Miles and Miles of Texas
by Jesse Mullins, Jr.

Texas, where everything 
is bigger, is also higher, wider, 
and handsomer than most ever guessed.

EL PASO, Texas—So I’m sitting here in La Hacienda Café, having the tortilla soup, which is pretty tasty and comes in a ceramic bowl the size of a tureen, holding what has to be a quart of the stuff, and the waiter has told me that this place is haunted, and then along comes the owner, C.J. (Chip Johns), and he plunks himself down at my table. I’m about to ask him about the ghost, but he’s spied what I’m eating.

“You know, we’re known for our Mexican food—we’ve won awards for it,” he says. He stabs a big finger in the direction of my repast. “Like that tortilla soup.” He grins. “We actually put chicken in it, instead of just having a chicken walk through it.” He lets go a big, gusty laugh.

WYMAN MEINZER, BENJAMIN, TEXAS
“C’mon,” he says—and none of this was planned; I’d not counted on meeting him. But next thing we’re up and moving and the soup is cooling its heels while he points out stuff like the table where Marty Robbins reputedly sat the night he wrote his classic tune “El Paso.” And on it goes through this adobe-walled, ghost-inhabited, historic establishment that fairly exudes El Paso history.

So what brings this magazine to this border town? Well, the idea was to write about Texas. But the state’s too big to get into any one issue. There had to be some kind of angle for narrowing things down.

Which is where the “story” comes in. There was an old story told of an insurance company in Chicago. A customer in Texarkana, Texas, had called to make an insurance claim. The Chicago headquarters, wanting to dispatch whatever employee was nearest the locale, found that their only Texas office was in El Paso. They called their man there, to ask him to go to Texarkana. His reply: “Why don’t you go yourself? You’re closer.”

It’s true. It’s farther to go across the state of Texas than it is to go from Texas to Chicago. Therein lay an angle. Why not traverse the state along that El Paso-to-Texarkana diagonal, more or less, and just see how much of the state, and what kind of a state, lies between those two far-flung points?

Which puts this scribe smack into the heart of Sun City, at this venerable hacienda, the oldest building in the city, just 50 feet from Mexico, following C.J. through the “Pancho Bar” (this place, a former residence of Jose Ortiz and [later] Simeon Hart, has more than one bar), where Pancho Villa married a couple of different gals. C.J. laughs at the “married” part. He puts it in more progenitive terms. He said Villa would not have relations with a woman until he told her was married to her. John says, “But [meanwhile] he never got any divorces. He had God only knows how many. But because he was a ‘good Catholic’ he wanted to be straight.”

There’s a death mask of Villa mounted on the wall, as one would mount a trophy buck. On another wall is the photo of a former prostitute from the 1800s, the one who now haunts La Hacienda. “I once saw her walk from here,” Johns points to a spot near the middle of the room, “to over here,” as his gesture indicates a spot near the wall.

Room opens upon room as we continue the tour. The place is a rabbit warren of spaces, including a straight-line array of little mini-rooms that once served as an Old West bordello.  

The story of La Hacienda, a.k.a. the Harts Mill Residence, a.k.a. a Texas Historical Site, is also the story of early El Paso. 

“Right here,” Johns says, meaning the Rio Grande, which is a mere creek just outside, “was the [site of the] crossing of Don Juan de Onate. In 1598, 22 years before Plymouth Rock, he crossed here, stuck his sword in the ground, performed the ‘La Toma,’ or ‘I take,’ and claimed this land for the King of Spain. 

“He was the first settler in America. Was a controversial figure. He got annoyed at some Indians that he thought didn’t do right by him, or didn’t work hard enough, and he cut their left foot off.”

Hart came along much later—in the 1800s—and ran the place as a mill and stage stop, among other things. Just a couple blocks away are the last remaining buildings of Old Fort Bliss, the early military outpost here. 

I tell C.J. I’m headed for downtown and he has a story there, too. “We had a guy by the name of Dallas Stoudenmire who was marshal here, and he once killed four men in 5 seconds. Right downtown. When you consider what they did over there in Tombstone, where four men [the Earps and Doc Holliday] killed five men… well, it’s like this. The Earps came through this town. They stopped here first, on their way to Tombstone. They didn’t like it here because they said it was too wild.” He laughs. “So they kept going. You see, we had this problem—there were bad guys in Mexico, and if they were wanted in Mexico, all they had to do was step across the border. Well, vice versa. The guys in the United States, all they had to do was step across the border into Juarez. So there was a constant ebb and flow. The bad guys were all right here.”

Downtown, on the northern slope of the river valley, facing Juarez and the mountains across the way, is a mix of old and new. Many great old buildings. It looks as though urban renewal didn’t have its dance with this dame. Meanwhile, the El Paso Convention and Performing Arts Center is an eye-catcher, an exotic looking, swooping design. 

Lots of Western wear in El Paso. This is the boot making capital of the West, and there are numerous billboards for the discount outlets. One store advertises 20,000 pairs of boots in stock.

Just around the corner, what was once the Speaking Rock Casino, on a local Indian reservation, is now termed an “Entertainment Center,” as its gambling enterprise has been suspended by the authorities—though only, perhaps, for a time, its backers contend. The slot machines and crap tables are empty, but the place still draws a modest crowd to its arcade, and the restaurant here was excellent. An eight-piece mariachi band was going great guns in the theater. What is it about those things? It has to be the trumpets—the way they play in perfect synchrony.

A few blocks further east, on Highway 375, is the Cultural Center, where one finds a lot of fascinating photos of early settlers and early Native Americans from that area. 

The “middle” mission, the Mission Socorro, established in 1683, was under renovation, with scaffolding across its front.  

Then it’s on out, further southeast, running parallel to the river, out past the stucco-and-tile and wrought-iron fronts and then the cotton fields—there’s much of it here—to the settlement of San Elizario. 

At the farthest-out location stands the San Elizario Chapel, with its nearby adjunct, the Los Portales Museum and Information Center, small but informative—the main source of lore on the missions. It also includes history of Texas and the border, as well as of the Conquistadors and the “Pass of the North,” a.k.a. “El Paso del Norte,” a.k.a. El Paso. On this sunny Sunday afternoon, a dozen local girls were out in the bandstand, with a boom box, chattering and laughing and learning new dance steps.

Heading for the Hills—and History
So much for El Paso. It’s not always best on a tour like this to follow the interstate, but out in this elongated tip of Texas there isn’t a lot of choice if you’re eastbound. So out on Interstate 10 we go. Meanwhile, to give some idea of how far west El Paso lies, the distance between this burg and San Diego is shorter than the distance between here and Houston. So of our three hops already discussed—San Diego to El Paso, El Paso to Houston (or Texarkana), and Texarkana to Chicago—the longest one never leaves the boundaries of Texas. And this is what I thought would be a good idea to traverse?

The Rio Grande is off to the right, and beyond that a ridge of mountains that is Mexico. It’s Sunday evening, and the darkness of the ground and the brightness of the sky are starting to conjoin, in a dusky middle ground, to meet in the middle on the horizon. The landscape was so bleached looking earlier, so scrubby and dry, but in the gathering gloom it looks cooler and refreshed, and those Mexican peaks go from being etched and valleyed to being more silhouetted, almost a moonscape.

Eighty miles out of town and you’re climbing. These are the Sierra Diablos. At 100 miles you top out on a little pass, though enough to make your ears pop. We’ve passed south of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, the best scenic bet in these parts. But just another  80 miles and you can spend the night in the equally scenic Fort Davis area.

The Davis Mountains, the next day, are a startling sight to those who never thought of Texas as mountainous. Some of the higher points rise about 7,000 feet, and Mount Livermore goes to 8,378.

On Highway 166 I wound my way, on invitation, to the home and studio of Wayne Baize, member of the Cowboy Artists of America. On a tree-clad mountainside, Baize and his gracious wife Ellen and their family have a retreat of a home, plunked down in some of the most unspoiled country in the state. Standing there in his studio, amidst his superb artwork, he pointed at a wall-mounted topographical map —one of those elaborate ones with raised elevations—and showed how these regional dottings of mountains string on up into New Mexico and are really just part of that chain that forms the Rockies.

Baize spent much time here while growing up and tells of his youthful explorations. “I saw the place where Kit Carson’s name is carved on a rock in these mountains,” he said. “It’s been fenced off, so you can’t get to it now.”

Going west and north on 166, one goes past the Sawtooth on the right and on the left there appears that site, called the Rock Pile. Even if one can’t view the name, it’s interesting to view these peaks and know that Kit Carson once passed this way.

As one completes the loop back to Fort Davis, the McDonald Observatory nudges into the skyline like the dome of some religious shrine, rising out of the conifers.

When in Fort Davis, Do as Locals Do
Fort Davis itself is small but colorful. The old fort is there, open for tours. The town itself is picturesque. Someone said that the Fort Davis Drug Store, Hotel, and Restaurant was the best place for lunch, and from the crowd of locals inside—every table was filled, and only counter stools were open—that seemed to be the case. An ox yoke hung from the ceiling, a moose head from the wall, and the counter was backed by an old-time soda fountain. A sign behind the counter proclaimed, “It may not be the easy way, but it’s the cowboy way.”

Outside of town, at the Prude Ranch, I went for a ride with Zane Cummings, a part-time Prude employee who also runs a daywork company (a company of cowboys who do day work on local ranches), shoes horses, and attends school at Sul Ross University in nearby Alpine, where he is working on his Master’s in equine reproduction. All this, among other things. Cummings knows Apache Adams, a legendary Texas cowboy who was profiled in our Feb. ’97 issue. Cummings has cowboyed with Adams and caught wild cows with him. We ride up through the junipers and some gorgeous country out back of the ranch headquarters, and he explains much about these parts.

Because of the nature the country here, there will always be a place to cowboy, Cummings says. That’s because they can’t work this country with four-wheel vehicles, due to the steepness and rockiness of the terrain.

There is much big game here. Cummings tells of elk herds being to the southeast and northwest, of whitetail and even a species of mountain sheep on these mountains, of cougars and javelinas and feral hogs. The feral hogs are a problem and a danger in this area. Cummings tells of a boar that recently had to be hunted and killed, and he was along with the bunch that took it. He reaches down with his hand and shows me how high the boar’s back stood—it’s a point well above his own stirrup. “The thing weighed 800 pounds,” he says. And he indicates with his hand the length of its tusks, and again the size is formidable.

Alpine, Marfa:  Alps and Mystery Lights
Before continuing the “diagonal,” which already has suffered a fairly pronounced southern bend, just a quick side trip to Alpine and Marfa, two “gateways” to the Big Bend country.

Alpine is home to the aforementioned Sul Ross University, a school known for its rodeo team and for its being host of the acclaimed Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The Museum of the Big Bend, housed there on campus, was closed this day, but it’s said to be good.

One climbs out of Alpine, heading west for Marfa. These mountains, locally dubbed “alps,” (for Alpine?) are surprisingly tall for Texas, like the ones around Fort Davis.

Out in the flats there is a structure where, at night, people can actually view the “Marfa mystery lights,” that famous luminous phenomenon. The building, built in a Santa Fe style architecture, faces the south and a fantastically long and flat stretch of desert prairie.

Just short of Marfa one finds a historical marker that turns out to be a message about Presidio, the “oldest town in America.” It is all very interesting, but good grief, Presidio is what? One hundred miles from here? It’s down where the Rio Concho flows into the Rio Grande—on the Mexican border. Strange, but not so strange. Texas has the best and worst in historical markers. I have been through stretches in which it appears that the responsible parties were on a mission to erect one every, say, five miles, come what may. So many of them speak of forgettable local family matters or unviewable, unpictureable spots that lie forever away. The good ones in Texas, though, are excellent. Watch for the stone masonry-type monuments, or anything with a parking area associated with it.

Marfa is not so pretty as Alpine, and ought to be on one’s loop only if Alpine is included. The town’s main square, which wraps its county courthouse, as found in all these Texas county seats, is quaint, and the courthouse itself, an unusual color, almost a peach tone, is attractive. From Marfa it’s a straight shot north to get back on track. A sign out by the airport advertises “glider rides.” But more surprising is what lies ahead between Marfa and Fort Davis.

The signs outside the buildings say “Village Farms/Marfa Division.” These are greenhouses. Hydroponics. High-tech stuff. Imagine the biggest warehouse you’ve ever seen, not in height, though these are more than a story tall, but the biggest you’ve ever seen in terms of floor space, and then imagine it made of glass. And then understand that there is a handful of these things. No, two handfuls, at least along state Highway 17.  It seems so paradoxical that these modernistic buildings would stand here—so “aquatic” in nature, nurturing something so lush—yet out in the midst of nothing but desert vastness.

Past Fort Davis, it’s on to Pecos, still on 17. Pecos’ biggest attraction is the West of the Pecos Museum, “housed in the old Orient Hotel and the No. 11 Saloon.” Some 50 rooms are filled with artifacts, and outside, in a park area, lies the grave of Clay Allison. They called him the gentleman gunfighter. Why? It’s because, as the keepers of this museum proclaim, “He never killed a man who didn’t need killin’.” 

RICHARD REYNOLDS / TxDOT
West Texas: a Mix of Energy and Mystique
From here the diagonal is resumed. Flying over this region a couple days previous, one could see that it was crisscrossed with little straight, tan lines, branching and feeding in all directions as they etched the gray-brown of the vegetation. And  one could see that those patterns went on for miles—hundreds of miles really. Now, being down amidst the mesquite and juniper, one sees what it was all about. It’s oil pumping units… and tanks… everywhere, with their clearings and connecting dirt roads. It’s the bobbing horseheads of innumerable pumping units, like a photograph of the oil glory days of the 1940s or 1950s.

Coming into Odessa, one passes mile after mile of oil field supply companies. It is as if the whole world has quit being anything else and gone full tilt into oil and gas. Pipe yards, truck companies, equipment—there is everything here. Midland is just beyond, and there, at a gas station, a lady tells of a restaurant that ought to fit the bill for local ambiance. She suggests Johnny’s Barbecue, downtown.

Midland has a couple of buildings over 20 stories, and a goodly collection over 10. Downtown, it’s unmetered slant-in parking. Unbelievable. New Yorkers can eat their hearts out.

Johnny’s is closed—this being after 7—and a local suggests The Cattleman’s, north on state Highway 349. There it will be the house favorite, a 14-ounce rib eye, a great choice.

Buffalo Gap: Echoes of a  Historic Past
Along comes Abilene, another oasis in this country. And taking a side jaunt from here on highway state Highway 89, we’re pointed south and west, toward Buffalo Gap. Ahead, about 8 or 10 miles away, is a line of buttes, and between two of them, a gap. That gap is where the road has oriented itself.

The town of Buffalo Gap is home to one of the niftiest Old West attractions around. Buffalo Gap Historic Village is just that—a village of authentic Old West (and early 20th century) structures.

Kevin Young, the director, gives me the nickel tour. The place covers a large city block, and is divided into three sections, representing three eras: 1883, 1905, and 1925.

Young tells of the significance of the Buffalo “gap” spotted earlier. “This is where the southern herd of buffalo passed through to feed on the nice sweet grasses of the Concho River Valley,” he says. “When the buffalo hunting hit its peak, Buffalo Gap became one of the so-called ‘hide towns.’ ”

There is much history around here. Fort Griffin, he says, was the “Tombstone” of this area of Texas. “It was the rough town. You’ve also got Paint Rock, which, besides having the best pie in the world, has Indian petroglyphs. On the winter solstice, everyone lines up facing that side of the river, and watches the sun light up the petroglyphs.”

This place, though, has it all. There’s a church, courthouse, schoolhouse, bank, depot, homes, stores, and a score of other buildings. There’s a dental office—the dental tools there will creep you out. In the Village Gallery they have old saddles, branding irons, ropes, hobbles, leggings, chaps, wheels, a grain drill. The displays on buffalo—and the bone business and the hunters—are some of the best you’ll ever see. On weekends, visitors see living history events.

DALLAS CONVENTION & 
VISITORS BUREAU
Big City Bound: Fort Worth/Dallas
From Buffalo Gap, the next important stop is Fort Worth, and Fort Worth itself is so important, as a Western culture destination, that it would be underserved by being condensed here. (On that count, see our story on page 18, for more.) But Fort Worth, with its Stockyards National Historic District, its Sundance Square in the downtown region, and its Arts District, with the Amon Carter Museum, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and other outstanding attractions, is collectively the best concentration of Western culture on the planet, period.

So to finish our tour, we carry on east. There’s less that’s of a Western nature this way, but still some points of interest. South of Dallas, in Grandview, lies the Beaumont Ranch, where we caught their Cattle Drive weekend, and saw stunt rider Kevin Bode perform. The most striking feature of the ranch is its Old West-era town, with several merchants doing business in vintage looking shops.

Home stretch:  Tyler and Points Beyond
Tyler has a gem in Brookshire’s World of Wildlife Museum and Country Store, on the south side. It’s small but extremely well done… and free. The animal mounts are amazing, but the nostalgic old general store has the most atmosphere. You’ll swear you’ve been transported to the 1920s.

Same as at the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore. This one is a surprise and a treat. The highlight: a huge enclosed space in which they have recreated an early 20th century town. Not in miniature—life sized, right down to a street that has a Model T and a horse and wagon, both mired in the “mud.”

Carthage, which lies close to Louisiana, has the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, which also houses the Tex Ritter Museum. Every year the Hall of Fame inducts new members, and I found myself at the Junior High, where the ceremony is held, on the night of the inductions. The press is gathered back in the classroom areas, watching the event on video hookup, along with the (waiting) presenters and performers. It’s a strange sight to see stars like Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, David Frizzell and Johnny Bush mingling with this bunch, grinning, joking, everyone seated on school furniture, as though everyone’s been transported—demoted?—back to the 9th grade again. Finally, it’s on to Texarkana, and journey’s end. The terrain has become steadily more evergreen. The pine trees appeared like advance guards, taking first the hilltops, as an army takes the high ground first, then flushing out the hardwoods from the bottoms. The pasturelands and cows have disappeared. As we end this trek, we come to country as far removed from El Paso’s as can be imagined—lots of greenery, lots of rain, a whole different culture, nudging up against the hillbillies and the bayou boys. But it’s been a good run, every mile of it. And it beats a drive to Chicago, even if it is a ways further to go.            AC

STUDIO 23,  CARTHAGE, TEXAS

There is more inside the January/February 2004 
issue of American Cowboy magazine.  
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