BIG BEND COUNTRY: TERLINGUA TEXAS

TERLINGUA TEXAS

Once a year, on the first Saturday of November, over 10,000 chili aficionados, known as "chiliheads," descend on Terlingua for the International Championship Chili Cook Off.

The Chili Cook Off started in 1967 as a battle between two Texas characters, Wick Fowler and H. Allen Smith, both known for their witty humor. And their chili. Somehow Frank X. Tolbert got thrown into the chili mix, with 2 festivals sort of competing wih each other in one big happy chili party.

Terlingua is located near the Rio Grande. The villages of Lajitas and Study Butte are close. And across the Rio Grande is the village of Santa Elena.

In the 1880s cinnabar was discovered in the Terlingua zone. Cinnabar is the thing in the ground from which Mercury is extracted. Cinnabar mining turned Terlingua into a bit of a boomtown, with a population of over 2,000.

Those mining boomtown days are long gone, though the subsequent discovery of a mineral called terlinguaite brought a bit of a new boost to Terlingua in 1900. Terlinguaite is a mineral form of Mercury formed by the weathering of other mercury containing minerals. Since it was discovered by Terlingua, it was named after the town.

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