Shafter's Trail
Andrews, Andrews County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1875, Col. Wm. R. Shafter and a company of soldiers traveled from Fort Concho (where San Angelo is today) to Monument Springs, N. Mex., charting the arid plains, mapping all the vital watering places. This marker is in the only town of today through which Shafter's Trail passes. Here Col. Shafter, defending his party, chased Indians who ran 12 miles to the northwest. Thus he found the salt lake known ever after by his name. His expedition's maps of this formerly unknown land opened the Permian Basin to settlement. (1965)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1875 Colonel William R. Shafter led a company of soldiers from Fort Concho across the arid plains toward Monument Springs, New Mexico, mapping the scarce watering holes that made the country passable. Along the way he skirmished with Native fighters and located the salt lake that still carries his name. The maps his expedition produced charted a land that had been largely unknown to newcomers, opening the Permian Basin to settlement.
Why it matters
It marks the U.S. Army's reconnaissance of West Texas during the Indian Wars, the surveying that turned an unmapped frontier into ground the settlers—and later the oil industry—would claim.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1875, the plains of far West Texas were among the least-mapped country in the United States. This was the tail end of the frontier era, the years the history books call the Indian Wars, when the U.S. Army was pushing surveys and campaigns into lands that had long belonged to Native peoples and that newcomers regarded as trackless and forbidding.
The great obstacle here was water. This is arid, high country — the kind of land where a traveler's life depends less on the direction of the trail than on knowing where the next reliable spring or waterhole lies. An army that could not find water could not move, and settlers would not follow a route they could not survive.
So the era's decisive weapon was often the map. Charting the 'vital watering places,' as the record puts it, was the work that turned an impassable blank on the map into country that wagons, herds, and eventually towns could cross.
People & events
The central figure is Colonel William R. Shafter, who in 1875 led a company of soldiers out of Fort Concho — sitting where San Angelo stands today — and struck west across the arid plains toward Monument Springs in New Mexico. Their assignment was reconnaissance: to chart the country and, above all, to map every dependable source of water along the way.
The expedition was not a peaceful survey. At one point Shafter, defending his party, gave chase to a group of Native fighters who ran roughly twelve miles to the northwest — and it was in the course of that pursuit that he came upon a salt lake. The lake has carried his name ever since, a small permanent mark left by a single day's hard riding.
The town where this marker stands holds a distinction worth pausing over: it is the only present-day town through which Shafter's Trail passes. The route that a column of soldiers traced across empty country in 1875 now runs through an inhabited place — a living reminder that today's roads often follow yesterday's reconnaissance.
Its place in the American story
Shafter's Trail is a window onto how the American West was actually claimed — not in a single dramatic stroke, but through methodical mapping backed by military force. The dramatic battles get remembered, but it was the quieter work of charting waterholes that made permanent settlement possible, and this expedition is a textbook example.
The marker is honest about the cost embedded in that story. The same reconnaissance that 'opened' this land to newcomers came at the direct expense of the Native peoples who already knew and used it, and whose presence the expedition met with pursuit and conflict. Opening a frontier for some meant closing it for others, and this trail holds both truths at once.
There is a long tail to the story, too. The maps Shafter's expedition produced charted what would later be recognized as the Permian Basin — a name that means little in 1875 and a great deal in the twentieth century, when oil made this 'formerly unknown land' one of the most economically important regions in the country. The soldiers surveying for water had no idea what lay beneath it.
If you visit
You're in Andrews, and the thing to appreciate first is simply where you're standing: this is the one modern town along Shafter's Trail, so the marker is less a monument to a spot than a doorway onto a route. Read it, then look out at the horizon in the direction of that long-ago march.
The land does the storytelling. This is wide, dry, big-sky country, and even from a comfortable car it's easy to feel the central problem Shafter faced — the sheer distance between one source of water and the next. Let that sink in and the achievement of mapping it stops being abstract.
For a road-trip frame, hold two eras in your mind as you drive the modern highways of the Permian Basin: the 1875 column picking its way from waterhole to waterhole, and the oil country that rose on the same ground generations later. Same landscape, two completely different Americas — and this quiet marker is where they meet.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Col. William R. Shafter
Related events
- · 1875 Shafter expedition from Fort Concho
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Early Settlers of Andrews County
Andrews, TX
Andrews County sat on one of Texas's last frontiers, where Anglo settlement lagged some sixty years behind the rest of the state because of Comanche resistance and a punishing scarcity of water. O. B. Holt filed the first land claim in 1886, and hardy families like the Cowdens and Peter Von Holebeke followed, but by 1900 the county still counted only 87 people and did not organize until 1910. Windmill pumps and drift fences finally made ranching workable on the dry plains, and the 1930 discovery of oil turned decades of stubborn endurance into sudden prosperity.
Captain Randolph B. Marcy's Southern Route Expedition
Odessa, TX
As the 1849 Gold Rush drew thousands westward, the U.S. Army sent Captain Randolph B. Marcy to escort the 'Forty-Niners' toward Santa Fe, opening a wagon road from Fort Smith with the help of the Delaware scout Black Beaver and engineer James H. Simpson. After delivering his party, Marcy set out to survey a return route from West Texas, guided by a noted Comanche named Manuel across the Pecos, the Monahans sandhills, and an old Comanche trail near present-day Odessa. The resulting Fort Smith–Santa Fe road gave emigrants a shorter southern path across the continent.
Old Buffalo Wallow
Odessa, TX
This shallow depression is a surviving buffalo wallow, worn into the West Texas ground over untold years by bison rolling in the dirt to shed winter coats and drive off insects. Great herds once migrated across these plains between Canada and Mexico, sustaining the Plains Indians who followed them for food, clothing, and shelter. In the 1870s the herds were slaughtered en masse—encouraged by the army, settlers, and hide hunters—and had all but vanished by the time Odessa was founded in 1886.
Midland County
Midland, TX
Sitting midway between El Paso and Fort Worth on the Texas and Pacific Railroad, the townsite took the name Midland in 1881, and Midland County was created in 1885. The area had been a crossroads of trails and the site of one of the last Comanche raids into Texas before cattlemen, sheepmen, and windmill-watered farmers moved in. The 1928 Permian Basin discovery made Midland an oil headquarters, and in 1954 the ancient "Midland Man" remains were found nearby.