Pecos County Texas map

The county sits where the Permian Basin meets the Trans-Pecos, and it belongs to both. Its northern half is oil country on the Delaware and Central Basin platform; its southern half runs into the desert mountains and creosote flats of the Basin and Range country. Seven counties touch it: Crane and Ward to the north, Crockett east, Terrell and Brewster south, Jeff Davis west and south, and Reeves northwest.

The shape is irregular — a wide block in the north with a long southern arm reaching down between Brewster and Jeff Davis — and the distances inside it are real: it is more than 90 miles from the northern line to the southern tip. Only Brewster County is bigger.

Measured from the middle of the county, Odessa lies 77 miles northeast, Midland 93 miles northeast, Alpine 63 miles southwest and Marfa 84 miles southwest. The county was created from Presidio County in 1871 and organized in 1875, taking its name from the Pecos River, which does not actually run through it — the river forms the boundary a short distance to the northwest, in Reeves and Ward counties.

Those are the only two incorporated places in nearly 4,800 square miles. Bakersfield, Coyanosa, Girvin, Imperial and Sheffield are unincorporated communities strung along the highways and the irrigated land north of Fort Stockton, most of them a few dozen people. Iraan takes its name from Ira and Ann Yates, the ranch couple whose land the Yates oil field was found under; the name is pronounced as two syllables, "Ira-Ann."

Comanche Springs was one of the largest spring systems in Texas, discharging enough water to irrigate thousands of acres and to make this the only reliable stop on the Comanche War Trail between the Pecos and the Rio Grande. The U.S. Army built Camp Stockton beside it in 1859 to guard the San Antonio–El Paso road; the post, rebuilt after the Civil War as Fort Stockton, is now a restored historic site of officers' quarters, barracks and a guardhouse near the middle of town. The Annie Riggs Memorial Museum, in a former hotel a few blocks away, holds the county's collection.

The springs stopped flowing in the 1950s and early 1960s when irrigation wells north of town drew the aquifer down below the outlet level. The resulting lawsuit between the town and the well owners is one of the landmark cases in Texas groundwater law, and the outcome — that a landowner may pump what lies beneath his own land — still shapes water rights across the state. A municipal swimming pool sits over the spring outlet and fills when the water table rises far enough, which it occasionally still does in wet years.

In 1926 a well on Ira Yates's ranch above the Pecos came in and opened the Yates field, one of the largest oil discoveries ever made in Texas. Individual wells in the field's early years produced at rates that forced the Railroad Commission into some of its first proration orders. The town of Iraan was laid out on the ranch to house the field's workers, and the field has been kept in production for a century by successive rounds of secondary and tertiary recovery. Iraan's other claim is the cartoonist V.T. Hamlin, who worked in the field there in the 1920s and drew on the local fossil country when he created the comic strip Alley Oop; a park and small museum in town mark it.

Across the county the pattern repeats at a smaller scale — oil and gas in the north, irrigated farming on the Belding and Coyanosa flats where the aquifer allows it, and cattle everywhere else. In the last decade a large share of the county's surface has gone to solar farms and wind turbines, drawn by the same flat, cheap, sun-heavy ground. The land rises steadily from the flats in the north to the Glass Mountains along the southern boundary, so the county spans desert basin and mountain country in a single tax roll.