Dead Man's Pass is a narrow canyon on a remote and perilous section of the road from San Antonio to El Paso and on to California that travelers used after the Gold Rush of the 1840s. The journey took several weeks, and this area became notorious for wild animal attacks and raids by Native Americans and highwaymen. Also called Dead Man's Run, it had been named by 1849, when an ambush on Dr. Lyon's wagon train left two teamsters and an unknown number of Indians dead. In 1850, another group met a similar fate after turning back from Beaver Lake and passing through here on the way to San Antonio for supplies, with four teamsters killed in the encounter. The U.S. Army tried to protect travelers on this hazardous road, but when Forts Clark and Inge proved too remote, it established Camp Hudson on the Devils River ten miles north of here in 1857. Even so, dangerous conditions continued for many years. In A Texas Pioneer, freighter August Santleben enumerated several dozen civilians and soldiers killed along the trail, including five members of the Amlung family and seven others who died here in one day in 1858. The pass was still considered dangerous as late as the early 1880s. Santleben chronicled several deaths in the area over a forty-year period, totaling nearly four hundred in southwest Texas. Nearby Dead Man's Creek and Dead Man's Canyon also preserve the memory of the dangers of nineteenth-century travel. This path later became a stage route to Ozona and then State Highway 163, and it is remembered as a treacherous frontier road.