In the two years since the Tiguas first proposed the casino, however, the state has refused to sign the required compact, or treaty, that would allow the establishment of such a gaming facility on Texas soil. Gov. Ann Richards and Attorney Gen. Dan Morales contend that state law prohibiting casino gambling in Texas applies to the Tiguas as well as everybody else.
The Tiguas, on the other hand, claim their status as a sovereign Indian tribe entitles them to go into the gaming business as Indians in other states have.
“The gambling is our white buffalo,” says Mr. Silvas. “In the old days, the buffalo was the Indians’ housing, it was our clothing, it was our food, everything we needed. We need something to hold the future. We need something to take care of our children. The gaming money will bring education, housing, health, job placement to our people, whether they qualify under the blood quantum or not. Everything that our people need will be there for them.”
“It’s not for one person to get rich,” says Governor Torrez. “It’s not like Donald Trump, becoming rich for his pocket by gaming. The money generated by gaming is going to the pueblo, to give us everything that’s required for us to become better citizens. And the city of El Paso wants the gaming because we’re going to generate a lot of jobs.”
The fight between the Tiguas and the state is in the federal courts now. To Miguel Pedraza, the drawn-out battle is just another example of the state’s long indifference to the plight of his tribe.
“The state wanted to get out of the Indian business a long time ago,” he says. “The Sunset Commission shut down the Indian Commission. That was bad, because the Indian Commission was a mediator between the Indians and the state. It could negotiate a lot of problems that Indian people have, but now it’s costing the state a lot more to go to court and fight us.
“It’s like Hueco Tanks,” he says, referring to a huge jumble of boulders in the desert northeast of the reservation. Hollows in the rocks catch rainwater, and various tribes of Indians and their ancestors camped or lived there over the millennia. “We consider Hueco Tanks sacred ground,” he says. “We do a lot of our praying out there. We go there to give names to children. I’ve done it to my grandchildren. A lot of our grandfathers that we talk about and remember are associated with Hueco Tanks. There’s a place we call the Grandfathers’ Cave where we see names of our people who are here no more. It’s sacred ground to us. We have begged the state many times that Hueco Tanks should be in our hands. But Hueco Tanks has been made a state park. And since that happened, vandals have destroyed a lot of the pictographs there, and the state has allowed mountain climbers to climb the rocks. They have drilled holes in the rocks.
“When people go and desecrate something that’s part of you…it’s like digging up graves.”
After half an hour, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the war chief, and the other members of the council walk back from the construction site where the bones of their ancestor were uncovered.
“What happened?” their white visitor asks.
“No comment,” comes the reply.
“No comment.”
“No comment.”
“We have a lot to be angry about,” Governor Torrez finally says. “But so be it. It was our destiny to be placed here. This is where the Life Giver intended for us to be. And he’s a tough guy to go against.”
July 1994
No place is dearer to me than Fort Davis and the Davis Mountains, where I grew up in a hidden, isolated heaven during the 1940s and ’50s. I can’t imagine a better time and place in which to have been a child and an adolescent than then and there. Almost as dear to me are the Big Bend to the south, the Guadalupes to the north, and the desert flats that connect the mountain ranges. My favorite city is El Paso, the only city I saw when I was growing up, and the city where I began my manhood and my career.
It’s all changing now. Some of the changes are good, some downright evil. In the long run, I believe it’s a bad thing that the world has discovered my country.
Trouble Across the Pecos
One night David Finfrock was delivering his Texas weather report on Channel 5 in Dallas/Fort Worth and mentioned that some meteorological thing was happening “in the Trans-Pecos.” At the conclusion of his forecast, he returned to the anchor desk to exchange the usual TV happy talk with his colleagues.
“David,” said anchorman Mike Snyder. “What the heck is the Trans-Pecos, anyway?”
The somewhat bemused Mr. Finfrock replied that the Trans-Pecos is “the part of Texas that’s on the other side of the Pecos.”
It’s the fat arm that juts westward between the two Mexicos. It’s 31,478 square miles, slightly larger than South Carolina and shaped much like it, drooping southward into Chihuahua and Coahuila as South Carolina droops into Georgia and the Atlantic.
Some 673,000 people live there. Of those, 615,000 live in El Paso County, the smallest of the nine Trans-Pecos counties, at the western tip of the state. If El Paso were to secede from Texas and join New Mexico, as it sometimes threatens to do, there would be only 58,000 people in the region, and its largest city would be Pecos—about twelve thousand population.
The Trans-Pecos used to be a secret place. Its several magnificent mountain ranges are isolated in a kind of western Shangri-La, surrounded by desert flats, many of which are covered with greasewood, mesquite, and cactus. Its towns are small and far apart, connected by narrow two-lane roads.
The only major highway—Interstate 10—hugs the flat places wherever it can and bypasses the little towns. On much of it, the mountains are only pale shadows on the horizon, and driving it is a long and tedious ordeal. Those doing it usually are in a hurry to get from Dallas or San Antonio to El Paso or some point beyond, or from California to some place east. Not many drop off the interstate to follow the lonely two-lanes southward to the beautiful grasslands and oak and piñon groves of the Davis Mountains or the rugged ranges of the Big Bend, or northward to the looming Guadalupes.
The Trans-Pecos is a place where not much has changed over the years except nature’s cycle of rain and drought, the rising and falling of livestock prices, and the model years of the cars and trucks. The region is almost as empty and isolated today as it was more than a century ago, when the army and the Texas Rangers removed the last Indians and cattlemen moved their herds across the Pecos to settle the last Texas frontier.
Most who have lived there for the past century haven’t minded their isolation. Many have cherished it. They’re self-reliant people, independent, individualistic, conservative, distrustful of all government in which they aren’t personally involved. Fort Davis, the seat of Jeff Davis County, has never even bothered to incorporate and become a real town, because its people haven’t wanted a mayor and city council making rules for them.
Few outside the Trans-Pecos have known about it, or cared. Those who live there like it that way. The freedom they value most is the freedom to be left alone.
In a Texas rapidly becoming urban, the Trans-Pecos is one of the few remnants of what the state used to be, the last patch of almost pristine wilderness.
But the world has discovered the Trans-Pecos. Change is arriving, and with it, dread.
As the old ranch patriarchs and matriarchs have passed on, many of their holdings have been divided among heirs. Some have sold out to buyers from outside. Developers have bought parts of ranches and subdivided them into “ranchettes” of five or ten acres. They’ve cut roads into the canyons and up mountainsides and sold the land to retired people and fed-up urbanites as sites for small houses and mobile homes.
The City of El Paso has bought a twenty-five thousandacre ranch on the edge of the Davis Mountains, not to raise cattle, but to suck its water from under the earth someday and pipeline it to that always water-needful city. Neighboring ranchers fear the water under their land will be sucked into the pipeline, too, leaving them literally high and dry.
“If six hundred thousand people in El Paso need water, who are we to stand in thei
r way?” asks Bob Dillard, Jeff Davis County judge and editor of the county’s weekly newspaper, The Mountain Dispatch. “From a political standpoint, we’re nobody. We have no clout.”
An Oklahoma company has purchased a ranch in the Sierra Diablo of Hudspeth County, not to raise cattle, but to move in daily trainloads of human waste from New York City and spread it over the land.
“If they want to put sludge on their property, that’s all right with me,” says Topper Frank, who ranches eight miles from the site. “But nobody knows what it contains, or where it goes.”
About twelve miles from Topper Frank’s place, a nuclear waste storage site is in the planning stage. It will receive waste from Vermont and Maine. And cities and states all over the country are casting glances at the wide-open spaces for possible dumping grounds for their own urban poisons.
Near Van Horn, a consortium of utilities companies is about to erect 150 wind turbines—one hundred-foot-tall towers with huge propellers on them—to generate electricity. “There’s talk in Fort Davis, too,” Judge Dillard says, “of putting a wind farm on top of Star Mountain.”
The tall cliffs of Star Mountain are one of the spectacular sights along the road through Limpia Canyon, one of the most scenic highways in the state. “Can you imagine it with one hundred-foot-tall windmills on top?” Judge Dillard asks.
A group of businessmen in Pecos, on I-10, seventy-five miles north of Fort Davis, has proposed that an interstate be built through that same Limpia Canyon to Fort Davis and on southward through Marfa to Presidio and the Rio Grande. Its chances of approval are nil, but other highway construction already under way has people wondering.
“Suddenly the state is widening the highway between Fort Davis and Marfa,” says Judge Dillard. “Suddenly they’re widening all the bridges in Limpia Canyon. Suddenly they’re widening the road from Kent to Nunn Hill, one of the least-traveled roads in this country.”
Kent is a gas station-store on 1-10 at the northern end of the Davis Mountains. Nunn Hill is near the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin, in the highest, most pristine reaches of the range.
“Suddenly we’ve been noticed,” Judge Dillard says. “I can’t help thinking there’s some kind of movement to…I don’t know what. There are pressures that this part of the world has never seen before. They’re pressures that are going to be really stressful for the people of this area, from a lot of different directions. And they’re all land-use issues. What is going to happen to this place?”
The alarm that warned the rural Trans-Pecos that its way of life is threatened was an item in a newsletter from Congressman Ron Coleman to his constituents in 1989. The El Paso Democrat, who represented most of the Trans-Pecos then (he since has been redistricted out of some of it), announced that Congress, at his request, had authorized one hundred thousand dollars for a study of a portion of the Trans-Pecos to determine the feasibility of adding it to the National Park system.
“I received Coleman’s newsletter regularly,” Judge Dillard says, “but it usually was about Fort Bliss and the colonias at El Paso, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. When I saw the mention of the study, though, I called the congressman’s office and asked a few questions.”
He learned that the area under study included nearly all of Jeff Davis County and parts of Presidio, Brewster, Pecos, and Reeves counties. He published an article about it in The Alpine Avalanche, which he edited at the time.
Word of the study spread across the Trans-Pecos like a grass fire on a windy day. Angry citizens demanded and got a public hearing. About four hundred people—almost a quarter of the Jeff Davis County population—gathered at the parish hall of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Fort Davis. “The hall was packed,” Judge Dillard says. “People were standing outside, listening at the windows. The Park Service sent people from Santa Fe, Denver, and Washington to say, ‘We’re not as evil as you think we are.’ ”
Mr. Coleman didn’t attend, but sent an aide to read a statement. “Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” he read. “There is no proposal on the table, here or in Washington, to create a national park in the Fort Davis area. The team from the National Park Service is here only to survey the area’s resources. Nothing more. The reason I ordered a study instead of introducing legislation was to determine first the feelings of the greater Fort Davis mountain community about the idea. And I can tell you another thing, too: If the community does not want a park, there won’t be a park. It’s that simple.”
The locals weren’t bashful in making their feelings known. To put such a huge area under federal ownership, they said, would destroy the tax base of Jeff Davis County and harm the tax base of neighboring counties, all of which already are among the poorer counties in the state.
Furthermore, the federal government already owns two large national parks—the Guadalupe Mountains and the Big Bend—in the Trans-Pecos, and a national historic site right there in Fort Davis. And a quarter of the acreage in the Texas state park system also is in the Trans-Pecos.
Furthermore, the landowners weren’t about to give up their ranches to the feds.
“Our ancestors bought our property over one hundred years ago with their blood and their sweat and their tears,” said Andrea Allen, president of the Borracho Cattle Co. at Kent. “Our ancestors preserved very ably the land that we now live on, paving the way for what is now the fourth generation. We were taught to love the land and to love our freedom. We were also taught to hold on to the land and hold on to our freedom. That is our mandate, and that we shall surely do.”
“People were enraged,” Judge Dillard remembers. “Folks were screaming at the park people. But there were others who quietly said, ‘It’s the best thing that could happen to the area.’ A lot of people were saying, ‘The only way this country will ever be preserved and kept from going the way of those five-acre ranchettes is the federal government stepping in and taking control of it.’ But will anyone say that on the record? No.”
Mr. Coleman quickly killed the study and washed his hands of the park idea. But the national park scare had one important result: It led to the creation of the Davis Mountains Heritage Association, which, as its membership and sphere of influence grew, became the Davis Mountains Trans-Pecos Heritage Association. Now it’s metamorphosing again into the Trans-Texas Heritage Association.
Whatever its name, its message and mission have remained unchanged. “Preserving Land & Its Natural Resources,” its bumper stickers declare, “Through Private Ownership.”
“We thought they were talking about maybe one or two particular parcels within the Davis Mountains,” Topper Frank says. “You can imagine the look on everybody’s face when they drew a line around 4 million acres, virtually all of it privately owned. That was the beginning of the association. We went to work and got the funding cut and stopped the [national park] study. Then after that, the Endangered Species Act came into the picture, and since then it has been just one thing right after the other.”
Mr. Frank, of Van Horn, is current president of the Heritage Association. Ben Love, of Marathon, is a rancher and lawyer who helped organize the group and served as its first president. They’re sitting in the association’s office in Alpine, explaining the work that’s taking so much of their time.
“A lot of people think the association is just the big ranchers of West Texas, but we’re quite diversified,” Mr. Frank says. “We have teachers, lawyers, doctors. What’s at jeopardy here is not just large ranches in West Texas, but private property in general. We do represent a lot of people who own a lot of land. We represent over thirteen million acres in Texas—almost 10 percent of the state. But we have members as far away as Connecticut and California. The same thing that’s going on in West Texas is going on in New York, New Hampshire, Maine, places where there are not large land holdings. Private property is in jeopardy everywhere.”
And, Mr. Love adds, the big villain is the federal bureaucracy. “There are so many regulatory regimes at b
oth the federal and state levels. And most of them are in the name of some sort of environmental protection, either under the Clean Water Act, the Wetlands Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Endangered Species Act. The bureaucrats have found that they can exercise more land-use control under the guise of environmental quality protection than any other way.”
If government bureaucrats can keep writing regulations for the land, the association members say, they can restrict use of it so severely that its market value will plummet, and its only willing buyer then will be the government.
So the Heritage Association serves as a sort of Minuteman organization, to monitor the doings of government agencies and warn landowners of possible threats to their autonomy.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Mr. Love says. “The members of this association are probably the stoutest believers in a good-quality environment, and we’ve done a pretty good job of keeping it that way. We’re very careful about where we build roads. We don’t create eyesores. We don’t use herbicides and pesticides. We don’t pollute the water or the air. This is the reason the bureaucrats are interested in the Trans-Pecos—because we’ve kept it the most pristine part of Texas.”
Even though the federal government dropped the idea of another Trans-Pecos national park, the Heritage Association believes it has resorted to other means to try to gain control of as much of the area as it can. And its favorite weapon in its back-door attack is the Endangered Species Act.
“When it was passed in 1973, nobody thought twice about it,” Mr. Frank says. “Who’s in favor of killing off a species? The problem is the rules and regulations that followed. What the feds couldn’t get done through law, they accomplished through rules and regulations. And that’s where the real danger is. There’s no input from the public on rules and regulations. They start setting these things up, and then all of a sudden you find yourself included in it, and you find out you can’t erect a windmill or a tank or a barn on your own private property because it affects the migratory flight of something. You get sucked into it.”
Generations and Other True Stories Page 24