Site of Chihuahua Road
Del Rio, Val Verde County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Chihuahua Road was a nineteenth-century lifeline that connected Chihuahua, Mexico, with the Texas port of Indianola. Opened to exploit rich trade in Mexican silver and gold, the road eventually carried every type of goods, adventurers, settlers, soldiers, and "Forty-Niners" bound for the California gold rush. The road was traversed by many types of vehicles: stagecoaches, wagons, ox-carts, and traveling ambulances, which were light carriages with 4-foot wheels. Not until the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway came to San Antonio in 1877 did this road lose its commercial importance. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Chihuahua Road was a bustling nineteenth-century trade artery linking the silver and gold country of Chihuahua, Mexico, with the Texas port of Indianola. It carried everything from stagecoaches and ox-carts to California-bound Forty-Niners chasing the gold rush. The road's commercial reign lasted until 1877, when the railroad reached San Antonio and rendered the long overland haul obsolete.
Why it matters
Routes like the Chihuahua Road knit together the economies of Mexico, Texas, and the wider West, moving goods and people decades before the railroads redrew the map.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · California gold rush
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
San Felipe Springs
Del Rio, TX
Spanish explorers named these springs in the 1600s for San Felipe de Jesús, the first Mexican martyr, and their reliable water made the site a natural stopping place on the arid road west. In 1849 the springs marked a watering point on the newly blazed route between San Antonio and the Pacific, and from 1857 to 1883 they served as a stage stand on the San Diego line.
San Felipe Springs
Del Rio, TX
The seven San Felipe Springs have drawn travelers since at least 1542, and in 1675 Spanish priests named them for their king; in the 1700s Comanches camped here along a war trail into Mexico, and a mission rose downstream in 1808. By the 1850s the springs lay on the vast San Antonio–to–San Diego mail route and the Chihuahua Road, where wagons hauled Mexican silver and gold toward the Gulf port of Indianola. After settlers arrived in 1864 and dug the 'Mother Ditch' for irrigation, the town of Del Rio soon took root.
U. S. Army Camel Corps
Del Rio, TX
A scheme to use camels for transport across the arid Southwest, floated in the 1830s, became reality under Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and the first animals landed on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1856 for training at Camp Verde. Several expeditions passed westward through Del Rio, camping in this very park. Officers praised the experiment, but the Civil War ended it — and confirmed sightings of wild camels persisted into the mid-20th century.
Comstock
Comstock, TX
Comstock sprang up in the early 1880s as a watering stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, taking advantage of a natural lake in the arid country west of the Pecos. Named for a railroad dispatcher, it replaced the earlier settlement of Sotol City and grew into a busy hub of the wool and lamb trade, even sheltering Texas Rangers for a time. After World War II, new technology and shifting economies thinned its population.