Welcome to Pecos County, the real West

“The traveler from the east, upon reaching the drainage of the Pecos can yet say, ‘I have arrived in the west.’
Here history is so stark, so real, so dramatic that no fiction can surpass it in picturesque qualities.”

J. Frank Dobie, Coronado’s Children

See more Pecos County history on these pages:

Pecos County, as it appeared on the map, when the Texas Legislature created it out of Presidio County in 1871.The name, “Pecos” derives from the Pecos River, the county’s boundary on the north and east, but the origin of the name remains a mystery. …

Pecos County, as it appeared on the map, when the Texas Legislature created it out of Presidio County in 1871.

The name, “Pecos” derives from the Pecos River, the county’s boundary on the north and east, but the origin of the name remains a mystery.
According to Adolph F Bandelier, the word was first applied by Juan de Onate, who in 1595 established the first settlement in New Mexico. Others have stated that the word is a corruption of a Mexican name for the stream, Rio Puerco, meaning “dirty river.” Elsie Parsons, another authority on New Mexico, claimed it is from the Jemez Indian name “Bahkyush”. It has also been been contended that it is a derivative of the Spanish word, pecoso (“freckled”).

“Puerco” is the name of the river on most of the early Spanish maps of the area.

The first county seat was St. Gall, a community near Comanche Springs that later became Fort Stockton.

In 1868, Peter Gallagher bought the land that included the military garrison and Comanche Springs, platted 160 acres for a townsite named Saint Gall and established two stores at Comanche Springs. The Saint Gall area had been first surveyed in 1859 by Anson Mills of El Paso as a site for the original post. The platted subdivision shows “Initial Point Center of Plaza.” Zero Stone, in the center of the plaza, marks the base point for all surveys in what became Pecos County.

Peter J. Gallagher, born in Ireland, was a general merchant with two stores and a personal estate of $10,000. He had two store clerks, John Moczygemba from Prussia and Gerard Storms from Belgium. Although probably not a United States citizen, Moczygemba in 1869 had been elected, but never qualified as the Justice of the Peace of Precinct 1. Gallagher had two other employees, a Bavarian and a Frenchman, who was by trade a brick mason. He had two stores, one 1,000 yards from the parade grounds, likely the present Koehler’s store near the creek, and another 400 yards from the parade ground, a large establishment southwest of the present courthouse and diagonally across from the James Hotel. Joseph Heid, from Baden, Germany, operated a saloon, and his wife, Wilhelmina, from Prussia, ran a boarding house for carpenters and mechanics.

According to the 1870 census, the population of Saint Gall region was 582, of whom 429 were civilians. The population was unusually cosmopolitan. Of the persons listed in the census, more than half (298) were foreign born, mostly from Mexico (261), but nine other foreign nations were represented: Ireland, 15; Prussia, 8: France, 7: Scotland, 2; Baden, 1: Bavaria, 1: Belgium, 1; Denmark, 1; and Malta, 1. The majority of the enlisted men at the fort (the Buffalo Soldiers) had been recruited in Louisiana after the Civil War.

Saint Gall became a supply center for the army, mail stages, wagon trains and travelers. One of the first attempts at irrigation farming in Texas took place near the settlement in the 1870s by Felis Garza and Cesario Torres. When Pecos County was formally organized on March 9, 1875, Saint Gall became the county seat. The name, however, was never popular with the citizens, and on August 13, 1881, it was changed officially to Fort Stockton in an election ordered by the commissioner’s court. The voters, by a majority of 64 to 29 favored Fort Stockton over Saint Gall.