Local Stories in Presidio County
Texas·9 places
History
Juana Pedraza's Fort
Fort Leaton is named for Ben Leaton, a freighter on the Chihuahua road, the wagon route from the Gulf at Indianola to Presidio del Norte and on to Chihuahua City. In 1848 he bought an adobe compound at La Junta from Juan Bustillos, who had lived in it since 1830, and made it a private fortress and trading post: an L about two hundred feet along its river side, walls a foot and a half thick, a…
Nature
La Junta de los Rios
The Rio Grande reaches Presidio nearly spent, most of it drawn off upstream in New Mexico and the El Paso valley, and the hundred and fifty miles above it run dry often enough to be called the Forgotten Reach.
Military
The Big Bend District
The army came to Marfa on 29 January 1911, when two troops of the Third Cavalry made a camp they called Camp Albert. It became Camp Marfa, and on the first day of 1930 Fort D. A. Russell. Through the Mexican Revolution the post was headquarters of the army's Big Bend District, which strung some forty small outposts along three hundred miles of the Rio Grande.
History
The Burial of Mr. Spanish
In 1954 Evelyn Davis, a seventh grade teacher at Marfa's Blackwell School, had her pupils write on slips of paper that they would not speak Spanish. The slips went into a cardboard coffin, and the school gathered at the flagpole to bury it in the flower bed.
Industry & Science
The Candelilla Trade
Candelilla is a grey green, all but leafless desert spurge that grows in stands on both sides of the Rio Grande and carries a hard wax on its stems to hold its moisture in. The stalks go into a vat of boiling river water, sulphuric acid is poured over them, and the wax comes up as a brown foam that is skimmed off and left to set in blocks. In that raw state it is called cerote.
History
The County Seat Election
Presidio County was organised in 1871 and ran from the Rio Grande to the Davis Mountains, with its seat at Fort Davis. The courthouse there later burned, and the record of the election that had chosen it burned with it.
History
The Presidio Mine
In September 1880 John W. Spencer, a rancher and freighter supplying Fort Davis, picked up a surface rock that proved to carry silver. He showed it to Colonel William R. Shafter of the First Infantry, who had it assayed. By June 1882 the partners had leased ground to San Francisco mining speculators, and in late summer 1883 the Presidio Mining Company was organised.
Transport
The Presidio Rail Bridge
The Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway was meant to run from Kansas City to the Pacific at Topolobampo, and it never got there. The Santa Fe bought what was left of it in 1928, and in 1930 it closed the last gap in Texas: running rights over another company's track from Alpine to Paisano Pass, then seventy two miles of new line of its own down to Presidio, and a bridge over the Rio Grande to…
History
The Refugee March to Marfa
Ojinaga, across the river from Presidio, was the last town in northern Mexico still held by federal troops. Pancho Villa opened his final assault on the evening of 10 January 1914, the federals broke overnight, and the town was his on the eleventh.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
