Forgotten Places
Where something of the original Texas still survives.
“In the beginning,” writes Texan historian T. R. Fehrenbach, “in the beginning, before any people, was the land: an immense region 265,000 square miles in area rising out of the warm muck of the green Gulf of Mexico, running for countless leagues of rich coastal prairies, forests, and savannahs; reaching out hugely 770 miles from boundary to boundary south to north and east to west, to enclose a series of magnificent, rising limestone plateaus, ending in the thin, hot air of blue-shadowed mountains.”
Newcomers we are, intruders on a wilderness with purposes of our own: varied purposes that have until quite lately not included the determination to preserve some islands of wildness among the workshops we have constructed to hammer out our dreams. Unique among the states, Texas chose and was permitted to keep its public lands upon admission to the union; 170 million acres were thus withheld from federal supervision and distributed indiscriminately for the balance of the century. Much of the modern history of Texas is the story of the fortunes that were built and broken through speculation in those lands. Less has been said about the consequences of their loss.
One consequence is that Texas is dismayingly poor in public recreational land and wilderness preserves. Federal lands in other states, especially in the West, have done much to fill the need for open space demanded by crowded city dwellers as outlets for their growing leisure. Except for two important but remote national parks in far West Texas, Padre Island National Seashore, and a few national forests in the East, the state is devoid of federal land that can now be used for this purpose. Most Texans must choose between private lands and scrawny state parks, and for all but a handful who have access to some property of their own, there is actually no choice at all. The need for wilderness and recreational land has become acute, even if it could not have been foreseen by the nineteenth-century politicians to whom the Texas earth surface seemed an inexhaustible resource.
Many significant natural sites still in private hands have never been adequately studied and classified; scientifically speaking, they remain unexplored territory. At the instigation of former State Senator Don Kennard—a canoeist, raconteur, and lover of the wilderness—the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin set about last year to rectify this situation. Establishing the Natural Areas Survey Project with Kennard himself as director, the School assembled a team of botanists, zoologists, geologists, and anthropolgists to examine four sites that ranged, quite literally, from the warm muck of the Gulf to several of the tallest blue-shadowed mountains in the state: Matagorda Island on the coast northeast of Corpus Christi, the Davis Mountains of West Texas, Victorio Canyon near Van Horn, and Capote Falls—a place so isolated that the nearest city (the remote settlement of Presidio) is nearly two hours’ drive away. Another team will consider five more sites this summer.
The four sites included in the first project are among the most memorable works of nature in the state. Each has long ago been disturbed to the point where it can no longer be called wilderness, but none has yet been blighted beyond recovery. They are wild places still.
In wildness, we are told, is the preservation of the world. To visit them is to know that is so.
VICTORIO
One cold dawn in January 1881, Texas Rangers attacked a small Apache camp in the Sierra Diablo twenty miles northwest of Van Horn. The Rangers saw the camp as merely the most recent base for Indian raids by followers of the Mescalero military genius Victorio, whose depredations in the region had reached their greatest intensity in late summer and fall of the previous year. History records it instead as the site of the last Indian battle in Texas—a trivial episode in itself, but marking the fateful moment when the white man took unchallenged dominion over the Lone Star State’s contested western lands.
The Indian survivors fled southward with their wounded, pursued by a party of Rangers. Today the quiet arroyo conjures images of Rangers, washed and rested, waiting impatiently for their fellow officers to return, wandering away from the corpse-strewn field across the desolate Diablo Plain to a slight, rocky rise, there to stand in numbed astonishment at the spectacular scene suddenly spread out below: a canyon 2000 feet deep and five miles long. The majestic power of Victorio Canyon is heightened by the improbability that such a natural drama could be played out silently, without warning, in the midst of featureless desert that gives no hint of what lies beyond. The impact of seeing Victorio for the first time comes from realizing that one has failed to take a true measure of the land. There is an unsettling awareness that eyes can grow lazy with flatlands’ predictable dimensions and monotonous probabilities, leaving one unprepared for canyons sliced through multicolored rock and successions of windworked statuary looming on steep walls like faceless apostles around some weathered Royal Portal. If the Rangers did not see it, it is their loss: the land is worthy of the moment.
Though in area relatively small, Victorio Canyon and Peak are stunning examples of Basin and Range physiography. The rugged Sierra Diablo typifies the limestone bank reefs that ring the Delaware Basin. Its prominent kin is the towering El Capitan Reef in Guadalupe Mountains National Park to the north. The mysterious narrow side canyons resulted from uplift, intense fracturing, and desert erosion. Eastward beyond the canyon mouth a bleached Salt Basin shimmers through turbulent air. An ever-present wind intensifies the immense solitude and grandeur.
Botanically the area contains climax grama and tobosagrasses with isolated stands of pinyon pine, juniper, and small-leaf oak. Eleven rare and endangered species of plants have been identified in the vicinity, and a shaded fork of Little Victorio Canyon narrows above 5000 feet to a moist, fertile oasis where ferns, oaks, fragrant ash, barberry, and bigtooth maples survive. Found throughout the Sierra Diablo are the native spines of giant yucca, agave, ocotillo, and cactus.
The lower canyon’s fauna is typical of the Chihuahuan Desert. Wildlife, after all, is unimpressed by scenery, and neither the vegetation nor the terrain differs sufficiently from surrounding areas for a unique habitat to have developed. Areas above the rim, however, constitute a transitional zone with some of the characteristics of the Guadalupe Mountains. The Sierra Diablo and Victorio Canyon have been insufficiently studied by biologists, but apparently the region has been an important route for the exchange of wildlife migrating north and south between the Navahonian Biotic Province and the Chihuahuan Biotic Province.
The most unusual features of the canyon’s wildlife are the bighorn sheep, recently restored to a corner of the state that witnessed their “last stand” two decades ago. As late as 1939 zoologists estimated that 300 bighorns survived in the Sierra Diablo and nearby mountains. By 1956 the estimate had fallen to five. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which last year released bighorns into the Sierra Diablo Wildlife Management Area of southern Victorio Canyon, hopes eventually to reestablish them throughout the mountains.
Inhospitable climate and physical inaccessibility have rendered the Sierra Diablo an area of few archaeological sites. Spanish rule left no mark on Victorio. Traces of prehistoric man persist as burned rock middens and lithic debris scattered along small stream terraces above the canyon floor, but the absence of dependable water supplies evidently thwarted human habitation in the area for many centuries. A short distance from the rim, perhaps a half-mile from the precise spot where local legend says the Rangers surprised the last embattled Apaches, the homestead of J. V. McAdoo stands. Built in 1917 by the first white man ever to own the surrounding land, the two-room dwelling served until 1945 as the home for a family of six. Often they cooked and slept outside. The widowed matriarch now lives in a modern ranch house several miles away. Her vivid recollections are a sobering reminder that the white man’s presence in the Sierra Diablo has been so brief that its beginnings were witnessed by those still living.
The self-centered arrogance so characteristic of settled, civilized man is impossible at Victorio. He who lives in London or Cairo, Shanghai or Boston—even the man who lives in Houston, Fort Worth, or Alpine—can scarcely imagine the land without himself or his kind upon it, even though he knows intuitively that it once was empty of his people and will surely be empty again. Victorio permits no such illusions. Man’s presence—any man’s—is revealed for the superficial thing it is. Those who live in the Sierra Diablo reminisce with stories of men who vanished without a trace, sensing uneasily that those stories are symbolic of their own tenuous existence here.
Nothing lasts in this ruthless country. The well-tended McAdoo cemetery stands beside the crumbling homestead, but the hollyhocks are clipped and carried from the ranch house beyond the hills, and the sound of human voices is not heard. Braced against treacherous winds at the lip of the empty canyon, one knows that everything men have fashioned for this land will sooner or later be an archaeological site, a spot marked “ruins” on a map—and probably sooner. Men do not “develop” the Sierra Diablo: they cling to it.
A student of the past has observed that Texas history is a story of racial and cultural conflict. The blood shed at Victorio is a poignant reminder of his insight. But the empty horizon, the weathered homestead, and the dry canyon filled with silences give ironic witness that the land outlasts the men who occupy it.
CAPOTE FALLS
Capote Falls, the highest waterfall in Texas, drops 150 feet from the volcanic rim of the Sierra Vieja 70 miles northwest of Presidio near the Rio Grande. Although its waters disappear into the desert sands before they reach the banks of that famous river, they form a brief dramatic oasis in the barren countryside.
The falls derive their name from a sloping capelike travertine deposit that backs the lower cascade. For countless years mineral-saturated spring water has plunged over the falls to evaporate in the intense summer heat and form this unusual geologic feature.
Sheer box canyon walls rise on three sides, appended with the brown, pot-bellied nests of hundreds of cliff swallows. Rich banks of maidenhair fern and columbine line the lower reaches, moistened by seeping springs and blowing mist. Sunlight rarely penetrates to these sheltered walls where deep shadows and the awesome vertical scale evoke the mystery of cathedrals.
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