The Fourth Division
For administrative and logistic purposes Butterfield broke his route up into nine Divisions:
.San Francisco – Los Angeles
.Los Angeles – Fort Yuma
.Fort Yuma – Tucson
.Tucson – Franklin
.Franklin – Fort Chadbourne
.Fort Chadbourne – Colbert’s Ferry
.Colbert’s Ferry – Fort Smith
.Fort Smith – Tipton
.Tipton – St. Louis
Of these, our interest lies with the Fourth Division – the section between Tucson and Franklin – which included those stations at Seneca Springs (Cienega de los Pimas), the Rio San Pedro, Dragoon Springs, Apache Pass (Puerto del Dado), Stein’s Peak (El Peloncillo), Soldier’s Farewell (Los Peñasquitos), Ojo de la Vaca, Mimbres River, Cook’s Spring, Picacho (opposite Doña Ana), Fort Fillmore, Cottonwoods, and Franklin (El Paso).
These listings and the alternate names are taken from the Report of Special Agent Bailey to the Postmaster General, dated October 18, 1858. Special Agent G. Bailey traveled on the first eastbound Butterfield stage which “started from the Plaza, at San Francisco, at precisely ten minutes past midnight, of the 14th ultimo [September 14]”, and which arrived at Tipton, Missouri, on the morning of October 9, 1858.⁶²
Of the stations along the fourth Division, it is those at Stein’s Peak, Soldier’s Farewell,⁶³ Ojo de La Vaca (Cow Springs) and the Mimbres River which are of particular relevance to this work.
Ormsby mentions all four of these places in his letters, referring to all of them by their Anglicized names. He describes the “Membrace [sic] River” as being “a stream of not much consequence” and estimates that they struck it at a point about 20 miles west of Cook’s Spring. He says that it was a further 17 miles west to Cow Springs (Ojo de la Vaca), and 31 miles from there to “Soldier’s Farewell Springs”, where the water was “good and durable.” The stations at Soldier’s Farewell and Cow Springs, like that at Cooks’ Spring, he describes as consisting of “one tent for the accommodation of the station men”, again negating the premise that Butterfield appropriated stations originally built by Birch/Giddings.
After leaving Soldier’s Farewell, he describes a journey of 42 miles to Stein’s Peak “without water, across a rolling plain with a smooth, hard road, part of which I must credit to Col. Leach.” He mentions that there was a corral at the Stein’s Peak station, and that it was situated in a hollow at the base of the mountain.
Special Agent Bailey noted that along the route there was no water to be found between Tucson and the Rio Grande except at the Company’s stations, and that permanent stations had been, or were in the process of being, established at all of the locations mentioned in his report.
The original schedule printed for the Overland Mail and dated September 16, 1858, lists only one of the above four stations, that at Soldier’s Farewell.
Various Tables of Distance published in newspapers, such as the Weekly Arizonan of March 3rd and 10th of 1859, are more detailed; bear in mind that these dates are almost six months after the Overland Mail Company began to make its runs. These Tables of Distance list: Steen’s [sic] Peak (without water), 35 miles to Soldier’s Farewell (without water), 42 miles to Ojo de Vaca, 14 miles to the Mimbres River and a further 16 miles to Cook’s Spring.
The Relevance of Leach’s Wagon Road
When in July of 1857 the Post Office Department stipulated the route to be taken over Route no. 12578, the wording of that stipulation included the following: “… thence along the new road being constructed under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior…” , an obvious reference to Leach’s El Pas0 – Fort Yuma road.
Ormsby refers to “a smooth, hard road, part of which I must credit to Col. Leach.” As well as his en route reports, Ormsby, on his arrival at California, lectured on his journey at a public meeting. In his upcoming book ” Butterfield Overland National Historic Trail: Passenger Diaries & Stories“, Mr. Bob Crossman reproduces a newspaper article from the Daily Alta California of October 12, 1858, which gives an account of that lecture. It states that Ormsby described traveling “…on Col. Leach’s road, through the Rio Grande and Mesilla valleys, crossing to Cook’s Spring, thence to Mimbres, in the Gadsden Purchase.”
Leach’s road was, therefore, of great relevance to Butterfield’s route through south western New Mexic0. There is of course no disputing the fact that Butterfield had major improvements made to the route, he also by-passed some parts and created new, but to say that – as Melody Groves does in “Butterfield’s Byways” (2014) that the builders of earlier roads “did not have transcontinental travel in mind” (p.56) is patently false – the facilitation of transcontinental travel was the primary purpose of all of the Pacific Wagon Roads!
Indeed, Groves makes no mention at all of Leach, saying only that Butterfield’s Overland Mail “traveled some of the the distance on existing roads, some laid out by the Army of the West and others created by travelers and local citizens.” (p.56) In the very next paragraph she talks specifically of Arizona and New Mexico with absolutely no mention of Leach. The Overland Mail would be only one of several mail contractors who would make use of sections of the El Paso – Fort Yuma road in New Mexico
George Hackler ( The Butterfield Trail in New Mexico, 2005) refers to “the road that Colonel James B. Leach built for the military…” A basic error because, as previously described, the road was built under the direction of the Department of the Interior, and was the first one to be so.
It is for these and various other reasons that the author repeats the assertion that Leach’s El Paso – Fort Yuma road is not given enough credit; very often completely overlooked, at best given only minimal attention.
Note: For convenience all references above are made to Leach and Butterfield rather than to the actual engineers of the roads.
Barney Station and Leach’s Tank
Barney(‘s) Station is widely considered to be the precursor to the stage station established at Ralston City, and in some ways it was despite the fact that the Ralston station was established at a later date and had no connection to either the Birch/Giddings’ SA&SD line, or to that of Butterfield.
Barney Station was often used as a geographical point of reference for the location of the silver strikes of the Virginia Mining District when news of them began to appear in the national press, it being the nearest stage station to that place. But by this time (1870), Barney Station consisted of little more than adobe ruins. When mail service over the southern overland route was suspended at the beginning of the Civil War, stations along the route had been abandoned and fell into disrepair; it is doubtful that Barney Station was ever used again.
When W. D. Brown, discoverer of the mineral ledges in the area, first arrived there around 1867, he saw “nothing but the ruin of mud walls, once stabling for Butterfield’s mail horses.”⁶⁴ Around the same time, William A. Bell, a government railroad surveyor, discovered the station to be “an uninhabited ruin”.⁶⁵
From the early descriptions and accounts of travel over the Butterfield route cited above, and from the given Tables of Distance, it is plain to see that Barney Station had not been established at the time of the very first trips over Route No. 12578. A Table of Distance published in the Daily Alta California on November 19, 1858, makes no mention of Barney Station, but it is mentioned by name in J. M. Farewell’s letter of October 27, 1858.
Sometimes the names “Barney/Barney’s Station” and “Leach’s Tank” are used synonymously; the inference being that the station was located immediately at the site of the Tank. For example, Farewell refers to “Barney’s Station, or Leeche’s [sic] Tank”, stating that it was approximately 35 miles east of San Simon. Similarly, Julyan refers to “Barney” as a “long-vanished stage stop, sometimes called Barney’s Station and also Leach’s Well”, sited five miles northeast of Lordsburg.⁶⁶
That there was a connection between the location of Barney Station and the Tank is not in doubt, but there has been much discussion over exactly where the Tank itself was located. Roscoe and Margaret Conkling⁶⁷ refer to two tanks in the area – one to the east and one to the west of the Pyramid Mountains. We have already shown that there was only one tank in the area – that which Leach’s crew constructed close to the center of the Valley of the Playas, on the eastern side of the Pyramid Range.
In 1969, a hard bound facsimile of A. H. Campbell’s Report Upon The Pacific Wagon Roads⁶⁸ was published. Campbell, it will be remembered, was the Chief Superintendent of the Pacific Wagon Roads project. Included with this publication are reproductions of three maps, one relating to each of the three roads.
Map No. 1 relates to the El Paso to Fort Yuma road; the map was produced under Hutton’s direction, and is dated 1857-1858. On this map the location of every watering point is marked, both natural watering places and those improved and/or constructed by the Wagon Road crews. It of course includes the tank constructed in the Valley of the Playas, which is shown as being situated immediately adjacent to the south side of the Wagon Road, between the Burro Mountains to the east and the Pyramid Mountains to the west. Also marked on the map are the mail stations in existence at the time the map was drawn; there are no stations between Los Peñasquitos and El Peloncillo (Soldier’s Farewell and Stein’s Peak), that is, there is no Barney Station.
However, there are some discrepancies between what is shown on the map and the written descriptions provided in Chief Engineer Hutton’s report on the road’s construction.
On the map, the names “Valle de las Lagunas” and “Valle de las Playas” are transposed. Hutton’s narrative states that Ojo Excavado was situated in Burro Canyon; the map however marks it as being in the next canyon west – present day JPB Draw. In this same canyon (JPB Draw) is marked “mail station”, i.e. the Soldier’s Farewell station, and it is indeed near this position in JPB Draw that the remains of the Soldier’s Farewell station are located.
From Chief Engineer Hutton’s report we know that the tank itself and the associated well were located close to the center of the Valley of the Playas, and that the well was sited so as to collect “surplus water from the tank draining down from the south.” Leach’s Tank therefore, must have been located in that area where present day Mudhole Draw joins with the eastern end of Lordsburg Draw. This is the only location near to Barney Station where water runoff flows in from a southerly direction.
The first reference to Barney Station that we found was in Farewells’ letter of October 27, 1858. We can conclude from this that Barney Station was established between Butterfield’s first runs in mid-September of 1858, and late October of that year.
Was Barney Station located immediately at Leach’s Tank as Farewell suggests? Certainly it wasn’t located at the site of any natural water source, but it is unlikely that it was sited directly adjacent to the Tank, which must have been at a low point in the Valley of the Playas. We can immediately dismiss the suggestion that a station would have been situated in such a place, where it would have been flooded during heavy rains; for the same reason we can dismiss the statement that “Barney’s was located in the bottom of the Lordsburg Playa.”⁶⁹ Logic dictates that the station would have been at a relatively higher elevation, out of any flood plain.
A Township Survey map confirms this; that map is the November 1870/January 1871 survey of Township No. 23 South, Range 18 West, in which Ralston City is located, carried out by Robert B. Willison under contract to T. Rush Spencer, Surveyor General of New Mexico Territory.⁷⁰ This map pinpoints the exact location of Barney Station, by that time abandoned, but confirming Conkling’s location of Barney Station in Section 1 of that township, as opposed to the 1980 USGS map⁷¹ which places it too far to the west and in Section 2.
Using Willison’s survey map, we identified the position it gives for Barney Station on a modern USGS map and found that the station was indeed in Section 1, at a location approximately four miles northeast of Lordsbsurg, at Latitude 32° 20’ 15.80” N, Longitude 108° 38’ 34.41” W. (See 1980 Geographical Survey map above.)
All in all, references to Barney Station during the years 1858 – 1870 are sparse. It is given as one of the stations on Butterfield’s route in Tables of Distance published in 1860, and is described in them as as lying 21 miles east of the station at Steine’s Peak, and 19 miles west of that at Soldier’s Farewell.⁷²
Established after Leach’s tank and well had beeen constructed in the Valley of the Playas, in conjunction with these, Barney Station served as an important, althought unreliable, watering place on that otherwise frequently arid stretch between Stein’s Peak and Soldier’s Farewell. Undoubtedly Barney Station and Leach’s Tank were used by Butterfield up until 1961, when the Overland Mail Company was ordered to change to the Central Route.
©2007-2023 Jim & Erica Parson
REFERENCES FOR THIS INSTALLMENT:
⁶²Bailey, Special Agent, to A. V. Brown, Postmaster General. Appendix to Report of the Postmaster General. Dated December 4, 1858. In: The Executive Documents of the Senate of The United States, Second Session, Thirty-Fifth Congress, 1858-’59. Washington: William H. Harris, Printer (1859). Page 739.
⁶³Soldier’s Farewell: A hill located in Township 22 South, Ranges 14/15 West. Twelve miles NE of Separ, NM. The original (Spanish) name for this landmark is Los Peñasquitos which, very loosely translates as “the small, rocky outcrops”, or “the small, rocky bluffs”, the name being descriptive of the terrain. The origin of the English name “Soldier’s Farewell” has been the subject of much speculation. Julyan (The Place Names Of New Mexico) refers to three legends surrounding the origin of the name, and says that they all date to the late 1880s, but that all three may well be apocryphal. Local folklore has it that Soldier’s Farewell was so named because it was the point at which military escorts parted company with the stage coaches which they had been accompanying. This is not something the military did as a matter of routine. On those occasions when a military escort was provided, it was during those periods when the threat of attack by Apaches was heightened. Escorts were provided for travelers across the most dangerous stretches of the road, favored by the Apaches for ambushes, such as Cook’s Canyon, Doubtful Canyon, and later between Knight’s ranch and Shakespeare. There are no reports that the military favored any particular location for parting ways with those they were escorting.
The account of the Overland Correspondent for the Daily Alta California newspaper, himself named Farewell, although not definitive, does at least place the origin of the name at a much earlier date than the late 1880s. Written at El Paso on October 27, 1858 (published on November 16, 1858), J. M. Farewell’s account of the origin of the name states that it came about as the result of a soldier taking his own life at the site after becoming overburdened by the harsh military lifestyle. If Farewell’s account is close to the truth, and bearing in mind that there appears to be no use in print of the name Soldier’s Farewell prior to the establishing of Butterfield’s line, we can narrow down the time-frame when the name might have come into use. There was only one military expedition which crossed the area in which Soldier’s Farewell lies after the Mexican Boundary Survey teams and Lt. Parke’s 1853 Railroad Survey, at which times the English name was not in use. That would be the 1856 expedition under the overall command of Major Enoch Steen who led several Companies of the 1st Dragoons from the Rio Grande to Tucson in order to take position of the newly acquired Gadsden Purchase lands. Noted historian and author Berndt Kühn has narrowed down the time-frame even further, to October of 1856. Cited in George Hackler’s 2005 The Butterfield Trail In New Mexico (page 151), Kühn says that, on the night of October 4, 1856, a Private by the name of Gilbert shot himself. Gilbert was a member of one of the three Companies of Dragoons who were traveling west from Fort Thorn to Tucson. Gilbert’s Commanding Officer, Lt. David M. Gregg, reported him as having “committed suicide because of intemperance.
⁶⁴Daily Alta California. June 19, 1870. Brown does not give an exact date for his arrival at the site, but says that he had begun his tour of the “Southern Territories” in 1867.
⁶⁵Bell, William A. New Tracks In North America. A Journal of Travel and Adventure Whilst Engaged In The Survey For a Southern Railroad To The Pacific Ocean During 1867-1868. In Two Volumes. London: Chapman & Hall (1869). Volume II. Page 37. Hereafter referred to as Bell (1869).
⁶⁶Julyan, Robert (1998) The Place Names Of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Page 31.
⁶⁷Conkling, Roscoe P. and Margaret P. (1946) The Butterfield Overland Mail, 1857-1869 (Three Volumes). Glendale: Arthur H. Clark Company.
⁶⁸Campbell, Albert H. Report Upon The Pacific Wagon Roads. Ye Galleon Press (1969).
⁶⁹Hill, Janaloo. The Butterfield Overland Trail Through Hidalgo County. Cited in: Hackler, G. (2005) The Butterfield Trail In New Mexico. Yucca Enterprises. Pages 162-163.
⁷⁰U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records . DM ID: 120267, New Mexico. Twp – Rng: 023.0S – 018.0W. [map]. Santa Fe, New Mexico. R. B. Willison, Surveyor. November 1870 – January 1871.
⁷¹U.S. Geographical Survey. Lordsburg Quadrangle, New Mexico – Hidalgo Co. [map]. Photorevised 1980. 7.5 Minute Series. Reston, Virginia: United States Department of the Interior, USGS, 1963.
⁷²Mesilla Times. October 18, 1860 and October 25, 1860.
Leave a Reply