Originally posted June 12, 2026
When Everett Ewing Townsend, a 23-year-old customs inspector stationed on the border in the Big Bend, saw the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains for the first time, he knew his life was about to change. The vista — a hundred-mile panorama of lush green piñon forests giving way to forbidding desert and finally to the glittering ribbon of the Rio Grande — brought him to his knees. “It made me see God as I had never seen him before,” he recalled years later.
It was August of 1894, and Townsend was on a mission to track mules that had been stolen from the Mexican side of the river. He marked the occasion in a small leatherbound journal he carried with him, where he also kept a record of local cattle brands, practiced his Spanish, and jotted down prayers and poems. He also kept a log of his travels, which even today would be dizzying: trips to Marathon, Boquillas, Terlingua and everywhere in between, all before the first Model Ts hit the streets of Alpine. (The future Mrs. Townsend liked to ride along on his patrols, and logged over a thousand miles on horseback their first year of marriage.)
Read the full story at The Big Bend Sentinel
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