Rattlesnakes, Bandits, and Big Bend's Hot Springs. (original) (raw)

J.O. Langford was a young but sickly and despairing man when he made his way from Midland to Alpine in 1909. Langford was born and reared in Mississippi but left there for Texas because he suffered frequent bouts of malaria in his home state and thought the arid West Texas air might be good for him.

In Alpine, Langford listened with great interest as an old man held forth in a hotel lobby, describing a place where people had bathed in the water for centuries and were cured of whatever ailed them—stomach trouble, rheumatism, skin diseases and maybe even malaria. Langford asked the old man why no one had ever tried to develop the springs, like they had at Hot Springs, Arkansas.

"Nothing down there but rattlesnakes and bandit Mexicans," the old man told him. "And it's too far away—that damned country promises more and gives less than any place I ever saw."

Still, Langford was sold. Langford filed a claim on the land, sight unseen, under the Homestead Act. Two weeks later, the land was his. He got it for 1.50anacreandanunderstandingthathewouldlivetherecontinuouslyforthreeyearsandmake1.50 an acre and an understanding that he would live there continuously for three years and make 1.50anacreandanunderstandingthathewouldlivetherecontinuouslyforthreeyearsandmake300 in improvements. So Langford, his wife Bessie, and 18-month-old daughter piled everything they had into a wagon and traveled 11 days to their new home.

"This was a fantastic country, like none I'd ever seen, like no other I've seen since," Langford wrote in his memoir, Big Bend: A Homesteader's Story. "And, looking back on it now, I can see that ours was a fantastic situation. A chronically ill man of thirty-one, a traveling salesman out of Mississippi, using up his last few dollars to take his wife and baby to a homestead in the wild, unknown country of the Texas Big Bend."

One of the unknowns was the fact that a man named Cleofas Natividad, his wife, and their 10 children were already living at the hot springs and had been for quite some time. Langford's sympathies were with Natividad and his family. He decided the deed he held was "a trifling thing" when compared to the fact that Natividad's family had probably been living there for generations.

At some point during the 21 days he bathed in the hot springs and drank the water his malaria vanished. Langford and Natividad constructed a bathhouse and charged visitors 10 cents per day or $2 for a 21-day treatment. But, like the naysayer in Alpine had warned, the country was hard to get to. Langford had to supplement his income by working as a schoolteacher, a self-taught doctor, and mail carrier.