A grimace. In death. It was a cold, gray day in Marfa as I sat inside Presidio County’s bull barn, planted on a hard wide plank on the bottom row of bleachers that surrounded an auction pen on three sides. A deep dim surrounded me, save a beam of daylight shooting through a door I left cracked, and the wind outside swirled around the sheets of metal that formed the ceiling and walls—popping and creaking with each gust.
Despite the loneliness of the empty barn, I tried to conjure almost seven decades of local ranchers hauling their bulls and heifers in for annual sales, banking on, hoping, that they would walk away with thousands of dollars to sustain their cattle operations. The auctioneer’s barks and rough cadences rang throughout the barn as hardworking ranchers and cowboys licked their chops at high bids and the prospect of a brisket meal after the sale.
I glanced down at the dirt floor, and there it was—a mummified cat, brown with hardened fur, tiny paws, and rows of sharp teeth smiling up to me. Or maybe it was mocking me, as if to say, “You have the looks of someone that I can be frank with. You’re better off dead.”
I had stepped into the abandoned building in 2021 to record some audio for my podcast, Witnessed: Borderlands, an account of the ton of cocaine found in Presidio County Sheriff Rick Thompson’s horse trailer in 1991—just over yonder from the bull barn near the rodeo arena. I thought it might be cool to have some on-site audio, so I had been wandering around what used to be at points called “The Presidio County Fairgrounds,” sticking my microphone up to a horse’s snout and trying to capture some kind of essence of what was going on at the now empty grounds 30-odd years ago. As I left, the cat—who I casually named “Snappy”—seemed to follow me, and his ghoulish visage floated through the rotating images in my mind for days.
Four years later, I found myself sitting on the same hard board at the bull barn listening to two world-class pianists—Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy— playing Beethoven, Bach and other classical masters. The transformation from the prior frigid, windy day was breathtaking—not because there were any fancy renovations done to the new iteration, but because it felt rustic, comforting, with full bleachers of warm conversations, even if it was an odd venue for the pianists.
You get this haunting feeling, though, of the decades of prior use for the barn—bull sales. Sure, they sold heifers too, but the label of “bull barn” spurred me back to memories when I watched cattle sales as a kid in Kerrville. Where the grand pianos were positioned, once there were the beasts.
Sterry Butcher, former Sentinel reporter and periodic Texas Monthly writer, described it better than I could with her 2002 coverage of a bull sale there.
One by one the bulls trotted into the sales ring. Long lashed and their hides a deep red, most of the bulls looked mildly surprised at their surroundings and gazed around, switching their tails, seemingly unfazed by the bleating and yelping of the auction’s ringmen.
The fourth bull was full of mettle, however, and he lowered his head and plunged from one side of the ring to the other, throwing sawdust and sand all over the people seated near the ring.
One rushing pass near the rails almost snagged the shirttail of an unsuspecting ringman and then the bull paused for a moment, pawed sand over his back and gave a long and thoughtful look to the bars of the ring. The folks sitting near him gave a long and thoughtful look to the bars of the ring too, until suddenly the pattering auctioneer belted “outside!” — the gate opened and the bull dashed out.”
The only thing I would have added was a “snort.”
From bull barn to Bullroom
Ballroom Marfa, the gallery on E. San Antonio Street, where most visitors come into Marfa, has become one of the city’s most prominent galleries since its origins in 2003. Generous donations and foundation grants have made it a platform for commissioning and supporting a wide variety of exhibitions as well as film and music projects.
The pianists’performance was the brainchild of Vance Knowles, Ballroom Marfa’s creative director, who has spearheaded the nonprofit’s music programs. When Presidio County, owner of the bull barn, put out a request for proposals for someone to lease the space, Ballroom jumped on the idea of making it an event space, and as the only bidder, won a lease at $12,000 per year.
I went out to meet Knowles a week before the first event and took a gander at Ballroom’s improvement. I had told Knowles the story of Snappy the cat in an earlier phone call. “We actually found it when we first went out there,” Knowles said. I was in disbelief. After inquiring about Snappy’s whereabouts now, Knowles confidently said, “I’m pretty sure we gave it a proper burial.”
But as my photographer, Jennifer Pittinger, and I went to meet Knowles at the barn, we came across a bull ramp with Snappy resting on top.
As we toured the barn, Knowles had a look of awe on his face—even though he had been in the space numerous times. A lanky guy, he’s got a face that looks like it will remain terminally young and also conveys he’s been around the block more than a few times. Outside the barn, Knowles was chatty, often zinging one-liners about the state of affairs in Marfa.
But inside we walked through in silence staring into the high ceilings and gingerly climbing the bleachers to get a view from ahigh. In recounting how the event space came about, he noted that not everyone was so enthusiastic, that the lease space was a hard sell to the Ballroom board. “We had a structural engineer that couldn’t even believe we wanted any kind of an assessment,” Knowles recalled when looking at the lease. “He said, ‘It’s like my wife and I could knock this down today with our bare hands.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t do that. Just tell me the integrity of this, that, and the other things.’”
Knowles is confident that what they are now calling “Bullroom” will become the most popular venue in town. “The sheriff’s horse is out here too, so part of the lease was to feed the horse,” he said. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Knowles is joking—like the proper burial quip for Snappy—but this is something I’m fine with believing.
Knowles pointed out that his crew—including Method Building Company of Marfa—only wanted to make minimal improvements, such as replacing some of the lumber for the bleachers and some other safety features for crowds. “There’s a rawness to it,” he said. “Sure, we don’t like the look of the new lumber, but it’ll all fade out.”
When the warm, hooded lights hanging from the ceilings were seen as too low, they just cut the pipes suspending them to raise them closer to the ceiling. Past the ring where the bulls formerly pranced, there’s a small stage area that seems perfect for a Texas swing band
Knowles, who has long played a variety of roles in Texas music scenes, served as right-hand-man of sorts for Lyle Lovett. “I sent photos of the barn to Lyle Lovett three or four months ago,” he said. “It’s not that Lyle was the deciding factor, but he’s like, ‘Oh, get that thing, get it, and don’t do anything other than put a PA in there. This is a place where I could come to town and just play—a natural setting.’”
In a heap of Texas irony, Lovett was trampled by a bull in 2002 on his uncle’s farm and faced a long rehabilitation to his leg.
A long history of the cattle kingdom
The bull barn was built in 1936, but traces its purpose back to 1918 when rancher Lucas Brite formed what would become the Highland Hereford Breeders Association. In 1885, Brite settled the land around Capote Peak and eventually invested all his efforts into Herefords, with thousands roaming his ranch in the early 1900s. At its peak, Brite’s operation was shipping out about 1,000 bulls a year. The Brite Ranch won numerous awards among Hereford breeders for keeping the lines pure. The scruffy, dense, red-and-white coats of this stocky breed adapted well to the arid climate of the high desert. And the bulls’ short horns inspired the Marfa schools’ mascot—the Shorthorns.
Newspaper accounts vary a bit, but around 1957, the association held its first bull sale that would continue as an annual event.
Marfa National Bank President Chip Love recalled the excitement that brewed over the years as the sale approached each fall. “At the time, Herefords were king,” he said. “I remember as a kid, my dad used to let me put the bids on the bulls, buy the bulls,” Love said. “There were times in there when it was pretty damn cold, but the warm meal afterward made it worth it.”
Several area ranching families kept the auctions going through the decades—with Joe Lane playing a prominent role as chairman for most of the sales. In 1996, Lane told the Sentinel, “These are rugged, range-raised bulls ready to go to work and improve any cowherd.” Bull sales in the 1990s were setting records, with a record price of $6,300 for one bull achieved in 1992.
By the early 2000s, Lucas Brite’s heir, James “Jim” White III, began organizing the event with his brothers, Mac and Beau, and Love remembered Beau (who died last summer) as being a master of keeping the ring moving. “He really enjoyed it,” Love said. It’s unclear when the event ended, but most accounts indicate that 2003 was the last sale.
The bull barn and the sounds of an auctioneer popping his tongue and words—“49, I have 55, ttuk ttuk ttuk, I have 60, ttuk ttuk ttuk”—faded away in the abandoned barn, with only the winds and creaking metal breaking the silence, and only Snappy roaming the pen and bleachers until he (she?) too fell to decay with the years.
Looking forward
When the night of the Kolesnikov and Tsoy concert arrived, a fairly large crowd mingled outside the barn and sipped on beer and ranch waters as the sun set, darkening the clouds aloft over the stretch of grasslands to the Davis Mountains. Among the chatting and gossiping, many remarked about “how cool this all was.” And it was. Under the low, but warm lights, the audience sat in the bleacher rows transfixed on a performance that seemed to fit just fine in the roughness of the venue. With semi-circle American flag drapings circling the arena at the top rafters, it had a 1930s Americana feel.
When we met with Knowles earlier, he was clearly excited about the possibilities for booking more music—including an avant garde Western singer from Amarillo that was likely next in line.
“This space is intimate, special in Marfa,” he said. “That’s what I want to do—intimate … but it still has the capacity for so many people.”
As for Snappy? Pittinger had picked up the rigid carcass to examine it, while I merely took a close look at the deformed critter in her hands. “I can’t believe you touched that thing,” Knowles commented. “Meh” she replied, “The bacteria are long gone.”
“I thought it had a proper burial,” Knowles said. “No matter how many times I get rid of it, it just continues to come back.”
We stood outside and took a final look at the steel behemoth. I wondered who would feed the sheriff’s horse. Then we all remembered that Marfa Spirit Co, the distillery built out of the old Godbold Feed Mill in town, has a mummified cat on its wall in the bar, which looks pretty much like Snappy. I said: “Maybe we can get them together.”