The Comanche Trail: The Road That Was Already There

The road through Persimmon Gap existed long before anyone surveyed it or named it on an American map. Comanche war parties from the Llano Estacado, the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, had been traveling this corridor since at least the early seventeen hundreds, moving south through the gap in the mountains and descending into the Chihuahuan Desert toward the deep interior of northern Mexico. They came for horses. They came for cattle. They came for captives to be ransomed or adopted into Comanche bands. And then they went back north, along the same braided network of routes through the mountain passes and desert arroyos that historians now call the Great Comanche War Trail.

Spanish colonial authorities could not stop it. Mexican federal forces could not stop it. The United States Army, when it arrived in West Texas after the Mexican-American War, could not stop it immediately either. The campaigns from Fort Davis that finally ended Comanche raiding in the Trans-Pecos extended through the eighteen seventies.

For roughly one hundred fifty years, the landscape that visitors now experience as remote and empty was one of the most intensively trafficked corridors in North America. Thousands of people moved through Persimmon Gap on military and commercial business that the Spanish crown, the Mexican republic, and the early American republic were unable to control.

The silence here now is recent. It was purchased with military force, with the reservation system, with the destruction of the buffalo herds that sustained the southern Plains economy. The gap did not always feel like this.