Padre Island National Seashore             

Oral History

Bob Whistler, who was a Chief Park Naturalist for the National Seashore in 1970s and early 80s, did much to record the island's cultural and natural history.  Because of him we have maybe 60%-75% of the museum and archival collections that we have today.   One of his projects was to find people who had close connections to the park and record their personal narratives of life on the island on audio tape and then transcribe the tapes.  Mr. Whistler also retained many letters and newspaper/magazine articles written about the island by people closely connected with the island.  These accounts and articles are now in the park's museum collection for anyone who would like to research the history of the island.  However, because the archives and museum collection are now in storage, they are unfortunately open to researchers by appointment only and not at all to viewing by the general public.

Here are a few quotes from the park's oral history tape transcripts.  More may be added with time.

Use these links to go to specific topics within this page:

Burning off Salt Grass    What Cattle Will Eat    Life during the Second World War   

The Feather Trade and Terns on South Bird Island    Bob Whistler's Notes and more about birds

Excerpts from the Jim Lynch Interviews

This first is from a transcript of a undated (probably in the 1970s) meeting between David Brown (D.B.--unidentified), Jim Lynch (J.L.--former foreman of the Dunn Ranch during its last twenty years), and Bob Whistler (B.W.).  The topic is how the island has changed since the ranch closed in 1971 and the grass that grows on the island and its use for cattle.  Mr. Lynch has commented that the cattle didn't like a grass known as sacahuista or "salt grass" and that it was of little use for cattle.   This transcript has not been edited for either grammar or spelling.

Burning off Salt Grass

D.B.    I can imagine -- that's exactly the kind of questions we're trying to get at.  You burned off Sacahuista (sic) ? Wherever you -- salt grass -- wherever you found it.

J.L.    Well -- what they would do -- in the past there was natural barriers through here for fire lines.

B.W.  In other words, I think maybe -- another words moving dune fields maybe come across the island.

J.L.     Oh yes.  They use to be all along and you might find 4,000 or 5,000 acres -- 1,000 acres in a spot that we would burn off and it had a natural barrier around it to stop the fire,  We'd come to one of those that was being taken over by this old salt grass, why then we'd just stick a match to it. We would maybe skip quite a ways so the cattle wouldn't have to travel back and forth to find grass -- we would burn a spot here, maybe skip 4 or 5 miles, burn another spot, and do the same all up and down the island to get all the old thick grass out and then that's in the flats.  It doesn't grow that much on the hills but in the flats it gets bad.  That's the only thing -- the better grasses are covered up by that and from the sunlight and everything else, I'm sure.  For some reason or other, it just takes over.

What Cattle Will Eat

Further on is this conversation about what the cattle will eat (surprisingly):

D.B.    What is it -- mostly what they won't eat is that sawgrass.  Is  there anything else they definitely won't eat?  The stuff along the back --

J.L.    They eat any -- I tell you cows that comes up over here is pretty hardy and they'll eat most anything.  I see them out on the beach hustling for themselves and people think that they're crazy chewing on a rope or chewing on a dead fish, and they do that -- people would laugh at the cow as crazy.  The cow's not --the cow is looking for salt.

D.B.    Yeah.

J.L.    And so then they chew on the rope and get the salt out of it.  They eat those fish for bone meal.  They get something out of anything they eat.  Well,  anyway, they -- you bring a cow from the Mainland over here they'd starve to death on things like that but --

D.B.    Yeah.

Excerpt from the Louis Rawalt Interviews

Louis Rawalt was a friend of Pat Dunn and lived on the island from 1920 until around the opening of the National Seashore in 1970.  Even after moving into Corpus Christi, Louis kept a small shack on the island and spent most of his time on the island until failing eyesight prohibited him around 1976.  He made his living selling what he found on the beach and the fish he caught at Big Shell Beach.  For nearly forty-three years he was also Audubon warden of Bird Island.  Bob Whistler's interviews with Mr. Rawalt provide fascinating details about people and wildlife on the island.

The original texts were transcribed differently than those of the Jim Lynch interview and are reproduced exactly below.  In  these, Bob Whistler and Mr. Rawalt are the only two participants.  Bob Whistler's comments and questions are in parentheses.  Mr. Rawalt's are not.  Uncertain transcriptions are in brackets.  These are only samples from a series of interviews that lasted over several years.

Life during the Second World War

(Okay.  Well, when the war started, what happened on Padre Island?)

Well,  they ran everybody off of it except me, and, of course, they had Coast Guard stations about every six miles.  they had a house in back of the dunes, and they patrolled the beach.

They finally let people come over, but they couldn't stay after dark. They had to be off the island before dark.  And people got to where they -- they just shied off from coming over.  Or they'd come over and stay on the upper end, but as far as coming way down, it was too much of a trip.

They couldn't be caught there during the night, because they had these patrols with dogs.  And these guys would carry these .45 automatic rifles and, hell, they were scared of their shadow.  They shot stumps and everything else.  You didn't want to be out there on the beach. 

(You wouldn't want to be out there even if you could.)

No.  Huh uh.  They let me stay, but I didn't try to fish at night at all.  I just fished during the day.  There were quite a few of them that I got to know real well.  Especially the cooks.  There were two cooks that liked to fish and they'd have a day off and they'd come down.

And of course that's when you couldn't -- you had to have red meat stamps and coffee stamps and sugar stamps.  They'd always bring me a ham and 10 pounds of coffee and a bunch of sugar.  Hell,  I had more stuff than I  had before they had stamps.

They'd come down and fish.  And on paydays, I'd start in -- and those darned boys knew when I was going to town and by the time I got to Port Aransas I had them hanging all over.  They'd come out on the beach and wave me down and jump aboard.

(In other words, they'd want you to get them stuff, huh?)

No, they just were going on liberty.  They...

(Oh, I get it.) 

They didn't have any liberty trucks.  I used to haul them back and forth when I was going. Of course they were nice  service men.  They'd always cumshaw a bunch of stuff.

(Now I'm learning something.  I wasn't aware that the Coast Guard had built these cabins or buildings for these fellows to stay in.)

Yeah.  They had one big building.  I guess about 24 by 30 and -- you've run across some of those chunks of concrete, haven't you?  With openings?

(Oh, there's one down at Big Shell, I know.)

Well, there's one up...this camp that was on the beach, you'd pass it.  Well that was their septic tanks.  But they had bunks in these buildings.  They had power plants, water systems.

And, let's see...About six, twelve...about six miles south of where Leslie had his house, they had a camp down there.  It was a -- what the hell did they call it? -- anyhow, it was Civil service.  They were servicing those targets.  And they had a building there, oh, about 15 feet wide, about 30 feet long, and it had two bunks, one of them here and one of them here, then a space, you know, and two, and then it was divided, and there'd be four more.  They had a separate place for a dining room -- nice table, benches, stoves  --  and they abandoned that and I moved into it.

And they left blankets, these good Navy wool blankets, mattresses, pillows, cooking utensils -- they just, you know, pulled out.

(Is that right?)

There it is.  They turned it back to the landowners who were [Jones] at that time.  I stayed in there for, I don't know, a couple or three years.  It was a heck of a nice place.  It was in back of the dunes. 

(Well, you said this was Civil Service.  They serviced the bombing ranges?)

Yes, the target areas.

(The target areas.)

Yeah.

(So, they had, apparently, the... I guess it was the Army boys -- I don't know if it was Navy...)

No, it was Navy.

(It was Navy.)

Navy.

(Yes.  They'd have practice runs...)

Every day.

(Every day.)

Oh, yeah.  In fact, they had one target area about eight miles south of the Black Hill ranch house.  They had it fenced in to try to keep the cattle out.  And their targets were pretty well over towards the beach and there were some big dunes over there.

And these boys would make their runs and turn those .50 calibers loose and, oh hell, they'd miss that damned target by 400 yards and hit that dune over there.  And a norther would come up and blow that sand on the back side to the lagoon and all these .50 calibers would roll down to the bottom.  They were stuck in those sandhills, you know.

I'd go over there and get a bucket full of those things.  There were brass, but they were filled with lead.  And I'd just build a healthy fire and get some hot coals and I'd just pour a bunch of them in there.  Melt that lead out, and the lead would go down in the sand, the fire would burn out and you could pull it away, and here you'd have a big sheet of lead to make my sinkers out of.

(That's a good idea...I declare.)

They had some nice places down there.

(Well, tell me -- the cattle seemed to know when these planes were coming or something, did they?)

No.

(They didn't.)

What they'd do is, they'd send out a plane about 30 minutes ahead and if there was any of the cattle in there, he'd buzz 'em -- you know, to chase them out.  'Cause every time they killed one of them damned cows over there Burton would jump the Navy and hell, some of them damned old cows wasn't worth $15 and he'd get $300 a head for 'em. 

(Is that right?)

I used to tell him, "Damn it, Burton, what are you doing?  Running some of them old buzzards in there that are about to die?"

The Feather Trade and Terns on South Bird Island

(...ing about the royal terns and something about...)

Yes, they could have because at that time I guess there were something around 30,000 of the royals and Caspian terns that nested on South Bird Island, but then the one they were most interested in was the snowy egret.

Now we didn't have too many snowies down here.  That was up country, starting with -- close to the Brazos River, and along in there -- from there north to Florida.  Florida is where they did most of that, with the feathers of the snowy egrets and the feathers of the royal and Caspian terns.  Somen [sic] wore them on their hats at that time.

Bob Whistler's Notes

As Mr. Whistler interviewed Mr. Rawalt, he took notes.  Sometimes the notes clarify what was on tape or made up for a missing section of tape.  Here are a few of the notes (copied exactly--replete with spelling and grammatical errors) Mr. Whistler took on Mr. Rawalt's experiences with birds on the island.

"Birds-Loma Alta, Louis said there was rookery for night herons in the Shin Oaks, Bay Trees, Indian Tooth Ache Tree (Prickly Ash Tree)"

"Big clump of oaks our forest, Great Horn Owls used to nest in there for years."

"All  the fish eating bird rookeries were on North and South Bird Islands.  That area contained all the nesting birds.  Perhaps before the Civil War maybe had some nestyin by Packery Channel."

"White Pelican-

10-15 colonies, First of April start ot nest.  The eggs are laid 3 days apart when finally comes and feeds after hatching difference in age.  Young takes the weaker young shakes it and throws out of area, only o makes it."

"10,000 to 20,000 terns nested here before dredgeing.  Large colony of white Pelicans in Mexico perhpahs they are going down there??????  Used to be 1500-2000 White Pelicans on South Bird Island before dredging.  There were other birds such as terns, Gull Bill, Caspian, etc."

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