|
San Angelo enjoys a rich and surprising history. The current city traces its roots to the 1860s, to early cattle and sheep ranchers, to Fort Concho, and to the Wild West, but humans have lived in this West Texas oasis at the confluence of the Concho rivers for thousands of years.
The first Europeans, Spanish missionaries and traders from New Mexico, came to the confluence area as early as 1629 – a year before the founding of the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Other efforts followed throughout the 1600s.
From the 1700s through the Civil War, Apache and Comanche Indians used the Concho River-Colorado River system to move across Texas, and the Concho confluence area remained a major camping ground for these nomadic buffalo hunters and raiders.
The river system brought the first Americans to the area in large numbers in 1849. The Lower Road to the California gold fields followed the Concho River across western Texas. The Butterfield Overland Stage & Mail (today’s American Express) had stage stands in the area.
Cattlemen and the first ranchers came during the Civil War, and the U.S. Army in 1867 established Fort Concho at the strategic confluence location.
San Angelo was the start point for the Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail, often called the most historic cattle trail in the West. Buffalo hunters came to decimate the southern herd. Fort Concho troopers, including all four regiments of the U.S. Army’s black soldiers, protected cattle drives, buffalo hunters and stage lines, and conducted offensive operations against Indians.
The last frontier soldiers left Fort Concho in 1889, but by that time the city was a comfortable regional center for ranchers and farmers served by the railroad.
The city’s fortunes took a dramatic turn in 1923 when Santa Rita No. 1, the discovery well for the vast Permian Basin oil fields of West Texas, was found. The oil well turned San Angelo into a boom town into the mid-1930s. The oil and gas industry remain important to the city’s economy today.
San Angelo has grown steadily since the oil boom years. The U.S. military returned to the city to train pilots for World War II, and it remains today with Goodfellow AFB.
Large dam projects tamed the Concho rivers and created the city’s western reservoirs in the 1950s and 1960s. A regional medical center since the building of the first hospital in 1910, today’s San Angelo Community Medical Center and Shannon Medical Center have become first-class, full-service healthcare providers. |
