Roads, Fences, Personally Autographed Pictures Of Jesus

A man I know ranches the eastern Concho Valley in the almost desert dry country around the town of Eden.  We do what men in West Texas do when we meet-- which is to talk about rain, the lack thereof, the prospects of...

Vicinity of Red Creek, north of San Angelo

Occasionally, our conversation turns to the status of my pet project of creating a fairly accurate and fairly complete plant checklist for the western Concho Valley and moves on to the related subject of where the desert begins.  He is of the opinion Highway 277 marks the spot where the land shifts from merely miserably hot and dusty and dry to outskirts-of-hell- hot and dusty and dry...

He may be right.  If one follows the road north towards Abilene, one passes what locals refer to as Devil's Mountain.  The Texas Handbook Online discusses this butte under its formal name-- Devil's Courthouse Peak.  It rises, the article says, to 2315 feet above sea level in the midst of hilly terrain marked by "shallow stony soils that support scrub brush, sparse grasses, creosote bush, and cacti."  Another man whom I know comes from a family that was among the first to ranch the area surrounding Devil's Mountain.  He doesn't know how the hill got its diabolical appellation and knows no one who does but says it is an entirely appropriate appellation...

Devil's Mountain

Should one decide to head to the pleasures of a border town, Highway 277 snakes its way through southern Tom Green County, past the metropolises of Eldorado and Sonora, down to Val Verde County on the Rio Grande.  The road's terminal point in the United States is the town of Del Rio, home to Dr John R Brinkley in the 1920s and early 1930s, who crossed a bridge to broadcast across the river from the Mexican radio station XER-AM.  Brinkley had a diploma from a mail-order medical school, a clinic transplanting goat glands into men concerned about waning sexual prowess, plus lucrative sideline businesses that sold "genuine simulated" diamonds and personally autographed pictures of Jesus Christ...

John R Brinkley and wife at work

[Brinkley, a fascinating character, merits a future blog entry devoted solely to his chicanery and checkered career.  He enjoyed whooping, hollering and cajoling for hours on end over the radio but realized his audience would stray if he didn't find other ways to entertain them.  The dubious doctor solved this problem by giving live air time to country music acts (Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and Gene Autry being among them) hoping to break through to the big time.  XER's 50,000 watts guaranteed the yodelers a national audience.   To a very large extent, Brinkley can be credited with creating and shaping a mass market for white "roots" music.  So many rural musicians flocked to Del Rio to take advantage of the opportunities now open to them that the dusty desert border town found itself nicknamed "Hillbilly Hollywood"]  

John Romulus Brinkley and Del Rio Mansion

While we are still in Tom Green County, our jaunt down 277 crosses the country near the town of Christoval, home to a women's art colony in the 1920s and a monastery cum winery today.  Low flat land, it is broken by distant ridgelines.  Deer and rabbits can be found in the mesquite-juniper-creosote bush-live oak plant community that zigzags southwest toward the desolation of Crockett County...

Desert shrubs along 277 south of San Angelo include Feather Dalea, Vine
Ephedra, and Catclaw Acacia

My friend who says desert country lies west of 277 is a successful professional man, trained in the sciences.  He listens to me discuss evapotranspiration rates, hears my suggestion that his ranch is actually close to the point in the Concho Valley where potential water loss becomes three times greater than annual rainfall averages.  He shakes his head.  The test, he says, is much easier.  The land on the other side of fences along 277 just looks hard and dry and mean, plain and pure and simple...

West of 277

Note: Photographs of John R Brinkley located through Google Images without source information; all others by the author