Growing up on the Nail Ranch
Photographs courtesy Julia Nail Moss
The Nail family's adobe house with a frame porch.
Friends, family and neighbors put the stock tank to good use on a hot day.
By Ron Payne
From an interview with Julia Nail Moss
H
ave you ever thought that an unusual number of
flowing springs and a creek lined with cotton-
wood trees added up to the possibility of making
several sections of desert land into a viable homestead?
Now you are thinking like Sam Nail.
Sam Nail and his brother, Jim, were among the early
20th century pioneers who saw great promise in lower
Brewster County. A section on the east side of the Chisos
Mountains caught their imaginations, and they built a
log cabin in what was then known as Nail Canyon and
now Pine Canyon. Later, Sam’s brother married and
moved to Alpine. Sam too had plans for his future that
meant leaving the cabin in Nail Canyon. Burro Mesa
and the land up against it were calling him.
With the purchase of the Burro Mesa land and land
along Cottonwood Creek, Sam knew he had acquired
some of the best-watered ranch sections available. Once
the two-room adobe house was laid up with the help of
a Mexican cowboy, and its vigas, or roof beams, had
been brought down from the Chisos Basin’s pines, the
Sam Nail Ranch was well under way. It was to this, his
ranch’s headquarters, that Sam brought his bride, Nena
Burnham. Yes, Nena knew what she was getting into
marrying a young homesteading rancher. She had
grown to maturity on one of a handful of such ranches
that populated lower Brewster County by the early
1900s. There were Burnhams ranching at Government
Springs, Oak Canyon and Croton Springs in what is
now Big Bend National Park.
Sam wanted to introduce black cattle that he knew to
be better stock into the range mix of this arid ranch land,
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but grazing and shipping mixed-breed herds was “not
the way folks did it,” so he went along with his neighbors
and ran Herefords. For a brief time during the
Depression, Sam did introduce a few hair goats, but his
primary efforts were given to making his a productive
cattle ranch. The proceeds from running cattle were put
back into the livestock and the ranch’s capital improve-
ments. If he were alive today, Sam would certainly take
exception to the oft-repeated notion that ranchers like
him overgrazed their land with ill-suited ranching tech-
niques. He would, no doubt, want to know what sane
rancher would deliberately deprive himself of a future
by such poor husbandry of the land.
When Homer Wilson bought the Oak Canyon
Ranch and moved in across the road from Sam and
Nena, the couple didn’t mind that their new neighbor
was a sheep and goat man. The sheep fences Homer
erected only made it easier for Sam to ride herd on his
cattle. With the fences he no longer had to ride all the
way down to the Rio Grande to round them up. The
Nails and the Wilsons became good neighbors.
Some of the abundant springs on his land Sam dug
out to provide natural watering holes, or tanks, for his
cattle and horses. But the crowning achievement of his
water system were the steel tanks, 30 feet in diameter
and 5 feet deep. One of these was situated atop Burro
Mesa, the location of most of the ranch and its best
grass. It made more sense to water the cattle where they
grazed than having them come down to the valley to get
water. Otherwise they walked off the fat they’d put on
and used a great deal of time they could have put to bet-
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2012
ter use grazing on the good grass. A second steel tank in
the valley served several purposes. It supplied the cold
water piped to the adobe ranch house in the valley as
well as reserve for the cattle. The massive wood-frame
windmill was the booster pump to lift the water to the
mesa top. At the pinnacle of this wood tower is a huge
gear box that transferred the wind’s horizontal force into
sufficient vertical power to allow the water to fill the
upper tank. The valve mechanism in the booster-mill
was patented by Sam’s neighbor, Homer Wilson. This
wooden tower stands today as the solitary testimony to
Sam Nail’s industry, insight and ingenuity.
The valley tank was also the neighborhood swim-
ming pool. When the Burnham cousins, their families
and other visitors, like the Wilsons, came for more than
a swim, stayed for supper and overnight, Nena Nail was
up to the challenge. The two-room adobe had been
extended with the addition of a wood-frame kitchen and
porch on the mesa side of the house. Just inside the
northern wall of the adobe room, around the door from
the kitchen, was an evaporator milk cooler. In that same
adobe room, with thick mud walls for insulation, were
shelves and shelves of canned peaches, vegetables and
fruit always ready to be taken down from behind the
muslin sheet that kept the dust off them. If someone
dropped in unexpectedly and stayed for a meal, Nena
always had a big pot of beans simmering on the kitchen
wood stove on the west wall of the frame kitchen.
Although a cold water tap ran with water from the tank,
the wood stove served to heat water for cooking, bathing
and the weekly wash.