HORSEHEAD CROSSING When Ben Franklin said, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” surely he was talking about the horses in West Texas. The Pecos River flows through there and the water can be quite alkaline during the drier times of year when horses are most thirsty. Sometimes the water is so bitter that the horses won’t drink it and they perish from their thirst while the river gurgles merrily along to the gulf. In 1849 a fellow named Randolph Barnes Marcy was mapping the area for the army and he noted that there was a safe crossing there due to a gravel bottom in the river bed. He also noticed that there were the remains of several dead horses in the area. It became known as Horsehead Crossing in
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