The town of Terlingua exists because a Cleveland businessman won some land in a poker game and decided to find out what was on it. The story has been told in different ways over the years — the details vary, the contours hold. Howard Everett Perry founded the Chisos Mining Company in 1903, made a fortune from quicksilver, built an absentee empire from a thousand miles away, and died in a Boston hotel room in 1944 having spent most of his life avoiding the town that made him rich. Without him, none of modern Terlingua exists.
The Poker Game
The standard account, retold by Kenneth Ragsdale in his definitive history *Quicksilver: Terlingua and the Chisos Mining Company*, has Perry acquiring a section of land in remote Brewster County, Texas, in a poker game in New England in the late 19th century. The exact date and circumstances vary in retelling — some accounts say it was inherited, some say purchased cheaply, some hold to the poker version. What's certain is that by the late 1890s, Perry held title to a substantial parcel of unworked Texas desert and had no particular plan for it.
In 1898, mercury was discovered in nearby properties. Perry, who had been running businesses in Chicago and Cleveland — printing, real estate, miscellaneous concerns — investigated his Texas holdings. By 1900, geologists had found cinnabar (the bright red ore from which mercury is extracted) on Perry's land in serious quantities.
Going to Spain First
Before incorporating his mining company, Perry did something unusual for an American mining prospect of the era. He traveled to Almadén, Spain — the site of the world's most productive and longest-running mercury mine, in continuous operation for over 2,000 years.
Perry studied the Almadén operation for months. He examined their Scott Furnace technology (the workhorse retort design that vaporized cinnabar into mercury). He met with their engineers. He returned to the United States with notebooks and a plan.
In May 1903, Perry incorporated the Chisos Mining Company in Texas. Within months, the company was producing.
The Architecture of an Absentee Empire
Perry never moved to Terlingua. He visited periodically — twice a year on average — to inspect operations, fire managers, hire new ones, sign contracts, and leave again. His real life was in Chicago and later Boston, with seasonal escapes to Florida. His Texas holdings were a remote source of income, not a place to live.
This created a peculiar company-town dynamic. Howard Perry was a presence felt constantly in Terlingua — every employee worked for him, every paycheck came from him — and was almost never physically present. Managers ran day-to-day operations. The company doctor, the company store, the schoolhouse, the worker housing — all of it operated by Perry's instructions, transmitted by mail and telegram.
In 1906, after one of his Almadén research trips, Perry built himself a mansion overlooking the town. The architecture was loosely Moorish (inspired, supposedly, by what he'd seen in Spain), with arched verandas, thick adobe walls, and a commanding view from a hilltop. He stayed in it during visits. The rest of the year it sat empty. Today, it still stands in Terlingua — privately owned, visible from the path up the hill from the Ghost Town center.
The Boom
The Chisos Mining Company grew steadily through the 1900s and 1910s. The 20-ton Scott Furnace Perry installed in 1908 dramatically increased capacity. Strikes in the cinnabar veins were occasional but consistent. The 1914 vein discovery, which coincided with the outbreak of World War I and a corresponding spike in mercury demand for military applications, sent the company into its most profitable years.
At the company's peak in the early 1920s, the Chisos Mining Company employed several hundred miners and supported a town of approximately 2,000 people. By total mercury production over its operational life, it was the largest mercury mine in the United States and one of the largest in the world.
The Workforce
Most of the labor was Mexican-American. Many of the workers crossed the river from Boquillas, Mexico, on company permits and worked under Perry's company-town rules. Wages were modest. Working conditions were dangerous — mercury exposure was constant and largely understood by Perry's company doctors, who nonetheless continued to employ men in furnace operations for decades. Many miners and refinery workers experienced classic mercury poisoning symptoms over time: tremor, salivation, neurological deterioration, loss of teeth, chronic respiratory problems.
Perry's company-town arrangement compensated workers partly in scrip (company-issued currency redeemable only at the company store), a then-common practice that critics argued kept workers economically dependent on the company.
The Decline
By the late 1930s, mercury prices were falling and the easy ore was gone. Production at increasing depths became uneconomical. Perry, now in his 70s, gradually wound down operations.
On October 1, 1942, the Chisos Mining Company filed for bankruptcy.
The mines kept operating intermittently under successor owners through World War II. By 1946, all were closed. Within two years, Terlingua was a true ghost town. (Read more in The Quicksilver Boom Town That Refuses to Die.)
Perry's End
Howard E. Perry died on December 6, 1944, in a hotel room in Boston. He was en route to a Florida vacation. He was 86. He had outlived his company's bankruptcy by two years and his Texas adventure by half a century.
He never returned to Terlingua after 1940. His mansion sat empty for years. The mining town he'd built emptied within two years of his death.
What Remains
The Chisos Mining Company's physical legacy is visible all over Terlingua Ghost Town — the foundations of the company store (now the Trading Company), the worker cottages now restored as Airbnbs and galleries, the company doctor's adobe, the old movie theater Perry built that became the Starlight. His mansion still stands on the hill overlooking it all.
The Chisos Mining Company is also why the Mariscal Mine — the smaller operation deep inside what's now Big Bend National Park — exists in its current visitable form. Perry's company didn't own Mariscal directly, but it set the entire mining-district template that Mariscal followed.
The town of modern Terlingua — the artists, the river guides, the chili cookoff weekend that draws thousands — exists because Howard Perry's absentee empire briefly populated a chunk of unforgiving desert with infrastructure. After he and the company were gone, the infrastructure remained, slowly returning to the desert, and after decades, drew different kinds of people back. From Stardust Big Bend, you can walk to most of what Perry built in twenty minutes. It's worth doing.
