Cenizo Journal Fall 2010

DESERT BURIALS ~ Laid to Rest in Terlingua Ghost Town by Danielle Gallo I t’s said that the Indians believed the Big Bend to be God’s repository for all the leftovers of Creation, a sort of cosmic dumping ground for the terrestrial scraps and trimmings. This is felt most poignantly, perhaps, in Ter - lingua, where bizarrely shaped mountains tilt crazily over plains of yellow, red and blue clay, all eroded into crenella- tions like melting spumoni, and majestic spires and peaks rise like cathedrals adjacent to for- mations shaped like lumps of oatmeal dropped from a height. Terlingua Ghost Town appears to have sprung full- grown from its paternal soil. The walls of ruined stone and adobe houses mimic the bro- ken silhouettes of the sur- rounding mountains, and the difference between a path blazed a decade ago and one disused for a century is dis- cernible only to a trained eye. The Terlingua Cemetery sits on the edge of a small canyon or large arroyo, the last row of graves seeming in dan- ger of being eroded into the void with the ancient cattle fence that delineates its bound- ary. It is situated on a low, broad flat just between the Ghost Town and FM 170, a treeless, unsheltered rectangle ablaze and nearly shadowless under full sun. Creosote en - croaches on the graves like sec- ondary markers, and the inces- sant keening of cicadas issues in a drone, giving a sense not so much of a mourning song as of the desert declaring that life goes on as usual, indifferent to the place or circumstance. The count of graves in the cemetery varies, but general agreement numbers them at over 400. The graves are most- 12 Photo © 2010 Ara Gureghian The Terlingua Cemetery, owned by Bill Ivey, is a repository of Big Bend history past and ongoing. ly humble mounds of stone, or barrows, placed close together in meandering rows. The wooden crosses that marked the heads have succumbed in many cases to the elements and have been laid across the mounds, while others lean to one side or the other, trying to keep a grip in the rocky soil. There are a few tombs encased in stone, adobe and concrete, with niches built in to their heads or sides to hold candles and mementos, called grutas. These usually denote a person of means. Some of the graves are marked only by a gentle mound in the earth, often with a creosote bush at the head or foot, as though the desert is providing for the neglect of humans. Burial in the Big Bend was accomplished by digging a grave, burying the person and then constructing the rock mound or barrow over the site. Bodies were not simply covered by the stones, as the mounds may suggest. It is likely that the mounds were used to prevent animals such as wolves, which were common in the Big Bend until the turn of the century, from digging up the graves. Glenn Willeford, in his book Cemeteries and Funerary Practices in the Big Bend of Texas, 1850 to Present, shares an interview he recorded with Manuel Grana - do, a Terlingua mining town res- ident. Granado says that the Chisos Mining Company Cenizo Fourth Quarter 2010 would furnish the casket, “fixed nice…with some kind of cloth around it.” Miners would be pulled off their duties to dig the grave: “The graves were deep; they used bars to dig and then they had a big round rock they got from the arroyo or some- where, and they would put the dirt in and tamp it with that rock.” The cemetery and the small church up on the hill in the Ghost Town, Santa Ines, are of course deeply intertwined. The church was named after the 12- year-old martyred Roman saint, who was burned at the stake for her faith, because ground was broken for its con- struction in 1903 on her feast day, Jan. 21. Today, the tiny sin- gle room with its plank floor and beadboard ceiling faces a simple wooden altar with an image of the Virgin of Guada - lupe hanging behind it. Rough wooden benches repose against the back wall, waiting to be called into use. The building is adobe on a stone foundation, with remnants of adobe plaster still clinging to the exposed block walls. Granado tells us that the casket would be car- ried by six men from the church to the cemetery, with the pallbearers being relieved at the halfway point due to the distance between the two. The earliest recorded inter- ment in the cemetery came a mere nine months after ground was broken for the church: H.S. Cook, a 34-year-old man, was laid to rest here on Sept. 11, 1903 – the same year that the Chisos Mining Company recorded its first recovery of mercury. The mine was the largest of nine operating at dif- ferent times in the Big Bend and was one of the largest in the world through World War I. Its owner, Howard Perry, employed a doctor to check his mine workers regularly for mercury inhalation. Perry paid the doctor by taking one day’s pay per month from each and every one of his employees. The presence of this doctor is the main reason why the Terlingua Cemetery boasts a much more complete record of burials than many of the other “official” cemeteries in the Big Bend, where attention to paperwork was somewhat lax due to distance and the lack of proper medical care. There were between 1,500 and 2,500 residents of the area during the heyday of mercury mining, and the majority of

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