wax at a price that was beneficial to
the harvesters, the refiners and the
middlemen themselves. Maggie Smith
was one such entrepreneur, and
Jameson notes that at times “It was not
unusual for six or seven thousand dol-
lars to change hands in one evening,”
as Maggie purchased the wax from
her friends and neighbors across the
river.
In her memoir, Tenderfoot Teacher:
Letters from the Big Bend, 1952-1954,
Aileen Kilgore Henderson recalls
making a visit to Maggie down at Hot
Springs: “The Mexicans had just
brought a load of candelilla wax across
the river. We saw it stacked on Mrs.
Smith’s back porch. It is illegal to sell
or make the wax in the park and ille-
gal for Mexicans to sell it anywhere in
our country because their government
wants to buy it from them at a low
price. But Mrs. Smith lives just on the
edge of the park so the officials don’t
do anything to her, and I guess the
Mexican government doesn’t know
what she’s doing.”
The National Park closed the Hot
Springs concession in 1952. Maggie
Smith moved on to the Mexican vil-
lage of San Vicente and later to Study
Butte on the western Park boundary,
where she continued to operate stores
until her death in 1965.
When the Park made the decision
to close Hot Springs, over 1,500 peo-
ple signed a petition asking the Park to
let Maggie stay. Her legacy of generos-
ity and love for her border community
makes her a shining example of the
best of Big Bend history: not the stone
ruins of houses and stores, but the sto-
ries of the characters who inhabited
them.
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2015
21