Big Bend Administrative History

The famed environmental writer, Edward Abbey, found special satisfaction in visiting the wonders of Big Bend National Park. A former seasonal ranger at Arches National Park in southeastern Utah, the controversial and opinionated author of such works as Desert Solitaire (1968) and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), recalled in the late 1970s that "half the pleasure of a visit to Big Bend National Park . . . lies in the advance upon the object of desire." Calling the Chisos Mountains "a castled fortification of Wagnerian gods," Abbey also likened them to "an emerald isle in a red sea." He appreciated as well the cultural heritage of this rugged land, remarking that "we have good reason to think of frontier history as we drive steadily toward the looming mass of the Chisos Mountains." Then in a statement that echoed his love of undeveloped landscapes, Abbey declared: "I'd rather be broke down and lost in the wilds of Big Bend, any day, than wake up some morning in a penthouse suite high above the megalomania of Dallas or Houston." The author then promised the readers of One Life at a Time, Please (1988): "We will return, someday, and when we do the gritty splendor and the complicated grandeur of Big Bend will still be here." [1]

The process of resource protection and interpretation that so impressed Edward Abbey in the 1970s had followed a route that mirrored the bend in the Rio Grande from which the park received its name. Big Bend witnessed all of the policy changes implemented by the NPS in the half-century after World War II, and then reflected its own distinctive location in one of the most arid and isolated quarters of North America. Superintendents and their staffs from Ross Maxwell in the 1940s to Jose Cisneros in the 1990s had to reconcile visitor expectations, park needs, budget constraints, changes in scientific research, and NPS policy directives that shifted from the promotion of scenery to the championing of ecology to the rehabilitation of cultural landscapes. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Big Bend could claim a place in the larger park service system as a window on the fascinating and complex world of resource management every bit as important as parks with far greater visitation and public profiles.

For NPS historian Richard Sellars, the first years after World War II presented the park service with a critical challenge. "Park development," wrote Sellars in 1997, "was to be carried out with a scientific understanding of natural resources to help ensure their preservation." Unfortunately, "documented needs and statements of good intentions notwithstanding, the Park Service made no real increases in its biological program during the [Newton] Drury administration [1940-1951]." This Sellars attributed to the parsimony of conservative Congresses, the intrusion of war in Asia (the Korean conflict), and public use of the nation's premier parks at record rates. Recreation, especially for a war-weary nation just embarking upon the "baby boom" of the 1950s and early 1960s, dictated strategies for recreation rather than science, and the removal of "eyesores" and "hazards" from parks like Big Bend. [2]

During the tenure of Ross Maxwell as superintendent of Big Bend (1944-1952), the geologist had to devote the bulk of his energies to the creation of park infrastructure. Among his early staff hires was Harold Schaafsma, whose son Curtis Schaafsma recalled in a 1996 interview the summers that he spent with his father in the Big Bend country (1948-1952). "Harold was the de facto naturalist," Curtis told an interviewer, even though he had no scientific training or experience as an interpreter. Schaafsma would give campfire talks in the Chisos Basin nightly that drew substantial crowds (there being few other options for entertainment). He also "would travel to surrounding towns to sell postcards and window decals of Big Bend;" a source of income that augmented his modest ranger's salary. Curtis Schaafsma remembered in particular the time that the famed nature photographer Ansel Adams visited Big Bend (1947), with Harold Schaafsma serving as his personal guide. "Harold shared that late 1940s romantic vision of protecting pristine nature," said his son five decades later; a perspective that Adams promoted in books, calendars, and brochures about the wonders of the national parks. [3]

In order to fulfill this vision, the park service and superintendent Maxwell could not devote much attention to scientific research. Instead, they would remove old structures from the landscape that marred the beauty and/or starkness that evoked such a vision of serenity and escape. In 1951, architect Kenneth Saunders advised NPS director Conrad Wirth that the park service could not afford the cost of rehabilitation of the many facilities at parks like Big Bend that the NPS had inherited. Reductions in the budget for park maintenance during the Korean conflict further convinced Saunders of the merits of this policy. Thus Maxwell set out to remove such historic sites as Glenn Springs, and the famed bathhouses at Hot Springs. The park's roads and trails crew, recalled longtime maintenance worker Francisco Grano, would be sent out to remove these buildings. "Waddy Burnham's house [at Government Spring] was very nice," said Grano, "but it was torn down." Local ranchers like Hallie Stillwell long remembered with bitterness this destruction of their memories. Yet Reece Sholley McNatt, widow of chief ranger George Sholley, would recall in 1996 that "the Hot Springs bath house had terrible sanitation." Its proprietor, Maggie Smith, "didn't have a permit," said McNatt, "and didn't keep the tubs clean." Thus "the old buildings had to be destroyed, and Maggie was crosswise with the NPS over this and other issues." [4]

Other resource issues for Maxwell and his staff included the eradication of feral stock to ensure the restoration of a pristine wilderness. Early rangers like Bob Smith, Joe Rumburg, and Stan Sprecher recalled five decades after their employment at Big Bend that they would be sent out by Maxwell to hunt and shoot wild burros and horses. At the same time, hunters would enter the park illegally to shoot wild game, even as the park hired its own hunters to remove predators like mountain lions. Henry "Hank" Schmidt, who came to the park in 1957 as assistant superintendent under George Miller (1956-1960), recalled that "predators would be chased into the park and killed." Lions were plentiful, Schmidt told an interviewer in 1996, and "one woman was pulled off a horse in the Chisos Basin on a day ride by a lion." Restoration of the grasslands denuded in the 1930s and 1940s by overgrazing also occupied much of the staff's time under Maxwell, with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (SCS) arriving at Big Bend in 1951 to study this issue. But the area along the River Road suffered because the NPS allowed fluorspar mining to proceed in Terlingua and Boquillas to provide raw materials to the steel industry during the Korean war. The park service charged "user fees" to the trucking companies, remembered Roy Pitcock, owner with his brother Louis of the Rosillos Ranch within the boundaries of the park. The park also had purchased soil and water from "Tiny" Phillips, the previous owner of the Rosillos Ranch, for the construction of U.S. Highway 385 from Persimmon Gap to Panther Junction. [5]

When Lemuel "Lon" Garrison succeeded Ross Maxwell as superintendent of Big Bend, the first thing that he noticed in 1952 was the tragedy of decades of overuse. "We had not done right by this land," Garrison would write 36 years later in his memoir, The Making of a Ranger: Forty Years with the National Parks (1988), "but we could give it another chance and it would bloom again in the sense that it would fulfill its appropriate role in the series of microcosms of which our world is made." Garrison, who had come to Big Bend from a six-year tour as assistant superintendent at Grand Canyon National Park, marveled much like Edward Abbey a generation later: "What a beautiful laboratory Big Bend was!" His new park was "a land of strong beauty — often savage and always imposing." Big Bend was still in the midst of "a ten-year drought period" in which "two-hundred-year-old oak trees had died." Garrison also recalled that "beautiful Green Gulch had had one year of recovery from the 2,000 sheep 'Waddy' Burnham was reported to have held there." Tornillo Creek "also showed signs of this abuse," as "it had been beaten down fifty years earlier." Speaking of the historic road network in the park, Garrison claimed that "there had been hundreds of horses, mules, or burros hitched to freight wagons." All of these "had lived off the native vegetation, devastating a strip about five miles wide." [6]

What impressed Garrison as much as the natural resources of Big Bend was the human history still evident in its structures and sites. Gilberto Luna "survived eleven wives, sired thirty children, and was in his late nineties when he finally moved in with his grandchildren in Fort Stockton." The superintendent "had a suggestion of the extent of the farm populations from ruins of old adobes, melted into the ground from which they had been fashioned." One example was "an undated church ruin two miles below Gilberto's home," which "revealed occasional mounds of earth and rock marked by crude and anonymous, obviously human, graves." Garrison also remembered conversations with Bob Pulliam, "owner of the Mariscal Mine down in the deepest part of the park near the Rio Grande." Pulliam, for whose family Pulliam Peak was named, told the superintendent that "park acquisition of the [Mariscal] property included a commitment that he could recover all mining machinery or materials on site." By the time that Garrison had visited the mine, "much of the mining equipment had really vanished, probably into Mexico." [7]

By the mid-1950s, resource management at Big Bend faced the same dilemmas as other parks: the need for more scientific research, the growing visitation of a booming population (both nationwide and in the "Sunbelt"), and the lack of economic support from Congress. Russ Dickenson, a future director of the NPS (1980-1985), came to Big Bend in 1955 to spend a year as its chief ranger. He noted in a 1997 interview that he shared Lon Garrison's sense of wonder at the beauty and mystery of Big Bend. Before traveling to his assignment, Dickenson had visited in Washington with NPS director Conrad Wirth, who regaled Dickenson with tales of his experiences at Big Bend in the 1930s. Once there, Dickenson worked with chief interpreter Harold Broderick to create new programs for visitors. One feature that Dickenson recalled over 40 years later was the acquisition of an old house from a nearby ranch. He and Broderick brought the large, one-room structure to the Chisos campground, where it could seat 25 to 30 people for evening talks, or serve as a shelter in inclement weather. Dickenson also recalled that the prime visitation period in the 1950s coincided with school vacations (May through September). "Visitors were interested in the desert," noted Dickenson, and one of his tasks as chief ranger was to advise new employees "to acquaint themselves with the desert." Every six to seven years, Big Bend witnessed "the giant blossoms of cacti," and Dickenson was fortunate in 1955 to be present for this event. The chief ranger concluded upon his departure the following year that "Big Bend was a compression of ten years of experience into one," and later would consider it "the biggest small park in the NPS system" for its limited visitation, vast acreage, and many natural and cultural resources. [8]

Big Bend in the mid-1950s may have had this effect on a future park service director, but its resource management programs also took second place to the massive infrastructure initiative known as MISSION 66. Richard Sellars wrote with some irony that Lon Garrison would leave Big Bend in 1954 to become "the first chairman of the Mission 66 Steering Committee." The former Big Bend superintendent "recalled that the committee was instructed to 'dream up a contemporary National Park Service,' in effect, and to prepare the parks for an estimated 80 million visitors by 1966." Sellars would remark 50 years after the implementation of MISSION 66 that the program showed "evidence [of] the power that the construction and development professions had attained within the Service, epitomized by the influence of the landscape architects." By comparison, scientific research (never promoted heavily, according to Sellars) yet again waited for its turn in the NPS hierarchy of policies. [9]

For Big Bend, the MISSION 66 work brought much-needed improvement to visitor services and staff facilities. But the park also faced problems of visitor use, most obvious in the late 1950s with the celebrated media coverage of the death of Clifford White. Chuck McCurdy, hired in 1957 as the district ranger for the Maverick district on the park's west side, recalled four decades later how newspapers as far away as Denver sent reporters to cover the search for White and his wife, whom McCurdy called "a secretary for an oil company executive" from Houston. McCurdy and his chief ranger, Monte Fitch, spoke on different occasions in the late 1990s about the rescue mission as if it had just happened. The Whites had stayed in the Chisos Basin, and had hiked the Lost Mine Trail, said Fitch. Then the couple approached the park's gas station attendant to borrow a five-gallon can of gasoline, in the words of Fitch, "to go on a tour." McCurdy recalled seeing them drive by him on the park's west side carrying ocotillo plants in their station wagon. When he stopped them to inquire about the origins of the cacti, Clifford White claimed that "they got them outside the park," and that "they had been told they could harvest on unfenced land." Even though the Whites had "an air-conditioned car," McCurdy warned them of overheating in the intense desert sun. [10]

What happened next surprised even park rangers accustomed to lost visitors. For the next eight to nine days, said McCurdy and Fitch, the staff (already stretched thin by summertime visitation and its demands) scoured the southern reaches of Big Bend in search of the Whites. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) joined the rescue mission, believing that Mrs. White had gone to the river and drowned. More prosaically, Clifford White had driven their car to the Castolon site, passing through a barrier warning of erosion that had closed the River Road. "Big Bend can put someone in trouble right away," Fitch remarked in 1997, noting that "the temperature at Maverick Ranger Station was 122 degrees while the White search was underway." The NPS staff and federal agents confronted temperatures "so hot that horses died and planes couldn't fly in the heat." The park hired Mexican trackers to aid in the search, and Fitch recalled that they "only wanted ice cream to eat." Further complicating matters were the curious visitors who had come to Big Bend "to see the disaster." Finally the searchers came upon White's body, finding him near the Mariscal Mine where he had walked five miles from his abandoned vehicle. His wife had waited in the vehicle for several hours, then hiked towards the Chisos Mountains, where she found a cave with water. McCurdy recalled that "she ate prickly pear, and got the needles on her chest and mouth." [11]

The power of nature at Big Bend ironically hampered the park's efforts in the 1960s to accommodate the new directives of Interior secretary Stewart Udall. Appointed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, and continuing in that capacity under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Udall wanted America's parks to accept ever more visitors and add lands to their boundaries. Superintendents like Stanley Joseph (1960-1963), Perry Brown (1963-1969), and Luther Peterson (1969-1971), would watch as the nation created dozens of new park units under NPS director George Hartzog. In addition, the country witnessed a shift of values prompted by the environmental movement, and capped by passage in 1964 of the Wilderness Act. The goal was to set aside lands for future public enjoyment undamaged by human use. Doug Evans, who replaced Howard Broderick in 1961 as chief naturalist, wrote the first interpretative prospectus for Big Bend, and recalled in 1996 how his work at the park prepared the way for additional preservation of natural resources. In 1956, said Evans, Broderick had "pioneered the program of plants, and also got the Big Bend Natural History Association going." From this base, Evans in his five-year tenure as chief naturalist could develop "contact points at each major area of the park." In addition, Evans "created a small amphitheatre, and also did exhibits . . . and nature trails." [12]

In retrospect, the realities of the Big Bend landscape fit perfectly the goals of Udall and other champions of natural beauty and ecology. In April 1966, the Interior secretary accompanied Lady Bird Johnson on a one-day raft trip through Mariscal Canyon on the Rio Grande; a visit designed, said Doug Evans, to focus national attention on wilderness preservation. Joined by some 90 reporters and photographers, the First Lady came to the Marfa air station on April 2 to spend three days in west Texas, one of which would be devoted to Big Bend. El Paso Natural Gas Company paid the costs of her visit, recalled Evans, who drove to Marfa to escort Lady Bird, Udall, and NPS director George Hartzog to the park. "A cottage in the Chisos was 'redone' for her," Evans remembered, and the raft trip included "35 NPS trainees from the Albright center [at the Grand Canyon] in twelve Navy rafts." Lady Bird "was in the lead boat," said Evans, who paddled for her and Udall, and "she asked to be pulled ahead of the press" to gain some privacy. Evans mused that "the media were 'fish out of water,'" with several rafts capsizing on the ten-mile journey from Talley Ranch to Solis. Garner Hanson, president of National Park Concessioners, Inc. (NPCI), recalled in 1997 how his organization catered the event, and how superintendent Perry Brown "saw the visit as a challenge to preservation." Several Greyhound motor coaches traveled down the rutted dirt road to the Talley "put-in," while Lady Bird's press secretary, Liz Carpenter, wanted a "big bonfire" at the Chisos campground for effect. That evening, recalled Evans, NPCI arranged to have "a fiesta for her at the Rio Grande Village, complete with recorded coyote sounds." All of this graced the nightly television news, and the headlines of the nation's newspapers, not unlike the coverage generated three decades earlier when Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb promoted Big Bend's charm and peril in his own river trip through Santa Elena Canyon. [13]

One of the ironies of the visit in 1966 by Lady Bird Johnson was its focus upon the need for more wilderness designations in the United States. Big Bend appeared to the reporters covering the raft trip to be nothing but wilderness, as several interviewees recalled the difficulties of getting film footage out of the canyon area each day for shipment to the television networks. Yet 1966 also represented another defining moment for resource management within the NPS and other federal organizations: passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). This required public agencies to identify and research the historic significance of structures and neighborhoods, with the goal being protection via listing on the National Register of Historic Places. A young graduate student in history in the 1960s at Texas Tech University, Jerry Rogers, would later become director of the National Landmarks program of the NPS in Washington. In a 1997 interview, Rogers (a native of west Texas and the field superintendent at that time of the NPS's Southwest Support Office in Santa Fe), recalled how Big Bend National Park had fared in matters of cultural resource management before and after passage of the NHPA. "Big Bend was typical of other great scenic national parks," Rogers noted, in that "drawing visitors was more important." For Big Bend, "the great crime was bulldozing San Vicente," a small community of Mexican people on the United States side of the Rio Grande. The legacy of this and other efforts to remove evidence of human habitation at Big Bend bothered Rogers and Curtis Tunnell, director of the state of Texas's office of historic preservation (SHPO). Tunnell complained in public meetings that "the National Park Service gave lip service to archaeological resources [at Big Bend]," said Rogers. It helped Big Bend little that Rogers's supervisor, NPS director George Hartzog, created the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (OAHP). "Then the battle of George Wright and the 1930s biologists to gain equal status with scenery recurred with cultural resource management." [14]

With little chance for extensive work on Big Bend's remaining historic structures, staff time and money in the late 1960s and early 1970s went toward completion of surveys for wilderness designations. Under the Wilderness Act of 1964, Congress had required the park service and other federal resource agencies to submit such designations within ten years. Areas of 5,000 acres or more that had not been opened to public use (the "roadless areas" concept) would be sent to NPS headquarters for adoption into the wilderness program. Richard Sellars noted that "in part because of the opposition of local congressional members to a changing national political climate [the return of conservative leadership under the Nixon and Ford administrations], several large parks containing huge tracts of de facto wilderness never gained the added protection of the Wilderness Act." Among these were "Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Big Bend, in addition to Great Smoky Mountains." Interior secretary Udall had asked the NPS "to analyze specific wildlife management issues by placing the concerns in a broad ecological and philosophical context." The "Leopold Report" of 1963 that had prompted this initiative, said Sellars, "urged that scientific research 'form the basis for all management programs' and that every phase of management come under the 'full jurisdiction of biologically trained personnel of the Park Service.'" [15]

This emphasis on natural resource management came at the same time that other congressional initiatives affected NPS policy system-wide. By 1969 the parks had come under the aegis of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), with its calls for more public involvement in the planning and development process on federal lands (including discussion of "no-build" alternatives). In quick succession the nation witnessed in 1970 the first "Earth Day," followed by formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to monitor the ecological health of the nation's land, air and water resources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 further strengthened the role of government oversight of natural resources, as did the Clean Air Act. Park management from 1970 forward would require attention to these features, not to mention the training, funding, and awareness that these required of park staff. Especially problematic for Big Bend would be the promotion of the concept first articulated in the Leopold Report to restore the "ecological scene" to parks; a reference that Sellars called "the conditions at the time of the first European contact." [16]

Big Bend had many issues to address in the 1970s that limited an aggressive campaign for natural and cultural resource management. Cross-border traffic in narcotics, contraband, and immigration occupied much staff time, and augmented the image of the park as a "Wild West" site. Frank Deckert came to the park in 1975 as chief naturalist, and saw how visitors avoided the desert environment in favor of the mountains and Rio Grande. Deckert spoke in a 1996 interview of his efforts to create the "Three-Parks-in-One" concept, with visitors encouraged to experience the triangle of river, desert, and mountain terrain. During his five-year tenure as chief naturalist (1975-1980), Deckert also witnessed the return of peregrine falcons to the Chisos Mountains, and visitor confrontations with bears and mountain lions. One facet of park ecology that occupied Deckert's time was research on the history of fires in the Big Bend area. "The basin had a major fire once every 100 years," said Deckert, "and minor ones every 25 years." He took special note of the 1980 "Laguna Meadows" fire. Even as it scorched many of the native grasses, both landscape and animals returned after several years of absence. [17]

Deckert also worked to bring to the park dedicated young ranger-naturalists who would implement the new federal policies on natural resource management, as well as inspire visitors with innovative programs and activities keyed to an appreciation of Big Bend's complexity and richness. Vidal Davila would arrive at the park in 1977 to work in the naturalist division, which he recalled 20 years later as having one natural resource specialist. Davila, a graduate of Texas A&M University and one of the few Spanish-speaking NPS staff, "participated in the first controlled burn in the park." He also conducted in his seven years at the park (1977-1984) "a survey of springs, vegetation and wildlife, and peregrine falcons along the Rio Grande." Davila also accepted in 1982 an assignment to conduct "the first baseline survey of cultural resource structures" at the park. Because of his other obligations (among them service as an interpreter of Spanish for the law enforcement division), Davila devoted many of his off-duty hours to the site inspections and document research. "Management was surprised at the extent of cultural resources," Davila recalled in 1997 (not long after his return to the park as its chief of the division of sciences and resource management). He had identified 428 structures that had survived the ravages of time and the NPS policy of destruction. "San Vicente and Boquillas had ruins," Davila remembered, "but the areas were devoid of vegetation." He also remarked about the "many sites along the River Road [that had been] bulldozed." He concluded that, according to NPS policy at the time, "the old jacales and buildings had no place in the early setting of Big Bend National Park." The result was the loss of awareness that "various groups had lived a hard life, and did as well as they could." Davila especially admired the remnants of the Mariscal mine, which taught him of "the hard life for miners." The company had "hired many Mexicans, and was very isolated." [18]

Davila shared a commitment to promotion of ecological and cultural awareness at Big Bend with another of Frank Deckert's employees, Rick Lobello. First as a student of Barton Warnock at Sul Ross State College, then as a park ranger-naturalist from 1979-1981, Lobello and "the rangers were very enthusiastic about teaching protection of nature." During his time at the park, Big Bend won the Garrison Gold award one year for the best interpretative staff in the Southwest Region, an honor named for former Big Bend superintendent Lon Garrison and highly prized for its recognition of excellence among the 40-plus park units within the region. "Older rangers had shown slides with their talks," Lobello remembered, but "the younger rangers wanted to reach the visitors." Visitors found this level of enthusiasm appealing, as "Big Bend had fan clubs of regulars who stayed a week." Certain staff members became so visible that the interpretative programs "included the name of the ranger [giving the talk or tour] because of their popularity." Lobello credited much of this improvement to the work of Frank Deckert, who "created a family atmosphere and gave staff opportunities to try new things." Lobello would leave Big Bend in 1981, only to return five years later as the director of the Big Bend Natural History Association (1986-1992). In this capacity, Lobello would champion the restoration of the Mexican wolf to the park premises; a program that engendered much controversy when a similar effort was undertaken in 1995 in Yellowstone National Park (and which upon review was not instituted at Big Bend). [19]

The work of Deckert, Davila, Lobello, and their colleagues was augmented in 1976 by the designation of Big Bend as part of the "Man in the Biosphere" program of the United Nations. Robert Haraden, superintendent from 1978-1980, recalled in 1996 that "this was to show the link of man to nature." There would be a "core area of totally protected land [the park itself]," then "a buffer zone where man uses land so as not to harm the core part." This effort was problematic, given the uses of the park and the surrounding area in the past. Haraden noted "trespass from cattle and horses" from Mexico and neighboring American ranches. "Several days a month," Haraden continued, "a plume of smoke drifted down from Carlsbad." There had been a professor from the University of Texas at Austin who had found "a pterodactyl fossil with a 42-foot wing span at the western edge of the park," prompting Haraden to request a paleontology study. He also found trappers on park land taking thousands of animals for their skins. The Adams ranch was reported to be a central clearinghouse for such activity; a condition that Haraden verified when he visited there. The superintendent found between 3,000 and 5,000 animal skins drying on fences at the ranch, and asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to investigate. Their officers discovered that Mexican hunters brought pelts from inside the park to the Adams ranch, and USFWS agents confiscated some 17,000 skins in a raid. [20]

Coincident with Haraden's work in resource management was publication of former Big Bend naturalist Roland Wauer's "State of the Parks-1980: A Report to Congress." Wauer, who served at the time as the NPS's chief naturalist in Washington, claimed, in the words of Richard Sellars, that "although many threats resulted from activities within the parks, more than half come from external sources, such as commercial and industrial development and air and water pollution." Wauer asked Congress for "a comprehensive inventory of natural resources, programs to monitor changes in the park's ecology, individual park plans for managing the resources, and increased staffing and training in science and natural resource management." But the political climate for expanded park studies changed in the fall of 1980 with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan. Committed to a reduced role for government in people's lives, fewer taxes, and an end to 1960s-era programs of social welfare and environmental regulation, the Republican Reagan replaced the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter with officials like James Watt as secretary of the Interior. Watt, founder in 1979 of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (a Denver-based advocate for more usage of the West's natural resources), called quickly for a moratorium on new park lands, preferring to spend the limited funds at the NPS's disposal on what Sellars called "the upgrading of existing park facilities." [21]

This rapid reversal of fortunes for the park service had its effects on Big Bend. Keith Yarborough, professor of geography at Sul Ross State University, recalled how the "Man-in-the-Biosphere" program suffered from a lack of focus and funding. Yarborough, who had first visited Big Bend in 1957 as a student at Texas Western College (later to become the University of Texas at El Paso), called the program "very important, and little-understood." Created by the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), its goal was "to have a central core of research, a buffer to protect it, and the outside world beyond." If the biosphere project worked, "research filters out to create a wisely run economy." Big Bend always was to be its "core area, but has never spread its research." Yarborough did note that Mike Fleming, who came to Big Bend in 1981 to work in the sciences and resource management division, did create a "science research data base" to account for the fact that "the park gets 80 to 100 researchers annually, but has never had a research center." [22]

Robert Haraden's successor as park superintendent, Gilbert Lusk, would devote a good portion of his five-year tenure at Big Bend to improving management and research functions in science. He also became determined to elevate the status of cultural resources in the park, as evidenced by his commitment to better relations along the border between the United States and Mexico. Tom Alex came to Big Bend in 1981 as part of this new initiative, working as the staff archaeologist. Alex learned quickly that "no archaeology studies had occurred between the 1930s and late 1960s and early 1970s." Until passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, said Alex, "there was no concerted effort . . . to stop artifact-hunting, or to save buildings." At first, Alex worked on surveys of park power lines and highway construction. Yet his travels around Big Bend revealed that "the Chisos infrastructure sits on one of the most important archaeological sites in the park." Earlier examinations of Big Bend's archaeological resources focused on caves (Erik Reed in the 1930s), or open sites in the desert (T.N. Campbell in 1965). Alex would build upon their research by examining sites with carbon-dating techniques, concluding that human habitation in the Chisos Basin stretched back some 9,000 years. "Repeated occupation of the same site is unusual for west Texas," Alex remarked in 1996. The Big Bend archaeologist further noted: "This site is unusual in that only two or three other sites in west Texas exhibit repeated occupation spanning from Paleo-Indian to the Historic Periods." [23]

Lusk and his successor, Jim Carrico (1986-1991), also dealt with the initiatives promoted by local landowners to donate land to the park (and the subsequent backlash by other ranchers against these acquisitions). Houston Harte, publisher of the San Angelo Standard-Times, owned a large ranch on the northern boundary of Big Bend (the Harte-Hanks ranch), and he began inquiries in the late 1970s with park officials about a donation or purchase by the NPS. Jim Liles, chief ranger at Big Bend from 1977-1983, recalled in a 1997 telephone interview the delicate nature of these negotiations. The recent debacle over wilderness designation, which Liles recalled was promoted by the Wilderness Society office in Denver, made local ranchers both aware of the benefits of federal acquisition of their ranches (if they were in financial straits), and of the potential for more public "land-grabs," as the Sagebrush Rebellion rhetoric of the era claimed. The Harte-Hanks property (also called "Panther Ranch), recalled Bob Haraden, had been offered to the Nature Conservancy, but the latter "never got back to Harte." Since the 67,000 acres "would be a donation of adjacent land, it didn't need legislation," thought Haraden. Then "Tiny" Phillips, owner of the nearby Rosillos Ranch, approached park officials with an offer to sell his 28,000 acres. He was dying of cancer, and hoped to see resolution of the transaction before his death. Unfortunately for the park, Phillips sold his land for $1.7 million to the Pitcock brothers (Roy and Louis) before Congress could appropriate the monies for purchase. [26]

All throughout the Reagan era (1981-1989), the NPS struggled to accommodate pressures from environmentalists to expand the ecological base of national parks, as well as satisfy budget officials unhappy with plans for increased land purchases. Into this mix of interests in the late 1980s came the Davis Mountains study, which exacerbated public distrust of the federal government in general, and Big Bend National Park in particular. Brewster County magistrate Val Beard noted in a 1998 interview that "the opposition to the Davis Mountains study grew because of the secrecy." Several ranchers in the Davis Mountains north and west of Big Bend had approached U.S. Representative Ronald Coleman (D-TX) in 1988 about the potential for federal purchase of their lands (not unlike the arrangements underway for the Harte-Hanks property). Coleman had the NPS undertake a $100,000 study of the acquisition of ranches in the area as part of a ranching heritage park. "Coleman had no idea of what he was getting into," said Beard, as "he had done no investigations." Public sentiment was stirred by the formation of the "Trans-Pecos Heritage Association," led by Ben Love, whose property adjoined Big Bend on the north. Beard recalled how the Harte-Hanks plan had bothered county officials, as it removed acreage from the property tax rolls and made Brewster County 25 percent federally owned; a striking statistic in a state (Texas) that had entered the Union in 1845 with no federal control of its 256,000 square miles. The outcry at public meetings forced the park service to reject any efforts to establish the Davis Mountains ranching park, but the bitterness and distrust would endure for the remainder of the twentieth century, and affect attempts to add the Christmas Mountains and Chinati Mountains to the park. [27]

Under the cloud of the Davis Mountains study, park superintendents Robert Arnberger (1990-1994) and Jose Cisneros (1994-1999) chose different directions in their efforts at resource management. Arnberger, the son of a prominent NPS official (Leslie Arnberger), devoted a good deal of his time to external affairs, delegating to his staff the operations of the park. Among the more contentious issues facing Arnberger was his decision to remove an "eyesore" from the Chisos Basin: the old gasoline station and store. Arnberger also included law enforcement within the purview of the resource managemet division, spreading the workload among rangers without additions to the staff or budget. The Pitcock brothers, Roy and Louis, would remark in 1997 about the irony of Arnberger wanting an airstrip at K-Bar ranch, so that he could fly out of the park to attend NPS meetings elsewhere in the country (all this while the park service studied limitations on commercial aircraft in national parks). Keith Yarborough also lamented Arnberger's lack of commitment to scientific research, noting that the superintendent had downgraded the "chief scientist" at the park to the rank of "scientist," and how "scientific research has not been fostered as it should." [28]

Given the preceding half-century of resource management issues and controversies, it was nonetheless surprising in 1994 when the new superintendent, Jose Cisneros, came to Big Bend with a desire to elevate cultural resource issues to the plane of nature and science. A native Texan and fluent speaker of Spanish, Cisneros had spent his early career in human resource management for the NPS's Southwest region, and later as superintendent at such cultural parks as Bandelier National Monument, San Antonio Missions National Cultural Park, and Gettysburg National Historical Park. His own love of history and culture, combined with his assignments over the preceding two decades, had instilled in Cisneros the realization that Big Bend had much cultural history and tradition. Monies were not available in 1994 for a wide range of cultural resource studies, so Cisneros instructed his staff "to find ways to do this ourselves." Using funds saved from salaries, and by campaigning with regional and national NPS offices, Cisneros and his division chiefs began a process of studies in archaeology (in conjunction with Sul Ross State University), historic preservation, and interpretative programming that told the tale of Big Bend's many uses.

As Cisneros looked back in 1999 on his five years of management at Big Bend, he recalled how he found that "the Barker lodge was run down, as was K-Bar and the Hot Springs." He had "no problem with how natural resource programs were run," and reallocated funds to hire a wildlife biologist and vegetation specialist. By 1998, the park had acquired its first-ever grants for rehabilitation of historic structures, with the first task being the motel units at Hot Springs, and the second target the store at Castolon. Work also was accomplished at K-Bar ranch (which was used for student research housing), the Alvino House at Castolon, and the Daniels Ranch along the Rio Grande near Boquillas. Cisneros also worked with Sul Ross to expedite funding for the seven-year, $1 million archaeological survey overseen by Tom Alex and Bob Mallouf (the latter the director of the SRSU program). Alex noted how the monies allowed survey crews to work on what he called a "predictive capability" strategy. Given the park's 804,000 acres, and the lack of any definitive assessment of cultural resources, Alex and Mallouf (formerly the director of the Texas office of archaeology in Austin) used Global Informational System (GIS) mapping to identify fifteen percent of park lands suggestive of the larger whole. The survey crews then worked over these sites carefully, seeking "environmental stratification, and how soils, geology, and hydrology influenced habitation." When completed, the crews would have walked over every inch of 5,000 acres, and could suggest the scale and scope of land use from that sample. [29]

Of all the cultural resource work accomplished under the Cisneros superintendency, perhaps none symbolized more the new directions that the park would take than the $40,000 study of the Mariscal Mine. Cisneros continued the efforts of superintendent Jim Carrico to raise the funds necessary to hire specialists in architectural preservation, historical research, and cultural resource management. Eric Delony, director of the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), a partner with the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) in the study of structures and their uses, organized a team of graduate students from around the country. They assisted park staff from Big Bend and the Southwest Support Office (SSO), one of whom was Arthur Gomez, chief of historical programs for the SSO. In the mid-1980s Gomez had been hired by park superintendent Gilbert Lusk as part of the latter's efforts to expand cultural resource awareness. Gomez produced from that research initiative A Most Singular Country: A History of Occupation in the Big Bend (1990). One tale told by Gomez was the scale and scope of mining for quicksilver at the Mariscal facility, and Gomez would join the research team in the late 1990s to bring to light the importance of the massive structure astride the River Road. [30]

When Jose Cisneros departed from Big Bend in the spring of 1999, he noted that continuation of the momentum for cultural resource management would depend as always on the willingness of the superintendent and staff to give this dimension of park operations their due. Yet Cisneros's vision of stories told about human use of the park already had their effect on the interpretation that visitors received. Programs by the interpretive staff included historic structures, important figures, and key controversies in park resource management. In this manner, Big Bend National Park could thus serve as a reminder of the journey of understanding taken by the NPS since the 1940s to determine whether scenery, ecology, or cultural landscapes would be the window through which the public saw the land. Research on that story, begun with such foreboding in the depths of the 1930s depression and Dust Bowl, would vacillate throughout the second half of the twentieth century between the extremes of preservation and development, and the shortchanging of basic science in the nation's parks. Few superintendents had tried to bring cultural resources to the forefront at one of the NPS's "nature" parks as had Jose Cisneros. Yet the door had been opened for future superintendents and staffs to examine the reasons why Edward Abbey would consider Big Bend one of his "objects of desire," and how nature and culture combined for a new vision of America's national parks.

Figure 21: Chisos Basin Store and Registration Office (1950s)

Endotes

¹ Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988), 127, 129, 135, 141.

² Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 165-66, 173.

³ Interview with Curtis Schaafsma, Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe, NM, August 7, 1996.

⁴ Interview with Reece Sholley McNatt, Alamogordo, NM, December 18, 1996; interview with Francisco Grano, Marathon, TX, January 18, 1997.

⁵ Interview with Joe Rumburg, Green Vallez, AZ, May 31, 1996; interview with Bob Smith, Three Rivers, CA, September 7, 1996; interview with Henry "Hank" Schmidt, Sun Valley, AZ, December 10, 1996; interview with Roy and Louis Pitcock, Graham, TX, November 28, 1997.

⁶ Lemuel A. Garrison, The Making of a Ranger: Forty Years with the National Parks (Salt Lake City, UT: Howe Brothers, 1988), 231-32.

⁷ Ibid., 234, 250.

⁸ Interview with Russell Dickenson, Seattle, WA, January 28, 1997.

⁹ Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 183-84.

¹⁰ Interview with Chuck McCurdy, Santa Fe, NM, August 22, 1997; interview with Monte Fitch, Grand Junction, CO, August 27, 1997.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Interview with Doug and Doris Evans, Big Bend National Park, TX, October 18, 1996.

¹³ Ibid.; interview with Garner Hanson, President, NPCI, Cave City, KY, September 19, 1997.

¹⁴ Interview with Jerry Rogers, Field Superintendent, Southwest Support Office, NPS, Santa Fe, August 22, 1997.

¹⁵ Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 211-12, 214-15.

¹⁶ Ibid., 233-34, 244.

¹⁷ Interview with Frank Deckert, Superintendent, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Carlsbad, NM, September 20, 1996.

¹⁸ Interview with Vidal Davila, Chief, Sciences and Resource Management Division, BIBE, September 5, 1997.

¹⁹ Interview with Rick Lobello, Director, Carlsbad Caverns Nature Association, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM, August 18, 1999.

²⁰ Interview with Robert Haraden, Seeley Lake, MT, July 24, 1996.

²¹ Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 263-64, 281.

²² Interview with Keith Yarborough, Department of Geography, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, TX, January 17, 1997.

²³ Interview with Tom Alex, Chief Archaeologist, Sciences and Resource Management Division, BIBE, October 18, 1996.

²⁶ Robert Haraden interview, July 24, 1996; interview with Jim Carrico, Study Butte, TX, January 16, 1997; telephone interview with Jim Liles, Buffalo National River Recreation Area, Harrison, AR, August 21, 1997.

²⁷ Interview with Val Beard, County Magistrate, Brewster County, Alpine, TX, August 26, 1998. For an analysis of the controversy surrounding the Davis Mountains study, see Michael Welsh, A Special Place, A Sacred Trust: Preserving the Fort Davis Story (Santa Fe: National Park Service, 1996), 243-252.

²⁸ Interview with Robert Arnberger, Superintendent, Grand Canyon National Park, AZ, June 3, 1996; Keith Yarborough interview, January 17, 1997.

²⁹ Interview with Jose Cisneros, Superintendent, BIBE, August 21, 1997, August 25, 1998; interview with Vidal Davila, August 25, 1998; interview with Jose Cisneros, Santa Fe, NM, May 6, 1999; interview with Tom Alex, October 18, 1996.

³⁰ Mariscal Mine Program, BIBE, August 20, 1997; Arthur R. Gomez, A Most Singular Country: A History of Occupation in the Big Bend (Provo, UT: Charles Redd Center, 1990), 127-29.