This article is the third in a series about the history of the Big Bend Sector Border Patrol, reported in honor of the agency’s 100th anniversary.
TRI-COUNTY — While the formation of the United States Border Patrol in 1924 created a formal structure for the policing of the border, it was not the first to scan its vast desert landscapes. Five years before its inception, the Big Bend region was the nexus of a grand experiment with the newest border surveillance technology: airplanes.
Human flight was still in its teenage years when the U.S. Army began running air patrols in the Big Bend. In Marfa, a small, rocky landing area called Royce Field was built east of town near the present-day golf course and was one of seven bases across the Southwest.
The Army thought that the Big Bend would be an auspicious place to test the new technology because there was already ample military infrastructure near the border, thanks to the Mexican Revolution. In 1911, just as unrest south of the border became burbling, Camp Marfa — later called Fort D.A. Russell — was established.
Historian Lonn Taylor wrote that Camp Marfa became the “nerve center” for border security during the revolution’s heyday in the 1910s. Rather than fistfighting Villistas, the earliest watchmen sought to stem the illegal weapons trade, which depended on Big Bend merchants selling vastly inflated numbers of guns to smugglers who resold them south of the border.
Camp Marfa’s watchful eye soon swiveled to people and contraband entering the United States, rather than exiting. In 1916, raids on military outposts at Glenn Springs and Boquillas in present-day Big Bend National Park raised the stakes, and funding poured into the region’s military operations.
Thus the 11th Aero Squadron was born, led by Major Edgar Tobin of San Antonio. The landing of the planes in June 1919 was a major social event in Marfa, and the whole town turned out in their finest to watch their airborne acrobatics.
The Marfa crew ran their surveillance missions in De Havilland DH 4 biplanes armed with two Lewis machine guns mounted in the front and the back. The front gun was mounted on the left side of the motor and synchronized with its motions so it could fire between strokes of the propeller. The rear gun was mounted on a revolving stand and operated by a copilot wearing a safety belt that was fastened to the plane’s floor.
“Popular jibes were that the flyers were expendable,” wrote pioneering aerial photographer and chronicler of the Big Bend, W.D. Smithers. “They had no parachutes. Each had an orange and a bar of chocolate in case they had to walk out. They also had side arms.”
Pilot Stacy Hinkle ran the border between Sanderson, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona, and flip flopped between bases at Marfa and El Paso. He referred to the biplanes affectionately as “flaming coffins.”
At that time, the right gas for the planes — the highest grade on the market — was not available in Marfa. “The gasoline available almost invariably had some water and dirt in it,” he wrote. “It had to be strained by a chamois skin.”
Hinkle’s job was to search for people and cattle along the border, flying low to track their movements. The life of a patrol pilot wasn’t for the faint of heart — in the rugged Big Bend country, there were few flat spots for an emergency landing, and the radio-less pilots were ill-equipped to walk out from a crash. “Survival kits were unknown,” he wrote. “Perhaps the most important piece of survival and emergency equipment was the faith of the flyers that they would return.”
Just two months after its formation, the 11th Aero Squadron had perhaps its most exciting incident. On August 10, 1919, lieutenants H.G. Peterson (pilot) and D.H. Davis (gunner) set off from Marfa on their regular upstream run to Bosque Bonito, just south of El Paso. Somehow, the pilots mistook the Rio Conchos for the Rio Grande and followed the tributary river right into enemy territory, where they crash landed.
Search and rescue flights were launched the following day. There were no signs of the lost pilots until August 17, when a note from Peterson was delivered to Dawkins Kilpatrick’s store in Candelaria. The note explained that they were being held for ransom by bandits demanding $15,000 or they would be killed the following day. “I am in good health and spirits, as I am confident War Department will meet ransom,” Peterson wrote. “If not, goodbye, as they mean business.”
The leader of the bandit gang was known as “El Gancho,” who — per his name — was missing a hand and wore a metal hook in its place.
August 17, 1919, happened to be a Sunday, and Colonel George T. Langhorne, district commander at Camp Marfa, cursed the fact that the bandits had asked for a large cash payment on a bank holiday. He frantically contacted the vice president of the Marfa State Bank, H.M. Fennell, to find a workaround.
That particular Sunday fell during the Bloys Campmeeting. Fennell drove up to Fort Davis and burst into the men’s Sunday prayers, where he was able to raise $15,000 in pledges from among the faithful within five minutes.
Upon Peterson and Davis’ safe return, border pilots like Hinkle settled into a much less high-stakes routine. Hinkle himself did not care for the cold in Marfa and enjoyed his brief stints in El Paso — a warmer place where it was also possible to meet girls.
In his book Pass of the North, historian C.L. Sonnichsen wrote that El Paso became known as “the mother-in-law of the Army” because so many servicemen found wives there. Hinkle met his own in a meet-cute mixup: a fellow officer met a girl in town and told her that he would fly low enough over the airfield that he could wave to her. Since he would be obscured by the cockpit, he asked Hinkle to wave to the girl instead. That woman eventually became Hinkle’s wife.
Back in Marfa, Hinkle recognized that he had it good compared to the cavalry men stationed in the Big Bend’s far-flung reaches — and the cavalry men knew it. “[Civilians] referred to us as the “River Pilots,” he wrote. “The calvary-men, in less flattering terms, called us the ‘Big Chickens.’”
He was grateful to be living with his family in the relative civilization of Marfa. “The biggest problem [for the cavalrymen] was boredom. There was no recreation, nothing to do except possibly to drink and to gamble,” he wrote. “To sum up, the attractions offered by the Army for border service were: a life of hardships, possible death, starvation pay, and a lonely life without social contacts, in hot, barren desert wastes tortured by sun, wind and sand.”
In 1921, the Army’s air border patrol was suspended in all of its satellite locations except El Paso to divert resources toward bombing German seacraft. The official United States Border Patrol would be founded three years later but wouldn’t regularly make flights under the agency’s mantle for two decades.
Hinkle felt that he had performed a worthwhile service to the people of the Big Bend during the revolutionary upheaval, and took credit for relative peace in the decades to come. “The ranchers in the Big Bend and Upper Big Bend country, where so much of the raiding, stealing and murdering had gone on for so many years, were most grateful that our patrols ended such raids,” he said.