|
Terlingua, then and now: Thousands gather to honor miners
Reprinted from the New York Times TERLINGUA - Adolfo Molinar, 81, of San Mateo, Calif., found his old stone house, or some of the walls, anyway, on the sun-baked hills of this oddly vibrant ghost town in the Big Bend country of West Texas where he delivered water as a boy to Mexican quicksilver miners 70 years ago. Anastacio Sanchez, 89, of Odessa was one of those miners, excavating cinnabar ore for mercury 840 feet underground. And he was doing it seven days a week for $1.40 a day. So was Pascual M. Lopez, 89, of Carlsbad, N.M. "It was hard work, I'll tell you, drilling though the faces, and dangerous," said Mr. Lopez, who recalled starting at 75 cents a day. This was homecoming weekend for about 400 sons and daughters of the Chisos mines and their children and grandchildren, a reunion to relive good and hard times and venerate ancestors buried in rude stone graves in the Terlingua cemetery. Volunteers compiled lists of former miners, and the National Park Service scanned family photos into a computer for oral histories. "Are you Maria?" shrieked Lena White, 81, of Eugene, Ore., daughter of a former mine superintendent, laying eyes for the first time in 60 years on a certain familiar face. Maria Zamarron Bermudez, 83, of nearby Alpine, who as an 8-year-old helped support her fatherless family by working in the mine hotel restaurant for 75 cents a week plus free meals and baths, looked blank. "Who are you?" she asked. Then it hit her: Joe White's daughter. "Lena!" she squealed. From 1903 to its bankruptcy in 1942, its closing in 1946, through one world war and the start of a second, and the denuding of the landscape for firewood to run the furnaces, the Chisos Mining Company supplied much of the global hunger for explosive mercury crystals. Named for a nearby range of mountain peaks - chisos is a Spanish word for ghost - the company earned a fleeting fortune of $12 million for the hard-bitten mine owner, Howard E. Perry. He profited on the backs, many said, of Mexican workers who streamed into Texas to escape revolutionary upheaval in Mexico. (When Perry's workers were making $542 a year, he was making $4,400 on each of them.) This year, for the first time since the first reunions were held - in 2004 and 2005 - distant relatives of Perry also attended, despite concerns that they would be given a hard time. But they were embraced. Richard Bailey, 78, of Houston, a grandnephew of Mr. Perry's, chatted with Mr. Sanchez and was happy to learn that at some point in their employment at Chisos the workers got Sundays off. "It was better than I thought," said a relieved Mr. Bailey. Indeed, many of those who returned had warm words about Perry, who died in 1944. "He was a good man," said Ms. Bermudez, who in addition to working in the restaurant helped keep house for the mine owner the few times a year he left his mansion in Portland, Me., to oversee operations from the mock Spanish hacienda he built here. Others praised Perry for building a school to educate Mexican children, at times alongside Anglo children, a rarity elsewhere in Texas. "There were three of us in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade, and behind me was a fifth-grade row and then a fourth-grade row," recalled Jim Parker, 74, who became a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and later became a student of Latin American affairs. But others said it was a harsh life, a view expounded in "Quicksilver," a history of Terlingua and the mines, by Kenneth Baxter Ragsdale and published by Texas A&M University Press in 1976. Miners were each allocated no more than a bucket of water a day, two buckets for a family, and were sometimes paid in Mexican currency or scrip to spend in the Chisos trading post, nicknamed by workers Mr. Perry's gold mine. Miners worked 12-hour shifts in two-man teams, one man wielding a spike, the other a hammer, and carried 80-pound packs of ore on their backs out of the mine to the smelter. Burros were deemed too valuable for such work. "The Hispanic people were disposable," said Amalia Gonzales, who came with other family members to accompany her mother, Felipa Arispe, 85, from Alpine to her birthplace here. Mr. Molinar, the man who carried water as a boy, said his miner father lost his teeth to the effects of mercury poisoning from breathing the vapors of the ore smelting. Cynta de Narvaez, 49, a Cuban doctor's daughter who fled her debutante life in Manhattan to guide river tours on the Rio Grande and foster cross-border exchanges with Mexicans, started the homecoming event in 2004 to promote goodwill. This weekend's reunion was the third, and maybe the last. The event has been a boon for Terlingua, a haven for artistic dropouts and home to a freewheeling chili cook-off that draws thousands of visitors. Named perhaps for its three local tongues, Indian, Spanish and English, Terlingua had a population of 2,500 in 1918, during its mining heyday; by 1970 it had dropped to 25. But its fortunes rose again in the 1980s when it was bought at auction by a civic booster, Bill Ivey (who bid unwittingly against his own father, Rex Ivey). "It's a special place, nothing like the outside world," Ms. de Narvaez told visitors to the town's retro Starlight Theatre on Friday night. Noting how the parking lot was filled with the cars, vans and pickups of their children, she said the hopes of the early miners had been fulfilled. "You can't say this isn't the American dream," she said. Terlingua, then and now: Thousands gather to honor miners Reprinted from the New York Times A few U.S. senators, led by John Sununu, R-N.H., are again taking aim at Alpine's Amtrak service, says Henry Wulff, president of Texas Association of Railroad Passengers (TXARP). The chili hordes keeping it hot Folks from throughout the known and unknown world began arriving last week for the 41st annual International Chili Championship, which will conclude Saturday, Nov. 3, at Krazy Flats, located on the north side of Highway 170, just 8.9 miles west of the intersection of FM 170 and SH 118 in Study Butte. Gallery Night brings out stars Avalanche staff Sara Tandy considers herself a very lucky woman. Husband: David, head basketball coach for the Sul Ross Lady Lobos Don't forget to make the time change Sunday. |
| Subscribe | Health News | Financial News | Entertainment | Home |