Box Canyon in Doña Ana County, southern New Mexico, was originally known as Picacho Pass and figured in overland travel through the Southwest on the Butterfield Overland Mail route. On the line’s first westbound stage, Waterman L. Ormsby called it “Pecatch Pass,” apparently misrendering the older name derived from nearby Picacho Mountain; the village of Picacho and its stage station near the canyon’s mouth shared that origin. Ormsby described the pass as about two miles long with steep, difficult grades, though not the worst on the route. In the nineteenth century, such passes were important chiefly for linking settlements and mail lines across hard country.