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. They called it Vinegarroon, after the whip scorpion native to this country, a dark armoured thing about as long as a thumb which, when something alarms it, sprays a fine mist from the base of its tail that is four fifths acetic acid. It smells exactly like a spilled bottle of vinegar. The nearest court sat at Fort Stockton, more than a hundred miles off, and the camp was a problem the Texas Rangers were tired of riding to. It was a Ranger who asked for a magistrate on the spot. On 2 August 1882 the Pecos County commissioners obliged, appointing a saloon keeper named Roy Bean justice of the peace for a brand new precinct, and Bean hung out a sign advertising barrel whiskey and the law in the same breath. By December the tunnel was done and the work had moved west, and so had he, first to Strawbridge, which is Sanderson now, and by about 1884 to a place called Eagle's Nest that the railroad had renamed Langtry. Amistad Reservoir covers the site.