Big Bend Country: Land of the Unexpected

by Kenneth Baxter Ragsdale

Having first visited the Big Bend in 1928, Kenneth B. Ragsdale has been digging around in and writing about the region for the last forty years. In Big Bend Land of the Unexpected, he takes a nostalgic retrospective journey through the times and places of this increasingly popular corner of West Texas to say goodbye to those who made the history, created the myths, and lived the legends.

Building his stories around themes of compassion, conflict, and compromise, he profiles both famous and relatively unknown figures. He tells stories of curanderas (healers), charity workers, a woman who practiced medicine without a license, and another who started a private lending library in her store to encourage rural, poor children to read. In contrast to these stories, he chronicles blood feuds, shootouts, and the violence bred in wild, relatively lawless spaces.

In a fascinating play on levels of meaning, Ragsdale traces the legacy of J. Frank Dobie and his stories of buried treasure—treasure that turned out to be that of the imagination if not of gold. Finally, he turns his attention to the cinematic portrayal of life in the Big Bend. He looks at the filming of Giant both as a subtext of its own--how the coming of celebrity and celebrities affected local lifestyles and self-perceptions--and as a cultural commentary on the popular perception of the West.

Ragsdale's stories cover a half-century, roughly 1900 to 1955, from wagon trains to the filming of an epic movie, a time in which the face of the Big Bend the quicksilver mines closed, a national park was established, isolation and cattle gave way to vacation ranchettes and tourists.

Big Bend enthusiasts will want to join the author in his farewell tribute as he recaptures the spirit of the times through the eyes and words of the people who made the region the folklore attraction it is.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1998

Reviews

[Jeff]

I enjoyed and highly recommend this gentle book. Ragsdale writes with a confident, introspective prose offering the reader personal vignettes beginning with his first visit to the Big Bend area in 1928 as a child. His fascination with its stark beauty drew him back throughout his life and he dug around in and wrote about the region for forty years. In Big Bend Country: Land of the Unexpected, Ragsdale takes a nostalgic retrospective journey through the times and places of this increasingly popular corner of Southwest Texas to say goodbye to those who made the history, created the myths, and lived the legends. It's fascinating to see how his perspective about the region changed throughout the course of his life. Ragsdale's well-written and well-researched book offer portraits of some of the Big Bend's notable characters and incidents, from the late Hallie Stillwell to two chapters on the filming of "Giant" in and around Marfa in the mid-1950s. Having visited and revisited this fascinating country over the years, I think Ragsdale truly captured the mystery of one of our country's last great places. If you close your eyes, you can almost feel the age and life in the landscape, while hearing in the audible silence the ghosts of ranchers and miners who made this strange place their home.

[Nan Kirkpatrick]

If you're interested in the Big Bend region of Texas, this is a fun history.