07/24/2026
Good morning from Wild Rose Pass looking west towards Star Mountain.
The pass received its English name in March 1849 from Lt. William H. C. Whiting of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Whiting and Lt. William F. Smith led a reconnaissance expedition that left San Antonio in February 1849 to survey a practical wagon road westward following earlier efforts by Texas Rangers under John Coffee Hays in 1848.
On March 19–20, 1849, the party ascended a canyon and found a fine pass with a clear stream, trees, mountain valleys, and abundant wild roses—the only ones Whiting had seen in Texas. He wrote: “Wild roses, the only ones I had seen in Texas, here grew luxuriantly. I named the defile ‘Wild Rose pass’ and the brook the ‘Limpia.’”
The roses are generally identified as a native species (often linked to Rosa woodsii or historically called the Demaree rose), growing at springs and seeps. The party camped nearby at a site later called Painted Comanche Camp (marked by Indigenous rock art/paintings), near where Fort Davis would later be established.
