Beaver Lake was a small lake or beaver pond formerly found on the Devils River in what is now

Val Verde County, Texas Val Verde County is a county located on the southern Edwards Plateau in the U.S. state of Texas. The 2020 population is 47,586. Its county seat is Del Rio. In 1936, Val Verde County received Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 5625 to co ...

. It was located about 19 miles north of second crossing of Devil's River and 44 miles from Howard Springs.

History

Beaver Lake was first encountered upstream of the head of Devil's River by the 1849

U. S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

military expedition that established the San Antonio-El Paso Road. It was described by

Robert A. Eccleston Robert A. Eccleston (1830-1911) was a pioneer, California Gold Rush#Forty-niners, forty-niner, and diarist whose records offer crucial insights into the discovery of the Tucson Cutoff and Yosemite Valley.Robert Eccleston, Edited by George P. Ham ...

, one of a party of forty-niners traveling with the expedition. In Eccleston's diary of that trip he writes about the lake they camped near from July 23–26, 1849, as:

a pretty little lake. There was however no path down to the water & the bank was very steep. My brother and I went fishing in the lake... He caught two catfish... There is a beaver dam on the lake close to our camp. No beavers have yet been seen.

It was 213 miles from San Antonio on the road, according to the topographical engineers with the expedition.Robert Eccleston, Edited by George P. Hammond and Edward H. Howes, Overland to California on the Southwestern Trail, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1950, pp.74-75, note 1, p74 The Beaver Lake Ranch, located nearby to the north.

References

Bodies of water of Val Verde County, Texas San Antonio–El Paso Road San Antonio–San Diego Mail Line Lakes of Texas Stagecoach stops in the United States {{ValVerdeCountyTX-geo-stub