Big Bend, 1944: Wilderness By Eviction

The adobe structures at Castolon are what remain of a community that was told to leave so that wilderness could exist in its place. Before the park came, there were ranches here, wells, wagon roads, milking sheds, family graves. The landscape that visitors now experience as pristine and remote was, within living memory of Big Bend's first visitors, a worked borderlands economy with named families at its center.

The Texas state government spent the nineteen thirties acquiring land for what would become Big Bend National Park. The process involved condemnation proceedings, buyouts, and, in some cases, pressure that families with informal or unrecorded land-use rights were not positioned to resist. Hispanic families who had occupied and worked this ground under Spanish land-grant traditions, and later under Mexican and then Texan law, often lacked the formal title documentation that Anglo homesteaders held. Anglo-owned titles moved through the condemnation process. The families whose tenure was rooted in older, less legible traditions had less legal standing when the state arrived with papers.

Congress established Big Bend National Park on June twelfth, nineteen forty-four. The park encompasses eight hundred one thousand, one hundred sixty-three acres. It is the only national park in the United States that contains an entire mountain range.

Roughly fifty ranching families were removed from the land that became the park. The National Park Service's own interpretive materials acknowledge the displacement, including the families at Castolon, the Homer Wilson Ranch, and the scattered homesteads of the Chisos foothills. The adobe walls you see here are not ruins of an abandoned place. They are the remains of a place that was made to be abandoned so that the rest of us could have a wilderness to visit.