Ep. 34: Big Bend and the Deserts of the West | The American West

In the eyes of the world, the West’s several deserts have become defining landscapes for the modern region. But one of them, the Chihuahuan Desert, has produced the only large public lands found anywhere in Texas. Therein lies a story that shapes a state. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  By no means as well-known as the Sonoran or Mojave Deserts, the Chihuahuan Desert nonetheless is responsible for giving at least a piece of Texas acclaim to being Western. I'm Dan Florys, and this is The American West.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Big Ben and the deserts of the West.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  It's 3 a.m. on a January 1st, and I'm about as far southward in North America as one can get and still be in the United States.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Where would that be? Well, I'm somewhere outside the crumbling, rock-bruin, dirt-streaked town of Terlingua, just west of famed Big Ben National Park. I'm in the midst of a thronging, post-New Year's Eve soiree, to be honest, and the party that never ends is holding forth this night at the refurbished old Terlingua Bordello, basically an adobe cavity with a cement floor and tin roof topped off by a red signal light from a train crossing. This is New Year's Eve in Transpacas, Texas, with real old Texas Rangers in string ties,

• 3:01Speaker 04

  what appears to be a Buffalo Bill Cody clone, someone else decked out as Cactus Ed Abbey, and someone else who may actually be Freewheeling Franklin from the fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic books. Everyone is two-stepping alongside UT hippies from Austin, river runners out of Montana, Mexicans from across the nearby Rio Grande, park service rangers in partial uniform, a delicate New Ager or two, a photographer from Texas Monthly Magazine, and the cowboy flotsam from a slew of local bunkhouses. There are several truly beautiful women sipping freshly distilled Soto and mezcal.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  As a friend puts it with true Texas elegance, "just a whole buttload of people." And there's music, of course, guitars, banjos, a mandolin, an accordion laying down rhythm, and it's rollicking across the desert so joyously and distinctively regional that local coyote packs in every direction are joining in. It's either too late or too early to think hard about such things, but having spent the past week backpacking the South Rim Trail in Big Ben's Chisos Mountains, rafting the length of the Rio Grande's Santa Elena Canyon, and car camping in my Jeep down 55 four-wheeler miles of the river road,

• 4:26Speaker 04

  to me, the scene appears to be the purest expression of a western soul you're likely to find in Texas. At least since the Armadillo World headquarters closed in Austin in the early 1980s. Where else in Texas for such a thing but way down here in the so-called Transpacas, the downward plunging piece of this gigantic state that actually has enough public lands to qualify as a part of the modern West? Why here for such a thing and nowhere else? Because of the enveloping desert, all who visit will agree.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  This part of Texas is western because of public lands, and these public lands exist because of this immense mystical slice of America that is the Chihuahuan Desert, which sprawls in every direction around us. The desert, of course. Cause and animating effect here all followed from a condition of desertness. This unlikely crowd has joined here tonight, drinking the desert's juices, ingesting its flesh, agog at its dark sky stars, enraptured with its stories, dancing to music inspired by rock and sun

• 5:51Speaker 04

  because the desert produced Big Ben National Park and its state park sister, Big Ben Ranch. That left this part of Texas a wonderland open for human adventure.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  There are many kinds of landscape settings to celebrate in the West. From alpine lake shores to towering redwoods. From Pacific beaches with salt breezes to plains badlands. But if one of the defining characteristics of the West is aridity, the deserts get us to that apotheosis western effect sooner than any other ecologies. It's maybe not an exaggeration to say that we are living in an age of a desert aesthetic, even a desert chic. Some of us these days have grown up with romantic notions about saguaro-studded mountains

• 6:56Speaker 04

  bathed in neon sunsets, which may be an emerging landscape shorthand for the West in the eyes of the wider world. Of course, if a desert mystique does exist, it must be a recently acquired taste for its opposite, revulsion and even fear at the desert's barrenness and weather extremes can still flirt about the edges of the mind. Think about it. Remove the invention of air conditioning from the Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and Phoenix equations, and no more Palm Springs, Vegas, or Phoenix.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  The desert I want to talk about now is a specific one. The Chihuahuan Desert, which is the largest desert in North America, stretching 1,000 miles from Mexico's arch-tourist town of San Luis de Potosí across six Mexican states before finally lapping across the Rio Grande to reach almost as far north as Albuquerque. Despite its vast size and penetration into the US, the Chihuahuan is the least known and understood of all the West deserts.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  The famous American desert cities, Palm Springs, Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, are not here. Hidden away in the far tip of Texas, remote El Paso, which Texas clearly stole from New Mexico, is the only large American city in this desert. The Texas towns it harbors, Marathon, Marfa, Alpine, Presidio, Terlingua, are interesting and eccentric but barely known outside the state. In New Mexico, the only Chihuahuan desert towns of any size, Carlsbad, Socorro, Las Cruces, Silver City,

• 9:01Speaker 04

  one with the unlikely name of Truth or Consequences, exists in the bottom of a western state many Americans think you need a passport to visit. So oddly, given its geographic sweep and the fact that it's the only American desert that lies east of the continental divide, the Chihuahuan is not a famous western desert. Except among Texans, which means there's a story here. The Sonoran Desert, which also reaches northward up from Mexico, because of Tucson and especially Phoenix, a giant American city with professional and big-time college sports teams

• 9:43Speaker 04

  and more golf courses than many entire states have, is far better known. In America's winters, Phoenix functions like a deep-sink western version of Florida. The Sonoran Desert gets press and media attention. The Sonoran is the only American desert to possess the towering cactus that says "western desert" to people everywhere. The giant saguaro is not found in the West's cold deserts like the scablands of eastern Washington, the sagebrush flats of the Wyoming Basin and the Great Basin, or the Colorado Plateau.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Giant saguaros don't even extend into the Mojave Desert. This ultimate cactus is found only in the Sonoran.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Despite similar, unimpeachable, hot desert qualifications and a shared border with the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan Desert likewise entirely lacks saguaros. One of the remarkable features of the Icoton where the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts meet, readily visible at a spot called Texas Pass on Interstate 10 in southeastern Arizona, is the presence of saguaro cactus on the west side of the pass, but none to the east, where Chihuahuan species take hold.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Like other deserts, the Chihuahuan does have a diagnostic plant species, though. It's called the Agave lechegia. In contrast to 25-foot-tall, mini-limbs saguaros, lechegias grow like clumps of sharp bananas, the clumps reaching maybe 18 inches high. That, in fact, may explain something about the anonymity of the Chihuahuan Desert compared to the west's more famous ones. Travel to Phoenix and hike the Maricopa Trail, or visit one of the units of Saguaro National Park near Tucson, and you're in a forest of saguaros soaring up around you like cactus

• 12:05Speaker 04

  redwoods. Head west from Las Vegas into Red Rock Canyon State Park, or east from Palm Springs, California, to Joshua Tree National Park, both in the Mojave Desert, and you're walking through a remarkable and impressive desert overstory of 20-foot-tall Joshua trees that resemble yucca sprays perched on top of branched tree trunks. Go to the Chihuahuan Desert, and your characteristic plant is a banana-clump succulent that doesn't reach to your knees. Not so memorable. Which may explain why, as deserts go,

• 12:46Speaker 04

  the name Chihuahuan doesn't trip neon lights in the larger American imagination. But if you take the time to learn and know and appreciate this American desert, it very likely is going to worm under your skin with a mystical desert infection that virus-like will lodge somewhere deep inside and never leave. Myself, I got infected by the Chihuahuan Desert thirty years ago. It's never given me up.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  We humans, apparently, have always been susceptible to desert power. Although we didn't evolve in deserts, the desert was always out there on the margins, resisting us with its aridity, but compelling us with the strange music of its effects on life and topography. The desert is both presence and character in the sacred texts of the Western world, the Koran and the Bible. In the Bible, the desert is lodged like a knot in wood as a sacred setting where Jesus of Nazareth tested himself. It's the ultimate unconquerable wilderness, the antithesis of the Garden of Eden before the fall.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Rippling out of North Africa across the Mediterranean, sun and dry air and blue sky, called, and painters and writers and mystics went. In the American West, a similar desert muse pulled Ernest Blumenstein and Nikolai Fetschen, Georgia O'Keeffe and Andrew Dasberg to New Mexico's desert aura a century ago.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  In American West Desert Taxonomy, it was a naturalist named Forrest Shreve, who first recognized a distinctive desert in the southwest. He named the Chihuahuan. Given the state of desert intoxication today, it's pretty intriguing to burrow a bit into what we thought of the Chihuahuan back then, back in the day. One really good way to get at that is through the eyes of American explorers. And there is one, a man named Robert Hill, who penetrated the Chihuahuan Desert by doing exactly what many people do today. Well over a century ago, Hill passed along the far southern border

• 15:20Speaker 04

  of the United States by floating the Great River, the Rio Grande, through the suite of spectacular canyons that river carves into the country that in our time has become Big Bend National Park. So far as man's conception of time is concerned, the American desert is, always has been, and always will be. So said Robert Hill to begin the article he wrote about his trip, which is not a bad opening line from a geologist. But Robert Hill was not ordinary, and neither was the desert he was writing about. A native of Tennessee,

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Hill had come to Texas as a young man, become fascinated with the study of geology, and ended up getting a degree in that field from Cornell University. Although he was briefly on the faculty of the University of Texas, by 1885, Hill had gone to work for John Wesley Powell at the United States Geological Survey, and on to a quite prestigious career as a geologist, eventually working on projects like the Panama Canal.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  As an example of the American mind caught in the crossfire of changing ideas about western deserts, Hill's account of this first official exploration of the Chihuahuan Desert is almost as perfect as a circle. In order to emulate what Powell had done on the Colorado River, Hill was dispatched by the Geological Survey to investigate frontier rumors that on its way from the Colorado Rockies to the salt flats of the Gulf of Mexico, at its most southerly loop, the Rio Grande contained canyons as frightening as those of the Grand Canyon. The year was 1899.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  The reaction of Americans to deserts at the time was still pretty much revulsion. Desert country was the antithesis of the green, wet, lush landscapes old-worlders had settled in the east, a promise of which had sent many of the first American settlers going west to places like Oregon. Hill's Running the Canyons of the Rio Grande appeared in The Century Magazine. Years ago, at a book fair somewhere, I picked up a battered, surviving copy, then went to a bar and devoured Hill's account to the accompaniment of a couple of margaritas.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  The magazine's 1899 layout of Hill's piece of exploring was pretty damn sensational, with seven half-toned plates of downright beautiful drawings by legendary painter Thomas Moran, whose art of Yellowstone in the early 1870s had almost guaranteed the creation of the world's first national park. While a bar is not a bad place to sit back and lose yourself in Hill's story, I'd now argue that maybe the best way to read this early Chihuahuan Desert impression is to take it to Big Bend Park. Hike far enough into the Chisos Mountains to find an alligator juniper for a backrest

• 18:46Speaker 04

  and a bit of shade, then dig your feet into the ground for balance, because Hill's account is about to carry you on America's whiplashing perceptions about deserts a century ago.

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  Hill's party of six, loaded into three John boats, started their "long" journey into the unknown, as they put it, at the border town of Presidio on October the 5th, 1899. Hill was not the first to descend these now-famous canyons of the Texas-Mexico border. During a low ebb in his career in 1855, that painter of western Indians, George Catlin, apparently floated through the Middle Rio Grande's dramatic canyons. In 1881-82, Texas Ranger Charles Neville ricocheted through Santa Elena Canyon on a winter adventure.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Local James McMahon, whom Hill would hire as a guide, said he'd been through the canyons three times. But in the 1850s, the Mexican Boundary Survey had seen its boats destroyed in the second big canyon, Mariscal, and had then pronounced all of the Middle Rio Grande canyons impassable. When Hill's party arrived on the scene, the canyons were officially listed as "unexplored." Hill obviously felt the mystical pull of deserts with his essay's opening line about timelessness, but he quickly reverted to the more general distaste Americans felt.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  "Every aspect of the big bend country, landscape, configuration, rocks, and vegetation," he said, "is weird and strange and of a type unfamiliar to the inhabitants of civilized lands."

• 23:30Speaker 04

  The basins between the desert mountains were covered with what Hill called "a spiteful, repulsive vegetation." What was there were the cone-shaped sprays of lechuguas and agavas and sotoles and yuccas, some of the latter in near tree form. Cactus was everywhere, of course, prickly perils and barrel cactus and many armed choias of several species. Pale-green mesquite trees and tens of thousands, millions actually, of fragrant creosote bushes made up the shrubs and half-shrubs.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  The creosotes, South American arrivals here from only a few thousand years before, that lent an intoxicating perfume to the desert after rains. Gnarled alligator junipers grew on mountains like the Chisos Uplift, and cottonwoods waved yellowing fall leaves right through the winter and the arrival of spring flowers. How did Hill react to all this? All of it was repulsive. Ocatillos with their showy red flowers, a plant now much admired in all the deserts of the Southwest.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Hill characterized those as "like serpents rising from a Hindu juggler's carpet." At the time they reached the first of the Big Bend's canyons, the Colorado, a stone labyrinth that was about to plunge the river through towering vertical slots without sun, Hill continued to be shocked by what he called "mocking desert flora." But day by day, experience with the desert began to soften him. So soon he could speak of coming to "a valley which presents a beautiful panorama of desert form and color.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  The hills are of all sizes and shapes, dazzling white with vermilion foothills of red clay," he wrote. When the brown current carried their boats at last into what he called “the Grand Canyon,” by which he meant “Santa Elena Canyon,” via a narrow vertical slit in the face of the escarpment, Hill concluded that “the solemnity and beauty of the spectacle were overwhelming.” These were the first references to beauty on the exploration. Even with his built-in bias against deserts, Hill, it turned out, was capable of being

• 26:17Speaker 04

  moved by the same scenes that thrill Big Band River runners in our time. Hill’s party portaged the one major rapids in Santa Elena, the famous rockslide. That took them three days of misery, yet left them with an impression of unusual beauty, Hill said, particularly during “the glorious moonlight,” which is one of the characteristics of the desert. From the rimrock, looking 1,700 feet down into Santa Elena, Hill couldn’t help himself. “The view is grand beyond all conception,” he marveled.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Exiting through the staircase formations at Santa Elena Canyon’s mouth, Hill’s party was now in what he called “the Turlingo Desert,” and without the verticality of the canyon to admire, he once more mustered classic desert revulsion. “The Turlingua Desert was one of the most bizarre pieces of landscape that can be imagined,” he wrote, “one of the hottest and most sterile regions conceivable.” Again, though, the compensation was vertical. Looming on the eastern horizon now were the Chisos Mountains, a group of white-clad spirits

• 27:41Speaker 04

  rising from a base of misty gray shadow and vegetation, Hill said.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Dead ahead on the Rio Grande was Mariscal Canyon, where as Hill put it, "The river presented the appearance of apparently plunging into a seething hole without a visible outlet." Soon they were through Mariscal, though, floating past the hot springs and approaching the village of Boquillas on the Mexican side of the river, a collection of what Hill called "dirty adobe huts." Now they were approaching Boquillas Canyon, which Hill thought better deserved the Appalachian Grand than even Santa Elena, as it was a place, as he said, "of remarkable forms of rock sculpture."

• 28:31Speaker 04

  "The moon was full while we were in this canyon," he wrote, "and the effects of its illuminations were indescribably beautiful. Language cannot describe the beauty of such nights."

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Exiting Boquillas and their successful passage through Water, Big Bend National Park's great river canyons, Hill found the river now turning almost due north, a stretch of the Rio Grande known as the Lower Canyons, today a marvelous descent along the Rio Grande National Wild and Scenic River. Hill wrote that this lower course is almost a continuous canyon to Del Rio and from an aesthetic point of view is even more picturesque and beautiful than the portion of the river already described. In the clear air, they guessed the cliffs were 500 feet high.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  An actual ascent proved them to be 1,650 feet. They found more hot springs and many forms, as Hill wrote, like the Badlands of Dakota. In their last run before the Devil River entered the Rio Grande, Hill was overcome by what he said were some of the most beautiful and picturesque effects where the canyon walls were purest white, which weathers into great curves.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  It had taken a full month of exposure to the desert, but eventually the words weird, repulsive, spiteful, bizarre, and sterile all disappeared from Robert Hill's vocabulary. In that subtle and simple alteration in language, Hill had vaulted a gulf. The Chihuahuan Desert might remain a difficult place for Americans to imagine as home, but Hill's experience showed that the desert was a place Americans could begin to think about in an entirely new way. The western deserts were not the east, they were not the Midwest, or the south, or Oregon. They were different from all those places,

• 30:48Speaker 04

  different even one from the other. But deserts possessed a magic of light and form that was powerful, one that couldn't be denied. Deserts were capable of stirring the soul.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  The western deserts do something else. In the form of national parks, they've offered up public lands' possibilities to keep their magic alive and available. The Mojave Desert landed its major public lands' feature, Joshua Tree National Park, now a monstrous 795,000 acres, in 1936. Six national parks, five of them in southern Utah, plus Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, preserved the deserts of the Colorado Plateau. Great Basin National Park was established around

• 31:47Speaker 04

  an island mountain range of 77,000 acres in 1986. Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument, established in 1937, was the initial large Sonoran Desert Preserve, a cactus fairyland of 331,000 acres. Two units of Saguaro National Park, set aside in 1994, offer up 92,000 acres of Sonoran/Saguaro Mountains and Basins, bracketing Tucson.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  The Chihuahuan Desert, whose crowning expression lies in that southerly plunge of the US map known as the Big Bend Country, has inspired major set-asides of public land, too. But because the Chihuahuan is east of the Continental Divide, with a large part of its expanse in Texas, this desert has a different story. In neighboring New Mexico, significant pieces of the Chihuahuan emerged as parks and national monuments fairly early.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Eastern New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns National Park, set aside because of its almost 120 limestone caves, opened as a park in 1930. The 47,000 acres of Carlsbad does preserve an impressive slice of desert landscape, though three-quarters of which is now official wilderness. Westward in New Mexico, White Sands National Park is 160,000 acres of rippling, snow-white gypsum, a vast dune field in the midst of the Chihuahuan.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Originally established as a national monument in 1933, White Sands National Park designation is recent, 2019. The most typical, and I think the most stunning, Chihuahuan desert creation in New Mexico is also recent. The vast 496,000 acres of Oregon Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument, half of which is official wilderness, is near Las Cruces in the south of the state. Its birth was in 2014.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  That leaves the huge sweep of the Chihuahua across southwestern Texas to account for. And as I explained in episode 22 of The American West, Texas has a history that left it almost entirely without federal land ownership. Not only did the state never experience the public lands creations that typify the West, Texas very consciously privatized virtually every foot of its territory, including even the deserts and mountains of the Big Bend country. Raised in the deep south myself, and with the experience of living for almost a quarter

• 35:03Speaker 04

  century in Texas, I think I recognize Texas's situation with respect to the modern West. Texas is the South's West. Like Georgia or the Carolinas, Texas removed all its native tribes from the state. Beyond the 100th meridian, Texas possesses landscapes that are geologically and ecologically Western, but the southern roots of its citizenry made it difficult for Texas to think in terms of public values when it came to land. Land was for owning, fencing, and keeping everybody else out.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  And therein is a problem. It's not possible to overemphasize how necessary it is for people to be able to experience the landscapes of their places. There's no route to becoming a native of place without it, no way to develop a sense of the fundamental world, the natural community of plants and animals of which are a part. For that, you have to have the full five-sense experience of direct contact. Which is why the Big Bend of the Chihuahua Desert is so important for all Westerners, for all Americans, but especially so for Texans.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Here's how Big Ben changed Texas. By every right, one of our revered Western heroes ought to be a federal official named Roger Toll, whose name adorns a mountain in Big Ben National Park but is otherwise almost anonymous in Western history. Toll was a park service man, an experienced superintendent who'd headed up Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, and Mount Rainier National Parks. He was born in Denver, and with public lands out the door, he'd climbed mountains—50 peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park alone.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, in Texas in the 1930s, there were a handful of national legislators who thought such a grand state shouldn't be left out in the creation of crown jewel national parks. So Roger Toll journeyed to Texas and evaluated seven potential sites for national park or monument status. His conclusion was that if Texas were willing to acquire the lands, since at the time, the National Park Service had no budget to buy private lands, there were at least three nationally important landscapes in the state.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Big Ben, the Davis Mountains, also in the Transpicas, and a canyon called McKittrick in a range split between Texas and New Mexico known as the Guadalupe Mountains. All three were Chihuahua Desert landscapes in the only part of Texas with topography on the scale of the rest of the American West. In effect, Roger Toll had put his finger on three potential sacred places in the Texas Southwest. Charmed particularly by Big Ben, which he thought one of the noted scenic spectacles

• 38:39Speaker 04

  of the United States, Toll in 1936 was in the process of drawing up a map of possible Big Ben Park boundaries when he was tragically killed in a car accident near Dimming, New Mexico.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Building on Toll's legacy, the Texas Democratic Convention made it part of their platform that for reasons of Lone Star pride, the state should seek at least one national park. And it was clear that Toll's first pick was Big Ben and the Canyons of the Rio Grande. Equally critical, since this was during the Great Depression, creation of a Big Ben park would serve as a federal bailout of pioneer ranchers, whose cattle had devastated the fragile desert grasslands in little more than three decades of grazing.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  Some of them were already letting their lands go back to the state in lieu of paying taxes. Then, the Texas bottom line set in. The New Deal of the 1930s represented a first rising tide of conservative distrust of the federal government and the state. The National Park Service planners wanted a 1.5 million acre park. With unsold Texas school lands in the desert going for a penny an acre then, the total purchase price for that much of the Big Ben was a measly $1.5 million.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  Yet the Texas Legislature and Governor James Alred refused throughout the 1930s to appropriate the money to acquire the land. A citizen's effort to raise money for the national park, like the ones that were at the very same time creating Acadia and Smoky Mountains National Parks in the East, in Texas netted the munificent sum of $8,347.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  It required nearly a decade of President Franklin Roosevelt's entreaties, but finally, in 1947, Texas transferred at least half the land the Park Service wanted, 708,000 acres, to the federal government. Once park personnel evicted 25,000 cattle, 18,000 goats, 8,000 sheep, and 1,000 horses, Big Bend, today, an international biosphere reserve of 801,000 acres, an international dark skies park, and the most dramatic desert park in America, finally opened to the public.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  Because of Big Bend's remoteness, even today, it struggles to attract visitors from other states. But the park has been a game changer for Texans. It's made tiny towns like Alpine and Marfa, Marathon and Terlingua, destinations for artists, photographers, nature lovers of all kinds. Because access to the natural world does things like this, Big Bend and the Chihuahuan Desert inspired a cultural byproduct now known as Texas regionalism, an arts movement begun by painters Jerry Bywaters, Alexander Hoag, William Lester, and Otis Dozier.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  They and the scores who followed them were entranced enough by the desert to create what they called "an art of the southwest for the southwest." The Big Bend effect has been a thing for a while now. Once I sat sipping coffee at the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon at dawn on New Year's Day and watched Texas music legend Butch Hancock row then-Governor Ann Richardson out of the depths of the gorge into the sunlight of the Terlingua Desert. The Big Ben Effect is very much alive in the present moment.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Somehow, in one of the reddest of all Republican states, Texas conservatives and liberals, ranchers and tree huggers, stand in agreement. There absolutely should not be, cannot be, a border wall built in Big Ben National Park. Big Ben Park presently has no official wilderness designated, but former Big Ben Superintendent Bob Kruebenacher is presently leading a campaign to change that, too. That trio of Texas Chihuahua Desert places Roger Toll had recommended in the 1930s?

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Well, despite the Grand Dark Sky Astronomical Events now held at the famed McDonald Observatory, the beautiful Davis Mountains and its crowning peak, Mount Livermore, the second highest in the state, has never become a national park. And unless widespread Texas hatred of federal projects somehow magically evaporates, that's not likely ever to happen. When Lyndon Johnson was president, though, his wounded state pride about Texas's lack

• 44:38Speaker 04

  of national parks sent Interior Secretary Stuart Udall back to the Chihuahua Desert. I was once lucky enough to breakfast with Udall and got to ask him about his reaction to Toll's third choice, the Guadalupe Mountains, a range of desert canyons and pinnacles lapping against the New Mexico border that make up eight of the 10 highest peaks in Texas, including the highest one. "That place just bowled me over," Udall told me. "That transparent desert air, El Capitan looming like the prow of a ship and visible

• 45:21Speaker 04

  from 100 miles away, and that canyon, what is it, McKittrick? My lord, what a paradise that place is." There was just no question in my mind. It was a national park-class landscape.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  By now, the National Park Service did have an acquisition budget. So, McKittrick Canyon and the Guadalupe Mountains became Guadalupe Mountains National Park in 1966. Its 86,000 acres of Chihuahua Desert opened to the public in 1972. And in the words of the late Austin music icon, Kinky Friedman, "This grand Chihuahua Desert Park continues to this day to offer the highest high in Texas."

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• 48:51Speaker 07

  Dan, in this episode, you're talking about deserts, and specifically the Chihuahua Desert.

• 49:00Speaker 07

  I'll admit, as a child of the Midwest, I didn't think of deserts as being, obviously, everyone's heard of the Sahara Desert. But growing up, I didn't think about desert as being sort of discreet areas like the Rocky Mountains, or the Cascades, or the Appalachians. Yeah. I thought of deserts as just being sort of blank spaces on the map. Right, and you point in this, the beginning of this, you get into the different ways that humans, like the long relationship that humans have to deserts, sort of emotionally and intellectually and culturally. But I'll admit, I took a class, maybe my third year of undergrad,

• 49:43Speaker 07

  on the North American deserts. And what intrigued me about it was, I wasn't really aware that there were multiple deserts to think about, and differences between different deserts. Oh, yeah. And here, I'm just, you know, coming clean on my ignorance, but you obviously have had a long relationship with

• 50:04Speaker 07

  deserts as a resident of Texas, and time in New Mexico and all that. You think very carefully about particularities between these different landscapes and vegetation and all that.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm something of a desert rat, I guess, and have been for a long time. I can even date it. I think my interest in deserts probably goes back to having started reading Ed Abbey, maybe in the early 1970s, probably Desert Solitaire in particular. And at the time, I was fascinated by Western landscapes, but it was the Rocky Mountains that really intrigued me. And I had most of my trips to the West, I was still living in Louisiana at the time, early 70s.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Actually, I was in Texas in graduate school then, when I was reading Ed Abbey for the first time. And I was very much into mountains. And all my trips west, you know, were to the high 14-footers of Colorado, or to the Wind River Range in Wyoming, or the snowy range outside Laramie, or something like that. So I spent most of my time thinking and driving around, looking at mountains. But Abbey kind of made me start paying attention to deserts. And then I ended up, just by virtue of where my university postings were, sort of being

• 51:44Speaker 04

  stuck in a part of the American West that was more inclined to be arid and desert-like, and, you know, became fascinated with it all.

• 51:55Speaker 07

  Yeah. You, in this episode, you talk a lot about individual, sort of, conversion, I guess is a good word for it. You describe Hill.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, Robert Hill.

• 52:08Speaker 07

  Robert Hill going down the Rio Grande, and he begins by describing the desert in these terms of sort of mild horror and maybe disgust, right? And over time, you recognize that he... Or you observe that he changes his description of the desert and he sort of begins to appreciate it, but it strikes me again and again throughout this that there's, people have to be convinced of the desert's beauty and utility, maybe not utility is the right word, but its beauty and its values.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The desert is not a place particularly for people out of the Western Europe, Eastern American experience. The desert is something you have to develop a taste for.

• 53:02Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Because it doesn't come naturally, I don't think. And, you know, as I indicated a few minutes ago, it didn't really necessarily come naturally for me either. I mean, a kid coming out of Louisiana, a desert seemed to be the, absolutely, the antipode, the the farthest difference from the kind of world that I grew up in.

• 53:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  And that in itself, I think, was intriguing to me.

• 53:29Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  I was probably fascinated with deserts in the very beginning because, wow, this is such a base reversal from the kind of world that I grew up to. But I do think it's the desert mystique and fascination, and it's very real. A lot of people very much experience it and are compelled by it, but it's something that you come to. And, you know, I also, I mentioned in this script that one of the things that makes it possible to regard the desert as being this mystical kind of place is modern technology.

• 54:08Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Because without it, without air conditioning, as we all know, everyone who has ever spent any time in Phoenix, for example, knows very well, if air conditioning did not exist, Phoenix would not exist.

• 54:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  It's a technological revolution in the 20th century with air conditioning and automobiles in particular, that makes the desert, makes it possible for the desert to sort of put out. It's kind of magical hold over people.

• 54:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, if you're riding a horse through that country and you're worried about your horse's next drink of water, it's hard to appreciate the aesthetics of this landscape.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  It's hard to appreciate it. So it's a part of the West, I think, that, you know, maybe just like warm clothing makes it possible to enjoy the Rocky Mountains in the winter. Air conditioning makes it possible to enjoy the deserts and automobiles too. And so a lot of the, a lot of the appreciation for deserts, a lot of the great books that have been written about deserts are 20th century things and not since.

• 55:18Speaker 07

  In this episode, you also tell a story, not only of sort of an individual conversion, but also broader cultural and institutional conversion to appreciating the deserts in terms of talking, in terms of the creation of national parks.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 07

  That preserve these landscapes. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the relationship between individual experience and those larger institutional transformations? Because there's certainly a connection there, although it's probably not as neatly mapped as you might imagine.

• 55:58Speaker 04

  Well, as I say in this particular episode, I lived in Texas for two decades. My first university job was there.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  And one of the things about Texas that I've, I've talked about before in these podcasts is that it's, it's a hard thing to decide whether Texas is a part of the West. Because for one thing, Half or more of Texas seems to ecologically belong to the South rather than the West. But there is a Western third or so of Texas that is geographically, ecologically, geologically Western. And so it fulfills that kind of, you know, that necessity of being a part of the West. But the thing that distinguishes the modern West, of course, is the public lands phenomenon.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  This is what really makes the whole, the whole wheel spin around the axle of the modern West is having the public lands and all the issues that go with managing public lands. And Texas, because of its particular history, didn't get to have that and didn't attempt to have that. In fact, it sort of deliberately moved away from it. But the Chihuahuan Desert provided the opportunity in the form of now two pretty significant national parks. Big Bend National Park, which is the one I talk about primarily in this episode, but also Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which is a much more recent one.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  They're both national parks in the state of Texas, in the Chihuahuan Desert or Transpacas part of the state. And they have really, in a way, become of outsized importance, I think, to people in Texas in particular, because it's the one part of the state where you really have the landscape open for adventure. And in my own personal experience in Texas, in the two decades that I lived there, and I mean, I did my best in the park. I lived up in the high plains country and ended up exploring a lot of the canyon country there, almost all of which was under private fence and no trespassing signs.

• 58:25Speaker 04

  And there were two state parks there, which I explored minutely and also did an awful lot of trespassing and occasionally would ask some rancher if I could explore a canyon on his property, but mostly I just kind of trespassed in order to explore that part of the world. But when I wanted to actually experience something of the public lands state of Texas, the place to go was always the Big Bend and out to Big Bend National Park and Guadalupe Mountains National Park. And I mean, I've got a buddy in Austin, I just got a text from a couple of days ago who told me that he's getting knee surgery done on one of his knees because it's been,

• 59:07Speaker 04

  he and I climbed Guadalupe Peak, the highest peak in Texas, in that park about 30 or 35 years ago, and he hasn't been up since then, and he's getting his knee fixed so he can go up to the top of Guadalupe Peak again.

• 59:21Speaker 07

  Nice.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  So it's that kind of, that kind of thing that these public lands do, even for a state like Texas, which has so little of it, nonetheless Texans, I think, have a disproportionate kind of pride in this part of the state, and with good reason, it seems to me.

• 59:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it's, it's interesting too, that the Big Bend has become such a flashpoint in the headlines recently.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 07

  With the idea of a border wall and the opposition to it, you know, you read, you read some of these articles and they're talking to, you know, local sheriffs and folks who are very conservative, but this is a line in the sand for them because of how much they value those, those parks.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  That's exactly it, and, and it's, so it brings what we were just talking about up to the very present moment. I mean, Texas is perfectly content with a border wall to be on the outside of the park, even in the Transpacas, they're willing to have it be up around Presidio and so forth, but not in the park, no way. And so it's one of those things that's linked to a kind of a pride of state and a pride in this public lands National Park there, that no matter which side of the political fence you're on. You're against there being a border wall and Big Bend National Park.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  And that's a, you know, that probably says volumes about the importance of this place to the state.

• 1:01:03Speaker 07

  Yeah. And for those of us who love public lands and, and

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:08Speaker 07

  Parks, it's very encouraging to see that.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  It's very encouraging to see that. Absolutely.

• 1:01:11Speaker 07

  Thanks, Dan.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Yep, that rental.

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