Milton Faver
Shafter, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(ca. 1829 - December 1889) The earliest large-scale cattleman to settle in the Big Bend, Milton (Don Meliton) Faver prospered against seemingly impossible odds to become the first cattle baron west of the Pecos. While operating a freighting business on the Chihuahua Trail, he moved his family to Presidio del Norte and opened a general store about 1855 . After accumulating a large herd of cattle in Mexico he moved his family and vaqueros to the mountain country north of Presidio and made his headquarters on Cibolo Creek in 1857. He established two other ranches at nearby La Cienega and La Morita. Springs flowed abundantly on all three ranches, providing water for livestock and agriculture. In the fertile fields surrounding the ranches, Faver devised and installed irrigation systems that supplied water for vegetables, grain, and large peach orchards. El Fortin del Cibolo, ranch headquarters, served as a supply station for the U. S. Army quartermaster division at Ft. Davis. Troops used the ranch as a point of departure for forays into Indian occupied regions to the west and north. Celebrated for his hospitality, Faver was known as a gentleman of means who lived in style. He died in December 1889 and was buried on his ranch at Cibolo. (1992)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Milton Faver — known in the borderlands as Don Meliton — parlayed a Chihuahua Trail freighting business and a Presidio del Norte store into the first great cattle empire west of the Pecos. Around 1857 he moved his family and vaqueros to the mountain country north of Presidio, fortifying his headquarters at El Fortin del Cibolo and adding ranches at La Cienega and La Morita, all watered by abundant springs. He engineered irrigation for grain, vegetables, and peach orchards, supplied the Army at Fort Davis, and lived, by all accounts, as a hospitable gentleman of means until his death in 1889.
Why it matters
Faver proved that ranching could thrive in the forbidding Big Bend, opening far West Texas to the cattle kingdom and linking frontier commerce to the U.S. Army's western outposts.
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Nearby & related markers
Milton Faver Ranches
Shafter, TX
By the 1880s Milton Faver, who had come to the Presidio country from a store and freighting business at Presidio del Norte, controlled vast reaches of the county — including most of its best permanent springs. His three fortified ranches, El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega, and La Morita, made up the largest single landholding around, worked with adobe and stone buildings, corrals, and irrigation systems and stocked with the county's biggest herds. After Faver and his family died, the lands were sold off in the wake of a lawsuit, and later ranching families — the Dawsons, Pools, and Greenwoods — worked the former Faver range into the late twentieth century.
El Fortin del Cibolo
Shafter, TX
Built in 1857, El Fortin del Cibolo was the fortified heart of Milton "Don Meliton" Faver's ranching empire in the Big Bend country. Guided to the area's dependable springs, Faver seized control of the region's only steady water, irrigating vast gardens and a peach orchard whose crops fed soldiers at Fort Davis and the miners of nearby Shafter. Its thick adobe walls, corner towers, and gun ports made it the first major outpost between Fort Davis and the Rio Grande.
La Morita Ranch
Shafter, TX
La Morita was the third ranch that Milton Faver carved out of the Big Bend borderlands of Presidio County in the nineteenth century. A Midwesterner turned Chihuahua Trail merchant and freighter, Faver moved his family to the region by 1857 and built a ranching empire spanning thousands of acres of sheep and goat country. At La Morita, abundant springs fed a system of pools and ditches, and his hands raised adobe dwellings, stone fences, and corrals in the traditional style of the frontier Southwest.
William Edward Russell
Marfa, TX
William Edward Russell left Kentucky as a young man and worked his way into the Big Bend, trading along the Chihuahua Trail and keeping a store at the Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos. He became one of far West Texas's leading figures—rancher, merchant, farmer, and silver miner—founding the settlement of Ruidosa, where he dug irrigation ditches and ran a mill, and holding county offices including sheriff. With his wife María Tomasita Rodriguez he raised a family straddling the Texas–Mexico borderland he helped develop.