Excerpt from Big Bend People after the passing of Cowboy Connie Chris Calvin

      By Carlton Leatherwood

Chris Calvin at his non-alcoholic saloon

The Cowhead Ranch has always butted a hardscrabble environment, and the drought this year brought no exception.

As hay costs skyrocketed, the animal population at the unusual guest ranch (25 miles north of Terlingua on Highway 118) was peeled away. "I gave away three horses," Chris Calvin, the ranch owner, said. "I just couldn't afford to feed them."

He posted a sign at Cottonwood General Store asking for a new home for some goats and pigs, too. "It was not long before they were all gone," he said. "Everybody got a good home."

He kept two horses and some good laying hens. He usually gets about 10 dozen eggs every week and sells those to the Cottonwood on Sunday mornings.

The ranch was started seven years ago on a piece of land as plain as a nearby greasewood hill. Cowboy Chris, as he is sometimes called, didn't have a plan, and he only worked with a pick ax and a couple of other hand tools. He built one building at a time.

"I tore down old barns," he said. "I tore down the old Baptist church in Terlingua. People would call and offer a little shed to tear down. These buildings are made out of whatever I could drag up."

Over the years, he has erected enough sleeping units for 20 people, the Nine Point Social Club, where people gather for breakfast around a wood stove, and a saloon, which doesn't serve alcohol, among other buildings. "The church came from right on the other side of neighbor Charles Jenkins," he said. "I put some 20-foot posts under it and pulled it here with a tractor."

If a building isn't square, not exactly right, guests just like it more, he said.

Calvin was raised on a dairy farm in Northeast Texas and had one of his own. He became a champion cattle auctioneer.After 15 years, he rambled a bit, ending up at the Alamo movie set near Brackettville, where he played guitar and staged shootouts in the streets. Then he and a fellow named Doug Davis got in his pickup with $150 between them and headed for Terlingua.

After wrangling for Linda Walker's Big Bend Stables for five years, the dream of a guest ranch was born.

"This is where the Lord dropped me, right here," he said. "He said, this is where you belong. I had a chance to be something totally different."

“People love it, and I love this old country,” he said. “I don't charge very much. I get a lot of young couples with three or four kids, and I know they are strapped. If they have any money, good. If they don't have any money, I tell them to enjoy the Big Bend.”

He has had guests from Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, among many other places. They leave their signatures on the walls of the Social Club. "I've built up a pretty good clientele," he said. "Quite a few motorcyclists stop by now" to enjoy such things as the cowboy shower tub.

Some mornings he sits out at the saloon with a cup of coffee, ready to enjoy his creation himself, looks around and thinks, how did I build all this by myself?

And he misses auctioneering some. He can still belt it out and does for benefits, raising money with such items as pies and homemade quilts in Terlingua.