#37 / 2004: Tour 3: Langtry, Texas

LANGTRY, TEXAS      

#37

We pulled out of Amistad and spent an afternoon in Langtry, Texas, home of Judge Roy Bean. It looks like a ghost town; just a few homes are still occupied. There is a museum on the judge there, and since it was free, we decided to drop in. We got there near dusk; the museum was already closed, so we made camp for the night on a dead end street at the top of a small hill, overlooking the town. Next morning we grabbed our cameras and walked into town.

       

I was so curious to know what kind of person ran the museum and lived out in the middle of nowhere, so to speak. The director was the son of folks who had run a souvenir shop and soda fountain back in the years the town was a big tourist attraction. Before that his dad had been a roaming rancher, running cattle concerns throughout Texas and Mexico. The director had managed ranches just like his father after he retired from the service. He bought his parents house when they retired and became museum director when the job opened up. 

“I like quiet,” he said.

       

The big boom for the tourists was after the Second World War up until the eighties or so. About the time VCRs came out and all the drive-in theaters died away.  I was shocked to learn that by two-thirty that afternoon over one hundred people had already visited that day. So I always remind myself not to operate on false assumptions and quick judgments.

       

One of the nicest things about the place is the fabulous desert garden created all around all the old buildings. I have studied them greatly and fancy some of them in my own little "casita." I loved the purple sage and some of the tall cacti that look a bit like palm trees. Also there is a plant called candelaria which can be used to make (surprise) candles, because it contains such a hard wax. That fascinates me and one of the things I want to learn is how to turn that plant into candles.

                

Langtry was probably named after a man who helped engineer the railroad through the region, but Roy Bean always claimed it was named after Lily Langtry. He was obsessed with her and always said the singer would show up one day. When he built his two-room white frame home he called it an “opera house.” There was also a saloon, store, church, and school in the town.

        

There are many artifacts and stories about the years Chinese railroad crews from the West and Irish, Italian, and other Anglo crews from the east who worked on the tracks before they drove the silver spike into the junction near Langtry. Bean got his start in a makeshift canvas tent he called a saloon, following these work crews. There are still mountains of broken glass bottles and empty opium tins all around Langtry.

       

When the town was in its planning stages, the now Judge Roy Bean (with one book of law, usually ignored) decided to build an actual wooden structure. After the tracks were finished the railroad company, in appreciation and respect for his good sense, had officially made Roy Bean the only real law officer west of the Pecos River. 

He never really hung anyone, but took everybody for all they were worth with his trumped up charges and fines. But he seemed to be a relatively fair man. He loved Lily Langtry, but never lived to see the day she finally came to town, a few months after his death.