Texas Luxury Hotel, Working Ranch, & Historical Landmark

Deep In the Heart of Texas
Architectural Digest, June 1999
Michael Ennis

Texas luxury hotel The guests at Cibolo Creek Ranch quickly make the acquain- tance of an unusual little man named Milton Faver. Known for generations as the Mystery Man of southwest Texas's remote Big Bend country, the multilingual Faver went by the hispanicized honorific Don Meliton and was variously mistaken for a New Yorker or a Frenchman; most likely he was a Missouri native. He was only a teenager when he shot a man in a duel and fled to a tiny town in northern Mexico in the late 1830s.

About ten years later he recrossed the Rio Grande and began building his empire. Hardly more than five feet tall, dandied up in the latest Victorian gentleman's attire, Faver fought off rustlers and Apache war parties, eventually running a herd of more than ten thousand longhorns on a vast expanse of rocky, arid range. Wheeling and dealing over sips of his homemade peach brandy, the erstwhile fugitive reinvented himself, in the words of the Texas Historical Commission plaque that welcomes visitors to his old stamping grounds, as "the first cattle baron west of the Pecos."

Today, Don Meliton is buried atop a tumulus of volcanic rubble overlooking Cibolo Creek, where he bears silent witness to the posthumous collapse of his improbable empire and its equally unlikely restoration. The three adobe fortresses that once defended his domain, reconstructed from their hand-tied ocotillo roofs to their hand-forged brass door latches, have recently become the redoubt of travelers drawn to the wide vistas and pellucid skies of this quintessentially western landscape.

Equal parts working ranch (a few hundred rare purebred Texas longhorns still graze the twenty-five-thousand-acre spread), wildlife preserve, historical landmark and luxury resort, Cibolo Creek Ranch draws a clientele as diverse as its attractions. Its guests include celebrities enjoying a week of solitude and horseback riding; Houston socialites and Dallas professionals trekking into the spectacularly rugged Chinati Mountains; European art cognoscenti on pilgrimage to the late Donald Judd's pasture-scale installation of concrete cubes and aluminum boxes in nearby Marfa; and bicoastal foodies who have heard the buzz about the remarkable cuisine.

Don Meliton's monuments were rapidly disappearing into dust when entrepreneur and amateur historian John Poindexter, shopping around for a ranch with "character," made his way up the gravel-strewn bed of Cibolo Creek in 1988. "It was like coming home," the third-generation Texan says of the connection he made with the crumbling ruins of El Fortin del Cibolo, the first and largest of Faver's adobe castles. "I knew at once that this was an extremely important historical artifact."

Poindexter spent two years researching the sites before beginning the nearly five-year restoration, enlisting architect Chris Carson of the San Antonio firm Ford, Powell & Carson along the way. They tracked down deeds and travelers accounts, pored over old photographs, toured nineteenth-century adobe houses throughout the Southwest and excavated the buried foundations at El Cibolo to reveal the exact dimensions of long-razed galleries. "We found photos in the Library of Congress that enabled us to determine the height of the original doorsteps," Poindexter says, underscoring his determination not to neglect the slightest detail.

Whatever remained has been reused. Miles of the ranch's distinctive, mortarless stone fences have been restacked from the rubble of the originals. The mud-pile ruins of eroded walls have been recycled into new adobe bricks. Rock-lined acequias that Faver dug to channel springwater to his orchards and fields have been retrenched, providing the babble of running water in a land that averages less than fifteen inches of rain a year.

At La Cienega, the second-largest and best-preserved of the ranch's three forts, the dining room's cement-hard, one-hundred-and-forty-year-old adobe walls are unadorned originals, as is the cottonwood viga y raja ceiling, though its elements are now intricately wired together. Walk into any of La Cienega's four guest rooms and you won't see any twentieth-century amenities to spoil the period mood; compact but luxuriously equipped modern baths are hidden behind the double doors of rustic armoires.

While the past is inescapable at Cibolo Creek Ranch, everything else is optional. "We pretty much run on custom itineraries," says Arthur Ahier, the affably punctilious Canadian who manages the ranch, leads bird-watching tours and wildlife shoots (cameras only) and supervises the congenial but unobtrusive service. "People tell us what they want, and we try to do it."

Many guests are content simply to stroll the parklike environs of the forts, study the encircling mountains while soaking in the heated pools or sit on the veranda and meditate to the melodious trickle of the acequias. Jeans are standard attire for elegantly presented dinners served in the long, narrow gallery where Don Meliton once held court. Apres dinner conversations are often continued outdoors, beside a roaring campfire dubbed Texas TV – rooms have neither televisions nor telephones – while shooting stars whiz overhead.

But real adventure is no farther than the ranch's own backyard. The Chinati Mountains, accessible by foot, horse, mountain bike (bring your own) or four-wheel-drive, are the product of an ancient volcanic cataclysm. They offer an otherworldly landscape where towering red mesas punctuate gentle, sage-colored hills bristling with desert succulents. Seeps and springs emanating from the porous lava nourish verdant oases shaded by massive cottonwood trees; not far from El Cibolo, a spring-fed waterfall plunges into an enchanting hidden canyon.

A two-hour hike into the Chinatis is rewarded with stunningly panoramic proof of just how remote this country is: Across the hundred-mile breadth of the horizon, bounded by the mountains of Mexico to the west and Big Bend National Park to the east, there's hardly a trace of human influence, not even a contrail to mar the sky. (The ranch has a caliche airstrip for private jets, but it's a four-hour drive to the nearest scheduled air service.)

Stuck among the natural splendors are fascinating shards of human history. A morning ride leads past an enclosure where Texas Rangers corralled cattle rescued from rustlers, then on to a display of nine-hundred-year-old Native American pictographs: cryptic rust-red stick figures painted in neat registers across strata of ancient limestone. A short walk up a small creek ends at a cavity in the surrounding cliffs, where the ceiling is blackened by soot and a mortarlike depression in the stone floor marks the spot where generations of Native Americans ground their seeds and grain. Shafter, an 1880s silver boomtown at the south edge of the ranch, is now the archetypal ghost town, its houses gutted adobe shells, its cemetery filled with neat rock-covered mounds.

Room rates include three meals a day, and for many guests Cibolo Creek's food is a stand-alone attraction. "It's cross-cultural cuisine – I don't like the term fusion – focusing on organically grown local ingredients," says Culinary Institute of America graduate Lisa Barber-Ahier (she's also Arthur's wife). The cultures she crosses range from Asian to Cajun-Mex.

Don Meliton continued to expand his herds well into the 1880s, even as fence-me-in innovations like barbed wire and windmill-powered well pumps threatened his hegemony; historians point to his death in 1889 as the end of the free-range era in West Texas. But although the current incarnation of Milton Faver's cattle kingdom seems poised to become a classic American destination, Poindexter doesn't plan to increase his room count much beyond the present sixteen. (In addition to the four at La Cienega and eleven at El Cibolo, there's a charming, utterly private one-bedroom cottage at La Morita, the smallest and most isolated of the three forts.) "This is a place lifted out of time – an island in time," Poindexter says. "And we intend to keep it that way."