Horror on the Texas frontier

Crockett County—In the arid expanse of southwestern Texas lies Crockett County, where the Devils River country meets the Pecos, is a lonely waterhole that once offered life to weary travelers for centuries. Howard's Well, also known as Howard Springs, stood as a vital oasis on the San Antonio–El Paso Road. On April 20, 1872, it became the site of one of the most savage attacks in the annals of the Texas Indian Wars.

A Mexican supply train bound for Fort Stockton was ambushed, plundered, and burned by a large raiding party of Comanche and Kiowa warriors, possibly joined by Mexican allies and army deserters. Nearly all 17 souls aboard; men, women, and children perished in a frenzy of torture and fire. The Howard's Well Massacre shocked the frontier, fueled outrage in military dispatches, and helped tip the scales toward harsher federal policy against reservation Indians. Though overshadowed by larger clashes like the Red River War, it remains a grim testament to the brutal final years of open warfare in West Texas. 

The springs themselves had a long and contested history. According to legend, an 18th-century Franciscan priest, Padre Alvarez, prayed for water in the dry draw and watched a spring burst forth where he planted his staff. In 1848, ex-Texas Ranger Richard A. Howard rediscovered the site while guiding an expedition under Colonel John Coffee Hays to map a wagon road from San Antonio to El Paso. The party nearly starved but noted the water’s lifesaving value.

By 1849, the U.S. Army incorporated Howard’s Well into official maps of the San Antonio–El Paso route. Forty-niners heading to California goldfields passed through, as did the first regular mail lines established in 1853. Travelers described a small but inexhaustible pool tucked beneath a limestone bluff in Howard Draw, reachable only by crude rock steps. Sparse grass and mesquite offered little forage, but the water was reliable, critical in a region where the next dependable source lay 30 to 44 miles away. 

Native peoples had known the springs for millennia. Kiowa and Comanche bands favored it as a camping ground, fiercely resisting eviction as Anglo settlement expanded. Earlier raids left graves and scattered bones nearby; Captain Edward Fitzgerald Beale’s 1857 expedition passed human remains and heard stories of prior ambushes.

The well lay along the Chihuahua Trail and overland routes, making it a natural choke point for raiders preying on wagon trains, stagecoaches, and military supply lines. By the early 1870s, the Texas frontier remained volatile. The Civil War had stripped garrisons, and reservation Indians, nominally confined to Indian Territory, still conducted long-range hunts and raids into Texas. Supply trains to remote forts like Stockton and Lancaster were tempting targets, laden with food, ammunition, and draft animals. 

On the morning of April 20, 1872, a Mexican freight train led by a man named Gonzales rumbled toward Howard’s Well. The wagons carried U.S. commissary and ordnance stores from San Antonio to Fort Stockton. Nine men drove the teams; the rest were women and children traveling with the outfit, seventeen people in all. They likely paused at the springs for water, unaware of danger. Suddenly, a force estimated at 125 to 150 raiders struck. Reports described the attackers as Comanches and Kiowas, reinforced by Mexicans and possibly deserters from U.S.-colored regiments who had fled into Mexico. The assault was swift and overwhelming. The train was plundered for arms, ammunition, and livestock, then set ablaze. 

What followed was horrific even by frontier standards. Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie’s command had recently clashed with Comanches elsewhere, but this attack stood apart for its calculated cruelty. Survivors and soldiers later pieced together the scene. Several victims were taken alive, bound to the wagons, and burned as the flames consumed the train. 

An elderly woman was dragged away, shot, and scalped. Her grandchild, witnessed by the child’s mother, had its ears severed, was scalped, and had its brains dashed out. The mother, who also saw her husband killed at the wagons, was carried off by the raiders. Others, ropes burned through by the fire, crawled from the inferno only to collapse as charred, unrecognizable corpses with hands and faces frozen in supplication. 

When Colonel Merritt of the 9th Cavalry arrived hours later with his troopers, smoke from the burning wagons first drew them in. They found no survivors able to recount the full horror. Eleven bodies were buried on the spot; three wounded men and one woman were evacuated to safety. One additional woman was feared captured or burned beyond recognition. 

Merritt’s official report, dated April 29, 1872, and forwarded to the War Department, captured the outrage: “One of the most horrible massacres that has ever been perpetrated on this frontier.” He described the pursuit. Companies A and H of the 9th Cavalry, many recruits inexperienced in Indian warfare, followed the trail seven or eight miles to a steep bluff. A sharp fight erupted. 

Lieutenant Vincent was mortally wounded while leading his men and died that night. Captain Cooney was thrown from his horse and injured but continued. The troopers claimed six Indians killed, but ammunition shortages and the command’s move to a new station forced them to break off the chase. The surviving woman who escaped provided the only eyewitness details of the raiders’ losses. 

News of the massacre spread quickly. Newspapers printed Merritt’s account, stirring calls for retaliation. The event coincided with other depredations and was cited as evidence that reservation Indians were violating treaties by hunting and raiding in Texas. It contributed directly to the U.S. government’s decision to cancel hunting permits for Kiowa and Comanche bands, tightening restrictions and setting the stage for the Red River War of 1874–75. That larger campaign finally broke the power of the southern Plains tribes and confined them to reservations. 

The Howard’s Well Massacre endures as more than a footnote in Dry River Country history. It illustrates the raw asymmetry of the Indian Wars: supply trains offered no glory, only desperate defense against superior numbers and intimate knowledge of the terrain. For the raiders, it was a strike against the military infrastructure that eroded their nomadic life. For the victims, ordinary freighters, and families, it was an unimaginable ending in a place that had promised only water. 

In the broader sweep of westward expansion, such episodes underscored the human cost of Manifest Destiny and the closing of the frontier. Visitors to Crockett County today can stand near the marker, feel the dry West Texas wind, and imagine the smoke rising from those wagons on a spring morning in 1872. The springs may be silent, but the memory of the massacre still echoes across the draw.