Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Chihuahuan Desert Symposium
October 27, 2004

“The Chinamen are the same as slaves.” The San Antonio journalist, Fred Locker, reported it as fact. “They are sometimes used severely, if they don’t work to suit the bosses.” 3000 Chinamen lived at track’s end as railroad construction moved eastward past Sanderson towards Del Rio in May of 1882.

Alone in the adjunct building of the Main Street Bookstore in Alpine, I had just opened “Judge Roy Bean’s Country,” by Jack Skiles, and the phrase was the first that my eyes fell upon. The employees of the store come across the street to restock, to aid a customer, and sometimes to just to check out if anybody is hanging out. Larry McMurtry’s famous bookstore in Archer City trusts their customers, too, to not leave without paying at the main store – a wonderful civilized style of mercantilism probably only possible in small towns.

Jack Skiles is a hero of mine. He manned the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center in Langtry for many years. I first saw his wonderful native plant garden at the Visitor Center in the early 1980s. It was a major inspiration for my personal involvement with the horticultural industry’s early exploration of drought-adapted plant material.

An hour after I bought the book, I met Raymond Skiles, Jack’s son. Raymond is a ranger in the Big Bend National Park. I shook his hand and told him how his dad inspired me, albeit unknowingly. The line for the barbecue for the Chihuahua Desert Research Institute’s 6th Symposium moved, and so did he. A myriad of conversations were bubbling all about me. I next ran into John Karges, one of the program co-chairs of the event.

I asked him what mounded yellow daisy the 40 pronghorn antelope were feeding on north of Alpine – I had seen them on the way to the Institute’s Arboretum on the way to the barbecue. John is on the board of the Institute, and is the Chihuahuan Desert resource biologist for the Texas Nature Conservancy. His personal library of southwestern biology is renown among his peers.

A fleeting smile crossed his face as he remembered his own sighting of the group. “That is the biggest group of pronghorn I have seen on that road, and I have driven it for more than a thousand times on my way to work in Fort Davis. All of them were in that patch of yellow, and some were prostrate on it. Usually there is only a herd of 15 somewhere in that pasture. What makes today so special for them to join up like that – was it because the plant is at peak bloom?”

After debating if there really was a direct relationship between the plant and the pronghorn, we each took a guess at what the plant might be – John said prairie zinnia, and I guessed a pectis. It is not easy to identify plants a hundred yards past a fence when traveling at 70 miles an hour. Dr. Cathy Hoyt, the director of the Institute, and the other program co-chair of the symposium overheard our discussion and offered a third possibility – “the spiny yellow aster.” We decided that because of the showiness of the blooms that John was probably correct.

Over 250 people were attending the symposium. Over 90 speakers filled the two days of the conference. Scientists and naturalist-interpreters involved with the Chihuahuan Desert from all over the United States and from northern Mexico discussed their projects and reported on their research. Before moving on in the barbecue line, I thanked John and Cathy for allowing me to present a paper – and that I was deeply appreciative of being included.

Late that night I reopened the Skiles book. It opened at that same page because an old bookmark was in the book. The phrase jumped out at me again. “The chinamen were the same as slaves.” I read a little further, and learned that thousands of men had worked on the construction of the railroad. That afternoon I had seen a presentation that showed some of the lasting ecological effects of the centuries-old trail in New Mexico known as the Camino Royal where it made the long waterless trek known as the Jornada del Muerto. Because of the presentation, I put down the book and contemplated the effect of the railroad construction on the local ecology

The symposium, to me, is a sign of our region’s maturity – hundreds of people gathered in Alpine that love the Chihuahuan Desert, devoting years to learning about its ecological history and ecological dynamics. People interact with their geographical landscape in at least three distinct ways. First, people observe the landscape as a matter of course during the average working day. We and our fellow citizens use the landscape in non-consumptive or consumptive ways. Some activities modify the landscape to varying degrees. Third, we communicate about the landscape, and the symposium was revealing new perspectives to me to consider.

What was the ecological result of the building of the railroad from El Paso to San Antonio in the 1880s? Construction camps were at two fronts, coming from both east and west, and the rails finally connected just west of the mouth of the Pecos. A total of 8000 men worked on the project with pick and shovel, and with horsepower furnished by quadrupeds, not internal combustion engines. Food was cooked with wood. Cattle and goats grazed in the area to feed the men as did replacement horses and mules that had to be readily available for the construction crews. The rugged country from Sanderson to Del Rio had never before had that many people or livestock. The local ecology got hammered – most of the woody plant material stripped away and the grasses grazed to the ground. Until the 1960’s much of the landscape was mostly grassland, but since then the area has become filled with juniper and other brush species.

The journalist of the 1880s, Fred Locker, “interpreted” the scenes of the railroad-building for his readers, trying to capture the “life is cheap” atmosphere of the camps, saloons and the dangerous work (dozens of men died in the year taken to complete the railroad.) The workers toiled from sunup to sundown and slept among cactus, cenizo, and catclaw on gravelly ground (in tents if they were lucky.) After I turned off the light to sleep, a quirky question played with my half-asleep mind.

What if Magoosh was present, overlooking the work from a hidden vantage point? The old Lipan shaman very well could have been there – he had lost his first wife in Colonel Mackenzie’s 1873 raid across the river. During the rest of his life he often traveled between the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico to the Musquiz area south of the Rio Grande where other Lipans still lived. Over a 40 year span he finally convinced almost all of the Lipans in Mexico to move to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. How would have he “interpreted” the scene?

Before the railroad was built, the area (on both sides of the Rio Grande) had been “Indian Country,” a stronghold of Lipan Apache, Mescalero Apache, and Kickapoo Indians who often raided the wagon trains of the Chihuahua and El Paso trails further to the north. It had taken Captain John Bullis and his Seminole-Negro Scouts most of the previous decade to trail and then defeat each raiding party at their hideouts (often in Mexico) before the raiding had stopped.

Not long before the building of the railroad, the old shaman had married a Mescalero woman, and their child Willie had been born 18 months before in a camp of Victorio’s. Not long after Willie’s birth, “El jefe de los jefes,” Colonel Terrazas, who owned most of northern Chihuahua and was the governor of the state, cornered and killed Victorio and 70 other Warm Springs Apaches. Magoosh and his wife had been showing off the baby to her relatives in New Mexico at the time. Before I fell asleep, I decided that Magoosh would have said, “Will Willie have to live like this? Why do so many people come from so far away to suffer so badly? Why is the work worth more than human life and dignity?”