DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is Los Ojuelos, out in Webb County, and friend, this place has been holdin' secrets since long before Texas was a word anybody said out loud. For thousands of years, Los Ojuelos — The Springs — sat out in the south Texas brush country offerin' up the one thing you couldn't live without in that country: water.
Pure, reliable, precious water. In a landscape that could kill you with thirst, those springs were something close to sacred. And that reputation had a way of attractin' both the best and the worst of what people bring with them.
In 1810, a man named Eugenio Gutiérrez received a Spanish land grant that included the springs. Now, havin' a grant on paper and havin' peace on the ground — those are two different things entirely. Eugenio tried to settle here.
His son Isidro tried too. Both of them were blocked by conflicts with Comanches. The land said yes; the circumstances said not yet.
It would take another four decades before Los Ojuelos finally got its permanent settler. The turning point came in 1850, when a Texas Ranger outpost was established at the site under the leadership of John Salmon Ford — a man the world knew by the name Rip Ford. That outpost was there to regulate the trade road running between Laredo and the port at Corpus Christi, and the Rangers' presence changed the equation.
With that outpost holding the line, José María Guerra — a grandson of Eugenio Gutiérrez, if you're keepin' up with the family tree — was finally able to permanently settle at Los Ojuelos. Three generations of the same family, reachin' across four decades, before someone could finally plant roots at the place their grandfather had been granted. During the 1860s, Guerra built several caliche structures at the site: a chapel, a small irrigation system, and other buildings that today stand among the best preserved Spanish-Mexican ranch architecture in the entire region.
The man built to last. The springs did what springs do — they drew people in. From the 1870s all the way through the 1940s, travelers came to the village, and a community took shape around that water.
And here's where the story gets a little unexpected. The most lucrative crop for the settlers wasn't cattle, wasn't cotton. It was peyote cactus — indigenous to the area, and in widespread ritualistic and medicinal use among American Indians.
Licensed or not, known or not, peyote was the economic engine runnin' quietly out there in the brush. Then the 1920s rolled in, and Los Ojuelos found itself with a Texas Ranger outpost again — this time dealin' with a different kind of traffic. Tequileros, they were called.
Liquor smugglers crossin' over from Mexico. The Rangers were back, the trade road was still hummin', and the springs were still there. But the ground beneath all of it was about to shift in a way nobody could stop.
Oil. The discovery of oil came in, and with it came drilling, and with it came the clearing of peyote fields to make room for wells. The peyote trade — already strained by overharvesting — was greatly reduced.
And then, as the development of Mirando City took hold and oil and gas drilling spread, the springs themselves dried up. Los Ojuelos, The Springs, no longer had springs. By the 1930s, the site was virtually abandoned.
Now, that's not quite the end. Native Americans still come to the area every February to purchase peyote harvested from area ranches, bought through licensed dealers. And oil and gas drilling continues to be an important economic activity in the Los Ojuelos area to this day.
The buildings Guerra put up in the 1860s are still standing. The water that sustained thousands of years of life is gone. And out there in Webb County, the brush country holds all of it — the grant, the Rangers, the springs, the silence — like it always has.
What the marker says
For thousands of years, Los Ojuelos (The Springs) were a source of the precious south Texas commodity of water. Eugenio Gutiérrez received a Spanish land grant in 1810 that included the springs, but attempts to settle here by Eugenio and his son, Isidro, were blocked by conflicts with Comanches. In 1850, a Texas Ranger outpost was set up under the leadership of John Salmon “Rip” Ford to regulate the trade road between Laredo and the port at Corpus Christi, and the Rangers’ presence enabled José María Guerra, a grandson of Eugenio Gutiérrez, to permanently settle at the site. During the 1860s, Guerra built several caliche structures, including a chapel and a small irrigation system, now among the best preserved Spanish-Mexican ranch architecture in the region. The springs drew travelers to the village from the 1870s until the 1940s. The indigenous peyote cactus, which had widespread ritualistic and medicinal use among American Indians, was the most lucrative crop for the settlers. In the 1920s, a Texas Ranger outpost near Los Ojuelos dealt with tequileros (liquor smugglers) crossing from Mexico. The discovery of oil greatly reduced the peyote trade due to overharvesting and clearing of peyote fields for drilling. Native Americans still purchase from licensed dealers every February peyote harvested from area ranches. The springs dried up following the development of Mirando City and oil and gas drilling, and the site was virtually abandoned in the 1930s. Oil and gas drilling continues to be an important economic activity in the Los Ojuelos area. (2010)