By Megan Wilde, Associate Editor

The enormity and harshness of Big Bend’s landscape seems to flaunt human affairs. Yet for millennia, we smallfry have tried our hand at surviving here, prospering from the land, and conserving and honoring this unique place. Long-time resident Tom Alex has gracefully captured and paid tribute to a few of these attempts in his new book, Big Bend National Park and Vicinity, the latest in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series.

Through archival photographs and stories, Alex, the national park’s archaeologist, gives glimpses into the jumble of lives that have flickered here during recent centuries – Chizo Indians, Spanish missionaries, soldiers, farmers, ranchers, miners, park forefathers and staff, river runners, and various desert rats. Not a comprehensive history of the region, this is the sort of book that will appeal to lovers of Big Bend, admirers of tenacious spirits, and anyone enchanted by ephemeral faces suspended in old photographs.

Among the hundreds of faces Alex has collected in his book are sweet-faced young women, imported to remote desert ranches as live-in teachers, the cowhands they married, and one horseback wedding party in a fog-veiled Rosillos Mountains canyon. Tired Chisos Mine workers raise a bottle and strum a guitar after a hard day’s labor, and a Civilian Conservation Corps crew rests up from building the road to Chisos Basin. A covey of children say cheese, grimace and squint in the sun on their first day at the then-new San Vicente School. Everett Townsend and other park-service visionaries scout out the pine-forested Sierra del Carmen for an international peace park that’s still being dreamed of, today. A handsome Boquillas couple poses with their foster children, in front of their home, where for many years they fed and watered visitors from both sides of the Rio Grande.

Not just people are documented in Alex’s book, though. Some space is devoted to our vestiges: national park buildings, shops, farms, mines, army camps, and adobe homesteads. Many of these structures have since been lost from the landscape, swept away by the elements or demolished by a park service that, at the time, thought it was doing a good deed by returning the park to its natural state. Save for a few steadfast cottonwoods and windmills, these images are all that’s left of such places and the people that passed their days in them.

Weaving these photographs and stories into a coherent pictorial history was a challenge, Alex says, and so was deciding what photographs to leave out. Since he was asked to do the book in 2007, he has sorted through thousands of images and documents in the national park archives, the Archives of the Big Bend at Sul Ross State University, and the Presidio County Museum in Marfa. He also interviewed several area old-timers and their families and borrowed photos from their personal collections.

“You really have to pick and choose,” Alex says. “And to me it was really heartbreaking, because I wanted to do a lot more than I was able to do in this amount of pages and photographs.”

As he made decisions about what to include in the book, he relied on his love for the Big Bend and one overarching theme as guides: how this magical place has affected people, how people have impacted and sometimes exploited this place, and how that interplay has changed over time.

But in comparing life here, today, and life here a century ago, he found at least one common story.

“If you look at the early ranching period,” he says, “a lot of the early ranchers that came and started trying to establish ranches would be successful for a period of time, and then they would have to sell out. That’s kind of what’s been going on in the last couple of decades.”

Drought, overgrazing, and economic woes drove some of those early ranchers and settlers away. And in recent years, as the area’s population has grown considerably, Alex says some new residents have found they can’t take the remoteness, the harsh environment, or the scarcity of stores and medical services.

These comings and goings, then and now, reaffirmed something Alex says he has learned after living in south Brewster County for nearly three decades.

“In order to live here, you have to have an alternative attitude,” he says. “You have to have an openness to learn what you got yourself into and develop a sensitivity to this place, to figure out how you should behave and what you need to survive down here.”

“The desert is self-limiting. There’s only so much water. There’s only so much the desert will allow you to do to it until you have to back off,” he went on. “You either learn to adjust, to adapt, or you have to move on.”

There will be a book signing with Tom Alex at 7 pm on January 15 at Front Street Books in Alpine. For more information on this book: www.arcadiapublishing.com.

Megan Wilde writes and fusses with plants, cats, chickens and equines from her home in Alpine.