Journey to the Edge of Texas A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression Chapter 3 - Rough Riding

Journey to the Edge of Texas

A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression

Chapter 3 - Rough Riding 

By Carlton Leatherwood Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, Writing, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depressio

By Carlton LeatherwHOUrIt took men of courage and imagination to settle the rangeland of Texas, particularly the mountainous desert country farther west. Asa Jones was such a man. He chose to put a ranch on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, in the Big Bend region.

Faced with thirsty livestock, he ran pipes down the towering bluffs of the Lower canyons to the river. "When I put those 300 ewes on the place," he was quoted, "there was a coyote for every one of "em, and a bobcat trailing every coyote."

It's still an isolated, tough place to eke out a living. I was able to get a sense of Asa Jones's life from the back of a horse provided by Lynn Carter, operator of Chisos Remuda, the mountain stable in Big Bend National Park. He had me mount one of the unregistered quarter horses. He also had a few paints, all accustomed to the high altitude and rocks. "We pride ourselves in our horses for this type of operation," he said.

Craig Carter, circa 1985

The stable nestles in a mile-high basin in the Chisos Mountains, most of which was once ranchland. The ranchers first worked the Chisos foothills, but by the late 1920s cattle had overgrazed those grasslands. Shortly after the herds were moved onto the highlands, development of the park began. Forty thousand head of stock were ultimately displaced.

Carter and his crews conduct guided horse trips through the mountains the year round, and on a winter day his son Craig rode with me toward the South Rim, the scenic high point of the park. The trail is a wooded, fourteen-mile loop with a vantage of seeing 107-miles of the Rio Grande, including the yawning mouth of Santa Elena Canyon.

Craig and I talked about his relationship with C. M. "Buck" Newsome, a former U.S. Border Patrol officer who ran the Chisos Remuda after leaving his government job. Newsome had hired Craig's father, and he gave Craig his first pony when the kid was three.

An aspiring country and western singer at the time of the ride, Craig borrowed the title of a book by Newsome, Shod With Iron, for the name of a song he had written:

Shod with iron and ready to ride,

trying to turn the great Rio Grande tide ...

He rode a big red horse ...

He was hired to hold back a nation of poor

who were trying to reach out for a bit more

Now time has taken its toll, and the story's

beginning to unfold, the dust has settled

on the trails he rode, but the memories

and stories will never grow old.

"About the only time I was nervous singing a song was when I sang that one in front of Buck," Craig said. "He never said much about it. He didn't dislike it, or he would have told me."

Newsome's job with the Border Patrol was to apprehend, process, and send back the illegal aliens who cross the river border into Texas, at times like a tide in the Rio Grande. Said Craig, "You see, if I were one of them, I'd be coming across, too. Living over there you just can't get ahead."

We passed through the Laguna Meadows. This time it was a leisurely trip, but Craig and a park ranger had once traversed the three-and-a-half miles of rough terrain in forty minutes--to fight a fire in the meadows. Our horse crossed the charred area, much of which is still barren, but stands of luxuriant native grasses have returned in spots.

Craig has had other adventures in the park, such as the time park rangers chased a mountain lion after a boy was mauled. "I went up there to take them some food and water," he said. "They happened to tree the cat a little bit after I got there." After the lion was killed, Craig brought it out on his horse.

The two of us reached the South Rim about lunchtime. The view was breathtaking, a panorama stretching for unknowable miles to the south. In his book Newsome reports the distance estimate of Ventura Gamboa, a Mexican national who once worked for him: "I asked Ventura how far we were looking across the river into Mexico. He said, 'Senor, como ocho dias a caballa'" ('Sir, about eight days horseback').

After eating the chicken Craig had packed for lunch, we took the trail to Boot Springs, skirting ice-encrusted springwater creeks as we rode. In April and May this is a gathering spot for birders who want to see the Colima warblers, which migrate from their wintering grounds in Mexico to nest in the Chisos. The tiny warbler is but one of the more than 395 species of birds that have been sighted in the park; no other National Park Service area contains so many. At the Boot camp site, all we encountered were a few lively and fat Mexican bluejays.

Just as the Chisos are as far north as the warblers come, some of the flora and fauna here can be found nowhere else in the United States. And vice versa. This is the last outpost of the ponderosa pine (in Pine Canyon), Arizona cypress and Douglas fir (in Boot Canyon), and quaking aspens (on 7,835-foot-high Emory Peak).

As we returned to the stables, we caught a glimpse of a white-tailed deer--another oddity in the apparent middle of a desert. Deer roam in these mountains the way they did throughout the lowlands and highlands when a moister climate prevailed 10,000 years ago. When the lower elevations dried into desert country, the deer were marooned up here along with the pinyon pines, junipers, and oaks. That's why, in the fall, a horseback rider can catch a glimpse of a white-tailed deer romping through vivid splashes of red and yellow foliage.

The whole Carter family worked the Chisos Remuda. "As far as the labor situation, I should have had a house full of kids," the elder Carter said. He and his wife Cathey had two, Craig and Lynnene. Craig handled an outpost, the Lajitas Livery, for wagon rides and campfire cookouts. Lynnene lent a hand at headquarters. Mrs. Carter grew up in nearby Marathon and couldn't wait to return to this area after moving away as an adult.

"It's home, it grabs you," she said. "I love it. I really do. I got homesick for the mountains. You can turn around two or three times without bumping into anybody." She reflected a moment and added, "When it rains you freeze to death in July. If you're out in it and get wet, I guarantee your lips will be blue. It's that cool and nice."

Her advice for park visitors: "You've got to get out and do some riding and hiking and looking, and not just drive through, to really appreciate it and see it."

Riding out of Chisos Remuda wasn't adventurous enough for me, so I contacted Mimi Webb-Miller, a free-spirited U.S. citizen who ranched near San Carlos, Mexico. She deserted the big cities of Houston and Dallas for the love of a different way of life.

"We're running horseback trips and truck trips for those who would like to come over into Mexico," she said the first day I saw her. "It's in the frontier zone, so a visa isn't required. We have a ranch about eleven miles from Lajitas. We bring people out to the ranch and San Carlos, which is about seventeen miles in. The horseback trips are very diverse."

I fell for her pitch.

Mimi Webb-Miller, circa 1985

As we jostled inside the Bronco along the backcountry bumpy ranch road, Webb-Miller explained the nature of her trips. She hosted people at the ranch and satisfied their fancy, whether in a ride to an abandoned lead and silver mine or to an old frontier fort, called presidio. Then there was the view from 10,000-foot mountains.

"I originally came out to run a river," said the young blonde, who was on her way to becoming a legend in the Big Bend. "I'm an outdoor person. I fell in love with the country and came out for my first vacation as a single female alone--and ended up coming out about once a month to break the routine of Houston." She moved to Lajitas and worked in its development and at the Trading Post.

"I think it takes a tough person to live here," she said "Aesthetically, there's a beauty here like the beauty I dealt with when I dealt with art. Life is very simple. It's basically a matter or existing. but I never seem to have time to do all the stuff I want to do out here. I like to go fishing, and I still haven't been fishing. I enjoy ranch life tremendously. Even though I cook on a woodburning stove and make tortillas, I still enjoy working cattle and being out on the ranch itself."

Webb-Miller grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, majoring in art history. She moved to Houston and started guiding groups through museums and commercial galleries, transporting them in her own Checker cab.

That was another time and another place.The day I visited, Webb-Miller was rolling flour tortillas in the rustic kitchen of her Rancho El Milagro. Light filtered through a small orchard of quince, figs, and peaches into the unscreened windows. The place had no electricity. At night, she said, she burned kerosene lanterns, and thick block walls combined with the 5,000-foot altitude to keep the room cool. Nor did her home have running water inside. Instead, she and her friend Meno Proano had tapped a spring with pipe and a hose. The spring, and several others, fed a creek that tumbled down a narrow valley. I follwed it to a forty-foot waterfall that poured into a pool secluded by dense vegetation.

Back in the kitchen, Proano joined in the cooking after a day of planting oats for feed. He rolled out a goat membrane and filled it with sliced kidney and liver, onions, tomatoes, lime juice, and salt--a traditional Mexican dish called burronate. It then went into the Lily-Darling wood stove in the corner of the kitchen to cook for a later meal. For now we would munch on hot tortillas and feast on the rest of the goat. A cat purred underfoot as mariachi sang over a car radio in the background of our conversation.

The next morning we set out for the ruins of the old lead and silver mine. There were no easy trails here, sometimes no trails at all, and cacti slapped our chaps on the entire route across the desert. Oscar W. Williams, surveyor and Harvard lawyer, wrote a letter about a similar 1902 ride. He noted his horse was always slipping, sliding, and lurching on round pebblestones: "I never saw so many round pebbles, apparently waterworn, anywhere except in the beds of creeks and rivers. Yet here they lay in the high lands as well as the low--on the crests of mountains as well as in the hollows of valleys."

We trotted in the vicinity of the Comanche War Trail. Running across the Trans-Pecos region from the northeast to southwest, it split into two forks in the Big Bend. One fork crossed the Rio Grande near Lajitas and continued into Mexico through San Carlos. The other crossed between Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons. Throughout the mid-1800s, aided by late summer rains that filled water holes, the Comanches penetrated deep into Mexico by way of the Lajitas route, taking livestock, housewares, and captives along with them. Slowed by the pirated herd, they returned with their booty via the other fork, which was farther from soldiers at Presidio. The bones of cattle that died en route still litter a trail a mile wide.

Our ride entered San Carlos Canyon, where we splashed through a boulder-strewn creek, from which an aqueduct (following canyon curves) carries water to townspeople. Ranchers have also constructed small rock huts in the canyon to shade the offspring of their goats. We were more straightforward in finding respite from the grinding sun; we found a cool spot under some ferns that grew on an overhang.

After a lunch of steak and potatoes, we ascended to the rim of a side canyon--a precipice that tested the sure steps of our horses. High in the mountains we came to the ruins of a mining community that Webb-Miller believes once was populated by 5,000 people. The adobe and stone hulls of long-vacant buildings sprawl up the mountainsides. As late as the 1950s men labored here, removing, over time, a million tons of ore (primarily for lead) for American Smelting and Refining Co.

The mine did not exist when Williams, the early surveyor, rode to San Carlos. He had, however, previously discovered another lode native to the area, the storyteller Natividad Lujan. Lujan was born in San Carlos where he lived most of his life. A grudge forced him to move across the river to Texas. He would at times act as guide for Williams and tell of earlier days by the light of a burning sotol (a desert lily) where they camped. His grandfather had worn the uniform of a Spanish soldier and was sent to serve at the San Carlos presidio, an outpost against the Indians. "Here in San Carlos I was born and raised among wild Indians, many of whom lived temporarily in and about the presidio," Lujan said. "When a tribe was in danger from their enemies, they would ... make a treaty with our people of San Carlos, in which they would promise to be good to our people of the town and not to rob or kill any of them, no matter what they might do to other peoples; and we would for our part let them live among us.

"The people of Santa Rosalia used to talk hard about us, because some of these Indians while they lived with us went in a war-party to that place, and killed and robbed many of them. But, Senor, we could not stop them when they started out on the warpath, nor did we know where they were going ... Thus, many kinds of Indians lived among us. I remember when at one time there were among us Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Mescaleros, Gilenos, Pananas, and Cionabas."

The observations and collected stories of Willams were published as a book, Pioneer Surveyor, Frontier Lawyer, in 1968. S. D. Myres edited it with annotations.

San Carlos, with a population of about 2,500, retains much of the layout and character of Williams's time. Williams had asked for a hotel and restaurant and found none. There is today one tiny restaurant. Streets parallel the creek. Stores carry goods necessary to the home, not the few tourists. A church fronts on a pleasant plaza. The aqueduct provides a means to water plants and to wash the main street, which is almost free of vehicle and sign pollution.

The nearby presidio was built by the Spanish as part of a network to guard the northern frontier of New Spain. Troops first occupied it in October 1773. The ruin sits eleven miles southeast of Lajitas on the east bank of San Carlos Creek. The fortification was located there under a plan that placed presidios at 120-mile intervals from the Gulf of California to the Gulf of Mexico. The plan required sites on unobstructed land with good water and pasture; such restrictions resulted in seventeen forts being more closely spaced.

The adobe walls at San Carlos, which rested on a stone foundation, have melted over time into mounds, but they still outline the presidio's shape. Rows of rooms for subordiante officers, soldiers, and Indian scouts backed up to the quadrangular perimeter wall. A chapel was centered in the northwest side. The main entrance presumably was midway in the southwest wall. Soldiers took their stations in diamond-shaped bastions at the north and south corners. A block of rooms built around a patio and projecting into the central plaza may have housed the captain.

When Webb-Miller and I headed back to Rancho El Milagro (and our dinner of burronate, I had a sense that the day of the horse, the day of the Spanish, and the day of the Indian isn't that far distant into the past.