Bill Dodson ~
Didn’t Volunteer to
Make Wax
Story by Lonn Taylor
Photographs courtesy of Bill Dodson
Bill Dodson age 6, and his little brother Jess, age 5, refreshing themselves
with bottles of beer, about 1943.
B
ill Dodson of Alpine has a sign on his gate that
says “Primo The Ledge.” This is because, he says,
“All of the Mexicans call me primo (cousin), and
I’m a legend in the national park.” He is a legend in Big
Bend National Park because he was born there in 1936,
made candelilla wax all over it as a young boy, knows it
like the back of his hand, knows everyone who works
there and likes to take people on hikes there.
When I first met Bill a few years ago, he told me he
had just taken a new ranger on a 12-mile hike through
the Dead Horse Mountains. “I wore that boy out,” said
Bill, who was 70 then.
Bill’s family were a special breed of river people. His
grandfather, Harve Dodson, was born in Tyler, Texas in
1865, grew up on a ranch near Salado and settled below
the Chisos Rim in 1901. He raised his family in a remote
canyon there. When park Supt. Ross Maxwell first met
him, he asked him how in the world he got his family into
such an inaccessible part of Texas. “Me and the old lady
walked in,” Dodson told him. “The kids was born here.”
Bill told me that the Big Bend was a violent place
then; Harve Dodson had to kill three or four men. He
cut one man’s head off and threw it in the Rio Grande.
Years later, he told his daughter-in-law, Bill’s mother, that
long after this happened he was riding one night from
Terlingua Creek over the mountain to Blue Creek. On
the Castolon Road he became aware that someone was
riding along beside him in the dark. He looked and saw
that it was a headless rider. He shot every cartridge he
had at him, but the headless man stayed with him all the
way to Blue Creek, 20 miles, and then disappeared.
20
Harve Dodson started writing an autobiography on his
deathbed, but he only got up to 1875 before he expired,
so no one knows why he came to the Big Bend. Perhaps,
like many early settlers here, he wanted to be where no
one could find him.
According to Bill Dodson, his mother met his father,
Harve Dodson’s son, Del Dodson, when she was 13. He
was picking cotton on her father’s farm near Fort
Stockton. When the crop was in, he left and she left with
him. They married and had four children before he
killed himself at the age of 35. They lived in a tent and
made their living by trapping in the Chisos Mountains
and along the river, but, Bill said, “he had to leave the
river because people kept shooting at him. He went to
Fort Stockton and killed himself because he couldn’t see
his children.” Bill’s mother was a 27-year-old widow,
seven months pregnant when her husband died. She
had his last child by herself, in a barn at San Vicente, and
then supported herself by buying furs in Mexico and
selling them on this side of the river, traveling at night
armed with a pistol to meet the trappers on the Mexican
side and carrying the furs back on her back. A year later
she married Sotero Marin, an 18-year old vaquero. The
re-marriage so traumatized young Bill that he did not
talk until he was 10 years old, and he still speaks with a
slight lilt.
Bill’s new stepfather had a hard time finding work on
ranches during the Depression. When Bill was 7 years
old his family started making candelilla wax for a living.
Candelilla wax is derived from the candelilla plant, a
cluster of tube-like stems resembling small candles that
Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2012
are coated with a wax that is used in a wide variety of
commercial products ranging from waterproofing to
cosmetics. For the next nine years the Dodson children
and their mother and stepfather lived in tents in a series
of wax camps in southern Brewster and Presidio coun-
ties, moving every three or four months when they had
exhausted the local supply of candelilla.
They had a dozen burros and a wagon, and every day
they would go out and pull candelilla plants up, using
both hands and working all day long, all year long. In the
summertime the temperatures would hover around 110
degrees. “We worked like dogs,” Bill said. They tied the
plants into bundles with rope and loaded them on the
burros, four 60-pound bundles per burro, and at the end
of the day drove the burros back to camp and stacked
the bundles. After three or four weeks of pulling, they
would have a stack of bundles “as high as a house,” as
Bill put it. Then they would spend four or five days cook-
ing the wax off of the plants.
The cooking was done in a metal vat that was buried
in the ground at the camp. The one that Bill’s family
used was about 8 feet long, 4 feet wide and 4 feet deep.
It took about 200 gallons of water to fill it, and the water
had to be hauled in buckets from a nearby spring. That
was Bill’s mother’s and his two older sisters’ job. When
the vat was full, a mound of plants was forked into it.
Bill’s job was to climb on top of it and tromp it down
into the water so that no plant protruded above the sur-
face. When it was stamped down flat, a hinged grate was
lowered over the vat to hold it down and a fire was lit in
a hole scooped out under the vat. The fire was started