In the morning I met up with my guide, Randy De La Fuente, and we climbed into a Jeep for our trip out to the Fresno mine. Our route took us over many miles of washed-out ranch roads, through several locked gates, into the back country of the state park. We wound our way up the great expanse of Fresno Canyon, bound by mesas and jagged hills topped with reddish outcroppings of rhyolite, a good sign of mercury, to what’s called Buena Suerte, a mining village that grew up in the 1940s around the Fresno mine.
Homer Wilson bought his ranch in the Chisos Mountains from Harris Smith, who then bought a ranch and raised his family in Fresno Canyon. Homer and Smith went into business together in the 1930s, after Smith noticed that the red outcroppings on his ranch had the same shiny character that he had seen in the Terlingua mining district. Homer was a mining engineer by training, and Smith had access to the land and plenty of water in Fresno Creek. The two partners pooled their capital and began acquiring more land and filing mining claims. By 1937 they had moved from prospecting and testing to actual mining. They were making a profit by 1940. Because the partners had access to good water, they first built an experimental flotation mill to process the ore; then, after a few years, they moved the mining camp closer to their primary mine shaft and built a rotary furnace, houses for workers, a school, and a store. For a few years, the village even had a post office. Everything was hauled in over that rugged country. Labor was cheap in those days.
Now I was standing in the ruins of the mining community that Smith and Homer fostered. The old store, constructed out of flaggy limestone, was still standing, with a roof and windows and two long stone tables topped with massive cottonwood planks within. The walls were plastered with local bentonite clay, Randy told me, and he should know, because he used to work in a bentonite mine nearby. Nowadays bentonite, used for cat litter, he told me, as well as for drilling mud and cement, seems to be the only real mining action in the area. Randy said the park had done some restoration work on the old store and that the stable in Lajitas brings people in on horseback to camp. There was a picturesque cedar corral for horses, or for mules, which were used to draw ore up out of the mines, though I suspect it was constructed more recently, perhaps for the horseback tourists.
Other buildings of the village were slowly crumbling, their metal roofs peeling back under the force of decades of high winds. Most of the workers’ quarters had been reduced to mere walls. They resembled something from ancient Greece or the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. In other structures, piles of slowly corroding roofing material provided good homes for rattlesnakes. Aside from crickets and a few scurrying lizards, the only visible inhabitants of Buena Suerte were creosote bushes and ocotillo.
At one point Randy pointed out a waxy candelilla plant, which has long been used in wax camps in the Big Bend and throughout northern Mexico. Wax production was big business. In 1923, a wax camp here in Fresno Canyon reportedly produced $100,000 worth of wax. Wax smuggling was a big business as well, because it was illegal to export wax from Mexico, though perfectly legal to bring it into the United States. One burro could carry up to $200 worth of wax, and sometimes trains of a hundred or more would come across the Rio Grande near Boquillas. Homer might have been in the wrong line of work.
About a mile from the village we came to the ruins of the processing facility, where the cinnabar ore was crushed into pebbles and then heated in the rotary furnace to separate the mercury from the rock waste. Collapsed ventilation stacks, mysterious tubes, ducts, and the old rotating kiln itself stood their ground against the encroachment of mesquite and huisache bushes. Old diesel generators, pumps, and other abandoned equipment littered the area. A bright yellow tractor rusted near an overturned Buick and the remains of a 1940s pickup.
Fresno mine, Buena Suerte, Texas
Homer died at his ranch in the Chisos Mountains in July 1943. Harris Smith abandoned the mining operations a year later. Seems he and Bergine Wilson didn’t get along. Other individuals and mining companies dabbled with the Fresno claim over the years, but prices were never again high enough to justify full-scale production. The primary use of the mercury had been for munitions, and in times of peace the market would collapse. Eventually, bomb technology changed, and the mercury wasn’t needed anymore. Buena Suerte was abandoned and so was Terlingua, remote and obsolete outposts of the military-industrial complex. Years later, Terlingua rose again from the ashes of a world-famous chili cook-off.
Towering over the abandoned village of Buena Suerte was a red-capped mesa, and behind that mountain was the Fresno mine. A long trench, once the cradle of a rail track, ran up to the shaft’s entrance, which had partially collapsed. Along the hill to the right of the main shaft other shafts were visible. They were covered by wire mesh, apparently to prevent errant hikers and history buffs from falling in. One elevator shaft remained, capped with a steel grate and a rotting timber structure. I peered into the darkness. I don’t know what I hoped to glimpse down there.
CHAPTER 3
THE TEXAS ROAD
No one in my immediate family could tell me very much about how or when or why our ancestors originally came to Texas, so I went in search of my great-great-great-grandfather Perry Wilson, father of T.A., grandfather of Homer and Earl, who came to Texas from Missouri with his young bride, Welmett, in 1854.
Perry was a wanderer, a restless cattleman and Indian fighter who followed the southern road to California more than once. For decades he and his brother Levi drifted their cattle along the western margins of Anglo Texas, first along the Red River in northwest Texas and later on the Devils River and points south and west. I became obsessed with this enigmatic ancestor. He left no letters or diaries that I ever found. Property records, passing references in oral histories, and a few entries in old archives were the only written traces of his passage through history. Yet he seemed in some indefinable way to hold the answers to my questions. In time, I logged thousands of miles as I tracked his movements along the western border and beyond.
My grandmother’s cousin Patricia, the one who had grown up in the Big Bend, was the family historian and genealogist. Everyone kept telling me that I needed to talk to Patricia about the Wilsons. Patricia lived in a suburb of Kansas City called Prairie Village.
I arrived in Missouri on a dreary late January day, dreaming vaguely of barbecue and the commerce of the prairies. If I wanted to understand Perry Wilson, and indeed early Texas in general, I needed to understand Missouri, because in the middle of the nineteenth century, this corner of Missouri was border country, the primary staging area for western migration.
All the trails—the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Butterfield Stage, the Texas Road—originated in western Missouri. Liberty, Independence, Smithville, Fort Leavenworth, Weston, Westport. I read Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, With the Border Ruffians by R. W. Williams, and Washington Irving’s Tour on the Prairies. I read Bernard DeVoto’s Year of Decision: 1846 and Annals of Platte County, Missouri, from Its Exploration down to June 1, 1897: With Genealogies of Its Noted Families, and Sketches of Its Pioneers and Distinguished People, by William McClung Paxton, who opened his learned volume with a discussion of what he called the “evidence of a pre-historic race” that had inhabited the neighborhood. Paxton did not seem to think these vanished people were Indians, because, he said, they made houses in the Egyptian style, with bricks. By the time President Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, and Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark passed through with their Corps of Discovery, the settlement of Missouri had been under way for half a century, financed largely by the fur trade. French influence was strong. Among such traders was the Chouteau family, who established the Missouri Fur Company and lent their names to nature trails and highway rest stops throughout Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
Missouri was a rough neighborhood, outlaw country, swarming with a wild mixture of every
conceivable American frontiersman and borderlander: trappers and fur traders and mountain men and pioneers, Indians and half-breeds wearing blankets, peddlers and prospectors, gamblers, whores, politicians, bankers, and land speculators. There were foreigners and journalists and other tourists, explorers, Mormons, boatmen, settlers, bushwhackers, claim jumpers, privateers and thieves and hunters, slaves and freemen and runaways.
The earliest American settlers, out of Kentucky and Tennessee, came the hard way, by wagon. The pioneers fashioned rude cabins from round logs, pointed with mud and floored with split logs called puncheons. Clapboards were a luxury. Once sawmills were built and lumber was available, log cabins were succeeded by proper houses, with chimneys of native stone and plank floors. Stoves eventually came up the river to warm the houses. Farmers avoided the prairie and set about clearing woods and forests, preferring to stay near the streams and minor tributaries, in the uplands. Land was cleared by felling smaller trees, which were cut for fence rails; larger trees were girdled. Once they rotted, they were rolled and burned, sometimes with rocks to make lime, sometimes with earth to make charcoal. Timber along the river was sold to the steamers, who would stop at a convenient riverside woodpile, load up with fuel, leave a note, and settle up later. Once corn and other grains were planted, quail and prairie fowl followed. Otters and minks, beavers and muskrats, lurked in the rushes along the rivers. Perch and catfish and buffalo fish, bass and campbellites, were found in great numbers; fishermen could stand by the falls and spear the fish with sharp sticks. The spawning of the fish was interrupted by the water mills, which settlers built so they might have flour, and whose wheels sometimes were jammed by the fish, but as years passed, the number of fish dropped off.
Rattlesnakes and blacksnakes plagued the homesteaders. One pioneer told a story of sleeping in a little mud-daubed cabin, the cracks covered inside with clapboards, that he had built in order to secure his preferment claim to the land. He made himself a bed with four poles and some trestles covered with hazel brush. In the middle of the night a noise behind the clapboards awakened him, and he lit his candle. Expecting to find rats, he pried back a board, and two entwined blacksnakes fell out, landing in his bed. He crushed their heads with a pole, grabbed an ax, and started peeling off other boards. His walls were infested with snakes.
Game was more common on the west bank of the Missouri. Bears were few, though wolves would cross the frozen river during the winter in large numbers to feast on rabbits. “They did little harm,” wrote a witness, “but their dismal howling made the night hideous. Though their presence was unknown to the sleeping family, the morning disclosed their tracks at their very door.” Deer declined as the number of settlers rose. Hunters would find bare spots in the prairie where the deer would lick for salt. They’d set up blinds on poles, twenty feet high, and lie in wait to assassinate their salt-craving prey.
Canoes, pirogues, bull boats, Mackinaws, and keelboats populated the rivers, all carrying their loads of peltries and supplies. Prior to the advent of the steamer, the river settlements along the Mississippi and up the Missouri were supplied largely by keelboat, attended at docks and levees by boatmen, who were known for their red shirts and blue jackets. They wore leather caps, woolen trousers, and stiff-backed high Suwarrow boots. The first steamboat to dock at the St. Louis levee, in 1817, was appropriately named the Zebulon M. Pike. The steamers began to make their way up the treacherous Missouri in 1819. One, the Jefferson, sank that first year. They were plagued by mechanical problems, sprang leaks, blew out pistons, ran aground on shoals and sandbars. They hit snags, which were trees caught on shoals, lying in wait, traps for the unwary steam captain with his tight pants, high boots, and ruffled shirt. Planters were what boatmen called trees standing on the bottom of the river. Worse were the sawyers, submerged trees that floated free, appearing and disappearing like phantoms.
By 1825 one or two steamers would reach Liberty landing every season, and in 1827 Colonel Henry Leavenworth and his Third Infantry landed there, having been charged with the task of establishing a permanent military cantonment near the mouth of the Little Platte River. Because there was no suitable place on the left bank of the Missouri, Leavenworth established the fort on the west side, in the Rattlesnake Hills. Thereafter the farmers of the neighboring counties profited by supplying the soldiers based in the cantonment of Leavenworth with beef, bacon, lard, firewood, and vegetables. A pioneer named Zadock Martin in 1828 was given authorization to settle at Platte Falls and maintain a ferry there and one across the Missouri. He came out of Kentucky with his stalwart sons and his Negro slaves and built a two-room log house on the eastern bluff above the Platte, where he and his handsome wife and three pretty daughters kept a saloon. No one lived within fifteen miles, but all who traveled west on the military road to Leavenworth and back were happy to have it there, a bright light along a dark road.
Martin was tall and brawny and well made to be a ferryman and tavern keeper. He wore a broad hat and carried a stout hickory walking stick and with his bright eyes and loud voice commanded respect from all men. He grew corn and maintained a sugar camp and cut his hay on the prairie. His cattle grazed the fertile bottomlands along the Missouri, and his hogs wandered the woods, feeding on abundant acorns, pecans, and hickory nuts. “His hog killing was done with dogs and guns,” Paxton tells us. “When pork was wanted, he shouldered his rifle, called his dogs, and went game-hunting.” Nine years after establishing his ferries, Martin built a large dam and a mill above the Platte Falls. The next year he acquired a pair of French millstones, which he shipped up the river. Martin used oxen to do his hauling and plowing. His cattle were primitive and fed on native grasses at night after their hauling and grinding; he possessed a buffalo steer that he took when it was a calf and raised with his herd; his hogs were called wind-splitters, and their fat, it was said, yielded oil instead of lard. Years later, when towns and counties were well established and municipal government had descended on that wild territory, the local worthies of Weston, then a thriving river port, decreed that a free ferry across the river be established. Martin lost a good business, and his lawsuit of protest went nowhere. Annals of Platte County fails to mention whose nephew or cousin was hired to maintain the new public utility.
Patricia and her husband, Grant, were kind and generous with their curious young cousin who came begging for family lore. Over the course of many decades, Patricia had pieced together an impressive genealogy of the Wilson line, which intertwines with other names such as Adamson, Routh, Covey, Williams, Nelson, and Crain. For years she published a genealogical newsletter, The Wilson/Adamson Links, in which she dutifully reported the discoveries she made in dusty basements of courthouses across the old border South. Grant did the same for the Clothier family, and like Patricia he published a family memoir, in his case about pioneer ancestors in Kansas. The Wilsons seem not to have left much in writing; they were practical people who farmed or raised livestock; at least one branch of the family were blacksmiths. Property records are the most prolific evidence of their passage through history.
In 1829 or 1830, William Wilson and his wife, Esther, came up the Missouri River from Tennessee and got off the boat in Bluffton, which was settled in 1816 by families from Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Or perhaps they traveled by wagon, like the earliest settlers of Ray and Clay Counties, who came in trains up the left bank of the Missouri, groups of families bound together by kinship and ambition, hauling their precious keepsakes and china, with barrels of salt and flour and meat on the hoof. The river would have been the faster road. Peddlers had long come down the wagon road or in keelboats, hauling their carts of dry goods; now on the steamers came heavy cargo in large quantities: bolts of cloth in calico, gingham, and cotton checks; tin cups, iron spoons, coffeepots, spools of thread and paper and pins; horn buttons, cakes of soap, ribbons, boxes of pepper, tablecloths, knives and forks and razors and sausage stuffers, along with neckerchiefs, hose, boots and shoes, wax dolls, oysters canned in milk,
bottles of pickles, kegs of whiskey, hammers and saws and firearms and Jew’s harps.
Following the trails of pioneers and settlers came wave after wave of entrepreneurs, artisans such as blacksmiths and cobblers and tailors as well as preachers, medicine men, and traveling photographers, not to mention gamblers, bankers, highwaymen, and whores. The Santa Fe Trail was outfitted first at Franklin, Missouri; then, as the river began to eat away at the banks, the trailhead moved across the river to Boonville, which saved a ferry ride. From a pathetic co-location of huts, Boonville grew into a thriving den of vice. The levee at Boonville became a clearinghouse as muddy clerks received the goods from the riverains and deckhands—enormous hogsheads of sugar orbited by bees and plundered by small boys wielding slender spoons whittled from thin reeds, which they inserted, like great featherless hummingbirds, through triangular openings meant to ventilate the great barrels.
Bridges over the Missouri River, Kansas City
Bluffton was the county seat for seven years, and the local citizenry built a fort on the bluff because they were expecting an Indian attack. The Missouri Indians had mostly died out by that time, ravaged with diseases caught from trappers, and the Kansa, who still inhabited the area when Lewis and Clark passed through, had departed as well. No doubt it was the Osage who worried them. Bluffton was eventually abandoned after the river altered its course, leaving in its trace an oxbow lake.
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