DUANE
Duane's take
The State of Texas put this one down in 1936, and I'm just here to pass it along the way they told it. Now, somewhere out in the vast stretch of Presidio County, in the country folks call the Big Bend, a man named Milton Faver did something that took either extraordinary vision or extraordinary nerve — and out here, you generally needed both. In the fifties, Faver established the first Anglo-American owned ranch in the Big Bend.
Think about what that means for a moment. This wasn't settled country. This wasn't tamed country.
This was Big Bend — raw, remote, and at that time, contested ground where hostile Apaches made their presence known in ways no rancher could afford to ignore. So Milton Faver didn't just build a ranch. He built three of them.
Three quadrangular adobe fortresses, each one planted at a big spring — Cibolo, Cienaga, and La Morita. Quadrangular. That word isn't an accident.
These weren't cozy homesteads with a porch swing and a hound dog. They were fortresses, shaped and built to hold against attack. Three springs.
Three fortresses. One man staking his claim across some of the most unforgiving terrain Texas has to offer. Milton Faver came out here when nobody else had, built what nobody else had built, and those adobe walls at Cibolo, Cienaga, and La Morita still speak to just how serious a proposition that was.
What the marker says
Here Milton Faver established in the fifties the first Anglo-American owned ranch in the Big Bend. Three quadrangular adobe fortresses situated at big springs Cibolo, Cienaga and La Morita served as a defense against hostile Apaches. Erected by the State of Texas 1936