The Sand Hills
Kermit, Winkler County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Mapped by U. S. Government, 1849, for gold seekers and settlers. Known earlier to Indians and many Spanish explorers. A 100-mile belt of sand in Winkler and 4 other Texas counties and in New Mexico. Width varies from 3 to 20 miles; outer dunes are held by dwarf oaks. Water at 2' depth supports willows, cottonwoods, and a plum thicket. (The plums gave food to early settlers.) Many dunes more than 70' high. Heavy, shifting sands a natural barrier to travel. Campsite and game reservation for Indians. Now part of expansive cattle ranges and rich oil fields.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This hundred-mile belt of shifting dunes, some rising more than 70 feet, sweeps across Winkler and neighboring counties into New Mexico. Long known to Native peoples who camped and hunted here and to Spanish explorers who crossed it, the sands were mapped by the U.S. government in 1849 for the gold seekers and settlers heading west. Shallow water beneath the dunes nourished willows, cottonwoods, and the plum thickets that fed early travelers, even as the heavy sands formed a natural barrier to their wagons.
Why it matters
A landscape that was campsite, hunting ground, and obstacle in turn, the Sand Hills embody how the land itself shaped Native life and the westward migration across it.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Blue Mountain
Kermit, TX
Despite its name, Blue Mountain is the southern escarpment of the Llano Estacado and the highest point in Winkler County. For centuries it served as a landmark and lookout on the West Texas plains, offering fuel, shelter, and water to those who passed. A 1938 excavation of its rock shelters found mortar holes and pictographs of hands, serpents, horses, and geometric designs, evidence of long human use.
Willow Springs
Kermit, TX
In the Sand Hills of far West Texas, Willow Springs was a rare and precious source of water, well known to the Comanche and to the pioneers who crossed this arid country. After gold was discovered in California in 1849, wagon parties bound west paused here to drink. Decades later a settler found the charred remains of a 40-wagon train, evidence of a violent and still-unexplained massacre whose artifacts now rest at Sul Ross State University.
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.
Monahans Sandhills State Park and Museum
Monohans, TX
The shifting dunes near Monahans hold traces of an astonishingly deep human past—flint points, grinding stones, and the bones of mammoths and giant bison from a wetter, grassier age. Spanish explorers Cabeza de Vaca and Antonio de Espejo met the Jumano people here in the 1500s, and for more than a century Apache and Comanche fought over its scarce water and shinnery-oak acorns along the Comanche War Trail. Later the California gold rush sent emigrant wagons through the sand, first mapped by Army engineers in 1849 and 1854; the state set aside 3,000 acres as a park in 1957.