Wallace Pratt: The Oilman Who Saved McKittrick Canyon

In nineteen twenty-one, Wallace Pratt was the most respected petroleum geologist in the United States. He had joined Humble Oil , the forerunner of ExxonMobil , in nineteen eighteen as its first geologist, and his field work had already made the company, and him, very wealthy. He was in Pecos on a business trip when a local judge mentioned that there was land available up in the Guadalupe Mountains. Pratt drove up and walked into McKittrick Canyon.

He never really left.

Over the next several years, Pratt bought more than five thousand six hundred acres in the canyon, drawn by the spring-fed stream, the limestone cliffs, the maples and oaks that turned gold and red in autumn , a spectacle completely unexpected in the Trans-Pecos desert. In nineteen thirty, he commissioned Houston architect John Staub to build him a stone house at the canyon's mouth, a retreat from the Houston petroleum world that had made him rich.

Pratt was paradoxical in the way that great conservationists sometimes are. He spent his career finding oil, but he deplored the flaring of natural gas as waste, pushed for wide spacing of wells to prevent reservoir damage, and advocated against water pollution by tankers and refineries , positions that were unpopular with his industry in the mid-twentieth century.

By nineteen sixty-one, Pratt was seventy-six years old. He had long believed that the Guadalupes deserved federal protection, and that year he deeded his entire McKittrick Canyon holdings to the National Park Service with a stipulation: a national park must be established here. The donation was the founding land grant that made Guadalupe Mountains National Park possible. Congress authorized the park in nineteen sixty-six, and it opened to the public in nineteen seventy-two.

The stone house still stands at the canyon mouth, now managed by the Park Service as the Pratt Cabin. Every autumn the maples in McKittrick Canyon ignite into the most vivid fall color in Texas, drawing visitors who mostly do not know the geologist who kept this place intact.