(MUSIC)

BARBARA KLEIN: Today people can visit the ruins of one of the Butterfield stagecoach stops, now located in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. To reach the park, visitors drive through the Guadalupe Pass, more than one thousand five hundred meters high.

In his description of that first trip west, Waterman Ormsby explained why the station was called "the Pinery."

READER: " ... on account of the number of pine trees that grow in the gorge of the mountain in which it is situated. As we approached the mountain, the hills and gulleys bore the appearance of having been created by some vast, fierce torrent rushing around the base of the peak, and tearing its way through the loose earth. ... [I]t seems as if nature had saved all her ruggedness to pile it up in this colossal form of the Guadalupe Peak …

"The great peak towers as if ready at any moment to fall, while huge boulders hang as if ready, with the weight of a rain drop, to be loosened from their fastenings and descend with lumbering swiftness to the bottom, carrying destruction in their paths.”

BARBARA KLEIN: The Pinery Station was a series of three connected buildings. The walls were made of local limestone and bricks of sun-dried mud called adobe. The roofs were also mud. A wagon repair shop and blacksmith barn stood nearby.

The Butterfield mail coaches used the buildings until August of eighteen fifty-nine. Then a new road replaced the one through Guadalupe Pass. It was better protected from Indian attacks because it passed by two Army forts. But the buildings at Guadalupe continued to be used by soldiers and others who passed that way.