When Everett Ewing Townsend, a 23-year-old customs inspector stationed on the border in the Big Bend, saw the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains for the first time, he knew his life was about to change. The vista — a hundred-mile panorama of lush green piñon forests giving way to forbidding desert and finally to the glittering ribbon of the Rio Grande — brought him to his knees. “It made me see God as I had never seen him before,” he recalled years later.
It was August of 1894, and Townsend was on a mission to track mules that had been stolen from the Mexican side of the river. He marked the occasion in a small leatherbound journal he carried with him, where he also kept a record of local cattle brands, practiced his Spanish, and jotted down prayers and poems. He also kept a log of his travels, which even today would be dizzying: trips to Marathon, Boquillas, Terlingua and everywhere in between, all before the first Model Ts hit the streets of Alpine. (The future Mrs. Townsend liked to ride along on his patrols, and logged over a thousand miles on horseback their first year of marriage.)
Life on the border in 1894 was relatively uneventful, even for a brash young lawman with a taste for adventure. That year, Townsend served warrants for a range of contraband including horses, shipments of cigars, and “1 bottle of coñac [sic].” The mounted inspector position was something of a precursor to the United States Border Patrol, which wouldn’t be formed for 30 years. That year, Townsend apprehended a Mr. Ah Koo and Ye Kee in separate incidents for violations of the Chinese Exclusion Act — one of the first significant laws restricting immigration in the United States, and whose passage pushed migrants seeking opportunity to cross the border illegally in places like the Big Bend.
Townsend resigned from Customs in 1900 and went on to ranch in Brewster County before being elected sheriff in 1918 and to the state Legislature in 1932. All throughout that time, the Big Bend was on his mind. He daydreamed about buying the Chisos Mountains for his own, with the ultimate goal of passing them on to the state of Texas. “I was fascinated by the grandeur of the scenery, enchanted by its varied colorfulness, and its mysterious and haunting soul — as evasive and illusive as a cosmic ray — hidden in the deep silence of its inscrutable heart,” he wrote.
In 1933, the year after Townsend was elected to the Legislature, he was approached by fellow assemblyman Robert Wagstaff of Abilene, who had just finished reading a magazine article about his old stomping grounds. Wagstaff was enraptured by “Running the Cañons of the Rio Grande,” an article published in 1901 by Robert T. Hill, who was sent by the United States Geological Survey at the turn of the century to finish mapping the canyons of the Big Bend — a task abandoned in the 1850s, when the government decided that the mighty, muddy Rio Grande was too beastly to run in boats.
In the story, Hill, the “father of Texas Geology,” waxed poetic about his run-ins with badmen along the border and the challenges of running a river that had not yet fully been mapped. “I returned the magazine and told Bob [Wagstaff] that the old gentleman might have stretched it a little about the fierceness of the bandits, but that he had not overdone the magnificence of our mountains and canyons,” Townsend remembered.
The two men got scheming, and in 1933 they introduced a bill to consolidate what was then called “Public School Lands” — the precursor to the contemporary General Land Office — in Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas canyons, creating Texas Canyons State Park. The long-term vision was to fill in privately-owned sections checkerboarded between the canyons and one day deed the land to the National Park Service, capitalizing on a wave of patriotism and enthusiasm for the outdoors.
Townsend was not the first person to consider turning the Big Bend into a national park — the idea had been floating around since the Mexican Revolution, but nothing formal had ever come of it. In 1924, state Senator Benjamin F. Berkeley of Alpine approached the Texas Fish, Game and Oyster Commission about the establishment of a 25,000-acre park in the Chisos, but enthusiasm for the idea quickly fizzled out.
Townsend and Wagstaff wanted something more ambitious than just preserving the Chisos, and got politicking to raise money for a project that had sprawled into Big Bend State Park, named for the region’s distinctive kink in the Rio Grande. The three canyons hemmed in a vast desert anchored in the middle by the Chisos Mountains, a lush sky island archipelago that to this day is the only mountain range fully contained within the boundaries of a national park.
At the time, The National Park Service was in its teenage years, as was the Federal Highway Act, which gave rise to a massive auto touring industry. Between the passage of the Big Bend park bills and the dawn of World War II, tourism to NPS units tripled. The agency estimated that if Big Bend State Park joined the service, between 200,000 and 300,000 visitors a year would make the long trek, supporting local economies by buying gas and sundries. “This is an investment for the whole state,” Townsend promised a fellow legislator in a 1941 letter. “It will be a tremendous source of income as long as America rides on wheels.”
The Big Bend project was always unique among proposed national parks. As former Chief Naturalist Frank Decker wrote in 1981, “No other national park has this combination of size and remoteness coupled with the romance and mystery of the Mexican border.”
The park’s international character was always a key part of its identity, and as late as the Obama administration advocates agreed that it would not be complete until its boundaries extended into Mexico to form an international park — a version of the “Friendly Nations Park” first envisioned in 1924 by Alfred Dorgan, who ranched near the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon.
Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, headlines in the Alpine Avalanche breathlessly narrated the political roller coaster park boosters experienced in trying to move the project along. Then — as now — there was a large divide in the daily experiences and politics of folks living in the mountainous water-stop towns of Marfa, Alpine and Marathon and the folks eking out a tenuous existence down by the Rio Grande. “If it had not been for you we would not ever thought of the Big Bend Park — most of us would be sitting up here in little Alpine never dreaming that just 85 miles south the most unusual scenery on the American continent is located!” Berta Clark Lassiter, the secretary of the Alpine Chamber of Commerce, wrote to Townsend after a particularly bruising legislative push.
Lassiter promised that a big box of celebratory cigars was on its way. “We hope that as you smoke each one that you will see visions of the big International Peace Park and will not just let your brain go to sleep now that you have accomplished big things for Texas,” she wrote.
“It was a hatred”
Down on the Rio Grande, the mood was a lot less celebratory. There was a tremendous catch to the lavish plans for a national park spanning the lower Big Bend: dozens of people were still living there, despite the fact that the party line up north was the land “wasn’t worth a damn for any commercial purpose,” as Townsend commonly claimed. Records identified 82 individual owners of land still living in the future national park — a figure that did not include tenants or count family members living with these property owners.
While the park acquisition and fundraising efforts in Austin and Washington adopted an upbeat tone, for the residents of the area that would become the park, that enthusiasm was laced with the threat of eminent domain, or the legal power that governments can use to forcibly strip property away from private landowners. The use of this power at the state and federal level expanded during the Great Depression as the government took on massive projects to help get folks back to work — projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam provided employment for thousands of Americans down on their luck but also wiped entire communities off the map.
Angry letters started to trickle across the desk of President Roosevelt, addressed from some of the most remote reaches of South Brewster County as the country teetered on the brink of war in Europe. In 1942, Norah Walker pleaded, “How are we going to feed our sons and fellow men if they take our farms and ranches away from us?”
Ferol Burnham, whose husband owned a ranch on the north side of the Chisos Mountains, was irate, stricken with grief and anxiety over her young son who had just gone off to fight Nazis in Europe:
We have a modern home there where our boys have lived all of their lives, they love it, and [my son] in France needs to come back to the only home he has ever known when the war is won. If he can’t go there, he will never feel as if he had come home. I wish that you might read some of [my son’s] letters in which he writes about the hills, canyons and trails that he longs for at home. The park project has passed since he entered the service, in fact his home was given away on D-Day when he was fighting for freedom and liberty.
The Big Bend the Burnhams moved to in 1908 was vastly different from the region that now draws more than half a million tourists every year and generates around $60 million in local economic benefit. Farms and ranches lined the river and the cool, spring-fed forests of the Chisos, providing fresh meat and produce for the booming mines in Terlingua and Study Butte, which produced materials like cinnabar, used in World War I for munitions.
Life was tough, and ranch work was hard. In the 1930s, drought pushed the cattle industry to the brink, and the government instituted a grisly buy-back program to keep local ranches afloat: they went door-to-door offering cash payments in exchange for the privilege of shooting the starving cattle — “a mercy killin’,” one rancher remembered.
It was also unbelievably remote, even by today’s standards. Highway 118 between Alpine and Terlingua had not yet been built, and the road to Marathon was extremely rough. When an ornery steer gouged out one of Mr. Burnham’s eyeballs, he rode 10 hours to the nearest doctor with it dangling on his cheek. (A few years later, he slipped and fell in a creek and repeated the long, makeshift ambulance ride with a broken femur.)
Despite the hardships, the Burnhams and the other families living in the Chisos enjoyed their lush, high-altitude homes, enjoying picnics at the Window and roaming around Casa Grande on horseback — scenic spots still popular with tourists today. “The Burnham family looks back upon the days they lived in the Chisos Mountains, deep in the Big Bend, as some of the happiest days in their lives,” AnneJo Wedin, a chronicler of Brewster County families forced to leave the park area, wrote in 1989.
The Burnham family had been fending off the feds for some time. After the passage of the state park bills in the early 1930s, the Alpine Chamber of Commerce approached Burnham about selling water to the government to support a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in the Chisos Mountains — the crew that built the iconic trail system and quaint Roosevelt Cottages that still draw crowds from around the world.
Burnham refused — in hindsight, a wise financial decision. The land underneath the site of the future work camp was purchased from Ira Hector in 1934, with the promise that cash would soon be on the way. As late as 1941, the family’s check had still not yet arrived. “These heirs are poor people in need of the money due them,” Townsend wrote to state officials. “Especially I would like to call attention to one poor little woman, a cripple, almost helpless in all of her limbs, who has no way of earning her living and desperately needs this money that is due her.”
The Hectors eventually got their check, but the damage was done. “[We] were certainly treated unfair,” Mrs. Hector later wrote. “We gave up all we had and moved out very unhappy.”
As a part of eminent domain proceedings, the government appraises the property in question and makes the owner an offer they literally can’t refuse. In the Big Bend, that figure was around $2 an acre ($41 dollars in today’s money), with more offered for “improvements” like structures and access to water. In September 1941, the Big Bend Land Department opened its doors in Alpine, staffed by Townsend and his secretary, Bob Hamilton. Land purchases began in February 1942 and wrapped up in September 1942 with all land for the park except 20 sections acquired, granted a total budget of $1.5 million by the state of Texas.
It was a Herculean feat — and one that took even the National Park Service by surprise. Ninety-eight percent of the future park’s acreage had been acquired in less than a year, with administrative overhead costs of about 3.5% — “a record in efficient management for land purchase in a national park,” historian John R. Jameson proclaimed in his book Big Bend on the Rio Grande.
Even the official records of the Big Bend Land Company acknowledged the tension in South Brewster County. They enlisted the help of locals to help break the ice with ranchers who might be hesitant to sell. In one instance, Robert Cartledge, the son of prosperous Castolon businessman Wayne Cartledge, accompanied a land agent to meet with a rancher at his gate and waited in the car as they chatted. The rancher was holding an apple and pulled a knife out of his pocket to cut it, but Cartledge couldn’t see the apple from where he was sitting — he dashed out of the car, ready to break up a fight.
Then, as today, landowners that don’t agree to the price the government sets trigger a legal process called condemnation. The Big Bend Land Department only launched condemnation proceedings against two individual landowners, neither of which actually lived in the area.
Many of these out-of-state landowners the office haggled with were the victims of land scams, like the legendary “Progress City” immortalized today in the lobby of the Brewster County Courthouse, which promised investors tree-lined neighborhoods and easy access to rail lines. The catch? All the lots were located at the top of Santiago Peak, a mountain between Alpine and the park that stands 6,522 feet in elevation.
Three women who wanted to see their land before they caved to the government wrote to the Big Bend Land Office. Cartledge was asked to arrange a trip to go check out their holdings, but after looking at the plats, immediately knew that something was amiss. “As near as I could figure things out, the land was somewhere up on Burro Mesa, but that neither God nor man could ever locate it, or want it if they did,” he wrote.
Once deals had been struck, the government gave families still actually living within park boundaries three years to scram. The Burnham family attempted to fight back but were told by state officials that it was futile. The family found themselves in an impossible David and Goliath situation. “[They] said you can fight it and we’ll just put you out, take you to court and break you and then take your land, if that’s the way you want it,” Bill Burnham remembered later.
The Burnhams attempted to ranch south of Marathon, but didn’t last long. Mr. Burnham died in 1947. Close friend of the family Hallie Stillwell was convinced that he had died of a broken heart. “I’ve always been for the park — I thought it was a great thing,” she told an interviewer in 1985. “But the sad part was seeing my friends have to give up their homes.”
Accusations of unfairness ran rampant, and the park families felt that they wouldn’t have a sympathetic audience in Alpine and Marathon, where the park project was popular. Bad feelings festered to the point that folks wouldn’t talk openly about the land deals for decades. James G. Anderson, a grad student at Sul Ross State University in the 1960s who wrote his thesis on land acquisition for the national park, quoted a woman who was so angry she didn’t want her name printed, but said that her family had signed over their land under “extreme pressure” at “a ridiculously low price.”
The animosity lasted generations. “I was raised to hate the National Park Service,” Ben English, a retired lawman and great-nephew of the legendary Hot Springs proprietor Maggie Smith, told the Big Bend Sentinel. “It was a hatred, and I don’t use that word very often.”
Life among the ruins
Townsend openly worried that the ranchers would be destructive over the course of their exits from the park, particularly toward the natural flora and fauna the Park Service was trying to protect. “Realizing that this will probably be the last year that hunting will be permitted in the Big Bend Park Area … I think everyone expects a big slaughter down there with little attention paid to the game laws,” he wrote to the Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission in 1941. “It is going to be a perilous time for all wildlife in the region, a crisis in its existence, where an epidemic of murder will rule, and its stock become greatly depleted for many years to come, unless steps are now taken to protect it during the next open season.”
A handful of locals attempted to cash in on the chaos of the park organization period. That same year, a Texas Ranger reported that a sign had popped up at Santa Elena Canyon, declaring it “Private Property” and directing tourists to stop and pay a fee. The sign was authorized by “Hernandez, Owner” –– likely Cipriano Hernandez, who technically owned the land but had died in a mining accident years prior.
The rangers eventually traced the scam sign to an Alpine shopkeeper named Mr. A.F. Robinson, who denied that he had been squatting on the land or collecting entrance fees. (The problem solved itself organically in 1943, when Robinson was murdered at his store by an unknown thief.)
As the architects of Big Bend National Park advocated for a utopic future, they were hard at work blowing up its past. Among the chief criticisms of the park project by former locals was the fact that the Park Service razed practically every structure left standing from modern settlement of the region: barns, cabins, and even Blue Creek goat baron Homer Wilson’s revolutionary fence, which he claimed was “wolf-proof.”
The Burnham family, who had written to President Roosevelt pleading to stay, finally left the park in 1945, and the park service used the vacant home for parties and other festive occasions. When the maintenance budget dipped too low to keep up the old structure, it was demolished.
The same fate befell Johnson’s Ranch, a storied outpost and airfield on the Rio Grande. Legend has it that the only time anyone saw old Elmo Johnson cry was when he returned in the 1970s to see the grand adobe house he’d built melting into the desert.
At the famous Hot Springs on the Rio Grande — where everyone from Comanche scouts to Mexican miners sought the healing properties of its lithium-rich waters — the National Park Service took dynamite to the bathhouse of a rustic resort that had once drawn health-conscious and intrepid bathers, leaving behind only the foundation that park guests still drape towels over.
The Park Service framed this destruction of cultural resources as a necessary evil. They wanted guests to experience true wilderness, and to allow the animals protected within its boundaries to return to a life untouched by human habitation. “Their attitude was that this was going to be a natural national park, and so they did have much of a protective feeling towards the historic sites,” Lovie Langford Whitaker, the daughter of the resort’s original proprietor, explained to an interviewer in 1986. “Some things were destroyed that shouldn’t have been destroyed.”
The remains of the Army camp at Glenn Springs was torn down, as was practically the entire town of San Vicente, which, by the time the park was established, was a small village of around a dozen Spanish-speaking families who raised large herds of goats. Their eviction from the park rankled Hallie Stillwell, the local rancher who had been convinced that some of her friends in the park had died of broken hearts.
Stillwell thought that instead the Park Service should have let the people of San Vincente stay as an opportunity to teach visitors about the hybrid border culture that she and her family had become a part of. “When I’d go down to the Hot Springs to take a bath, we always went up to San Vicente — we’d buy chickens from them and a goat and barbecue it,” she remembered. “I liked the people down there so much.”
The people of San Vicente scattered all over the region after they were pushed out of the park, but one family stayed local: Crecencio Sanchez moved over to the village of Boquillas on the Mexican side, where he hosted annual Christmas pageants that drew a crowd for a kind of family reunion.
Their descendants were repeatedly discouraged in their attempts to reconnect with this history. Otila Valdez, the great-granddaughter of San Vicente farmer Gregorio Marrufo, wrote a letter to a historian in Alpine in 1973: “Would you by any chance know who is in charge of preserving and caring for this place?” she asked. “My mother claims she questioned several park rangers as to what she could do to preserve the graves but to no advantage as the rangers did not believe she had anything to do with them.”
Attitudes toward historical preservation in the park shifted towards the end of the century, and the park started to reconnect with its former residents. Many of them initially wanted nothing to do with the feds, but some have come around and are regular speakers and attendees of the Pioneer Reunion — an ongoing annual celebration of the families who lived in the park before its creation. Now in its 33rd year, the event is a cherished gathering for many folks who love the park, but it was a hard sell for families still upset about what had transpired in the 1940s.
Peace University
In Washington, tensions around the land acquisition project resulted in little more than a pile-up of letters on President Roosevelt’s already-cluttered desk. The country was at war, and Big Bend National Park was a grand experiment conceived in its shadow.
That had been true as long as the idea of a national park in the Big Bend was conceived. The first people to publicly advocate for the park were soldiers stationed within its current day boundaries during the Mexican Revolution — a turbulent era that spilled over into the United States in 1916, the same year the National Park Service was established.
First, Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico; a few months later, followers of Venustiano Carranza — or at last, bandits who claimed affiliation with the revolutionary leader to take advantage of chaos and fear along the border — killed two soldiers and a little boy, Oscar Garnet Compton, at Glenn Springs in what is now the national park. The rebels then made their way to Boquillas, which at the time was a settlement spanning both sides of the river, and took two hostages.
When President Roosevelt took office in 1933, he wanted to atone for decades of aggressive interventionist foreign relations in countries like Mexico and Cuba, instead instituting his signature “Good Neighbor” policy. Texas Senator Morris Sheppard approached the president in 1935, two years after the introduction of the Big Bend State Park bill, about the potential for an international park on the border with Mexico. It caught Roosevelt’s attention immediately. From then on, the “Big Bend International Peace Park” was an integral part of the vision of America’s 27th national park.
Later that year, a summit was held in El Paso between the U.S. and Mexican governments to further discuss the idea, and a formal commission was established in 1936. Around the same time, Townsend began leading expeditions of journalists and potential fundraisers into the Sierra del Carmens, across the river from the eastern edge of the park. Of the journalists, he was proud that the smooth-handed reporters who had “never hubbed any real hardships or ridden more than a few miles” came out of the rugged mountain country “like He-Men.”
Fort Worth newspaperman Amon Carter presented Roosevelt with the deed to the land that would become the park on June 6, 1944, otherwise known as D-Day. In October of that year, Roosevelt wrote to his counterpart in Mexico, President Manuel Camacho: “We think of the Big Bend region in terms of its international significance and hope that the Mexican people look forward in the same spirit to its establishment … I do not believe that this undertaking will be complete until the entire area on both sides of the Rio Grande forms one large International Park.”
As the human race licked its wounds after World War II, papers around the country took the Big Bend story and ran with it — a rare case study of hope in times that felt apocalyptic. An El Paso paper proclaimed the park “Peace University”; a California daily called it “1,200,000 Acres of Peace.”
The New York Times ran numerous stories on the park’s development, fascinated by the prospect of a bicultural, binational project. As William Ullman wrote in 1941:
In the Big Bend two contrasting civilizations face each other across a river that is a boundary but not a barrier, and both succeed an age-old Indian culture that partially survives. Men have not always lived in peace here, as one soon learns sitting by a campfire and listening to the border men … Sometimes the region has been referred to as “Bloody Bend.” Accordingly there will be a lesson for all mankind when the Big Bend of Texas and the wild region opposite it in Mexico shall be converted into an international park area devoted to the recreation and enlightenment of men, and to the promotion of peace and understanding between neighbor nations.
The families living in what’s now Big Bend National Park did not need a “Peace University” to learn how to live in harmony with their neighbors in a time of war. They kept shoes and socks ready under the bed in case they had to flee bandit raids in the middle of the night, but continued living, working and going to school alongside people who hailed from both sides of the river.
Many of them felt that the law enforcement response to raids on the border was disproportionate, especially during a period known in other parts of Texas as la hora de sangre, or “the hour of blood,” when Anglos took out their anger and paranoia on innocent Mexican Americans. “The game wardens and the Border Patrol were always using a whole lot of authority, they really treated the Mexicans bad,” Wilborn Elliot, who grew up going to school in San Vicente, remembered. “The law was really terrible on ‘em.”
Numerous accounts of the generosity of American shopkeepers toward their Mexican neighbors dot the historical record — powerful businessmen like Wayne Cartledge even went so far as to keep birth records for transient workers who were at risk of being deported. As immigration enforcement ramped up after the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924, Cartledge advocated for reform at the state level, warning that harsh enforcement would bring the agricultural industry in Texas to its knees.
The idea of the “Big Bend International Park” persisted until relatively recently. In 2010, President Obama and Presidente Felipe Calderón of Mexico issued a joint statement that they planned “to preserve this region of extraordinary biological diversity” by recognizing Big Bend as “a natural area of binational interest.”
The tenor of border security in the United States has changed so much since President Trump’s first term that records related to the international park feel like transmissions from an alternate dimension. In 1945 — within living memory — M.R. Tillotson, a regional director for the National Park Service, took to the airwaves in Chihuahua City to extoll the virtues of the “International Peace Park,” which he viewed as “material evidence of the peace and good will that exists, not only between Mexico and the United States, but of that which we hope will soon come to bless the entire world.”
At the time, Tillotson noted, there was no military presence on either side of the border anywhere between San Diego and Brownsville: “How much better to have along this boundary between our two friendly countries one or more great international parks for the cultural benefit of our respective citizens than to have it bristling with guns and armaments!”
El muro
Texas’ gift to the nation — and by extension, the world — was the fruit of bitter sacrifice by a number of South Brewster County families, many of whom assumed this would be the last heartbreak. Now, the descendants of some of those families are working together with their former enemies to fight another massive eminent domain project in the region: the border wall.
Tillotson’s vision of a permanently demilitarized and passport-free “zona libre” in the Big Bend was shattered in the 1990s, when Joint Task Force 6, an initiative of the first Bush presidency, was deployed to the border to combat drug smuggling. The military returned in 2025 at the behest of President Trump to assist the Border Patrol in combating what the government has repeatedly insisted is an unprecedented crisis at the border.
In January 2026, the Sentinel broke the news that a border wall would be coming to the region, which sees, on average, just over 1% of all illegal border traffic, per Customs and Border Protection’s own data. Before President Trump’s triply-repeated campaign promise to build a coast-to-coast border wall, the conventional wisdom was that border walls were effective in urban areas, where they gave law enforcement a few extra minutes of lead time to respond to an attempted crossing. In a place as remote as the Big Bend, where forbidding terrain serves as a natural deterrent, the project seemed to most like nothing more than an expensive boondoggle.
Five contracts have been awarded in the Big Bend region, for a total price tag of around $7.6 billion, or $2.4 million per local Border Patrol apprehension. In May, the government awarded Southwest Valley Constructors — a subsidiary of Kiewit — with $1.7 billion for construction of “border barriers” in and around the park, which sees even less border traffic — by one count, around 0.02% of all annual activity.
One of the first people to speak out publicly against the wall was Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson, the great-grandson of Harve and Minnie Dodson, larger-than-life characters who ranched the rough country between the Chisos and the Sierra Quemadas in the early part of the 20th century. In March, Dodson drafted a letter with five regional sheriffs urging the Department of Homeland Security to consult with them before proceeding with any construction. “Border security is not a one-size-fits-all proposition,” the sheriffs wrote.
On June 5, the federal government inked a $25 million dollar contract with CBRE Inc., a company out of Fort Worth, for “real estate services in support of border wall construction” in the Big Bend, the 21st century equivalent of Townsend’s Big Bend Land Office. Man camps have been constructed, and bulk steel is arriving for staging.
The government claims that a traditional 30-foot steel border wall won’t be built in any of the Big Bend parks, but will instead build low-profile “vehicle barriers” in certain areas and fix up roads in others to allow for faster backcountry patrols. The shifting narrative and lack of transparency has left many folks with ties to the National Park despondent over what they feel is the destruction of a sacred place for political gain. “It’s just obscene what they’re doing,” said Carol Tokar Pavliska, whose grandmother’s family ranched at Dugout Wells until they were forced out by the park in the 1940s — with the promise that the land would remain untouched and open to all for time eternal. “We already lost it once, and we were told it would be here forever.”
Pavliska said she was making daily calls to representatives and trying to spread the word about the harms of the project, but it all felt futile, especially after June 8, when the Department of Homeland Security amended a posting that would waive dozens of environmental and cultural resource protection laws for a stretch of border that includes the National Park. “I’ve been told my whole life, ‘Don’t gather anything [from the park], don’t take anything, leave no trace,’” Pavliska said. “I did that, my kids do that, and what was it for? There really are no guardrails anymore.”
Ben English, the great-nephew of Maggie Smith who has since dedicated his life to preserving the stories and culture of the borderlands, said that one of the great ironies is that his virulently anti-government family would likely now be “big fans” of the National Park Service if they could see what unchecked development had done to the area around the park.
To English, the incursion of a wall is a great betrayal of the values of the original residents of the lower Big Bend and a violation of a tentative trust built over the course of eight decades. “This is not a political, partisan issue,” he said. “As bad as everything was back then, this is going to be a hundred times worse.”
English’s great-aunt held on to the bitter end — until she was finally forced to leave by rumors that she was running guns into Mexico. He sees a lot of similarities between his family’s story and those of landowners up and down the river currently faced with the impossible choice of whether to accept the government’s check or take them to court.
If “Aunt Mag” were still alive, he reckons, she’d tell these riverside ranchers and farmers to “dig in and fight”: “Sometimes you have to get mad-dog mean, but you gotta fight, because even if you lose, you’ll know that you fought the good fight.”
Special thanks to Victoria Contreras, Archives of the Big Bend.
