Carrizo Creek Station

Carrizo Creek Station was a former stagecoach station of the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line and Butterfield Overland Mail now located in Imperial County, California just east of the San Diego County line, it lies within the boundaries of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park just west of the Carrizo Impact Area. Its site is located along the bank of Carrizo Creek.

Carrizo, the site of the Carrizo Stage Station, lies on the Southern Emigrant Trail where Carrizo Creek flowed at the surface most of the year and often provided the first flowing water to travelers on that route after they had left the Colorado River. Earlier Carrizo, had been a watering place for the local Native Americans, Spanish explorers, Mexican traders, American fur trappers and soldiers.

The 1855 Railroad Survey expedition camped at Carrizo in June and its report described the place:

At Carrizo Creek the mail company used the adobe constructed by the military in June, 1855, as a station building. It was described by a correspondent as, an old adobe house with the thatch roof burned off, occupied by William Mailland in the fall of 1857.

The station at Carrizo Creek became an important link in the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line. It functioned as one of seven major stations west of the Rio Grande River. Passengers at Carrizo Creek disembarked here to change coaches leaving the east-bound stage from San Diego and boarded another that ran between Carrizo and Fort Yuma. The coach remained at the station until the other returned with west-bound passengers that had boarded in Yuma. Watering stations were established at an average of 30 mile intervals

That first Carrizo station keeper, William Mailland, in a drunken fit brutally killed his Native American wife, in May 1858. Fearing revenge by the local natives and arrest by authorities after he sobered up, he was said to have fled into the desert and was believed to have died, while an acquaintance claimed he had been seen east of the Colorado River, fleeing to Sonora.

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