The Bar Ditch

The term "bar ditch" has recently intrigued me, since I have been unable to find it in dictionaries. Frequently, local writers of newspaper articles use this term, indicating that they are probably natives of West Texas.  I found this a curiosity because I had used the term since I was a young boy and never gave much thought to its uniqueness, or to its origin.  I mentioned the term in a January 13, 2013 essay on this blog, and the number of hits I got in reference to the term indicate that it beguiles a lot of people.  Therefore, after some reflection, I came to some conclusions about the term and decided that the term merits some expansion.

In West Texas,  I grew up on farm land that was sold to my father by the Yellowhouse Land Company, an agency that handled the selling off of some land that once was part of the famous XIT Ranch in northern Hockley County.  The land was still raw grassland when my dad bought it, and it had to be "grubbed out;" that is, cleared of mostly mesquite, cat-claw, yucca, broom-weed, pad and cholla cacti, and other natural flora of the South Plains. Our land was adjacent to the Yellowhouse Ranch land, on both the north and east side of our land, and it was all un-fenced until I was about 5 years old.

Until recently, I had not thought much about how the term "bar ditch" came into usage in West Texas.  I am well traveled, but never heard the term used outside of West Texas.  

Road maintainers, also called "road graders," used to grade the unpaved, dirt, county roads of West Texas on a regular basis, especially after wet weather caused vehicles to create ruts in them.  In /West Texas before WWII, there were very few paved roads, except for main, well-traveled highways.  The county road maintainers used to grade the many, county, dirt roads so that they had sharp, downward angles from the transit area of the road, into the bottom of the drainage ditches.  There was rarely enough rain to fill the ditches, but whether by design or by serendipitous accident, the roads served other useful purposes which probably led to their being labeled "bar ditches."  The outer sides of the ditches were almost vertical and had banks from about four to six feet in height.

During the open range era, these dirt banks, or cliffs, were very useful to cowboys herding cattle from one range to the other, and they served as fences to keep the cattle moving in one direction.  But there was yet another use for the "bar ditches" by ranchers.  They discouraged cattle from crossing roads from one owner's land to the other, or from the same owners land to another range.  Ranchers often moved cattle from one range to another to keep from overgrazing certain ranges.   I believe that the creation of these deep, sharply banked "bar ditches" was by the counties at the behest of ranchers in West Texas because the construction of wire fences was so expensive, and the deep, dirt barriers along county roads was a good substitute. In fact, I am quite sure that it was the ranchers that first gave these barriers the name, "bar ditches." Before barb wire fences, the bar ditches also kept "drive by" hunters from driving vehicles onto ranch land to pursue small game. There were graded entrances, but even these were often protected by gates before the land was fenced.   These "hunters," sometimes drunks from the oil fields, out shooting just for the "hell of it," were considered a real danger to herds of cattle that sometimes grazed near county roads, well within the range of stray bullets meant for coyotes, foxes, rabbits, prairie dogs, or other small game.

Nowadays we do not see the bar ditches anymore.  Higher speeds of autos and more graded county roads probably contributed to the demise of the bar ditch as well as wire fences for ranchers who no longer need any other barrier to cattle movement. When the bar ditches existed, 40 mph was considered very fast. Those ditches could be very dangerous to high speed drivers.  Shallow ditches with lesser grades now serve to drain off the rain water of mostly-paved county roads. However, the term "bar ditch" is still used to describe the ditch alongside or outside the shoulder of any road in West Texas.

Did LBJ Love El Paso?

Did LBJ love El Paso?

In El Paso mythology, the late President Lyndon B. Johnson was a “friend” of El Paso and Mexico.  In a recent article by Diana Washington, she reports on this “love” and supposed altruism that LBJ exhibited for El Paso and Mexico.

LBJ saw politics as a means to riches.  For many decades he had a monopoly on the news media in Austin, Texas.  Austin had a single TV station (LBJ’s)  up until the 1970s while smaller cities in the State had TV stations of all three major networks.  Everyone in Austin knew that LBJ had a cozy relationship with the FCC and their refusal to license other stations in Austin was no doubt due to his influence.   He made frequent campaign and “informational” speeches on his station.

Soon after he became President, LBJ began to focus on “settling” the so-called “problem” cause by shifts in the course of the meandering Rio Grande.  The Rio Grande, like all major rivers, had a marsh plain of, variably, a mile or two in width within which the river often, after floods, settled into new courses due to the sandy nature of the marsh plain.  Under old Treaties with Mexico, the center of the Rio Grande was always described as the international boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Nature frequently shifted the boundary until flood control projects beginning in 1906 at the Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico.  That project was not completed until some ten years later.  Construction of flood control levees, diversion dams and irrigation canals soon followed.  By 1938 there were levees all along both sides of the Rio Grande from Elephant Butte, southward all the way  to Hudspeth County where there was a more narrow, sparsely populated marsh plain, where the Rio Grande winds its way through the narrows of the mountain ranges of the Big Bend.    

The so-called “Chamizal problem” that LBJ ostensibly sought to settle became a “problem” only as El Paso and Juarez began to grow into major ports of entry for imports and exports.  Real estate values near the ports of entry soared in value in the 1930s.  As part of the “Chamizal Agreement” LBJ and Mexican political leaders agreed on a new course for the Rio Grande that would split the valuable real estate in the old marsh plain between Mexico and the U.S. As a guarantee against future flooding and changes in the course of the Rio Grande, the river channel was re-directed and cement-lined from a point just upriver from the Paso del Norte Port of Entry to a place near the south end of Concepcion Street in East El Paso.

In reality, there had not been and danger of a flood changing the Rio Grande’s course again through the marsh plain since the completion of the last flood control projects in 1938.  The U.S. and Mexico shared control of the new International Boundary and Water Commission that monitored the flow of water in the Rio Grande and supervised the allocation of irrigation and city water between the two countries. 

As construction of the new “Chamizal Project began, excavations attested to the fact that the marsh plain had, not in the too distant past, been worthless real estate--up until about the beginning of the 1930s.  Excavations in the old marsh plain turned up what proved to be an antique collector’s paradise because the plain obviously had once been a dump for everything from old, up to 1920s-vintage,  junked automobiles, to ordinary trash and garbage. 

For those of us who witnessed it, the re-channeling of the Rio Grande was a huge undertaking, and obviusly only the largest of the construction companies could qualify as bidders. The winning bidder of the main contract was Brown and Root Construction Company.  That seemed okay—until we learned that controlling interest of the humongous company was in the name of …Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ’s spouse.  Anyone who believes that the bidding on the contract was fair and on the up and up, would also believe that LBJ was a totally honest politician. LBJ and lady Bird’s investment in Brown and Root was probably foreseen as lucrative about the same time that LBJ saw the possibility of “settling the Chamizal dispute.” So former school teacher, lawyer and alleged relative of Sam Houston, LBJ, not only projected himself as a “peace maker:” but also a “friend of El Paso,” and more conveniently for him, one of America’s newest millionaires.

The Rio Grande has shifted its course at many places along the Rio Grande (called the Rio Bravo in México),many times in history, but it only became a “problem” when the real estate became valuable. If the benefactor of the profits from the Chamizal Settlement had been a Republican, the mainstream media, including the El Paso Times, would never let us forget it.  Only because of the Internet are a few people enlightened about the mythology of LBJ’s “interest” in El Paso.