Hallie Stillwell: Schoolteacher, Rancher, Queen of Terlingua

Hallie Crawford was born in Waco in eighteen ninety-seven and arrived in Alpine in nineteen ten when her father opened a grocery store there. She earned her teaching certificate and at nineteen took her first position at Presidio, Texas, reportedly strapping her father's revolver to her side for the drive through wild country. A year later she transferred to Marathon, where she met Roy Stillwell, a rancher whose family had grown up in Mexico.

They married, and she moved onto his twenty-two-thousand-acre ranch forty-six miles southeast of Marathon, in the harsh desert country just northeast of what would become Big Bend National Park. Over the following decades Hallie Stillwell was many things at once: rancher, schoolteacher, newspaper correspondent for the Alpine Avalanche, and justice of the peace. In nineteen sixty-four she became the first woman elected justice of the peace in Brewster County, a position she held until nineteen seventy-eight.

She ran a trading post at the ranch and knew every canyon and arroyo of the Big Bend country intimately. She was one of the three judges at the first Terlingua Chili Cookoff in nineteen sixty-seven, and the following year she was named its permanent queen, a title she carried with genuine authority. She was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in nineteen ninety-two and the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in nineteen ninety-four.

Hallie Stillwell died in August of nineteen ninety-seven, two months before what would have been her hundredth birthday.