Boquillas (Texas)

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Boquillas was a town in the southern part of Brewster County , on the banks of the Rio Grande . The place is now part of the Big Bend National Park and houses a ranger station and several buildings for the supply of tourists under the name Rio Grande Village. Boquillas is a Spanish word and means "many small mouths", which probably refers to the many small watercourses or dry valleys that only temporarily carry water that flow into the Rio Grande when coming from the Sierra Del Carmen.

Rio Grande Village overview

geography

Boquillas is 562 meters above sea level on the north bank of the Rio Grande. The place has a semi-arid climate . The temperatures are on average over 30 degrees Celsius from April to October, and over 35 degrees from May to September. The average annual rainfall is 237 mm, with an average of over 30 mm of rainfall being measured in the months May to August.

history

There are several hot springs, the “Boquillas Hot Springs”, with a water temperature of 41 degrees Celsius, around seven kilometers north of the village. Rock paintings and traces of soot indicate that the place was used by Indians for a long time. Pedro de Rabago y Teran was the first Spaniard to reach the springs in 1747 and found Apaches who lived in villages and practiced agriculture on a modest scale. The springs later served the Comanches as a stopover on their raids into northern Mexico.

Boquillas Canyon

The first US-Americans explored the area under Major William J. Emory in the summer of 1852, which they found uninhabited. It was not until January 1882 that three surveyors, accompanied by a group of Texas Rangers , revisited the area. The group had taken boats down the Rio Grande. When they saw a group of wild horses at Boquillas Canyon on the US side of the river, the officer of the Texas Rangers is said to have ordered all horses to be killed so that Indians would not get possession of the horses. This incident is said to have resulted in the canyon being named "Dead Horse Canyon" and the Mexicans called the northern mountain range "Sierra del Caballo Muerto".

In 1883 silver and lead deposits were discovered on the Mexican side near the place “Boquillas del Carmen”. The ore was transported by cable car to the Texas side of the river, where it was processed. In 1882 the construction of the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway had reached the area of Marathon (Texas) , so that this was the shortest connection to remove the ore.

A permanent settlement formed in Boquillas from 1894 when Dennis Edward Lindsay opened a department store to supply the workers on both sides of the river. In 1896 the population was 300 on the Texan side and around 1,000 on the Mexican side, and Boquillas got its own post office. Boquillas del Carmen became a separate municipality in 1897 and in 1899 had around 2000 inhabitants. In the same year the "American Smelting and Refining Company" took over the smelting furnace and the ore transport. When Lindsay went out of business and moved to Lajitas in 1900 , Martin Solis, who ran a ranch in the area, opened a department store. A short time later, Jesse Deemer opened another store.

Around 1900, the German immigrant Max A. Ernst settled as a rancher about twelve kilometers northwest of Boquillas. He was a notary, justice of the peace, agent of Brewster County and built the first school in Boquillas, in 1901 he took over the post office. In competition with the existing department stores, he opened the “Big Tinaja Store”. He was shot on September 27, 1908, his death could never be solved.

In 1911 the furnace in Boquillas was shut down, and the American Smelting and Refining Company operated the only furnace in West Texas in El Paso. In 1914 a group of Texan businessmen tried to reorganize the ore transport, but the mines in Boquilla del Carmen closed before the end of the First World War.

As part of the Mexican Revolution occurred on May 5, 1916 a raid by troops of the Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco Pancho Villa on the locations Glenn Springs (Texas) and Boquillas. The attack of around 200 Villistas on Boquillas could be repelled

When the silver and lead mines closed on the Mexican side, the residents of Boquillas and Boquillas del Carmen left. The population of Boquillas was 25 in the late 1930s, rose to 40 in the late 1940s, and decreased to six in the early 1960s.

Today Boquillas is a destination for tourists who have a contact point in the nearby Rio Grande Village, but the area suffered from tourism between 2002 and 2013 when the border crossing to Mexico was closed. Only a few ruins have survived from the village of Boquillas.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ More detailed climate data from the Western Regional Climate Center
  2. ^ Brune, Gunnar: "BOQUILLAS HOT SPRINGS" in the Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association
  3. ↑ = Mountains of the dead horse
  4. ↑ Name for the soldiers Pancho Villas
  5. ↑ More about the "Glenn Springs Raid" in the article about Glenn Springs (Texas)
  6. ↑ Kohout, Martin Donell: "BOQUILLAS, TX" . In: Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association
  7. ↑ Troesser, John: Boquillas and Boquillas del Carmen on TexasEscapes

Web links

Extensive photo and map material on Boquillas at the "Portal to Texas History"

Coordinates: 29 ° 6 ′ 0 ″  N , 103 ° 34 ′ 12 ″  W.