Listening
to
Yesterday
by Ron Payne
W
ant to know what it was like when bullets were
whizzing during the Glenn Springs raid in the
spring of 1916? Wonder what families plant-
ed and raised to live on? Did the kids go to school?
Where? How did they get there? Who taught? Where
did people go to shop? What was it like to work in the
mines? What was the pay? Who made the candelilla
wax and why? Did the ranchers take to the idea of a
Park? You can learn all this from the Oral History
Collection at Big Bend National Park.
My wife and I are volunteers at Big Bend National
Park. Our job is to work with the Park archaeologist and
Photos courtesy Celestina Amatulli.
archivist to make the Oral History collection of the Park
You
can
still
visit
Gilberto
Luna's
homeplace
on
Old
Maverick
Road
in
the
Park.
With
a
succession
of wives, he
more accessible. What we do is not just fun, it is a real
raised
dozens
of
children
there.
contribution to the Park and its visitors.
Duplicating almost a hundred printed interviews
which answer those questions has been a slow process. Over the course of more than three decades, Park staff
Robert Wirt, a volunteer in the Park for more than a
The Xerox 5330 is plenty fast, but it’s hard not to read and previous volunteers have devoted their time to the decade, has researched and documented genealogies of
the stories as we go. When we finish our project, though, collection, preservation, filing, transcribing and printing many of the Hispanic families who owned or lived on the
finding specifics in the narratives will be a lot easier. We of this, the Big Bend Oral History Project.
ranches that became the Park. These can be read at his
are going to create an index of all the oral histories so
The oral history interviews are done over phone lines web page lifebeforetheruins.com. Wirt's dedication to this
that casual readers or researchers can get their answers and across kitchen tables. They are conducted in the research has been an invaluable contribution to the her-
readily. We are privileged to have access to the secured Park and at the homes of the pioneers who made our his- itage of those pioneer families as well as to the Park.
room housing the archive of Big Bend National Park, tory. Last year we traveled from the Park to Midland to
Among those family records was a disagreement
filled with a fascinating variety of accessions. Along with record one of these rich personal stories. When they are about the ethnic background of one of the 'grandmoth-
Cretaceous clams, chalcedony flakes, stone weapons available, we scan photographs and old documents into ers.' When we went to the home of a descendant, she
and brass cartridge shells is a treasure of eye-witness digital files. These recorded and transcribed narratives showed us an official document from a Mexican court, a
accounts where people talk about what their life was like are not as complete as memoirs nor as intimate as a birth record from the late 19th century. Of course, we
during the first half of the 20th century in south recorded conversation between a grandmother and her made a copy for the Park's archive. From that document,
Brewster County.
granddaughter might be, but their contribution to Trans it is now clear that the grandmother's heritage was
In the archive room, dozens of reel-to-reel recordings Pecos history will soon be more available for research.
indigenous: her name, Xochitl, is in the Nahuatl dialect,
hold these stories. In what looks like a library card cata-
Following a recent interview, an emotional visit took the Nahuan branch of Uto-Aztecan language from cen-
log are hundreds more audio cassette tapes in twenty place as the last living child born in the Alvino House, tral Mexico.
drawers, some copies of the older reels. These narratives the oldest building in the Park, walked through the very
In the years immediately before the creation of the
describe life in the Park when it was ranch land and in its rooms in which she grew up. This visit happened as the National Park in 1944, much of its land was purchased
early years as a National Park. These voices cannot result of a relative who visited Castolon, telling us that by the State of Texas and then became “Texas's gift to
speak from within the drawers – they are waiting for us “Yes, one of Alvino's children lives in [a town north of the Nation.” Land holdings that were the treasured
or someone else to transcribe them to a printed page.
the Park].” Although we're not fluent in Spanish, the dreams of Anglo families such as Johnson, Rice,
Over 100 of the interviews have already been put interview went really well with help from other family Burnham, Nail, Wilson and Daniels became a part of the
down in black and white and are lined up in folders in a members. It was a happy moment for all concerned.
Park in the 1940s, but the land belonging to Wayne
large filing cabinet. Those are the ones we're duplicating.
12
Cenizo
First Quarter 2013