Letters from the Big Bend

"March 4, 1911). . . and even at night when I cross the turbulent waters of the Rio Grande and listen to the music her waters make in their mad rush to the sea, it seems to say, "I pass on and on, but not you.""

Lonely musings and vivid accounts of daily life along the Mexican border provide an intriguing glimpse into frontier life in Texas during the troubled times of the Mexican Revolution. Jim Landrum was a successful lawyer when he left Florida in 1908 to recover from tuberculosis in the West. After a regimen of mercury treatments, he settled in the Big Bend and gradually regained his strength. He found a place in the border community as a trading post manager, justice of the peace, postmaster, and medic and married the daughter of a respected Mexican family. Frequent letters to family in Pensacola shared his joys and problems. The most devastating of these to be falsely accused of a crime-with no hope for a fair trial, he joined Carranza's Constitutionistas as a captain surgeon. In 1914, he rode with soldiers into Mexico and disappeared. The baby he and his wife expected would one day be called "The Cinderella of Big Bend."