Some of you may have heard Vickii Scisms talk at last summer’s Indianola Celebration. It was about the Chihuahua Trail. That trail is not, as one might first think, a place to walk small dogs, but was the trail from Indianola to the city of Chihuahua Mexico. There is much to discover about that trail not the least of which is where it was…
There were several routes that were used. There was the upper and lower trail. They were all used for various reasons back in the mid 1800s when the mule trains and trail flourished. One important reason for varieties of trail was to go where one could find drinking water for mules and mule drivers.
Vickii showed pictures of wagon ruts that exist yet today. There is an antique book, “A Texas Pioneer,” written by August Santieben. It is considered one of the best of the stories about that era. There are others about the roads to Chihuahua.
They loaded the merchandise brought west by ship to Indianola. Then it was to haul wagons with eighteen mules loads west to the forts beyond San Antonio and in the West Texas frontier.
However, they often went on to the city of Chihuahua. That’s where the Silver was. There, they sold the last of the merchandise and loaded Silver from the mines and brought it back to Indianola.
From there it would be shipped to New Orleans to be made into something. Quite often it was coined into money at the mint. Every step of the way was somewhat dangerous either for lack of water or someone wanting to capture the goods going either way. They were often worried about encountering hostile Indians.
While highways like Interstate 10 parallel parts of that old trail, railroads, which replaced those 18 mule wagons, parallel other parts.. Most of the trails went through what is now private land. Vickii’s mission, if you can call it that, is to research old maps and literature, find the trail records, locate and identify artifacts and take some interesting pictures all with the landowner’s cooperation.
Her team camps in the hills along the trail. They get to listen to the rancher’s tales and coyotes howl. Vickii says if you listen closely during some of those marvelous West Texas sunsets you can hear the wagons creaking along that old trail. It sounds like fun to me.
Soon we will have a new Historical Marker about the Chihuahua Trail here in Calhoun County. Indianola was the start of the trail and the end of the trail. It is another of the pieces of history that many folks may have missed from reading the history books. They tend to talk about the big events, while the folks who worked the trails of the time were a lot like us, doing our everyday things like getting things from here to there and things from there to here. We and they are history also.
