This Land Is His Land
(Page 2 of 3)
In Patterson’s view, this restriction, coupled with a complete lack of public access to the property, meant that the Christmas Mountains were deadweight. Once, the land had been used as a private hunting preserve for the owners of lots in Terlingua Ranch, but that lease lapsed long ago, and there has been no legal hunting since the GLO took title. The property contains some old mines and water wells, along with a silted-up masonry dam and tiny reservoir that were built in the forties and fifties. But the few dirt roads that still exist are dangerously degraded. There are no buildings. Eighteen miles of the nineteen-mile boundary border private land; the other mile abuts a remote part of Big Bend National Park, through which there are no trails. As Patterson reckoned it, his constitutional and fiduciary duty to use available real estate to raise money for Texas schoolkids dictated that he do something with this land. Like sell it.
And so, between 2004 and 2007, he offered the mountains to the National Park Service (NPS) and to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). Both turned him down. He then called for a sealed bid auction with either public or private interests, and that was when the trouble started. By doing so, he was defying two of the most powerful land conservation groups in America. Not only had the Conservation Fund disallowed development, it had expressly forbidden the GLO to sell the Christmas Mountains to anyone but the NPS or the TPWD without written consent. When the group protested, Patterson fanned the flames further by stating flatly that the Conservation Fund’s stipulation was “unenforceable.” It only infuriated his critics more to discover that he was right.
“Our position was that we had engaged private charitable dollars to complete the transaction and that the donor’s intent should not be violated under any circumstances,” says Larry Selzer, the president and chief executive officer of the Conservation Fund, based in Arlington, Virginia. With that came the not-so-veiled threat, delivered in a letter to Patterson from an officer of the Mellon Foundation, saying that if the sale went through, “the state of Texas [should] not look to the R. K. Mellon Foundation for any future help.”
By October 2007, nearly 6,300 people had signed a petition sponsored by Environment Texas opposing the sale. Harshly worded anti-Patterson editorials were appearing all over the state. But just as the pot was really beginning to boil, the NPS changed its mind. In a letter to the GLO, Big Bend National Park superintendent William Wellman said he would like to “reevaluate the feasibility of adding the Christmas Mountains to the park” and requested that Patterson delay the private sale.
Patterson’s response was blunt and seemed to change the ground rules yet again: “No hunting, no firearms, no deal.” He was referring to the NPS’s prohibition of hunting and firearms in its parks, which ran headlong into two of Patterson’s most passionate personal convictions. He believes that, at a time when hunting is becoming a rich man’s game, as much land as possible should be made available for hunting. The fact that, other than a few blue quail, there is virtually no game in the Christmas Mountains does not deter him from this view. “I was thinking about the future,” he says. “If we shut off hunting now, it’s forever.”
Patterson also believes strongly that, whether or not they use them to hunt, individuals have a constitutional right to carry guns in national parks. When the San Antonio Express-News asked Patterson if he complied with the NPS’s prohibition, he said, “I just ignore it. I mean, if I go to a national park, I am armed. I don’t care what they say.” (This fight is being waged at the national level as well: Fifty-one senators, including Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, have signed a letter asking the NPS and the Fish and Wildlife Service to “remove their prohibitions on law-abiding citizens from transporting and carrying firearms.”)
Not surprisingly, the “no hunting, no firearms, no deal” response sparked yet more screams of protest from around the state and the nation. In a matter of a few months, Patterson had managed to turn the disposition of a small piece of uninhabited land in West Texas into a moral crusade. The Houston Chronicle’s editorial page blasted his position in no uncertain terms: “Jerry Patterson is attempting to hold the mountains hostage to his belief that banning guns and hunting in national parks is unconstitutional.”
While all of this annoyed Patterson, it failed to sway him. He is simply immune to public pressure, especially when he believes he is right. He solicited, and got, two private bids on the property, one for $750,000 from Michael and Ramona Craddock, of Dallas, and one for $704,000 from John Poindexter, owner of the 30,000-acre Cibolo Creek Ranch resort in Big Bend country. Poindexter, of course, is no stranger to conflicts over private development of public lands. Though he has done what is generally considered to be an excellent job of land restoration at Cibolo Creek, he ran into a tornado of (mostly unwarranted) criticism when he tried to buy 46,000 acres from Big Bend Ranch State Park in 2006. Both his and the Craddocks’ plans envisioned restoring the land to its original form and allowing limited public access.
The plans seemed to confirm Patterson’s notion that private owners would be more likely to put money into the property than any public owner would. Still, the idea went forth in several editorials and op-ed pieces that Patterson was selling out to “deep-pocketed” bidders, developers, and “multimillionaires,” prompting prominent Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley to attack Patterson personally in the Big Bend Gazette in a piece of literary hyperventilation that read in part, “You don’t have to be a muckraker to smell the stench of Texas-style cronyism in Patterson’s bald land auction. It’s called a GLO cash grab.”
As long as he was making people mad, Patterson had another point to make. The draconian restrictions placed on the land by the Conservation Fund’s “gift deed” back in 1991 in fact made it impossible to develop the land in any way, ever. The most that could be done was to restore the few primitive dirt roads and three water wells. This provision was seen as so strict that back in 2004, the NPS had cited it as a reason not to buy the Christmas Mountains. Its letter to the GLO explained that “it was determined that there was no need to acquire this property because the restrictions placed on the property by the Conservation Fund when the land was gifted to the State of Texas would provide enough protection to the property and to the view shed of the park.”
Three years later, Patterson was making the same point. He argued that the severe restrictions on the property in the form of conservation easements meant that it didn’t matter whether the buyer was public or private. He insisted that the Christmas Mountains were “a park neither in law nor in fact. There can be limited access but they were never meant to be a public park and never will be a public park.” Private owners, he said, would be even better than public owners, because they were likely to be better stewards of the land. Still, at a November meeting of the School Land Board, which oversees the Permanent School Fund, Patterson relented and voted with the two other board members, Todd Barth and David Herrmann, to delay the private sale. The NPS was given ninety days to come up with a plan. Environmental groups, conservationists, and public lands advocates across the country were in full cry by then, unified in their support for selling the mountains to the NPS. No one, as far as I know, had publicly uttered a single word of support for Patterson.
Thus it was that I arrived in Big Bend in January with the embattled, though completely unbowed, land commissioner. An hour after touching down we were climbing a dirt road in a caravan of ATVs with two land office employees and the publisher of the Big Bend Gazette.
The first thing you notice when you get on the property is how steep it is. The place is vertical in the extreme, and on a prodigious scale. This does not come through in any of the published photos of the mountains, nor does their 5,700-foot elevation convey how big they seem when you are inside them looking up. As we bounced and bumped upward on the jagged road for five or six miles, rocky peaks and saddles loomed 1,000 feet above us; drop-offs into deeply cut canyons were frighteningly precipitous. Near the peak of the highest mountain, we stood at the razor’s edge of a sheer 2,500-foot cliff—twenty seconds of free fall to the ground below. I took in one of the most spectacular views I have ever seen in the American West, a 360-degree volcanic panorama that embraces the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park; the immense bulk of the Sierra del Carmen, in Mexico, that rises in blue mist to the south; and the receding peaks of the Solitario and other ranges to the west in Big Bend Ranch State Park.
Atop the jutting peaks, other truths are readily apparent. The land is, as Patterson has been insisting, completely inaccessible to the public, across both private lands and national parkland. The Christmas Mountains are not a park in any sense of the word, and—Patterson is right about this too—they are not public in any normal sense of the word. The land is “trust” land, held in portfolio by the PSF just like most of the 700,000 surface acres that it owns (the majority of the PSF’s holdings are submerged acres or mineral rights). Because of the perpetual conservation easements, little could ever be done to turn it into anything other than a patch of remote backcountry that would be used only by the hardiest of backpackers. The following day we hiked in through the nearest road access point in Big Bend National Park. This took us four hours. There were no trails. The point where the national park meets the Christmas Mountains is also without trails of any kind.
“It can’t be parkland because of the conservation easements,” Patterson told me, trying to explain his position. “It can be land that people have some limited access to. So far it hasn’t. Our two objectives in selling the thing were to find the best stewardship for this land and to provide the best access. It ain’t gonna be a picnic area. Poindexter and Craddock all have resources to do things like restore water, which is really important if you want wildlife. Now, if they have money and the time and the inclination to provide a better level of access than can be done through some other opportunity, then why are we so concerned with whose name is on the title?”
