The West Texas Long Crossing

You have roughly two hundred fifty miles of this ahead of you. That is not a complaint, it is a description. The West Texas crossing on Interstate Ten, from the Pecos River to the outskirts of San Antonio, is one of the longest stretches of genuine emptiness in the American road system.

Fort Stockton is about sixty miles behind you. Junction is about a hundred and forty miles ahead. Between them: scrub desert, limestone plateau, pronghorn antelope, and an unbroken sky.

This is the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest hot desert in North America, most of which lies in Mexico but which laps north across the Rio Grande into Texas and New Mexico. The Comanche controlled this territory for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their range extended from the southern High Plains through this desert corridor to the edges of the Spanish settlements in New Mexico.

The Spanish called this territory the Comancheria, and they were not exaggerating its scope. It was an empire, maintained through military force and trade and a mobility on horseback that the Spanish could not match. The Comanche acquired horses around the turn of the eighteenth century, probably through raids on Spanish colonial settlements in New Mexico, and the effect was transformative.

A people who had previously been mobile hunters became one of the most powerful political entities on the continent within two generations. They held this corridor until the eighteen seventies. The ranches you are passing were built on land that was actively contested within living memory of the people who built them.

The highway you are driving was, before it was a highway, a path through somebody else's empire. The gas stations at Fort Stockton are not optional. Plan accordingly.