From July 1880 when it belatedly participated in Grierson's Victorio Campaign, the Livermore Expedition was in, out, and around West Texas.  It was still exploring in the area some forty months later.

The object of this extensive expedition was ostensibly to explore possible railroad routes and to determine locations for new military installations in the Trans-Pecos.  This is somewhat surprising as the route for the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad had been fully established and surveyed in 1878-1879 by the railroad company.  Presumably the Texas and Pacific Railroad's survey was also well ahead of the track layers and both routes thoroughly established long before Livermore appeared on the scene.  The idea of further army posts in the area was equally superfluous as the Victorio Campaign at the beginning of the Livermore Expedition's long sojourn west of the Pecos effectively eliminated the Indian menace in the area.

William Roscoe Livermore (1843-1919), an 1861 West Point graduate serving with the Corps of Engineers, was accompanied by a full company of the Eighth Cavalry and literally a swarm of young lieutenants, including Charles Grierson for part of the time.  The party also boasted a gatling gun among its equipment.  Official references to the Livermore Expedition are almost totally nonexistent.  The only notice of its progress through West Texas appears in the social references. The Army & Navy Journal of November 17, 1883 referred to the expedition as one glorious picnic.  However, Livermore did make a few detailed maps of already well known portions of West Texas.  An undocumented source claims that the captain had a large six hundred pound collapsible telescope hauled to the top of Mount Livermore, the highest peak in the area and the second highest in Texas, which Livermore named for himself.   He claimed that with this powerful instrument he could count the buttons on the clothes of persons walking the streets of El Paso.  This was truly a remarkable feat as El Paso is not visible from the top of Mount Livermore.  The captain also claimed that the peak was nearly ten thousand feet high.  A later survey in 1894 deemed Livermore's estimate excessive and finally in 1901, Robert T. Hill with the United States Geological Survey, headquartered in Fort Davis two years after his much publicized trip through the canyons of the Rio Grande, established 8,382 feet as the height of Mount Livermore.

Lucy Miller Jacobson and Mildred Bloys Nored, Jeff Davis County, Texas, The History of Jeff Davis County (The Fort Davis Historical Society, 1993), pp. 118-119.

BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM ROSCOE LIVERMORE

Livermore, William Roscoe, army officer (Jan. 11, 1843-Sept. 26, 1919). Born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was graduated from West Point in 1865, appointed a first lieutenant of engineers, and was promoted through grades to colonel by 1904.  Most of his professional life was devoted to fortification work, but in 1879 he led a surveying party through the Big Bend country of Texas, charting a route followed shortly by the Southern Pacific Railroad from the vicinity of Fort Davis to Fort Clark (Brackettville).  A Congressional appropriation had been made ostensibly to "establish sites for a series of military posts to defend the frontier lands from any possible plundering raids from Mexico or from the Indian reservations, and to protect the scanty population from outlaws," but the survey of course was really intended to benefit the Southern Pacific.  Livermore's expedition included an 8th Cavalry detachment and some of Bullis's Seminole Scouts; the places where they camped, 20 or 30 miles apart, became stations along the Southern Pacific when the railroad exploited the route.  In the summer of 1880 Livermore's scouts performed duty against Victorio briefly.  Mount Livermore in the Davis Mountains, 8,382 feet, next to Guadalupe Peak the highest point in Texas, was named for the officer who used it as a point of observations and placed a base monument atop it.  Livermore was for a time chief engineer of the military Department of Texas.  In 1868 he and Sir Charles Bright had laid the first American cable from the U.S. to Havana, Cuba.  With Colonel A.H. Russell he invented several magazine and automatic rifles, including the method of loading by clip, patented in 1880.  Livermore retired in 1907, but was recalled in 1917 on special duty with the Chief of Engineers.  His home was at Washington, D. C.

Dan L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography (University of Nebraska Press, 1988), Vol. II, p. 863.