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  • Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    What Became of
    Felipe Frais?

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox

    Working his way up a desolate arroyo choked with catclaw and mesquite, Border Patrol agent Bill Crowe came to an exposed red sandstone formation.

    Checking for illegal aliens on the McVay Ranch about five miles north of Van Horn off State Highway 54, he had driven a few miles off the highway past the ranch house, and then taken a dirt road running almost due west toward Allamore. Behind Turtleback Mountain he had started cutting for sign.

    He hadn’t found any tracks yet, but as he looked at the rock ledge, something caught his eye. It was a rusty lard can, wedged between two segments of rock.

    When Crowe pulled the can from its resting place, he could tell it had something in it. Removing the top, he found another can inside. Opening that can, he smelled chili. Indeed, he saw that it held two well-preserved red chili peppers. But there was more:

    A shaving mirror, a wash rag or handkerchief with a hand-stitched hem, a pencil in a handmade leather holster, a bar of soap wrapped in paper, a tobacco pouch with rolling papers, the dried peppers and assorted seeds and a printed Arbuckle’s Coffee premium list with offers valid from June 1, 1896 to May 31, 1897.

    The most interesting item Crowe found in the can was a letter written in Spanish, folded into an envelope carefully sealed with stitching.

    It appeared that the can had been deliberately placed where he found it, partially concealed. Above where he had found the can, Crowe noted a scattering of gathered firewood at what looked like could have been a camp site.

    Then a bachelor, Crowe took the can and its contents to his residence in Van Horn and stuck it on a shelf in his laundry room. About a year later, he figured the folks at the Clark Hotel Museum might be interested in the desert-preserved time capsule and took it there.

    The museum curator got the letter translated and put it and the items on display in a glass cabinet.

    This is what it said:

    “Senor Don Jose Zepeda, my very esteemed friend, all of my great honor and joy. Hoping upon receiving these short lines I find you in complete health, and that of your family also, as my own I am enjoying, Thank God.

    “These short lines are to send my greetings, and to get me a jar of Magistral [quinine], and send me a little, if you can send it in grain form if not send it in liquid. Find 4 pounds of asafoetida and send me a bar. If you have the means send it with 2 chisels. And send me all these things with a person of your confidence. You know of all God has provided you have part. Provide me with what I ask and you will have part. I do stress you do everything possible to send me these things I asked for. I will return the favor. Good friend I wish I could see you instead of write to you. Felipe Frais.”

    So who was Felipe Frais?

    After the letter and other items found in the can went on display in the early 1990s, the museum hoped someone would come forward to provide more information on Frais, but no one ever has. And the internet offers no help.

    Whoever he was, he must have been fairly well educated, writing in an elegant hand. He drank Arbuckle’s coffee and saved coupons toward the premiums the famous coffee company offered.

    Frais’s asking for chisels led the museum staff to speculate that he might have been a prospector. Certainly, his request for confidentiality indicates he might have believed he was on to something in the area where he left the can. So does the line, “You know of all God has provided you have part.”

    The bigger question is what happened to him. For whatever reason, Frais’s letter never got sent. Did the good health he mentioned in his letter suddenly fail him? In fact, his request for quinine and asafoetida, two substances which many back then thought could cure anything from fever to flatulence to flu, indicates he might have been ill when he wrote the letter. Did he die somewhere in the desert, his quest for precious metals cut short by a virus, heatstroke, rattlesnake bite or something else?

    A web search reveals no recorded grave marker bearing his name. And if anyone came across Frais’s body in the desert, that fact is lost in the coroner’s records of El Paso County. (Culberson County was not organized until 1912.) Whatever happened to Frais likely will forever remain a mystery.

    Originally from Georgia, Crowe had worked for six months as a National Park Service ranger at Mount McKinley in Alaska before joining the Border Patrol in 1978. He retired in 2006 after 28 years of federal service, all of it around Van Horn. These days he works as a security officer at the U.S. District Court in Pecos, though he still lives in Van Horn.

    Other than an occasional arrowhead, Crowe says Felipe Frais’s modest possessions are the most interesting things he ever found while scouting his part of the vast Trans-Pecos desert.

    © Mike Cox -
    December 22 , 2011 column
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