Eighth-generation Texan explains life in West Texas, Terlingua

There’s something about the Big Bend Country of West Texas that gets into the blood, that calls to its sons and daughters to live a life of work and play under the open skies and among the Spanish dagger and lechugilla.

At 60 years old, Ben English, is one of those people into whose DNA that life has burrowed and found a home. Son of the desert, cowboy and lawman, he’s spent most of his 60 years following a family plan of service and work along the Rio Grande. And he’s understandably proud of the time his family has spent, on horseback and in a patrol car, helping police and make safe that wild country.

“My family actually has carried badges out here going back to the Republic of Texas,” English said. “They started in South Texas and then moved to the Big Bend but it goes back 140 years.

“In my early years, I always learned from my mother and father and from my grandparents. We were always people of the land. That means they were ranchers and cattle raisers, back when ranches were measured in sections, as in one head of cattle per section of land.

“There was no television back then, only radio, like the big Mexican stations across the river, so there was story telling (by family) and I guess it just stuck in my head,” English said. “There’s just something about this country that wherever you go, it’s always home.”

Home back then was the one-room schoolhouse in Terlingua, where English and his brother spent their early school years. There wasn’t much chance of skipping school than, either, especially considering there were just four people in Terlingua listed in the official census of 1960.

No fancy school buses carried kids to and from school, either. “From the time I was 4 or 5 years old, my grandparents put me on a ‘jenny’ (a female mule),” English said. “I was expected to be working cattle and to do a man’s work and so were my brothers. They would tell us don’t cross the highway.”

There was a completely different way of life for youngsters in the Big Bend, for everyone who lived there. The area is remote and wild even today but when English was a youngster, it was still primitive and tough. “People can’t imagine that kind of life today,” he said.

During the summer of 1970, the English clan was pretty much broke, he remembered. “Cattle prices were down and we were broke,” he said. And they weren’t alone, but people bucked up and helped their neighbors to get by. “This old desert” requires self-sufficiency and a dedication to work.

“Now, technology has allowed people to live down there but lots of them are not cut out for it,” English said. “You knew whatever you got yourself into, you had to get yourself out.”

English had a plan for his life from an early age. “I wanted to be a DPS trooper, a Marine and a writer,” he said, keeping some of what he experienced alive between the pages of a book. He recently had published his first book, “Yonderings,” about his life in the Big Bend.

“This book needed to be written,” he said. “I saw happen that almost nobody else has seen,” he said. “And I needed to write it. I wanted to set the record straight.”

English still spends much of his time driving through the Big Bend country, just enjoying the mountains and the desert and using his spare time to document his life through Facebook and his blog. He’s also a board member of the Big Bend Natural History Association and a steward for the Texas Historical Society Check him out at benhenglish.com to find out what’s happening in West Texas.