Big Bend Park dominates Brewster County Brewster County, the largest county in Texas, is located in the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas and is the site of Big Bend National Park, the largest park in the state. The area of southern Brewster County now in Big Bend National Park has long fascinated man, who has lived there for more than 9,000 years. The first human beings in the Big Bend were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers moving south ahead of the great ice sheets of the North American glaciers. When a prolonged period of drought ensued, the large game animals disappeared, and so did the people. When the drought ended, between 4000 and 3000 B.C., man reappeared. By around 1000 A.D., residents of the area were practicing rudimentary agriculture and could no longer be considered nomadic; and by the time the Spanish began to arrive, in the sixteenth century, pueblo culture had begun in the Big Bend.

But there was no extensive European presence in the Big Bend until the middle of the 18th Century, when the Spanish began to explore the area in an effort to combat Indian raids into Mexico from the north. For much of the 19th Century the presence of Comanche raiding parties on their way to and from Mexico combined with the forbidding local topography to discourage European exploration of the Big Bend. The first Mexican and American explorers of the area, who arrived after the Mexican War, found harsh country indeed. In October 1851 Col. Edvard Emil Langberg, a Swedish soldier of fortune who was the Mexican commandant of Chihuahua, traversed what is now southern Brewster County. In the autumn of 1852, M. T. W. Chandler, assigned by the United States-Mexico boundary survey to work down the Rio Grande from Presidio del Norte to the mouth of the Pecos River, led a party into what is now the heart of Big Bend National Park. Chandler explored Santa Elena Canyon, the Chisos Mountains (where he named the highest peak after his boss, William H. Emory ), Mariscal Canyon and Boquillas Canyon before giving up due to a shortage of supplies.

After the (Civil) War, three interrelated factors led to white settlement of what later became Brewster County: the presence of the United States Army, the development of the cattle industry, and the arrival of the railroad, all of which happened more or less simultaneously. Taking advantage of the Civil War, Indian cattle-rustling raids via the Comanche Trail rose sharply during the early 1860s and greatly reduced the number of cattle in northern Mexico. The high prices consequently paid by Mexican ranchers for imported cattle convinced Central Texas cattlemen to chance the long drive across the Big Bend country.

The burgeoning cattle industry got a major boost in 1882, when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway was built through the area. Suddenly the gradual influx of cattlemen became a veritable flood, as a number of surveyors who had come with the railroad and the Texas Rangers who had been assigned to protect them elected to stay. Several towns sprang up along the rails, the most significant of which were Alpine, then called Murphyville, and Marathon.

Five years after the coming of the railroad, in 1887, Brewster County was marked off from Presidio County, as were Jeff Davis, Buchel and Foley counties. Brewster County was named for Henry P. Brewster, secretary of war under David G. Burnet. The first Brewster County elections were held on February 4, 1887, when Murphyville was selected as county seat; on March 14 of that year a contract was let for the construction of the Brewster County courthouse and jail. About this time the mercury mining industry exploded in southern Brewster County. In 1884, a Presidio merchant named Ignatz Kleinman made the first significant discovery of mercury in the Big Bend, setting off a mining boom that made the Terlingua Mining District one of the leading sources of mercury in the nation in the first half of the twentieth century.

By 1910 the residents of Alpine decided that their town deserved to be the site of a summer normal institute; this school eventually grew into Sul Ross State University. By 1936 many local cattlemen had given up ranching and moved away, and much of their land eventually ended up in Big Bend National Park.

In May 1934 the Civilian Conservation Corps established a camp in the Chisos Mountains basin. The camp, eighty-five miles from the nearest town, was the temporary home of more than 200 laborers, mostly Hispanic. Their first project was to build a seven-mile road into the mountains using no power equipment. The federal presence in the Big Bend led the citizens of Brewster County to press for the establishment of a national park, and in June 1935 Congress passed legislation founding Big Bend National Park. Acquiring the land for the park was a long and often frustrating process, but it finally opened to the public in June 1944. In 1952 Houston oilman Walter M. Mischer began buying land around Lajitas, in southwestern Brewster County, and in 1976 he began “reconstructing” a Wild West town that had never existed, complete with condominiums, motels, restaurants, and shops, next to old Lajitas, the true ghost town.

The information above is excerpted from the Handbook of Texas, an encyclopedia published by the Texas State Historical Association. The Handbook can be accessed online at www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online. Copies of the two-volume set may be obtained by contacting the history organization at 512-232-1513.