BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK — Last Saturday, a crowd packed the Panther Junction Visitors Center for the 32nd Annual Pioneer Reunion, celebrating the descendants of the people who were living in Big Bend before it became a national park. The tri-county was heavily represented, but folks came in from all over the country to visit with friends and share old memories.
The event sprang up in the 1980s as a way to help preserve these stories and to extend an olive branch from the park to the descendants of the region’s first Anglo settlers. Some families who worked land within current-day Big Bend National Park supported the idea of a park — but others cashed their settlement checks with a simmering resentment. “When I was growing up down here, saying ‘National Park Service’ was like cussing,” said emcee and celebrated author Ben English.
This year’s slate of speakers included Laura Bridge, Joel Nelson, and Todd Bureau.
Bridge, granddaughter of Frederick Rice — the author of the spirited cowboy memoir My Name is Frederick Rice and I Was Born Here — brought a number of family artifacts to display at the function, including charming portraits, a century-old riding crop and a doll with a few more sharp ceramic edges than would be gifted to a toddler today.
She focused on two areas of special interest: the experience of young schoolteachers in the Big Bend and of “circuit riders,” preachers who roamed the area performing marriages and graveside services in an era where there were no permanent churches south of Marfa and Alpine.
Bridge also talked about the anxieties of living near the river during the Mexican Revolution, when everyone was on high alert for bandits. The circuit riders had a superpower — they seemed to be immune from borderland violence. “The bandits didn’t mess with priests,” she explained.
The stories of the Rice family paint a picture of prosperity in the face of extreme isolation. Then, as now, folks would come back from Marathon or Alpine with their buggies weighed down with goodies from the grocery store and feed supply. “The bottom line to me is community,” she said. “They were just right next door to somebody, they had to be intentional.”
Next, Grammy-nominated cowboy poet Joel Nelson of Alpine gave a talk on his memories of working the Chisos Remuda as a young man, just before serving in Vietnam. He worked for Buck Newsome, a former Border Patrolman with a big heart, quick wit and a crass sense of humor. “He had a way of expressing thoughts and ideas like nobody else I’ve ever known,” he said.
Guiding daily rides up to the South Rim — rain or shine — gave Nelson a completely unique relationship to the land and a repertoire of stories to last a lifetime. “There’s something about having to travel those trails every day in every weather in all kinds of seasons,” he said. “If you don’t, you miss a lot that sticks in your mind.”
Wilderness outfitter and airplane mechanic Todd Bureau rounded out the slate of speakers with a piece on the airfield at Johnson Ranch that had been decades in the making. The site — now only accessible via an hours-long journey down a four-wheel drive road — was once the home of Elmo and Ada Johnson, a colorful couple who led a surprisingly rich social life along the Rio Grande. “It was a place where you could eat well and be treated lovely,” Bureau said.
And a bonus during the Prohibition years: “There was always plenty of liquor available.”
In the years leading up to World War II, Johnson Ranch was home to the only civilian-run military airfield in the United States. Its privately-owned status meant that pilots did not have to adhere to military decorum: flyers of all ranks broke bread and hung out on the porch together, target shooting pie pans strung across the opposite bank of the river.
Perhaps the most famous of all the airborne legends to ever sign the register at the Johnson Ranch airfield was Amelia Earhart, who logged her name shortly before her disappearance in 1937.
The Johnson family had been willing to leave their land behind when the park was built, and didn’t return until 1974 to find the giant adobe ranch house melting back into the earth. The sight brought the tough old rancher to tears.
Bureau’s tale cut right to the core of the event — of bringing back to life the folks who gave up their land to preserve the river, the mountains and the desert for posterity. Over the course of protecting the park’s natural resources, many of the marks of human habitation have faded away. “There’s a history that needs to be told about these places,” he said.