Before it became a national park, the Big Bend was home to a number of ranches and mining operations. On the Wilson ranch, which stood at the center of the current park, Patricia Wilson Clothier spent her youth exploring the wonders of ranch life in the Chisos. Patricia´s richly detailed memories, coupled with a backdrop of Depression era hardships, bring the Big Bend to life in this original and vivid description of a childhood spent Beneath the Window.
Big Bend has been a National Park since the mid 1940´s. Thus it is preserved for visitors to enjoy, however almost all signs of earlier ranches and homes have disappeared. It is difficult today to imagine crops growing, peach trees bearing fruit and fenced pastures and shearing sheds. The Wilson ranch alone had some 40 miles of fence with careful attention paid to preserving water sources and using them carefully. Being a stone´s throw from the Rio Grande made Mexico and its people close and friendly neighbors to the American community in Big Bend. If you ever have a chance to visit Big Bend National Park, this memoir is a must."
Review Quotes
"This is the memoir of Patricia Clothier growing up in the 1930s and 1940s on a vast ranch in the mountains and high desert hugging the Mexican border in Big Bend country Texas, before it became a national park. Her family weathered rattlesnakes and drought, accidents, loneliness, and financial hardship of the Great Depression with fortitude, ingenuity, and grace. Like their scattered neighbors-miles away over rugged roads-it was the love of the land that gripped and held them there. Clothier paints a picture of this vast and glorious territory with words as vivid as any artist with a pallet of paints. A joy to read-an adventure of Western life you'll not forget." --Jean Bradfish, Award-winning author and editor
"The author calls her elegant little book a memoir. But I call it an American saga to match Gone With The Wind, Grapes of Wrath, and even shades of Little Women - fulI of passion, beauty, and pathos. It's truly larger than life and makes everyone cry. But it was the only life she knew. She was born on one of the last American frontiers - southwest Texas in Great Bend which is now a National Park."-- Annie Withers
A book with a different perspective. Is warm, yet full of strength. It is not only a story of the Big Bend, but of a family with joy, sorrow, and struggle. A story of a time and place that is gone but one that should never be forgotten. --Jack Lamkin, President of Friends of Big Bend
