Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  Leelee couldn’t say much about Moore or why T.A. and Bettie had left Frio County. She went there as a child many times. They’d be driving to San Antonio and her daddy would take a right-hand turn at Hondo, and then she knew they were going down to Moore to see family. “There are lots of Wilsons down there,” she said. “They had the look. Big and tall.” During the Depression various Wilsons and Crains (Bettie Wilson was a Crain) came to the ranch at Juno to work. “Daddy was a great one for hiring relatives. Wylie Crain lived over in the little house over there. Jesse Crain was working at the Juno ranch. Later Daddy hired Warner, and he drove the big trucks to haul the wool to town. Daddy always said he was the best truck driver he ever had, because when something breaks, Warner doesn’t try to fix it!

  “The young man that I just adored, I guess I was just in junior high, was named Dick Edwards, from down around Moore. He had graduated from high school, was a football player, and he was a big husky fella. And he wanted to come out and work. Granny’s father died, I don’t know when, and her mother remarried an Edwards. So this young man was in some way related. And he was good help. He’d been here several years, three or four, everybody liked him. He was a hard worker, and he died out here. They said he had a bad heart or something.

  “On Sundays, there at Baker’s Crossing, after you pass the big house on the road, two story, on up a little ways, are lots of these big ole live oaks, and there’s a little house set back there. And at one time the Altizers had that place leased. And on Sunday, all the surrounding ranch people would go down there and everybody would take something for lunch and afterward they’d have roping. The Altizers were big ropers. Sometimes Mother would take a pie or a cake, we’d stop there and visit. Of course all the men were down in the pens watching the roping. And all the men from here would go down for the Sunday roping. We had a whole bunch who always went.

  “I always wanted to go swimming. And Mother always said I couldn’t go unless someone went with me. She didn’t swim, so she wasn’t crazy about going with me, but I could always find Warner. He’d be around. He’d go. We’d walk down there, and he’d say, ‘All right, Anale, don’t drown, because I’m going to take my boots off before I come in after you.’ And I could swim. That was his favorite story. ‘If you’re going to drown, take it slow, I’m going to take my boots off.’ Oh, he was a character.

  “We’d come out for the weekend, because Daddy would stay out most of the time. If he had a bank meeting or a wool house meeting or something like that, he was always in town for that. He preferred the ranch.”

  Earl’s father was the same way. T.A. hated going to town and would do anything to avoid it. Earl would tell him that he needed to go to town for some reason, and T.A. would put it off and put it off until finally he would load up his wagon and set off. Today, with paved highways maintained by the state, the drive from Juno through Comstock to Del Rio takes just over an hour. In the early years of the last century, the trip might take all day. T.A. would take his time. He’d get just out of sight of the house, and then he’d stop and make camp. The rest of the family would see his fire off in the distance. That’s how I imagine him, along the bank of the Devils River, leaning up against a mesquite tree, perhaps burning an old dried sotol bush, shadows flickering on limestone. For more than ten thousand years people have been sitting by fires in that landscape.

  Leelee says that she never once saw T.A. lying down, not until he was laid out dead. His allergies and asthma were so bad that he couldn’t breathe unless he was standing or sitting. So he slept in a chair, in front of a fire, covered in blankets. T.A. came by his condition honestly. His father, Perry, like so many westering emigrants, had come to Texas in 1854 searching not only for his fortune but for a healthy climate, a place where he might be able to breathe freely.

  —

  Six months later I was back, again with my sons in tow. It was a summer of floods, one year before a summer of fire. Heavy rains generated by Hurricane Alex had drenched the vast watershed of the Rio Grande and the Río Conchos in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, causing the desert to bloom and filling Amistad Reservoir, just west of Del Rio, beyond capacity. Dam officials, fearful of testing the resilience of their fifty-year-old structure, were forced to open all fifteen floodgates; the resulting floods ravaged the communities downriver, tearing up hundred-year-old oak trees and upending homes and businesses all the way to Brownsville, four hundred miles downriver, where the Rio Grande pours its liquid cargo of silt and sewage, tires and nitrogen runoff, into the tepid waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The surviving trees as well as the eternal brush and river cane would for years display countless fluttering plastic bags as a testament to the high-water mark in places like Eagle Pass and Laredo and Roma, where on a bluff far above the river, a short distance from mysterious crumbling circular ruins bounded by barbed wire, you can visit the World Birding Center to learn about Plain Chachalacas and White-Collared Seedeaters.

  View of the Rio Grande and Mexico from a bluff in Roma, Texas

  We flew into El Paso to see my mother, who for decades lived in that strange and historic community where the Rio Grande flows out of its rift valley, through the Paso del Norte between the Franklin Mountains and Mount Cristo Rey, and assumes its geopolitical role as an international boundary.

  Traveling east through the pass, my sons and I were sticking close to the river, visiting family and ancestral landmarks along the way. We soon left behind the blasted and grassless landscape surrounding El Paso and passed quickly through the checkpoint at Sierra Blanca, a town that for years was known as the prime destination for trainloads of New York sewage sludge that were spilled without ceremony upon the barren ground. I rolled down the windows to see if my boys could catch a whiff of their hometown. “There’s a little piece of you out there!” I yelled over the roar of the wind whipping through the cabin of our rented minivan.

  We were headed for a place that the Spanish used to call el despoblado, the land without people. I felt uneasy as we continued southeastward. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t say what it was. At first I told myself it was the checkpoint and the intrusive questioning of the Border Patrol, who rarely fail to ask a driver where he might be going. My father always makes a point of answering, “I didn’t say,” but I had no desire to subject my boys to a confrontation with la migra or to endure a prolonged search of our rented minivan, so I simply answered, “Big Bend.” Still, the ever-encroaching gaze of federal law enforcement, as obnoxious as it might be, was unable to account for my psychological agitation. Finally, I realized what was bothering me: the color of the grass. It was green. It was July in the Big Bend—July in West Texas—and the grass in the Chihuahuan Desert was green.

  No one could know that the next summer wildfires would sweep across that very landscape to threaten the towns of Marfa and Fort Davis, as well as our family’s ranch in Juno.

  We stopped briefly at the enigmatic and quietly brilliant art installation called Prada Marfa, a modest simulacrum of a big-city boutique, patronized by scorpions and flies and flanked by barbed-wire fences extending toward the horizon. It’s really closer to Valentine than to Marfa, but nobody in L.A. or Brooklyn has ever heard of Valentine, Texas. I decided to skip Donald Judd’s austere minimalist steel boxes, on display at the Chinati Foundation, in favor of maximal exposure to the Big Bend’s infinite basin-and-range vistas.

  The Marathon Basin opened before us, a large depression bounded by the Glass Mountains to the northwest and the Del Norte Mountains to the west, various ridges and escarpments rising off to the east. Poking out of twenty-five thousand feet of fossil-laden Paleozoic limestone and shale were hard sharp ridges, known as hogbacks, composed of a variety of chert called novaculite. In places this chert emerged as scalloped white outcroppings called flatirons. Geologists have matched these deposits with Arkansas novaculite, which I’ve read is traditionally used to make whetstones for sharpening knives; they believe the rocks are one and the same formation and that they and
the surrounding strata, containing matching fossils of the same age, are the roots of the Ouachita Mountains, a range of Himalaya-sized mountains long ago eroded into sand. Some geologists believe that the Ouachitas were part of the original Appalachian mountain system, bringing together, in this warped, folded, compressed, stretched, and deformed landscape, the bones of the Appalachians with the southeastern vestiges of the Rockies, far younger mountains formed in a completely different episode of mountain building. Thus east meets west at the Big Bend of the Rio Grande.

  Prada Marfa, near Valentine, Texas

  The Ouachita formation, moreover, traces a long arc from its namesake mountain remnants in Oklahoma and Arkansas down through Texas via Austin, San Antonio, and Del Rio, to the Marathon Basin, a path that limns, through much of its route across Texas, the Balcones Escarpment, which neatly divides the coastal plains of South and East Texas from the stepped plateaus and uplifts that gradually open into the Great Plains. The Balcones scarp corresponds to a wide fault zone, both geographically and culturally. Before the late nineteenth century, when the Plains Indians were finally pacified—that is, conquered and exiled to reservations in Oklahoma—west of the Balcones was the Comanche empire; east toward the gulf lay the Anglo settlements in thin bands along the rivers. And as I was eventually to discover, that fault zone also happened to trace, with uncanny accuracy, a partial map of my ancestors’ nineteenth-century peregrinations.

  Our destination was the great basin of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, which was part of a large ranch formerly owned by Homer Wilson, my great-granduncle, who tried and failed to make his fortune there as a rancher and quicksilver miner in the 1930s and 1940s. At the time, all I really knew about Homer was that he and his family had lived up there together in a Sears, Roebuck mail-order house. I knew there was a Homer Wilson ranch exhibit in the park, but I had never gotten around to visiting it, and I quickly discovered that I was unable to answer even the most basic questions from my children about Homer’s life. I assumed that Homer had been raised on our family’s ranch near Del Rio, but I didn’t even know that for certain. I could tell my children that their great-great-grandfather Earl was Homer’s brother, but I couldn’t tell them much about his life or how he and his family came to settle and build a ranch along the Devils River, not far from the Mexican border.

  From Tornillo Creek, we ascended some three thousand feet up Green Gulch, navigating the looping switchbacks of a road originally built by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1934, to Panther Pass and into the Chisos Basin, a very large depression eroded into the center of the Chisos Mountains, which achieve elevations up to seventy-eight hundred feet. We drove through a fog so thick we could hardly see the road or the cliffs just beyond it. Rooms had not been hard to come by at the Chisos Mountains Lodge, because the July heat tends to discourage park visitors, yet there we were, shivering in our thin jackets, sitting on the front porch of our cabin, listening to the strange catlike barks of little gray desert foxes. That night I finally read Beneath the Window, a memoir by Patricia Wilson Clothier, Homer’s daughter and my grandmother’s cousin, whom I could not remember meeting, though I must have known her when I was a child. Homer was a geologist who dreamed of mineral riches in the Big Bend; he sold his share of a sheep and goat ranch near Del Rio and in 1929 began buying land in and around the Chisos Mountains. He married the young widow of his best friend, a fellow geologist who died in an explosion at the Humble Oil Company in East Texas, and in 1930 carried his new bride, Bergine, a city girl who had never ridden a horse or shot a firearm, to live in glorious isolation in what was still the most inaccessible and remote corner of the Texas border country.

  Homer ranched about forty-four sections, about half of the old G4 Ranch, a large operation that got started in 1885 with a herd of six thousand cattle ranging across fifty-five thousand acres. Some were shipped by rail to the nearest train station in Marathon. About two thousand were driven overland, more than three hundred miles, from Uvalde through Del Rio, Langtry, Dryden, Sanderson, and Marathon. By the early 1890s the G4 was running some thirty thousand head. It’s hard to imagine the Big Bend country supporting that many cattle, and in fact it couldn’t. Herds of buffalo migrated through from time to time, and the Comanches drove their stolen horses and cattle from Mexico along their great war trail, but these were sporadic and seasonal passages. Sustained heavy grazing was something else. But the grasses were abundant on the virgin pasturage, so at first the cattle thrived. Most ranchers in those days let their livestock drift, because fences were uncommon. They worked the cattle when they had to, when branding or marking calves, and when it was time to drive them to market. Drought came in 1885, and by 1895, when the G4 stock was liquidated, only about half the herd could be located.

  The Window, Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park

  Patricia and her parents lived in a two-story wood-framed Sears, Roebuck mail-order house that was purchased by the ranch’s previous owner, Harris Smith, who hauled his residence some eighty miles to Oak Creek by wagon in pieces from the train station in Marathon. Oak Creek, in Patricia’s telling, was a lovely oasis of willows and oaks enlivened with the sound of running water and the bleating of Angora nanny goats, in the lower reaches of the Chisos Mountains below the Window, an eroded pour-off gap that drains the entire basin, which is three miles across and almost three thousand feet deep at the lip of the Window, its lowest point. During wet weather the waterfall can be thunderous as boulders, carried by Oak Creek at flood, roll and bounce through the opening, dropping seventy-five feet to a jumble of debris below. Casa Grande, capped with a monumental lava formation, stands framed between the Ward and the Pulliam intrusions, two massive igneous formations that compose the poles of the Window gap and enclose the basin to the north and west with their high walls.

  Homer raised sheep and goats on his ranch and prospected throughout the Big Bend. Both Ross Maxwell, the first superintendent of Big Bend National Park, and Patricia report that Homer once found a small gold nugget in the Chisos Mountains, but it turned out that the most promising mineral resource in the area was cinnabar, a red crystalline mineral containing mercury. Ferdinand von Roemer, a German scientist who traveled throughout Texas in the 1840s and published the first survey of Texas geology, once traded a rope with some Indians for a small bit of cinnabar. Commercial mercury mining in Terlingua and nearby Study Butte began in the 1880s, which just added to the strange character of the bizarre moonscape of that area. Homer was a partner in the Fresno mine, eleven miles north of Terlingua, that began production in 1940 and supplied mercury to the military during World War II.

  Nothing is harder on the land than mining and smelting. The scars seem to last forever, at least in human terms, but the landscape of the Big Bend continually reminds us that even high mountains are cast down in time and deep valleys and basins fill with the eroded debris.

  Mining was Homer’s passion, but he seems to have spent most of his time ranching, which was never easy in the Big Bend, or anywhere else for that matter. To reach market, cattle, sheep, and goats had to be driven almost a hundred miles to the nearest rail station, in Marathon. Ranchers like Homer spent their days, which were always too short, fighting predators and improving their property: putting up fences, building water tanks, blasting roads out of the rock with dynamite. Homer took advantage of low sheep and goat prices immediately after the crash of 1929 to stock his ranch, but prices didn’t improve for years. The 1930s were hard for ranchers all over, but they seem to have been especially hard for a sheep and goat man in the Big Bend.

  Patricia spent her first fourteen years in the Chisos Mountains. She tells stories of depredations by bandits and mountain lions and coyotes, the perils of flash floods and driving along poor mountain roads. She remembers the challenges of cooking, cleaning, and homeschooling while living many hours’ journey from the nearest paved road. She records the sorrows of Depression-era agricultural economics and the joys of visiting her friend Julia
Nail, who lived several miles away with her family on a neighboring ranch. The Depression dragged on; money was tight and the banks were tough on a rancher, demanding detailed accounts of every head of livestock and expense, but at least the Wilsons and their neighbors could grow fruits and vegetables and slaughter a goat or a steer for meat. Ranch work was difficult and dangerous; working horseback in rocky country could lead to death by dragging, when a man, unhorsed, cannot free his boot from his stirrup. Men fell into canyons and suffered broken bones. One man, Patricia remembers, lost an eye to a cow’s horn. Medical help was far away, and when Homer suffered his first heart attack, he was lucky his doctor, visiting for a hunting trip, was standing nearby. Homer never fully recovered.

  Meanwhile, the state was forcing ranchers to sell their land for the national park. Some resisted, but Homer knew the state would take the land one way or another. He did his best to secure a fair price. Patricia found him dead on the screened sleeping porch one morning in July 1943. A small bird, trapped on the porch, was flying back and forth trying to escape. She had gone out on the porch to set it free.