Picket and Sotol House

As ranchers progressed, they built for the long run, but the pioneer “made do.” The settler heading for a new life in the West used materials at hand to construct a shelter for himself and his family. Where he could find trees, he built a log cabin. In hill country, he used river rock and stones. On the plains, he shoveled a hole in the ground for a dugout.

Far West Texas was a country between trees and hills and plains, with no rocks or trees and the soil was sandy. Here were crumbly caliche, small brush and desert plants. But the land was available to homesteaders, if they could handle the life it required of them.

The country was named for frontiersman Davy Crockett. It was an area where Uncle Sam experimented with the Camel Corps for desert military transportation. Soldiers at Fort Lancaster fought Indians, and people who passed through the unfenced country included immigrants, gold seekers and cattle drivers, all heading to California for the prosperity it promised.

In 1904, D.B. Kilpatrick and his wife, Truda, moved from Del Rio, Texas, to the stark area 35 miles southwest of Ozona to homestead land. After living on the property for three years and making certain improvements, the land would be theirs. The five sections the Kilpatricks settled on were crossed by the Fort Lancaster-Del Rio road that connected the old San Antonio-El Paso road at Fort Lancaster.

For a shelter, the Kilpatricks looked at what was available to them and adopted the hut-like construction formerly used by Indian sheep and goat raisers along the Texas-Mexico border: the yucca-like sotol plant.

The tall stalks grew from the center of sharp-leafed desert plants and died each year. Once dried, they became like wood. They were easily pulled loose for use as “logs.”

The couple constructed the two sotol rooms with a rough framework of vertically set cedar posts about four feet apart. Sotol was nailed horizontally to the cedar posts. More stalks were nailed to the other side of the posts, forming a double wall. Soil and small rocks were poured between the walls as filler and insulation. Cedar pieces, material scraps and tin can lids covered the cracks. The couple added a roof thatched with bundles another yucca variety called sacahuiste. The house was drafty with gaps allowing rodents and desert animals to enter in search of food. Perhaps knowing the difficulty of living in such a structure and with the knowledge that it would need to be for several years, the Kilpatricks didn’t last the required time to receive their land grant.

Arthur Mills moved into the sotol house, adding a third room using upright cedar posts nailed together and set into a trench. He stacked fieldstone to create a fireplace for cooking and heat. He also hauled lumber from Del Rio to cover the floor in the cedar post room, and he shingled the roof. Existence in this home was still stark. The dirt-floored north sotol room was used for storage and as a work area. The south sotol, also a dirt-floored room, was a combination kitchen/bedroom until Mills added the wooden-floored picket room, which he built to be the kitchen.

Furnishings included an iron bed, wardrobe and pie safe, brought in a covered wagon. The walls were too fragile for cabinets, so a crate was nailed up to hold small items. The chuckbox was taken off the wagon and used as a kitchen cabinet and table top. Two large bins stored flour and sugar. Saddles were hung by ropes from the rafters, a common practice to help prevent pest damage. A horse-drawn sled was used to bring water to the house from a well 200 yards away. The well and windmill were already on the property, left by a large-scale rancher who had constructed them to get his cattle to graze farther away from the Pecos River.

The exterior of the house had a small shelf near the door, which held a wash basin and a water bucket with dipper. Because of the danger of rodents and other animals getting into food supplies, no bulk flour, sugar or vegetables were stored in the north sotol room. Since predators were a problem to ranchers and setters, traps were often set. A horseshoe near the door wished its owners good luck.

Such buildings as the Picket and Sotol House were built for temporary use and were not made to withstand the severe West Texas weather. Because the material was more fragile than logs, lumber or stone, few survived. Jerry Rogers, then director of the NRHC, termed the structure “a rare and exciting find because it is probably one of the very last of its kind still in good enough condition and near enough its original state to allow historically accurate restoration.”

The house is a tribute to the ingenuity of early settlers, who used whatever was available to them when building a home in a harsh land.

For the Record: Restoration of the Picket and Sotol House was slowed by the lack of experience anyone had at working with the desert materials. Jose Maria Martinez of San Antonio and Juan Enrique Martinez and Felix Vela of Laredo, Texas, donated their labor to make the thatched roof for the simple hut, or jacal, using knowledge of a technique handed down through generations of their families.