November 22, 2006
Have
Boodle, Will Travel
By
Jack D McNamara
How unfortunate that Marfa residents should be so rudely
informed of
another Alpine entrepreneurial Great Project in a newspaper headline,
“Alpine mayor and councilwoman make pitch to move Marfa BP sector to
Alpine (Big Bend Sentinel, November 16, 2006).”
Ordinarily such things are done more subtly, as when a factory is
closed in the U.S. and moved to Mexico or China. The moving corporation
informs the affected public with at least a press release under the
corpo-name and provides promises of job training and psychological
counseling.
In exceptional circumstances there might even be enthusiastic proposals
for the conversion of the vacated working space. In this case the empty
sector headquarters might be converted to a swimming pool, for example.
Or a gallery for minimalist art.
The initiative among Alpine’s publicly subsidized entrepreneurial class
has been coming a long time. Marfa’s 1980s grabbing the aerostat
balloon was an insult that must be avenged. The smell of federal
dollars whets the appetite on a cool November morning.
We have frequently questioned Big Bend movers and shakers about such a
move and the response is always, “we have no plans at this time” … etc.
etc. No plans at this time but five minutes ago we had our eyes on the
Presidio County courthouse, or Capote Falls, or the Ruidosa church.
This business of raiding one’s neighbors for public and private
moneymaking institutions is the Way of the West, of course. Our
landscape is littered with monuments which used to be somewhere else.
Alpine is substantially furnished with buildings which formerly were
located on the Marfa Air Base. Many of our sewer and water lines were
formerly passing liquids at an air base in Del Rio. The same Alpine
City Council which is lusting for the Marfa Border Patrol Sector
Headquarters recently gave away the old high school gym which was moved
here from Marfa in the early Fifties.
The very formation of our Big Bend governments stands as a proud
paradigm of these western ways.
The first government settlement in the area was Ft. Davis in 1854,
named after the Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who modestly approved
this tribute to his fame as a Southern gentleman. The fort was
abandoned during the Civil War, but reoccupied in 1867 by several
regiments of black soldiers. By that time Mr. Davis was incarcerated as
the former president of the Confederacy. Whether this irony was noted
by the black U.S. soldiers (the “Buffalo Soldiers”), many of whom were
former slaves, is not recorded.
A large county named Presidio, consisting of the lands of Presidio,
Brewster and Jeff Davis counties, was formed in 1875 of those areas by
the Texas Legislature. This stimulated another partition and in 1887
the Legislature created the new counties of Brewster and Jeff Davis.
As the railroad neared the Big Bend the publicly subsidized
entrepreneurs of the time were stimulated to action. Why waste such a
wonderful opportunity on the U.S. Army headquartered in Ft. Davis?
Route that sucker to the south, and it was done. Immediately in 1885
the entrepreneurs in Ft. Davis loaded up the county government and
moved it to what was then a crossing of a wagon trail and the
prospective route of the railroad — which arrived in 1882 (the crossing
became Marfa).
What is now Brewster was designated to be three counties — Brewster,
Buchel, and Foley. But Brewster’s county seat, Murphyville, now Alpine,
held another strategic trail and railroad intersection. The lesser
Buchel and Foley were quickly absorbed, enshrining us in our current
glory.
This history courtesy of former Sul Ross historian Clifford Casey, from
his book Brewster County (Pioneer Books, 1972).
Are you getting the picture, Marfa? The natural evolution of mankind is
acquisition, survival of the fittest (or greediest) entrepreneur.
As the Nimby News has warned before, Alpine’s westward expansion is to
regain lost territory now infelicitously named “Presidio” and located
where you are now.
Mayor Clouse wrote in her letter announcing the takeover of the
formerly Marfa Sector (now to be named “Big Bend Sector,” according to
the mayor), “Alpine is the center for this charming tri-county area.”
Alpine city councilperson Mrs. Diane Ramos Asgeirsson cites the
advantages of Alpine’s hospital, university, and federal courthouse.
The hospital used to be partly Presidio County’s hospital district; the
university we thought belonged to the State of Texas; and the word
“federal,” as in “federal courthouse,” at one time meant more than the
ambitions of local entrepreneurs hungering for federal payrolls.
Mrs. Asgeirsson, a new arrival on the council who received large
campaign donations, refuses to answer publicly posed questions publicly
concerning what is her relation to Alpine developer and contractor Joey
DeHart.
Do we see an earmark forming? Did a letter find its way to U.S.
Representative Henry Bonilla?
Since 1924 Marfa has been the sector headquarters. Marfa has been the
site of major Big Bend military installations, including Fort D. A.
Russell, the World War II Marfa Air Base and the Prisoner of War camp.
Most citizens of Alpine know this tradition but we are once again
embarrassed by the mayor and perhaps the council. Mayor Clouse
apparently wrote as a “citizen” she says; but the letters were on City
of Alpine stationery. Who do you think typed the letters? And who paid
the postage?
Mayor Clouse does not represent many of us in her attempt. But there
appears to be no limit to the ambitions of Alpine’s publicly subsidized
entrepreneurs. We now have three banks and a credit union here but
Mayor Clouse’s faction admits no limit on her friends’ access to the
public money in the city treasury so long as we call it “economic
development.”
Or maybe the mayor intends her solicitation of the transfer of the
Border Patrol Sector headquarters as a kindly and neighborly act. Her
neighbors after all include several Border Patrol officers, including
the former sector chief, retired Agent Simon Garza. Move the sector
headquarters to Alpine, they live here anyway.
Might make a catchy slogan, sell another sewer line extension outside
the city limits, perch another water tank on a mountainside … sell,
sell, sell.
Fort Alpine, a bastion of defense in the Global War on Terror (GWOT).
•
(Also published
by the Big Bend Sentinel of
Marfa, Texas November 22, 2006.)
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