Nature
Eagle Nest Canyon
Eagle Nest Canyon, which runs up from the Rio Grande along the eastern edge of Langtry, holds one of the most important archaeological sites in North America. It is called Bonfire Shelter, and it lies about a kilometre up from the river junction behind a rampart of limestone blocks that fell from the roof and wall of the overhang. That collapse is the reason the site exists.
History
Fate Bell Shelter
Fate Bell Shelter, in the canyon that gives Seminole Canyon State Park its name, is one of the largest rock shelters in the Lower Pecos, and its back wall carries some of the best preserved painting of its kind anywhere. The style is called Pecos River, and it is very old.
History
Pumpville
Pumpville exists because steam locomotives drink. In 1882 the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, building the line that became the Southern Pacific, put a water stop on a stretch of West Texas where surface water is close to theoretical, and a settlement grew around the job of keeping the tanks full. It was called Samuels at first.
History
Sotol City
Comstock, in western Val Verde County, is a town on its second site and its second name. It was platted as Sotol City, east of where it stands now, presumably after the spiky desert plant that covers these hills, though no record actually says so.
History
The 1954 Pecos Flood
The highway bridge that carries US 90 over the Pecos River replaced one the river destroyed. In late June 1954 the remains of Hurricane Alice stalled over the Pecos drainage and dropped as much as twenty eight inches of rain on ground that could absorb almost none of it. The water came down the canyon as a wall.
History
The Border Blaster
John Romulus Brinkley made a fortune implanting goat glands in men who wanted their youth back. The operation cured nothing and killed people: by 1930 he had signed death certificates for dozens of patients, many of whom had arrived healthy, and he faced a run of wrongful death suits.
Nature
The Drowned Canyons
Amistad Dam, finished in 1969 by the United States and Mexico together, holds back the Rio Grande a dozen miles above Del Rio. The water it raised backed up the Rio Grande, the Pecos and the Devils rivers until the canyon floors of the Lower Pecos were under a reservoir. Archaeologists had been racing it for eleven years.
History
The Jersey Lilly
Roy Bean kept a saloon in Langtry and held court in it, and called himself the Law West of the Pecos, which for a while he genuinely was. The appointment was real: justice of the peace from August 1882, voted out twice, back both times, and retired of his own accord in 1902.
Transport
The Loop Line
When the railroad first reached the Pecos in 1882 it did not cross where it crosses now. There was no way to carry a track straight over a canyon this deep with the money and the methods available, so the engineers took the trains down into it.
Entertainment & Sports
The Sandbar Prizefight
On 21 February 1896 the heavyweight fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher was held on a sandbar in the Rio Grande, at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon below Langtry. It had taken four years to find anywhere to hold it.
History
The Seminole Scouts
Seminole Canyon is not named for anyone who lived in it. It takes its name from the Black Seminole Indian Scouts, descendants of people who had escaped slavery in the American South and found refuge among the Seminole in Florida, then went by way of Indian Territory to Mexico.
History
The Silver Spike
On 12 January 1883, about three miles west of the Pecos River, a rail gang working east from El Paso met a rail gang working west from San Antonio, and Thomas Wentworth Peirce, president of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio, drove a silver spike to join them.
Museums & Art
The White Shaman Mural
On a shelter wall above the Pecos River, about a mile up from where it joins the Rio Grande, there is a painting twenty six feet long and thirteen feet high holding more than a hundred figures. It is roughly two thousand years old.
History
Vinegarroon
Where the Pecos River runs into the Rio Grande there was a town for a year or two. In 1882 the railroad was boring its second tunnel through the canyon wall on the west side of the Pecos, and the camp that housed the crews doing it stood on this ground: tents, several hundred workers at least and by some accounts thousands, most of them Chinese labourers brought in for the job.
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.
