Hallie and Farewell
Rancher, judge, teacher, and mother: When Hallie Stillwell died this summer in her hundredth year, Texas lost its last link to the Old West.
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Motherhood changed Hallie as much as the ranch did. Married life had seemed an adventure, a liberation from the constraints of her parents. But once she discovered she was pregnant in 1919, Hallie realized her days of independence were over. Her first child, christened Roy but known as Son, weighed twelve pounds and was born after 48 hours of labor, endured without anesthesia. His arrival transformed the atmosphere of the ranch house; the cowhands, who had been so distant to Hallie, melted around Son. Two more children followed, Dadie and a second son named Guy. The cowboys �nally warmed to Hallie.
Over the next twenty-plus years, Hallie tended to the children, worked alongside Roy, and watched the children work alongside him as well. The ranch was plagued by a series of hardships. Everyone fell sick during an epidemic of Spanish influenza; Roy got tuberculosis; Son left to ï¬ght in World War II; a dust storm that looked like a crawling blanket smothered the ranch; drought choked the land. Hallie took it upon herself to modernize the ranch—usually over Roy’s objections. One of the ï¬rst improvements she wanted to make was to install running water in the kitchen. Roy, stubborn in his old ways, refused to install the sink, saying it would just get clogged up. Finally one of their nephews did the work. When Hallie wanted to build a bathroom, Roy balked again; this time she did the work herself. Later on, when a man drove up in a pickup carrying a gleaming new gas-burning refrigerator that Hallie had ordered, Roy became apoplectic.
“How is everything, Roy? Had any rain?” the refrigerator salesman asked.
“Nope. It is hotter than blue blazes and dry as hell,” Roy shot back, “and you can take that thing right back to Alpine.”
Like any true cowboy, Roy considered appliances unnecessary and a sign of going soft. Hallie was a generation younger and more open to change. But she wasn’t soft. In 1948, just as Texas was sinking into the grip of its most prolonged drought on record, Roy set off for town for a load of hay. Hallie thought of going with him, but she was watching her granddaughter at the time. Instead, she asked him to mail some letters and to bring her two loaves of bread.
“I later heard that Roy made the trip into town safely, got his hay, ran my errands, and made a last stop at the general store,” wrote Hallie afterward. He also visited their house in town to look in on Dadie.
“I don’t think your mama and the boys realize how serious this drought is,” he said to her.
“Oh, yes, they do,” Dadie told him. “Mama just always tries to cheer you up. She realizes how bad it is. She knows we’re in for rough times.”
Roy’s truck overturned on the way home. When Hallie got to the scene of the accident, he was unconscious, but she thought he would be all right. It never occurred to her that Roy, who was so tough and had weathered so much, might be fatally hurt. But doctors discovered massive internal injuries, and he lasted only 24 hours more. In the aftermath of Roy’s death, the drought worsened, and Hallie managed to hang on to the ranch only by leaving it in the hands of her sons and taking on a series of other jobs.
The job that she held the longest, and that she seemed to ï¬nd most satisfying, was that of justice of the peace in Alpine. From 1962 to 1977, Hallie drove all over Brewster County, the largest county in Texas, performing marriages, serving as the coroner, and judging misdemeanor cases. That job, along with her Ranch News column, which she began writing for the Alpine Avalanche in 1955, made her a local celebrity. Finally, when it was clear that the cattle business was becoming less and less proï¬table, in 1969 Hallie opened a general store and an R.V. park on her property just six miles from the northern entrance to Big Bend National Park. “That was one of the smartest things she ever did,” says Dadie. In a sign of the changing times, the store and park soon generated more money than the rest of the ranch. To the campers who arrived every year, Hallie became something of a tourist attraction herself. In 1991 Dadie opened a museum called Hallie’s Hall of Fame, which features exhibits like the Colt .38 pistol Hallie carried in Presidio, photographs of Roy on a white horse named Red, and the crude bedroll they once shared.
Toward the end, visiting Hallie was a different experience. She stayed at the nursing home in Alpine after a stroke made it extremely difï¬cult for her family to take care of her. As we sat outside watching the hills rise beyond Alpine, I told Hallie that I was reading her book, but I got no response. I tried several other openings; all failed. Eventually Hallie closed her eyes and dropped her head. I began to think that visiting Hallie hadn’t been a good idea. She was old, and I should have left her in peace. But I had hoped that by meeting her in person, I might get a glimpse of the individual behind the folksy legend displayed in the Hall of Fame.
Just then a small, spry woman with short white hair and sporting Wrangler jeans, a Resistol hat, and a cane, stepped up. “Hallie? Good morning! Good morning! Hello, darling!” she yelled. “I’m Faye, Faye Yarbro. We’ve had a lot of good times together!” Yarbro, a funny, salt-of-the-earth retired schoolteacher, had known Hallie for years, but she believed that Hallie no longer recognized her. This did not faze her. She went on chattering at top volume, and Hallie soon brightened visibly. “I found a picture of you,” announced Yarbro. “It was taken when you came and talked to a group of retired teachers, and you told about being in Presidio. You had a pistol that you put in your teacher’s desk. Sometimes Pancho Villa would raid over on this side, and the soldiers would come and take you to that fort.”
The signiï¬cance of Yarbro’s words struck me later. I had gone to see Hallie hoping she could uncover some original truth hidden inside the myths of her life, and instead I found myself listening to somebody tell those stories back to her. I realized then that Hallie was almost gone—not just that she was losing her hold on life but also that we are losing the reality of what her life once meant. There is no stopping the accretion of myths about her; a community hungers for legends and heroes. She knew West Texas when it was young. She knew Roy when he was a cowboy, when he raced horses and roped cattle and they slept under the stars on a bedroll. It did not matter that she was really more representative of the New Texas than the old one. The store and the campground, strangely public enterprises to mix with the solitary occupation of ranching, are exactly the kind of accommodation that ranchers all over West Texas are having to make these days. One can only imagine what Roy would have said about it all.
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