Yucca grows like sotol from a central trunk, but it adds new growth at the top and lets its dead leaves drop down in a palm-like grass skirt. The yucca also puts up a bloomstalk year after year, and the creamy flowers are a favorite browse of deer and cattle. Yuccas may live from 50 to 75 years, reaching tree-like proportions. The giant dagger that gives Dagger Flat its name may grow more than 6 meters (20 feet) tall. In good years it blooms around Easter-time, and a single bloomstalk may have more than 1,000 flowers and weigh as much as 30 kilos (70 pounds). Indians used nearly every part of the yucca in countless ways. They ate the flowers and fruit, wove baskets and made brushes from leaf fibers, and made soap from the roots. Along the border, natives still harvest the great yucca flower-heads and feed them to livestock.
The Mescalero Apaches roasted the mescal or century plant using the same technique they used for sotol. The mescal was as central to the Apache way of life as the bison was to the plains Indians. They made food, drink, medicine, mats, ropes, bags, and even needles and twine from the great, gray-green agave.
It is not true that the century plant takes a hundred years to bloom; it’s more like 25 to 50 years. Once started the bloomstalk shoots up at the rate of nearly 2.5 centimeters (an inch) in an hour, or up to 41 centimeters (16 inches) in 24 hours. Soon platters of golden flowers float on the air, and bees, flies, and ants come to the feast. The violet-throated Lucifer hummingbird may sometimes be found at a mescal in blooming season. At night the Mexican long tongued bat leaves its cave on Emory Peak and comes to feed on the nectar and ample pollen.
Like all agaves, the mescal expends its strength on this onetime burst of blooming. Once the seed pods form, the plant dies and young plants arise near its base. But that is not the end of its beauty or its usefulness. If you climb the foot trail to Juniper Flat through the thickly grassed woodlands above the Basin, you will pass more than one dead mescal with its towering bloomstalk supported by the limbs of some pinyon pine. Year by year, in graceful and gradual decay, the agave leans in its neighbor’s embrace. As it slowly splits up, it dresses the pine in a flowing drape of fiber fragments. You can see little wormholes here and there, and larger holes where woodpeckers have taken a meal. This life-supporting return to dust goes on all over these mountains.
The century plant took its name from the erroneous notion that it took 100 years to bloom. It takes “only” 25 to 50 years. Then the plant dies.
Many of the park’s finest grasses may be found in the mountains, for while the grasslands blend into the woodlands somewhere around 1,700 meters (5,500 feet), the grasses continue all the way up to the mountaintops. Again, the species change with climate, altitude, and ground cover conditions. The beautiful bull muhly favors north-facing slopes, and, growing in clumps up to just over a meter (4 feet) high, it helps hold soil on the hillsides. With its large purple flowering heads, it makes a good bedding grass for deer. So does the golden thread-leaf stipa that likes to grow under juniper trees, spilling its long blades in rounded clumps.
Since the return of the grasses the mountains and foothills both support a fascinating host of grassland animals. Some, like the yellownosed cotton rat, have come back with the grass. Many of these grassland creatures are abroad at night and are best seen at dawn and dusk. Even after dark you may see a great deal of life along the highway. The 16-kilometer (10-mile) stretch between park headquarters and the Basin may bring startling glimpses of grassland activity within reach of your headlights: a great horned owl with its catlike face and “ears,” sitting still as a sphinx in the middle of the road; a coyote pair gamboling like shepherd pups, their paired eyes flashing white and bright as automobile headlights. These carnivores have come to hunt the rats and rabbits making a mad dash across the road. Arthropods and snakes come to the pavement to warm themselves. The diamond sparkles that litter the blacktop may be reflections from spiders’ eyes. You see a blood-red coal of fire spring to one side at the edge of the road and then as abruptly as a UFO leap 3 meters (10 feet) straight-up into the air. A ringtail climbing a tree perhaps? Or a poor-will taking flight? A flash of pink lights at elbow and shoulder height turns out to be a mule deer and fawn. Stop, turn off your own lights, and look and listen and you will behold a world as it must have been a long time ago, singing in the silence underneath the stars.
Bandits and Revolutionaries
When the deepest channel of the Rio Grande became the boundary between the United States and Mexico in 1848, the Army assumed a thankless task: To enforce an invisible boundary in impossible terrain populated—if at all—by people traditionally disposed to crossing the river freely. At times the Army depended on the Texas Rangers. During the Civil War era troops were withdrawn from the Big Bend, and border incidents surged. After the Mexican revolution of 1910 that government lost control of its northern provinces. Bandit gangs plagued both Texas and California. Pancho Villa used border forays to create tension between Mexico and the United States. In 1913, raiding bandit Chico Cano was captured and freed by his gang in an ambush; the next year he killed his Customs Service captor. Cano was photographed with 8th Cavalry Major Roy J. Considine in 1918. Three soldiers and a small boy were killed in a 1916 raid on Glenn Springs led by Navidad Alvarez, a lieutenant of Pancho Villa. The store was looted and houses burned. Livestock raids on ranches sometimes left entire families murdered. Many Texas Rangers were killed in ambush over the years. Smuggling activities abounded. Arms and ammunitions passed into Mexico, and liquor (during prohibition) and silver bullion passed into the United States.