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The Last Resort
When Steve Smith bought the remote Big Bend town of Lajitas in 2000, he dreamed of building a lush, five-star retreat that would attract the likes of Tiger Woods and Tom Cruise. Instead, he paid dearly to learn an age-old lesson: The desert always wins.
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Of all the wrongheaded moves made at the new Lajitas, it was the sanitization of the trading post that broke the most hearts. Bill Ivey owns the Ghost Town at Terlingua now, but he ran the trading post through the eighties. When I met him for a quick lunch in Alpine in October, his memories of the old store grew the conversation to two hours. “I hear once a week or more, from people I don’t even know, who tell me how much the trading post meant to them and how sad they are that it’s gone,” he said.
Ivey can speak to that loss with singular authority. His dad, Rex, a Brewster County commissioner, owned Lajitas for nearly thirty years before selling it to Mischer in 1977. In Rex’s time Lajitas consisted of the trading post and an old cavalry post that was used as a hunting lodge, and Rex met Mischer when he came out for deer and dove hunts. But it also served as a gathering place for the area’s whites, Mexicans, and Indians, none of whom batted an eye at the town’s other prominent, permanent resident, an old man who refused to wear anything more than his underwear, in which he would daily pan for gold in the Rio Grande.
Bill grew up in that Lajitas, in the late fifties and sixties, attending school in Alpine but spending his weekends, holidays, and summers down by the river. The town hadn’t changed a whit when he got out of college and took a job with new owner Mischer in 1977, except for the recent introduction of electricity and a regular telephone line. It looked much the same when Ivey took over the trading post in 1980.
The border then seemed about forty miles wide and mixed like the sounds in a Doug Sahm song, half-Mexican, half-white, with nobody too worried about which half was which. The trading post was that community’s heart, the hub for little villages on both sides of the river. Built in 1912, it was just a beaten-up, dirt-floor adobe, with a front porch constructed of railroad ties and rails drug from Terlingua’s languishing quicksilver mines, and shade provided from a willow-leaf awning held in place by goat-pen wire. The store itself was stacked deep with every conceivable necessity, from bulk beans and flour to appliances, auto parts, clothes, and ranch supplies. Ivey would even get customers’ prescriptions filled on his weekly runs to Alpine.
“I was doctor, vet, lawyer, marriage counselor, pharmacist, and an importer of wax. I even ran the rafting business out my back door,” Ivey said. “I only had two rules: no fighting and no spitting, at least not in the store. And everyone carried guns back then, but they knew to check them with me at the door or I’d lose my beer license.” Ivey shakes his head as he realizes that this wasn’t that long ago. “I’d hold out a brown paper sack that they’d put their guns in, and I’d put their groceries in that sack and hand it back to them when they were leaving.” The trading post was also the only chance for gas in the area, and it wasn’t unusual to see a pilot like Tinsley taxi his plane down the highway to the pumps to refuel. Checks were cashed and loans were made, and Ivey accepted payment in dollars, pesos, or by barter. You could get a six-pack of beer or a spark plug for a live chicken.
And he did sell plenty of beer, the most of any business in Brewster County, he estimates. Every day at five o’clock sharp, when the whistle blew at Lajitas, the porch at the trading post became the spot for Big Bend happy hour. Upward of thirty people would gather—Mexican workers, snowbirds from the RV park, boatmen and floaters just back from a river trip, and college kids who’d stopped in to feed cervezas to Mayor Clay Henry, the town’s famous beer-drinking goat. Folks lolled in the shade, shot pool on a felt-free pool table on the porch, rolled dice in the corner, and fed quarters into a jukebox that Ivey stocked with Vicente Fernández 45’s that he bought on regular trips to Juárez. He also hosted monthly dances and impromptu barbecues, when conjunto bands, crossing back into Mexico after performing stateside quinceañeras, would stop in and play for free beer. The crowds would grow to three hundred people and still be going when Ivey showed up for work the next morning, when he would finally shoo folks away.
According to Ivey, Mischer encouraged all this. It was part of the borderland experience, and everyone got along fine. Before they were priced out of the RV park, snowbirds were staying for three- and four-month stretches to play $10-a-day golf, and they got to know all the resort’s workers. And Mischer wanted the place to be fun. He even had employees “ambush” chartered busloads of seniors headed to his hotel, stopping their caravans on the highway and stealing their valuables. The contraband would be returned at a reception when they arrived.
So life went in Lajitas, through the end of Ivey’s tenure in 1993, right up until Mischer sold out to Smith. But there was no place for a Mexican jukebox in the new Lajitas. In the summer of 2003, Smith opened a remodeled trading post complete with air-conditioning, indoor baños, and a wine-and-coffee bar. The gas pumps were gone, as were the willow leaves and goat-pen wire. And the people. When I visited it in August and October, the trading post was dead.
“Every facet of life in that trading post was filled with spirit,” Ivey said. “When I go down there now, all I see are a few workers, but they’re not allowed to talk to anybody. It’s sad.
“The Big Bend is not the kind of place you want to drive through and look out your window at,” Ivey continued. “It’s not the Grand Canyon, where you park your car, walk to the edge, take a picture, and then say, ‘Okay, let’s go to California now.’ Big Bend tourists want an active part in what’s going on. They want to hike, raft, and go get a beer on the porch in Terlingua. When I bought the Ghost Town, I wanted to make it a place you needed to go to if you were in Big Bend. But it’s not the reason anyone’s coming out here, and that’s why I’m proud of it. I did nothing more than let it happen, and a real community is there now.
“The people in Lajitas now know nothing about the place or its past at all. That’s a huge mistake. They should be selling its history and its culture. Otherwise you’re just buying dirt.”
At some point in 2006 Smith decided to stop pouring his own fortune into Lajitas. Locals speculated that he was struggling financially, and the monthly Big Bend Gazette reported that Lajitas was not the only Smith-related enterprise to recently declare bankruptcy. He was also involved in a dispute with the IRS over $140 million in tax shelters. Others wondered if Smith’s bean counters had prevailed upon him to fund his dream with other people’s money. In any event, last summer Lajitas borrowed $12.5 million from a financial house in Connecticut. Then, this summer, after resort revenues failed to live up to the terms of the loan, the lender posted the property for foreclosure, and Lajitas filed for Chapter 11 protection. A bankruptcy judge in San Antonio opened a three-month window for Lajitas to acquire new financing, but Smith, who by all accounts was still in love with the area, was unable to pull it off. In mid-October, Lajitas was back up for sale.
The latest auction of Lajitas was marked by considerably less drama than the last one. No stranger rode into town with his checkbook in his teeth to run up the bidding and take the place over. Instead, a San Antonio law firm opened one of its large conference rooms to groups representing six would-be buyers, the interested and the curious. The auction itself was off-limits to the press, as lawyers for Lajitas worried that the presence of reporters would chill the bidding. But there was insight to be gleaned in the law firm’s lobby. John Poindexter, the owner of Big Bend’s Cibolo Creek Ranch resort, was among the last to arrive and the last to leave. Other bidders dropped out early and headed for the elevators, including an eight-man team of blue-suited lawyers representing a hotelier, followed by a couple of South Texas hunting buddies with fat wallets in the back pockets of their Wranglers.
The high bid at day’s end was $13.5 million, but the bidder, who wished to remain anonymous, hadn’t offered enough money to pay all the creditors, and no deal was reached. At press time two weeks later, the various parties were still trying to hammer out an agreement, and the door was open for someone else to swoop in and snatch it up. Rumors from the summer started to resurface. A major hotel chain. Smith and a group of hastily scraped-together investors. Some other rich guy desiring a private playground. Asian money.
Down in South County, where the economy desperately needs Lajitas to remain open, locals hoped that whoever bought the resort would scale back the dream, place it somewhere between the best plans of Mischer’s and Smith’s. The vision on the porch was of rooms priced at $150 a night and an RV park that is open to snowbirds, that will tolerate the occasional rattletrap trailer. With the border now closed, the trading post will never return to its Ivey-era glory. That party is over. But the place could be friendlier to residents on this side of the river.
Still, in a larger sense the buyer and his intentions don’t really matter. The ultimate fate of Lajitas won’t be decided by any new owner. That determination will be made by the desert.
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