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Photo courtesy Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas
The Nail Ranch inside what is now Big Bend National Park.
R E -R EADS B OOKSTORE
Sam and Nena Nail’s Place
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12
word or two about the Sam Nail Ranch.
Sam Nail brought his bride to this desola-
tion to run sheep and goats on about
18,000 acres of land that, by the time Sam got
here in the early 1920s, had been so overgrazed
that it will probably be another 200 years before
it can be grazed to any productive effect again.
For Nena, and the daughter the couple would
soon have, Sam built an adobe house, about 20-
by-12, on a flat spot just up a low-grade slope
from the well he dug not far from Cottonwood
Creek. They planted two pecan trees and one fig
tree in what would be their front yard to supple-
ment the garden vegetables, chicken, eggs, mut-
ton and goat meat they could raise on their own.
The park literature does not say, but I’d guess
that Sam and Nena were only too happy to sell
their land to the state of Texas in 1944 when the
state was accumulating sufficient Big Bend
desert-and-mountain country to be able to deed
it to the federal government for a national park.
No doubt they missed their pecan and fig trees, to
say nothing of the stunning views that greeted
them no matter which way they looked morning,
noon or evening, but living in any town had to be
a whole lot easier than scratching out a living on
this ranch.
Only two terribly eroded adobe walls remain
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2011
to invite the visitor into the Nails’ living room,
and the mesquite and cacti have grown so thick
in what was once their home that you can only
step through the “door” and use your imagina-
tion to see them at the end of a hard-scrabble
day. The two pecan trees and the fig are still
there, and as we sat on the bench beneath one of
the pecans, the green-hulled nuts played an occa-
sional percussive note on the hard-beaten javelina
path that has been widened to accommodate vis-
itors like us.
The nuts had to drop close by to attract our
attention, because Sam’s old windmill still catch-
es the wind, probably because someone has kept
it in repair to pump Sam’s well to a small “tank”
or pool at its base to serve as a water source for
wildlife that now call this their ranch. The rotary
motion of the windmill is transferred to recipro-
cal motion by the gearbox, which now makes a
very arthritic continuing groan as the vane turns
the blades to catch even whispers of breeze. The
thumpa-pa-thumpa-pa of the pump plunger
sounds like a heartbeat as it draws the lifeblood of
the desert from this rocky slope to make of this
scrub-grown, abandoned front yard a shaded
oasis.
Before we got back to sit down on the bench,
I noticed what I thought was a carelessly tossed-