The Last Frontier
What Texas once was, Marfa still is.
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In Doc Whitman’s 22 years, the “little fellers,” as he called the illegals, had learned a lot. They could still walk 25 miles at night across the Marfa Plain from the Sierra Viejas north to Mount Livermore, avoiding rattlers and cactus. They still carried Clorox water bottles and plastic bags filled with sardines, flour tortillas, chiles serranos, and a few limes to quench their thirst. But huaraches had given way to Viet Nam jungle boots, and tennis shoes, and the stronger, long-haired young men outnumber their papas. They had learned to avoid making tracks on the smooth-raked dirt road paralleling the railroad track by wrapping their feet in burlap. Once a man had even attached horseshoes on his hands and feet and clomped across the path, up to a fence, and over into the pasture. Sometimes Doc wondered whether what he had done for so many years made any difference. It always seemed contradictory, tracking down people he knew wanted to work, while so many of his fellow citizens lived on welfare and food stamps. But he had done his job to the letter and considered himself lucky to have lived in Marfa his whole career.
When internal politics or politics between the green-uniformed Border Patrol and the blue-uniformed U.S. Customs got bad, Doc thought maybe Evans Means had the right idea. In this whole life, Doc had never met anyone like Evans, a loner, a mountainman, a tough old man of 85 who had lived by himself in his adobe and rock house below Sierra Vieja Pass, 35 hard miles from the highway, since 1913. There had been a wife, Louise, along the way, and time overseas in France during World War I, but Evans had always been a vaquero, a cowboy who wore a six-shooter and could handle ten mules and a wagon.
In 1901, when Evans was nine years old, he had come 500 miles with his family in a wagon train from Lampasas and settled at the old Double Wells Ranch, eleven miles west of Valentine. His mother had homesteaded the first of his sections in 1911, and Evans had staked out the rest two years later, 30191/2 acres all together at $1.50 an acre.
Evans had killed a man during his military service, not one from Germany but one from New Jersey. A big Italian doughboy who hated Mexicans thought he had found one and spent most of his off-time hours trying to pick a fight with the walnut-colored Means. Means recalled the scene as if it were yesterday while he stirred the two pots of apricots that had come off the trees his mother planted 66 years ago. They simmered in sugar and juice over the coals on his backyard grill. A cow and a few birds dug into the weeds and cans and bottles behind his house near the spring. After swishing the apricots about, he glanced toward his orchard where pomegranates, peaches, and figs were budding.
“I told him he was too damn big to hit with my fist and to cut it out. He said, ‘I been trying to get a fight out of you for three months. I’m gonna kick your ass and make you fight.’ I said, ‘You kick my ass and you’ll die.’ He came at me with a stick and I said, ‘What are you going to do with that stick?’
“He come at me and I never seen a feller jump as fast when my gun came out and went WRRRRRUP. It was kinda dark and I couldn’t see, but I hit him. That gun came out and went WRRRRRUP. That bullet hit him in the navel and carried him from here to my pickup. He lived about ten hours. Sumbitch still dead.”
Evans served two years in Leavenworth and was back by the end of 1920, working his place and getting free rides into town from rookie Border patrolmen who invariably thought Means was an illegal alien. He didn’t bother to let them know different until they got to Marfa so he could do his shopping: 100 pounds of sugar, 100 pounds of flour, 300 pounds of frijoles, salt, coffee, Bull Durham, bullets, and a fifth of Jim Beam. Usually Doc Whitman brought him back.
His kin had always thought him a scapegrace, half crazy for staying down in the country, sleeping in that dirty room, and never going to doctor, and they were all dead and he was 85 and planting pecan trees and thinking how he’d laugh when he hid behind his door and threw hot stuff, High Life or Clearlight they called it, on the next wetback who broke his lock. “The Lord says that man shall live by the sweat of his brow. If you get too damn smart to work and sit on your ass, you’ll die in six months.”
Evans worked in his orchard, watched a few cattle and horses, and kept on making horsehair ropes. From time to time he did missionary work, armed with his .44 pistol. He needed to take another load of New Testaments to the Mexicans on the river and down below Ojinaga. The Rio Grande River Ministry people were all right but they couldn’t reach these hombres like he could. And he’d better get doing the Lord’s work because He had been good to him. Evans often thought, if the Lord gave him another life, only two things would he do different: raise cattle instead of horses and do more missionary work. To hell with the rest.
From El Paso to Presidio, Evans Means is a legend, a man who, for whatever reason, has gone it alone. He is a bridge from young Lucas Brite, whose ambition was curtailed only by how hard he worked, to the present-day cowman, bound securely by paperwork, the Department of Agriculture, and inheritance taxes. Doc Whitman wasn’t the only man who daydreamed about the tough old man. Many men did, especially when thinking of all the ways in which they had trapped themselves into mild versions of slavery: jobs, class convention, families, materialism, affectations, pomposity, laziness.
Evans Means has tested society and will have nothing of it. Like Huck Finn, he was just a young man with little education and great confidence in omens and his own clairvoyance. He embodies the inescapable dilemma of all frontiers and emerging new towns. To what degree must one person live alone and free and to what extent must he submit to society? Is man a social being, responsible to others, or an independent individual, accountable only to his conscience? This democratic paradox was the central question of America’s last century, recorded in her literature from Natty Bumppo, to Huck Finn, to Emerson’s “Divine Individual,” to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to the anguish of Billy Budd. Evans Means, at least, has made his choice.
The country is changing hands. More than half of Presidio County’s acreage is now held by out-of-county residents: 750,000 acres, 30 per cent, bought by West Texas oilmen like Bobby French and Bill Blakemore or politicians like Wayne Connally, Forrest Harding, or Cletus (Cowboy) Davis. Even the governor’s brother, Andy Briscoe, has a place down near Jack Kingston’s hot springs.
Whether they are politicians, like John Connally, Lyndon Johnson, Dolph Briscoe
(the state’s largest landowner), or John Hill, or accountants, lawyers, or bankers, rich Texans still don’t feel they have done anything unless they own a ranch. Making money doesn’t matter as much, really. A ranch is the most powerful status object, more meaningful than a Highland Park mansion or a membership in the Houston Country Club.
There are ranches for sale, since many of the families of Presidio County are caught between the romantic view of their own past and the realistic facts of their present situation. Cattle ranching is feasible only if they have outside income. Some are financially strapped. Some are just tired. And they are selling. A fellow from League City and a rich gas man named James Dyer bought Bryant and Alice Harris’ Kelly Ranch, 30,000 acres, for $115 an acre. Bobby French, Odessa oilman, bought Lorraine Johnson’s old Dipper Ranch, 34,000 acres, in 1974 for $132.50 an acre. Bill Shurley bought Joe Tom Bishop’s Alamito Springs Ranch for his son-in-law Gene Nixon. Joe Tom moved west and bought a place in the salt flats near Van Horn. Some of the old families are holding on: the Brites, of course: the Mitchells, Crossens, Humphreys, Howards, Pools, the Espys, all of whose ranches were founded between 1881 and 1890. But a few more ranches seem to change hands each year.
Gary and Carolyn Rogers from Houston are the agents of change. Gary Rogers Ranch Brokerage handled the French, Bishop, Harris sales. The Rogers arrived in Marfa seven years ago to take on an ultimately unsuccessful effort to resurrect the Paisano Hotel. Gary then handled ranch properties for his Houston friend Julio La Guarta, and became more familiar with ranch property in his next venture, taking hunters out in old Houston Light and Power half-tracks to herds of pronghorn antelope and letting them blast away at the curious animals. One year Rogers ran 102 antelope hunters through Presidio County in the eight-day season. Since 1973, Rogers and his wife have sold ranches exclusively, $23 million worth. Rogers says the ranches are basically uneconomical and sell for only one reason: the buyers are “double-barreled rich and they just want that land.”
As it was in the beginning, so shall it always be in Presidio County: “A great place for men and dogs but hell on women and horses.” “If it doesn’t bite it’ll stick you with a thorn.” “It’s got to rain enough to bog down a house cat before I’m satisfied.” No amount of grousing or cussing will ever end the quest for land in this country. For there is little else. Preisdio County is not like East Texas where the small cotton and corn farms engender problems, not prestige. Or the Gulf Coast where land is something to force pipelines through. Or West Texas where the petroleum culture cheapens its ultimate worth. Only in South Texas with its rich bicultural ranching tradition does owning land mean the same as in the Trans-Pecos.
However furious the changing of ranch titles, the country will remain the same. It is too far, too isolated from mainstream Texas, too wild and rough to become urbanized. The land has a way of repelling the get-rich schemes of “Davis Mountains Resorts,” or the “Lost Frontier,” or the plans by the Gulf Coast Real Estate people to develop the 96 Ranch near Evans Means’ place. Of all three, only weather-cracked billboards remain.
In Presidio County, neither the auto nor pickup nor hordes of new residents will ever blur the distinction between farm and ranch and town as it has in other Texas regions such as the Rio Grande Valley. Here the town is less important than the farm or ranch. The county, not the city, remains the more important political unit. Marfa’s population will continue to drop. Unless new Border patrolmen are assigned to the Marfa sector, the 23 houses on the market will sell slowly, if ever.
Marfa High graduates will continue to leave for brighter lights and bigger cities. The franchise restaurants will stay away, venturing only as close as Alpine, 25 miles east. So will freeways and smog, new factories, people, high burglary rates, and rape crisis centers. For some, Presidio County will always be interminably dull and mediocre, almost lifeless. For others, topping the hill and seeing the lights of Marfa will be like coming into harbor after a storm. For Marfa and Presidio County and the people living there, the land is their blessing and their curse.
At the Big Bend Dance Club hoedown, Friday was now Saturday and Carl Robinson still had his coat on as he danced with his wife, Ellen, to Al Dean’s finale, “Cotton-eyed Joe.” As if he was clairvoyant like Evans Means, his worried look had disappeared. In a month he would have a new band director and two new trustees, and he would be working on schedule changes. He was thankful the Legislature had again defeated Land Commissioner Bob Armstrong’s project of buying the Diamond A Cattle Company’s Big Bend Ranch, the largest taxpayer in the county. Despite the politicians’ promises and assurances, where would he have come up with the $10,000 the Diamond A paid last year in revenue for the school? Not from new cities or new factories or a migration of residents from Buffalo, New York, seeking warmth. Like everything else, it would have to come from the land.
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