Downtown San Angelo Summer '25 - Magazine - Page 14
The Concho stage stop, carrying
passengers as well as mail and supplies,
consisted of an eight-foot wall
enclosing an adobe house and kitchen;
commissary; wagon, wheelwright and
harness shops; storage and coach sheds,
and houses for the
workers–rudimentary structures of
pickets, mud and buffalo-hide roofs.
Francis Taylor and his wife Ester took
operation of in it 1869.
Photo Courtesy of LegendofAmerica.com
The Mason County stage stop for the
San Antonio-El Paso Mail Company was
indeed in a more populated region
with a nearby fort. The stage line had
operated from as early as 1851 and was
“invigorated” by a rerouting to the
Concho Valley under the leadership of
Ben Ficklin, former Confederate Major,
government surveyor, route
superintendent, and instrumental force
in establishing the Pony Express.
Ficklin partnered with Francis C.
Taylor, and the Concho station became
the headquarters of an operation that
had routes between Ft. Smith, Arkansas
to San Antonio, and then to El Paso.
The Baltimore Sun announced “Mails
from Texas to California” on March 11,
1869: “On the 1st of February the
superintendent started with the mails
from Fort Concho, and establishing
stands all along the lines, the mail
reached Fort Smith, a distance of six
hundred and twenty five miles, on the
15th of February, so that the great
overland mail route from Fort Smith
and from San Antonio to California, by
tri-weekly stages, at an average speed
of one hundred miles per day, is now
in successful operation.”
Photograph of Major Ben Ficklin
Photo Courtesy of Monticello.org
In 1871, Major Ficklin suffered a cruel
demise. Dining in Washington, D.C.
while doing business for the stage line,
he choked on a fish bone. Efforts to
dislodge it severed an artery and he
bled to death. Taylor took over the
enterprise and, in honor of his friend
and partner, named the little settlement
on the south Concho “Benficklin.”
Taylor’s sister, Mary Jane Metcalfe,
relocated in 1876 to Ben Ficklin from
Loyal Valley where she had been
manager of the Mason County stage
stop. Mary Jane’s story, detailed below,
is one example of how women came to
settle in West Texas.
Mary Jane, born into privilege and
ease, lost her father to suicide and her
husband to mental illness.
Photo Courtesy of SanAngelo.gov
Mary Jane, seeking the comfort of
family, followed her brother and son to
Texas and brought with her, as so
many of our pioneering women did,
the gentle things that soften life’s
woes: faith, art, music, and education.
And, as so many women did and do,
she sought to maintain her herself and
her children with dignity, courage and
fortitude. Of her nine children, she was
survived by only three, perishing with
her daughter, Zemula, in the Ben
Ficklin Flood.
The Fort Concho we are familiar with
today seems quaint, a fun venue for art
shows and Christmas markets, but it
saw plenty of activity while it was a
commissioned military fort. On October
23, 1868 The Texas Republican reported
“[a] band of naked Indians . . .
appeared in the vicinity of the
government hay camp, about 40 miles
from Fort Concho, who chased and
drove in one or two hay cutters . . .”
In December 1868, the Boscobel Journal
(out of Wisconsin) reported that “about
30 Indians attacked the El Paso mail
stage near Kickapoo Springs. The driver
was killed, scalped, stripped naked . . .
and dragged off the road about a mile
. . . there was nothing on the stage but
the local mail from Fort Concho.” The
violence had not abated by 1872, when
newspapers such as the Daily Evening
Herald of Stockton, CA submitted the
prediction that “we are on the eve of a
general Indian war,” and in 1873, there
were concerns that release of “over one
hundred Comanche squaws and
papooses” confined at Fort Concho was
“very bad policy on the part of
Government officials.” The Austin
American-Statesman, June 5, 1873,
makes this argument: “The Indians
have not been so quiet on the El Paso
road for a long time as they have since
we hold their women as hostages for
their good behavior . . .We venture the
assertion that if their women are
returned to them without other
material guarantee, it will not be many
weeks before they recommence their
attacks . . .”
