Desert Legacy
by Phyllis Dunham
M
y family ranched in the Big
Bend in the 1920s and 30s.
As a child, I heard the older
folks speak about the Big Bend in tones
of reverence, awe and sadness. I heard
how their ranch and others had been
absorbed into the National Park after
they left. Throughout my life, I have
returned to the site where the family
ranch houses once stood. I feel a deep
attachment to the place where my
ancestors’ dreams flourished and then
failed. I went there first as a child with
my parents, later as a young woman
on adventure, again as a wife in love,
and then as a mother bringing her chil-
dren. In the last several years, I went
there mostly alone.
A single mom wanting to live a sim-
pler life and get my youngest son out of
a big-city high school, I made the deci-
sion six years ago to move to West
Texas – the only one of my tribe ever
to return. My son eventually graduat-
ed from Alpine High and left for col-
lege. And then I was offered a scholar-
ship in an MFA program at the
University of New Orleans. It was time
to go – but not without a last pilgrim-
age to the ruins of the family ranch. I
needed to see it again.
The W. E. Simpson Ranch formed
a rough arc around the northeast side
of the rugged Chisos Mountains whose
jagged peaks rise from the desert below
like an enormous crown. My great-
grandparents, Walter E. and Birdie
Simpson, known to me as Fat
Grandpa and Granny, pooled their
money with their son and his wife,
John and Roxie (my grandparents), to
buy the land and some livestock.
Walter and Birdie’s daughter and her
husband put in, too.
According to family lore, the six
adults set out from Del Rio with a half-
dozen or so horses, a door-less truck
with a chuck-box bolted to the flatbed,
Fat Grandpa’s new Buick sedan, a
wood-burning cook stove, their gear,
their furnishings, 1,200 angora goats
and seven small children. The children
16
Cenizo
My great grandmother, Birdie Simpson, who was known to all as Granny, standing at the gate
of the wood-framed house. A small portion of the adobe where my grandparents lived can be
seen in the background on the left.
rode on the chuck-wagon or behind
the saddles on their daddies’ horses.
The ladies rode in the Buick when they
weren’t driving goats. What is now a
three-and-a-half hour drive over
smooth asphalt took them nearly two
weeks across rocky terrain, down into
and up out of every steep gully or
canyon that funneled occasional storm
water south toward the Rio Grande.
When they arrived at the ranch site,
they set about putting the houses, cor-
rals, and garden together. They
attached a pulley and pump to the
Buick’s rear wheel. In the desert, a
Buick engine comes in handier for run-
ning a water well than for driving.
They ate what they could shoot or
what came from the garden and hen-
house. They supplemented that with
flour, sugar, and coffee from town.
Town was Marathon – about 70 miles
north over a dirt road.
As a child, I begged for stories of
their life in the Big Bend. My grandfa-
ther told me about the day in 1929
when he arrived in Marathon to find
Second Quarter 2014
the bank closed, their money vanished.
I imagine how small he must have felt
driving back to the ranch through the
enormity of the desert to bear the dev-
astating news. My grandmother told
me how she got so hot and weary
cooking all those meals for all those
people. She said, “Sometimes I would
lean in the doorway of my kitchen to
look at the Chisos, and I would be reju-
venated.”
I choose a breezy, cloudless day for
my good-bye trip to the ranch. There’s
a gravesite near the park road that
runs between where the corrals and
the houses once stood. Park officials
built a pull-off for people to visit the
grave and read about it. I use the pull-
off and the grave to locate the aban-
doned ranch. It is the grave of Nina
Hannold; she and her husband owned
the ranch before my family did. I’ve
never seen anyone visiting the grave,
but from the tennis shoe and hiking
boot prints in the rocky trail dust, I
know that people do. Nina’s grave is
enclosed by a rectangle of incongruous
wrought iron fencing. I read the
plaque nearby with its notation that
this grave is one of the few visible
traces of the Hannold’s pioneer home-
stead and that there are other settlers’
stories scattered through the Big Bend,
but most of the evidence has been
reclaimed by the desert or lost in the
vastness. There is no mention of the
Simpsons. I turn west off the trail and
pick my way carefully among the
lechugilla spikes and nodding ocotillo
branches toward my family’s home a
couple of hundred yards away.
Along the way, I sense what I often
sense when bushwhacking across
Chihuahuan Desert. It reminds me of
coral-strewn ocean floor. Except for
the whooshing of the wind, all is quiet.
And all but the earth itself seems to be
in motion. The olive-colored clusters
of creosote bush dipping against the
pale desert sand resemble fan coral
fronds swaying in ocean current. Low,
maroon prickly-pear pads with long
black spikes are sea urchin-like.
Reaching the ruins is always a surprise,
as if coming across the scattered detri-
tus of a shipwreck on the sea bottom.
A slanted wafer of crude concrete is
all that remains of the foundation of
my great grandparents’ house. The
wood siding and cedar shingles have
disappeared. A line of rocks the size
and shape of shoe boxes runs parallel
to the concrete about ten feet out.
This, the outline of the old porch,
delineates the area where Granny’s
cypress rocking chair once held her
body on late afternoons. I picture her
there, fanning herself in the shade and
drinking a cool glass of water from the
well, Fat Grandpa in the adjacent
rocker reading a newspaper.
I walk past the concrete to an out-
line of flat stones, precise as a blue-
print, that was the foundation of my
grandparents’ adobe house. In past
decades, traces of melted adobe half-
covered the stones but is all gone now.
Until the 1970s, several feet of their
stacked rock fireplace stood intact on