[3] Its early appearance was described by Robert A. Eccleston, one of a party of forty-niners traveling with the U. S. Army expedition that established the San Antonio-El Paso Road in 1849.
In Eccleston's diary of that trip he writes about the spring where they camped on August 2–3, 1849: The water...where we took it from, it was impregnated with vegetable matters that it was hardly fit to drink.
[4]On July 8, 1857, Edward Fitzgerald Beale wrote: Howard's spring is a small hole containing, apparently, about a quarter of a barrel of water, but in reality inexhaustible.
[5]: 20–21 A favorite living place, native tribes fought bitterly to control these springs, killing many teamsters and settlers in the vicinity as late as 1872.
[5]: 20 Later local ranchers overgrazed the region, killing off the formerly abundant ground cover, increasing the force of runoff, which then washed gravel into the springs and filled them up, and changing the course of the stream bed.