-five, and it became a reality on June twelfth, nineteen forty-four. It covers more than eight hundred thousand acres in Brewster County and administers about one hundred eighteen miles of the Rio Grande.