Desert Dwelling

Big Bend National Park’s craggy Chihuahuan Desert landscape may seem incongruous with the verdant and neatly organized crop rows of a farm. But if you were to visit the Rio Grande bottomlands during a stretch of the early 1900s, you would’ve found fields of vegetables, hay, and cotton lining the muddy river—a cradle of fertility in an unexpected place.

Despite the arid surroundings, Mexican families started cultivating the rich soils on the Rio Grande’s northern bank in the late 1800s. Where visitors today see fields of creosote, tamarisk, and mesquite trees, farmers raised crops for subsistence and to sell to area mining and ranching communities. Most evidence of this agricultural era was lost with the establishment of Big Bend National Park from the 1930s to ’60s. But vestiges remain, most notably the 1901 Alvino House,