Sheffield and Fort Lancaster: The Pecos Crossing
Texas
Where the Pecos River cuts through its canyon, there has always been a crossing. Nomadic peoples used it for thousands of years. In eighteen forty-nine, U.
S. Army surveyors chose this same ford when they laid out the San Antonio to El Paso Road, a major wagon and mail route to the Southwest and California. The Army built Fort Lancaster nearby to protect travelers from raids, and a decade later thousands of westward migrants rolled through.
The town that eventually grew here took the name Sheffield after a rancher named Will Sheffield who settled along the Pecos around nineteen hundred. Oil discoveries in the Trans-Pecos during the nineteen twenties brought a brief boom. Sheffield remains a small crossroads today, but the old fort's ruins still stand a few miles away as a state historic site, nearly two decades of comings and goings compressed into crumbling limestone walls above the river.
