In 1967, a New York journalist named H. Allen Smith wrote an article for Holiday magazine titled "Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do." This slander on Texas values prompted Dallas journalist Wick Fowler to challenge Smith to a chili cookoff in Terlingua, Texas. It was quite an affair, with folks like Carol Shelby, the journalist Leon Hale, and many more such people showing up. The great Gary Cartwright ended up writing about the cookoff for Sports Illustrated magazine. I present to you both H. Allen Smith's article that motivated Wick Fowler to challenge Smith and Gary Cartwright's article about the first cookoff. Both are extremely funny.
First, H. Allen Smith's article from Holiday magazine:
NOBODY KNOWS MORE ABOUT CHILI THAN I DO
When I was a boy of ten in Decatur, Illinois, my mother gave me twenty cents every morning—half of it for carfare to school, the remaining dime for my lunch. I could have spent that dime on candy or ice cream, but I can’t recall that I ever did, because it was at this magic and benign moment in time that I discovered chili.
Day after day I went to Chili Bill’s joint a couple of blocks from the school, sat at a scrubbed wooden counter, and for ten cents got a bowl of steaming chili, six soda crackers and a glass of milk. That was livin’!
I have been a chili man ever since those days. Nay, I have been the chili man. Without chili I believe I would wither and die. I stand without a peer as a maker of chili, and as a judge of chili made by other people. No living man, and let us not even think of woman in this connection, no living man, I repeat, can put together a pot of chili as ambrosial, as delicately and zestfully flavorful, as the chili I make. This fact is so stern, so granitic, that it belongs in the encyclopedias, as well as in all standard histories of civilization.
That is the way of us chili men. Each of us knows that his chili is light years beyond other chili in quality and singularity; each of us knows that all other chili is such vile slop that a coyote would turn his back on it.
My brother Sam believes that he should be given the Nobel prize for chili-making. He and I didn’t speak for a year and a half because of our clash of views on chili-making. Word got to me that Sam was telling people that our Pop had called him the greatest chili-maker in all Christendom. I knew this to be a falsehood; my father has said that I was the greatest. My sister Lou tried to deescalate our feud by saying that pop actually had remarked that he was the greatest chili-maker in the civilized world.
Brother Sam has gone along for years making chili without so much as a whiff of cumin seed in it, and cumin seed is as essential to chili as meat is to hamburger. I was at Sam’s house once and in a moment of fraternal feeling ate a spoonful of his foul chili. I remarked helpfully that it had no cumin seed in it and Sam said that I could leave his fireside and never come back. “One bowl of your chili,” said I, “would pollute the waters of the Great Salt Lake.” And off I stomped.
Thus began the feud, and it came to an end only after news reached me that Sam was warring on another chili front. He and I both believe that proper chili should be soupy, with lots of broth. He has a friend named VanPelt who composes thickened chili, Texas style. My chili and Sam’s chili are eaten with a soup spoon; VanPelt eats his from a plate with a fork. Sam and VanPelt broke off relations for a while after a highly seasoned argument over thin-versus-thick. Van Pelt contended that Sam’s chili should be eaten through a straw and Sam said that VanPelt’s lavalike chili could be molded into balls and used to hold down tent flaps in a high wind. I was proud of my brother after that; he stood firm against the wretched sort of chili that is eaten from a plate with a fork.
I voted for LBJ in 1964, but I now renounce that vote, for I didn’t know of his evil ways with chili. Down on the Pedernales, the President has his chili put together by Mrs. Zephyr Wright or that piebald old character Walter Jetton, who spends his time at the ranch barbecuing up a storm and talking in an ignorant fashion about chili. Miz Wright serves chili without beans. Walter Jetton has two recipes: in one he ignores beans, in the other he adds beans and then thickens things with cracker meal. There’s an old Texas saying that originated in the cow camps, concerning any range cook whose grub was consistently miserable. Of him the cowhands would grumble, “He ain’t fit to tote guts to a bear.” That, precisely, is what I say of Mr. Cracker Meal Jetton.
You may suspect, by now, that the chief ingredients of all chili are fiery envy, scalding jealousy, scorching contempt and sizzling scorn. The quarreling that has gone on for generations over New England clam chowder versus Manhattan clam chowder (the Maine legislature once passed a bill outlawing the mixing of tomatoes with clams) is but a minor spat alongside the raging feuds that have arisen out of chili recipes.
A fact so positive as the fact that chili was invented by Texans will, by the very nature of its adamantine unshakability, get shook. Lately it has become fashionable to say that chili—contrary to all popular belief—was first devised by Mexicans and then appropriated by the Texans. Some of the newer cookbooks come right out and say that chili is the national dish of Mexico. In Elena Zelayeta’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking it is asserted that the popular Mexican dish, Carne en Salsa de Chile Colorado—meat in red chili sauce—is much the same as the chili con carne of Texas. “It is a famous Mexican dish,” says Señora Zelayeta, “that has been taken and made famous by the Lone Star State.” This lady, one of the most respected of contemporary authorities on Mexican cuisine, then proceeds to destroy every shred of her authority by suggesting that a can of hominy goes well in a pot of chili.
On the other hand, if there is any doubt about what the generality of Mexicans think about chili, the Diccionario de Mejicanismos, published in 1959, defines chili con carne as “detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.” The Mexicans in turn get told off in a 14th Century English Herball, or General Historie of Plantes, in which is written of the chile pepper: “It killeth dogs.”
I am a frequent visitor in Mexico, and once, in a sportive mood, I decided to introduce chili into Mexico, get the Mexicans to making it in their homes and setting up chili joints along the highways. I have a good friend, once a novice bullfighter that failed at that trade, who is maître d’hôtel of a large restaurant. When he found out what I was doing, he spoke to me in soft and liquid accents: “If I ever hear you spick the words of chili con carne one more time in our beloved raypooblica, pues, I am not in the custom of spitting in the eye of gringos, but I will spit in your eye with glory and speed and hardness.” He didn’t make it with the bulls but I felt that he could make it with me, and so I gave up the chili-con-carnization of Mexico.
One present-day dabbler in chili lore has come up with a shocking discovery which he believes is proof that chili con carne had its origin in Mexico. Cited as the classic work by Bernarl Díaz del Castillo, which chronicles the invasion of Mexico by Cortez and his conquistadores in the 16th Century. Díaz reports that he witnessed a ceremony in which some of his Spanish compadres were sacrificed by Aztec priests, and then butchered; chunks of conquistadore meat were thrown to the populace, and these people rushed home and cooked them with hot peppers, wild tomatoes, and a herb that apparently was oregano. That, my friends, is seriously set down as the true origin of chili. I dislike having to say it, but if you are going to adopt this recipe, it must begin, “First, catch yourself a lean Spaniard.”
I know of only one Texan who has the facts straight on the origin of chili—Charles Ramsdell, author of an excellent history of San Antonio. It is clear from his delvings, as well as my own, that chili con carne had its happenings in San Antonio. Was it a dish contrived by Mexicans of old San Antonio de Bejar? No. Was it put together by white Texans? Not at all. You’d never guess in eight centuries. Chili was invented by Canary Islanders. In the 1720’s the Spanish were in command of the town, which they had founded, but the French were pushing in from the east, and an appeal went out to the King of Spain to send some settlers. The king obliged half-heartedly, shipping sixteen families out from the Canary Islands. They established themselves in rude huts on the spot now known as the Main Plaza. In their homeland, these people were accustomed to food made pungent with spices. They liked hot peppers and lots of garlic, and they were acquainted with oregano. So they looked around to see what was available in foodstuffs in their new home, and they came up with a stew of beef and hot peppers and oregano and garlic and, I make bold to believe, tomatoes and onions and beans. It is my guess, too that they managed to get hold of some cumin seed, which comes chiefly from North Africa. That’s the way it happened, and any Texas historians who dispute me can go soak their heads.
There are fiends incarnate, mostly in Texas, who put chopped celery in their chili, and the Dallas journalist Frank X. Tolbert, who has been touted as the Glorious State’s leading authority on chili, throws in corn meal. Heaven help us one and all! You might as well throw in some puffed rice, or a handful of shredded alfalfa, or a few Maraschino cherries.
Let it be understood that I am well disposed towards Texans and enjoy visiting their state; I’m tolerant of all their idiotic posturing, of every one of their failings, save only this arrant acclaim of superiority in the composing of chili. Mr. Tolbert of Dallas, who appears to be spokesman for the group called the International Chili Appreciation Society, declares that acceptable chili should contain no tomatoes, no onions, and no beans. This is a thing that passeth all understanding, going full speed. It offends my sensibilities and violates my mind. Mr. Tolbert criticizes Lyndon Johnson’s chili recipe because it leaves out beef suet and includes tomatoes and onions. Yet the President’s chili contains no beans. To create chili without beans, either added to the pot or served on the side, is to flout one of the basic laws of nature. I’ve been told that when I was a baby and it came time to wean me, I was fed Eagle Brand milk with navy beans frappéed into it. Thereafter, all through childhood and adolescence, I ate beans three or four times a week. If Chili Bill, back there in Illinois, had served his chili without beans, I would surely have deserted him and bought chocolate sodas for my lunch.
Texas has at least one chili scholar owning a glimmer of intelligence: Maury Maverick, Jr., son of the former Mayor of San Antonio and Rooseveltian Congressman. The younger Maury is a lawyer, and a true chili man in one respect—he speaks out against other chili cooks saying, for example, of California chili: “With all that goddamn sweet stuff in it, it’s like eating a strawberry sundae.”
As for Southern California, my friend Fred Beck, a gourmet and semi-professional wine taster, adduces evidence to suggest that Los Angeles is the chili capital of the world. (The title, by the way, is claimed by San Antonio and by the little town of Terlingua in the Big Bend country, and lately by Dallas.)
Mr. Beck tells me that chili was once called “size” in the town known to him as Lil-ole-ell-ay. “Size” came into usage by way of one Ptomaine Tommy, once proprietor of the largest and best-known chili parlor in the city. Ptomaine Tommy served straight chili and an epical Southwestern variation, a hamburger smothered with chili. He had two ladles, a large and a small. When a customer ordered straight chili, he got out the large ladle. When he wanted the other, he usually said, “Hamburger size.” So Ptomaine Tommy put up one sign that read HAMBURGER SIZE 15c, and another that read CHILI SIZE 20c. Other chili joints followed suit, and before long chili was know throughout Los Angeles as “size.”They’d say, “Just gimme a bowl of size.”
Mr. Beck speaks, too, of the era when the architecture went kooky in Los Angeles, and commercial structures were designed to suggest the nature of trade conducted within. There was a building on Pico shaped like a coffeepot, with steam issuing from its spout. A weenie stand on La Cienega was a large and hideous representation of a frankfurter. Then came the chain of Chili Bowls. It was quickly noted by the always perceptive Angelenos that these structures were shaped like giant chamberpots, sans handles, so it became customary to say, “Let’s drive over to the pot for a bowl of chili.”
During my probings into the story of chili I stumbled on a fact that made my heart leap. There is a town called Chili in my state, New York. Texans pay not even lip service to their chili, for they have no town of that name. As for the New York community, just west of Rochester (there is also a North Chili nearby), I was soon disillusioned.
I telephoned my friend Judge Ray Fowler of Rochester, “Why did they call the town of Chili by that name?” I asked him.
“Never heard of it,” he replied. “How do you spell it?”
I spelled it.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “ you mean Chy-lye. The early settlers named it in honor of Chile’s breaking away from Spanish rule.”
“So,” I said, “they misspelled it and then mispronounced it. And it has nothing whatever to do with chy-lye con carne?”
“Nothing at all.”
Just writing about this makes me disconsolate, so let us pass on to the chy-lye that comes in a bowl. The secret of making superior chili lies first in the ingredients and second in the genius of the cook. Nothing should ever be measured. Experimentation is the thing. Those blessed Canary Islanders in San Antonio wouldn’t have known a measuring spoon from an electric carving knife. Spanish cookbooks never issue peremptory orders, for that would not be polite. They speak of “maybe fifteen centavos’ worth” of parsley, a handful of so-and-so, and maybe a bunch of butter, and a few “teeth” of garlic if you have some in the house.
My daughter follows my haphazard methods and turns out chili that is the sensation of her set. She says she passes my recipe along to her chili-loving friends, and converts the ignorant to it, and all hands proclaim it to be the best of all possible chilis. That’s what she tells me. Whenever I hear those heart-warming reports I feel so bucked up that I give her a trip to Mexico or Puerto Rico. Much the same thing happens in the case of my son, though he tells me he composes my chili with the doors locked and the shades drawn. He lives in Texas. For a time I wanted to establish that lovely tradition, the old family recipe, a secret that wild horses couldn’t drag out of my descendants. A family is not a true entity unless it has in its archives a fabulous secret recipe. But my formula is out, and rapidly spreading, so I give it to the world.
CHILI H. ALLEN SMITH
Get three pounds of chuck, coarse ground. Brown it in an iron kettle. (If you don’t have an iron kettle you are not civilized. Go out and get one.) Chop two or three medium-sized onions and one bell pepper and add to the browned meat. Crush or mince one or two cloves of garlic and throw into the pot, then add about half a teaspoon of oregano and a quarter teaspoon of cumin seed. (You can get cumin seed in the supermarket nowadays.) Now add two small cans tomato paste; if you prefer canned tomatoes of fresh tomatoes, put them through a colander. Add about a quart of water. Salt liberally and grind in some black pepper and, for a starter, two or three tablespoons of chili powder. (Some of us use chile pods, but chile powder is just as good.) Simmer for an hour and a half or longer, then add your beans. Pinto beans are best, but if they are not available, canned kidney beans will do—two 15-17 oz. cans will be adequate. Simmer another half hour. Throughout the cooking, do some testing from time to time and, as the Gourmet Cookbook puts it, “correct seasoning.” When you’ve got it right, let it set for several hours. Later you may heat it up as much as you want, and put the remainder in the refrigerator. It will taste better the second day, still better the third, and absolutely superb the fourth. You can’t even begin to imagine the delights in store for you one week later.
I deem it a pleasure to have given you my recipe for chili. I can only say in conclusion that some people are born to the tragic life. There are three distressing physiological mistakes made by nature: the vermiform appendix, the prostate gland, and the utter inability of many people to eat chili because of delicate digestive tracts.
I really bleed for them. H. Allen Smith
Here is the article about the first chili cookoff in Terlingua that Gary Cartwright wrote for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
THE GREAT CHILI CHAMPIONSHIP FIX by Gary Cartwright
Justice was never an issue: Texas chili had been defiled. Yet the world championship chili con carne cookoff ended in no contest October 21 when the Dallas-based CASI (Chili Appreciation Society International) got cold feet.
It started as a routine Saturday afternoon lynching. Author-Humorist H. Allen Smith had waived caution and had submitted himself to CASI's plot to call attention to itself, hence to the chili recipe it is sworn to protect. Smith's attraction was that he fixed his name to an August story in Holiday magazine titled: Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do. From a hook that large, CASI could hang a Brahma bull. When Smith allowed himself to be coerced from his home in Mount Kisco, N.Y. to the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas, in the remote Big Bend country-there to cook burner to burner against CASI's chief chili chef, Wick Fowler—he had played into the hands of his enemy.
Texans for historical reasons believe that any chili that isn't theirs is trickery. A man who orders chili with beans would probably put catsup in his coffee. Beans are another matter entirely. So are fresh tomato, sweet bell pepper and other ingredients of Smith's school of chili. CASI is a self-appointed police force against such practices. In 1962 CASI Founder and Chief Chili Head George Haddaway attacked the chef of the Dobbs House kitchen at Houston International Airport because some infidel included Boston baked beans in his order of chili. The police came and, according to CASI records, berated the cook.
For the chili challenge, CASI selected the perfect battleground: Terlingua (pop. 9), in sprawling, barren Brewster County, which has a land mass equal to the combined areas of Rhode Island and Connecticut, but a population of fewer than 7,000. Only foolish pride or an incurable dope habit would force a man into this country to take a chance he knew he didn't have. CASI did not care which it was with H. Allen Smith.
Founded in 1951, CASI is an indefinite number of middle-aged, middle-class chili lovers. They are publishers, newspaper editors, prosperous attorneys columnists, local television personalities and ranking public-relations men. They have granted chapters to Los Angeles, Mexico City (Chino Ortiz, former Mexican ambassador to Chile, is a card-carrying CASI member), Tokyo, Saigon, Danang, Kansas City and to the National Press Club in Washington. But the nerve center of the organization is Dallas. Members of CASI prefer their chili thick, and they demand that it be hot. They are proud to burn in the name of chili con carne.
In the week preceding the contest, the chili war attracted front-page notice in papers ranging from The Austin-American Statesman to The Wall Street Journal, which billed the cookoff as the "Chili Bowl." Prodded on by The Dallas Morning News Columnist Frank X. Tolbert, the cookoff took on the aspects of a bitter political campaign.
Wick Fowler is a 255-pound sometime newspaper reporter who packages and sells his own chili mix and travels extensively (he recently returned from Vietnam) in the name of CASI. His recipe is the
outgrowth of a bunch of fun-loving pals dumping personal theories in the cook pot aboard his houseboat; but he believes it to be so surefire that he brought along a package of his two-alarm mix to use in the preparation of his entry. His Caliente Chili, Inc. of Austin will package and sell 200,000 batches this year: together with two pounds of lean, coarse-ground meat, one eight-ounce can of tomato sauce and some water, each package makes 1½ quarts of chili (the alarm number is optional) and costs $1 by mail.
Fowler admitted that he had never tasted Smith's chili, but added, "I saw a punch bowl of it recently. It makes a very clever centerpiece."
Smith heard this and called Fowler "hen-headed." He observed further that a "fowler is a despoiler of little birds. A wick is a hunk of rag stuck in a container of oil. It burns with a flickering, smelly flame. This Wick Fowler. I believe, will burn with the searing flame of ignominy at Terlingua next Saturday at high noon."
Columnist Tolbert—once threatened with expulsion by CASI for championing a greaseless chili favored by LBJ's doctors, but more recently, on publication of his book, A Bowl of Red, elevated to the position of a poet laureate of the society—jumped on the story.
What incensed Tolbert and his cronies was not the title of Smith's magazine article, which could be dismissed as eastern stupidity, but Smith's references attacking the revered chili pepper on which the Texas recipe hinges ("It killeth dogs") and the Texans' habit of thickening their boil with masa flour ("You might as well throw in some maraschino cherries").
What is more, Smith's recipe called for vegetables and, God help him, canned pinto beans. Tolbert wrote that Smith's recipe put him in mind of "a chili-powder-flavored low-torque beef gruel."
Smith got into personalities, firing off a letter describing his antagonists as a bunch of "childish, semirumped, Rotarian-type cracker breakers...."
"I have read most of Smith's books...in fact, all the dirty ones," retorted Fowler. "He is a very funny man. The funniest thing he ever wrote was that chili recipe."
To insure that the judgment would be a fair-and-square victory for Fowler and Texas, CASI asked each contestant to select one judge. The society appointed the balancing judge. He was Dallas Attorney David Witts, who is half owner (with Auto Racing Impresario Carroll Shelby) of the 200,000-acre Terlingua Ranch on which the ghost town is situated. Witts also happens to be one of three "kitchen helpers" in CASI's hierarchy. Fowler's advocate was Floyd Schneider, vice-president of a San Antonio brewery; H. Allen Smith puzzled the enemy camp by naming a Texan, Mrs. Hallie Stillwell of Alpine, as his judge. Mrs. Stillwell is Peace Justice of Precinct 1, Brewster County. Her court is in Hell's Half-Acre, Texas, an hour's ride from Stillwell's Crossing. It was much later that CASI learned she is H. Allen Smith's cousin, but that was a paltry concession, under the circumstances.
It was apparent that if Fowler didn't wear down his opponent, the land would. The Big Bend is a lonely, hostile, strangely beautiful land. At times it is like the wildest parts of Arizona; at times the wind wails across the moonscape, and a ghost light winks down from the Chisos (Spanish for ghost) Mountains. It changes personalities constantly. The mountains go from purple gray in the deep shadows of morning to a soft sand in the glare of the day, and they are arranged in a hundred shapes and sizes. In some parts the ranges are long and spiny in the silhouettes of sleeping dinosaurs. Others break off sharply; one resembles a reclining profile of George Washington. Still others are blobs, swirled at the peaks like fresh soft candy, or pinched at the sides to suggest Smokey Bear hats. Landmarks have such fetching names as Hen Egg Mountain (elevation: 5,002 feet), Squaw's Tit Peak and Dirty Women Creek.
"This land is unlike anything I know," says David Witts. "It's scraggy, violent, colorful, friendly, brutal, a paradox at every turn. You wouldn't think you could raise cattle out here, but we had 4,000 head last spring. There are places in Texas where cattle literally die from overeating. Out here there is not much to chew on, but what there is has a very high mineral content."
When Witts bought the land he didn't know he was getting a ghost town in the bargain. Inspired by Dallas Public-relations Man Tom Tierney, a city government was elected. For the first time in three decades Terlingua had a mayor, David Witts. Tolbert was elected water commissioner. In time most members of CASI found titles for themselves. Shelby is chairman of the Terlingua Racing Authority. His Cobras race all over the world under the banner of the Terlingua Racing Team. Europeans, says Shelby, are instantly impressed with the fact that the Terlingua Racing Team insists it was founded in 1860, some years before the invention of the combustion engine. The team emblem is three feathers and a jackrabbit holding his hand against the sun (allegedly saying. "Hold the peppers"), and among other racing titles currently on display in the Terlingua archives is the 1967 Trans-American Sedan Series championship.
Like the vast country where it hides, Terlingua is a town of contrasts—the most obvious being that it lives a lot for a ghost.
Until the mines watered out, Terlingua was the largest producer of quicksilver in the U.S. There was a time when maybe 5,000 boomtowners lived here. Now the population is given as nine, although Terlingua Post Master Daisy F. Adams (the post office is three miles from town) estimates the figure at closer to 20. "The number don't vary a bunch," cackles Daisy, showing off the single tooth remaining in her mouth, " 'cause every time a baby is born around here, a man leaves town."
The Terlingua Inn, the one-room jail, the church and the old Perry Mansion still stand more or less as they were at the turn of the century, when Chicago promoter Howard E. Perry had the spot jumping. The opera house next to the inn is four walls and sky. Several dozen crumbling adobe and bleached mud structures protrude in ruins from the scrubby hills, and one corner of town spills off into an 850-foot open mine shaft, where the town met its final irony: early miners abandoned Terlingua because of its heat (up to 120°) and its drought; their successors quit because the richest vein of all was submerged in an underground lake 850 feet below the earth's surface.
The town is laced across a jagged mesa sunk between the Chisos (pronounced to rhyme with Jesus) Mountains to the southeast in Big Bend National Park, and the Christmas Mountains to the north, where some prospectors "got lost and didn't get out till Christmas." In early times three Indian tribes—the Apaches, the Comanches and the Kiowa—would gather here, form raiding parties and sweep west across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The Indians called the place Tres Linguas (three tongues) and the cowboys corrupted that into Terlingua.
An old Indian named Marcos Hinojosa sometimes appears and sells warm beer to tourists who find their way to Terlingua. Hinojosa says that everything in the Big Bend "sticks, stings or stinks," but nothing really stinks now that the mines are closed. Dry lava beds curl through the dusty green sagebrush, through the century plants and Spanish daggers. There are no trees. The tallest living thing is the ocotillo, a desert shrub whose thorny ash-white arms reach higher than the head of a man or a bear. Mountain lions, bobcats, jackrabbits, rattlesnakes and enormous centipedes and scorpions have the land to themselves. The nearest center of commerce is Study Butte (pronounced Stewty Butte locally), five miles to the east. There a single resident named Maggie-Maggie operates a gas station-general store-beer hall. She wears ankle-length Indian dresses and carries a loaded pistol in her long bloomers for when the boys come to town. Tooter and four other cowpunchers who work the Terlingua spread do their regular drinking at Maggie's because the next closest center of civilization is Alpine, 79 miles north and across the Del Norte Mountain Range.
Nearly a full week before burn of if time, H. Allen Smith mysteriously appeared in Alpine and checked into the Ponderosa Inn. There on Thursday night he met Fowler for the first time.
"Mr. Smith let Mr. Fowler do all the drinking and most of the talking," reported Cocktail Waitress Jean Page. "Then Mr. Smith picked up the check."
Friday at noon Fowler's backers threw a cocktail party at the Holiday Inn near Dallas' Love Field, then herded their chili heads and a band of newsmen and cameramen into three chartered planes for the flight to Terlingua. Two hours and 30 minutes later, while a four-piece country and western band brought in from Fort Stockton played in the swirling dust, the planes touched down on the graded runway they call Terlingua International Airport. By Saturday there were 20 private planes parked in the brush. Shelby had flown in with his own contingent from Los Angeles. It included a bogus monk introduced as Father Duffy, and a young man wearing the cap of a Los Angeles policeman.
Father Duffy arrived fortified with two women friends. This appalled the Dallas delegation, which had piously insisted the junket be stag. CASI delegates feared their wives would find out. They did, anyhow. A group identified as the Terlingua Women's Auxiliary chartered a small plane, which buzzed the Terlingua Inn at the close of festivities, spraying the ghost town with 16,000 yellow cards. Engraved on the cards were such messages as: "Congratulations, you get the children" and "We'll arrange the alimony to fit your budget." One wife also told The Dallas Morning News she put crumbled crackers in her husband's sleeping bag.
CASI members pride themselves on enduring traditional frontier hardships: hot chili isn't the only pain they bear. Sleeping bags and toothbrushes were the only luggage permitted aboard. Several members carried pocket knives, and one Dallas attorney wore his duck-hunting suit. An enormous supply of beer was flown ahead. Witts and Shelby furnished other liquid refreshment at ranch headquarters, and Walter Jetton, Lyndon Johnson's personal barbecuer, was hauled along to do the cooking.
The delegates clambered into two bar-equipped red school buses which would ferry them first to the ghost town, then to the ranch where they would make camp. The trip from Terlingua to the ranch is 35 miles and takes about an hour. One bus barely missed a mountain lion. The other bus encountered no lions, but CASI members counted one horse, two cows, a Pearl beer can and any number of rabbits, hawks and eagles. A Dallas photographer smuggled along a length of rope because he knew that rattlesnakes will not attack a sleeping man who is surrounded by rope, then abandoned the idea when it was called to his attention that scorpions love rope.
Nights in the Big Bend are cold and damp, and the ground is hard. Animals move in the night. By Saturday morning it was assumed at CASI Camp that H. Allen Smith was dead, but the room clerk at the Ponderosa Inn assured the sore, red-eyed chili heads that that wasn't the case.
Tooter the Cowboy was there, representing the rank and file of Terlingua society. Tooter is a wiry, hell-raising drifter who looks something like an insensitive Montgomery Clift. When he is sober he trains horses for Ranch Manager Harold Wynne. Tooter wasn't sober this particular weekend. He was what Wynne called "mean drunk." Tooter drank and played poker until the last chili head fell out, and he was waiting on horseback, a beer bottle in one hand, when CASI delegates staggered to the outdoor breakfast tables of Walter Jetton. While chili heads spooned their eggs and asked each other what could be worse than a hangover, Tooter showed them what, galloping his cutting horse between the crowded tables and over the sleeping bags where some of the frontiersmen were still crumpled.
The following night Tooter took more money from the Dallas folks and terrorized Father Duffy and his friends. Ranch Manager Wynne explained that Tooter sometimes has trouble sleeping. This time the trouble was two Mexicans, brothers of a boy he had pistol-whipped in Study Butte, who were hoping to shoot him.
By high noon Saturday an estimated 500 chili fanciers had materialized out of the desert and pushed up to the front porch of the Terlingua Inn. They were overwhelmingly pro Fowler. They had come to drink free beer, sample chili and inspect firsthand "the elderly challenger H. Allen 'Soupy' Smith of New York," as Tolbert called him—though, in fact, it was CASI that had issued the challenge.
Smith appeared fit and rested. He wore a fresh open-neck sports shirt and had a sidearm strapped low on his hip. Fowler had slept in a garage under the ranch house and had been sick all night with a virus. While he made jokes about Smith's ancestry, particularly about the fact that Smith learned about chili in Decatur, Ill., his heart wasn't in it. Fowler, who at 58 is a year younger than his opponent, started appreciating chili during the Depression, when a bowl of red cost 5¢ in south Texas.
"It was cheap and greasy, and it saved my life," he says doggedly.
Precook ceremonies opened at 11:35 a.m. with a blessing originated years ago by a Negro cowpuncher and chuck-wagon cook named Bones Hooks.
It begins like this:
"Lord, God, You know us old cowhands is forgetful. Sometimes I can't even recollect what happened yestiddy. We is forgetful. We just know daylight and dark, summer, fall, winter and spring. But I sure hope we don't never forget to thank You before we is about to eat a mess of good chili. We don't know why, in Your wisdom, You been so doggone good to us. The Chinee don't have no chili, ever. The Frenchmens is left out. The Rooshians don't know no more about chili than a hog does about a sidesaddle. Even the Meskins don't get a good whiff of it unless they stay around here. Chili eaters is some of Your chosen people...."
When their praying was done and Master of Ceremonies Bill Rives had led the 500 in the singing of Hello, Terlingua, a song of his own composition, Rives tossed off a couple of one-liners accusing Smith of violating several city ordinances and read a letter from the governor making Smith an honorary citizen of Texas—an honor that Smith declined.
At noon they got with it. For two hours two pots boiled, two reputations simmered. The contestants watched their pots and posed for pictures, offering ladles of chili to Father Duffy or holding their noses at the misfortune of being so close to their opponent's entry. The hot Texas air was thick with spice. At one point Smith seemed dispirited. "What chance do I have?" he asked. "Last week Tolbert claimed in his column that a Texas Baptist preacher invented the airplane. Before this is over he'll be saying that Wick Fowler invented caviar in Swampnose Park on the Pecos River. There is no end to what these people will do."
He was wrong, happily, for judgment was swiftly approaching. The Fort Stockton plowboys laid down their instruments. Two amateur chili makers from Abilene who had been distributing free bowls of red under a tent in the shade of an adobe ruin stood at attention. Daisy F. Adams said this was the most dramatic thing she had witnessed since they no-billed Whet Thompson for gunning down a wetback at his front gate. In grand silence the three judges stood blindfolded on the porch. And while Matchmaker Tom Tierney did a vote-by-vote over the public address, they tasted.
Mrs. Stillwell voted for No. 2, giving Smith the lead. Floyd Schneider made it one-all, lining himself with Fowler.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. Tie-breaker Witts allowed someone to guide a spoon of chili to his mouth, and promptly spit it all over the referee's foot. Then he went into convulsions. He rammed a white handkerchief down his throat as though he were cleaning a rifle barrel, and in an agonizing whisper Witts pronounced himself unable to go on.
"I have to see a doctor," Witts explained. "I declare a one-year moratorium in the world championship chili con carne cook off."
The world will never know which bowl of chili maimed Witts. Texans take the chauvinistic view, assuming it was Smith's batch with the Kimbell-brand pinto beans and a tart sweetness like Walter Jetton's barbecue sauce with a sprinkle of chili powder added. Smith says flatly that Witts was stricken "by that vile scalding mud Texans call chili."
The world may not even care.
What CASI has in mind is a rematch one year to the day in Mount Kisco, N.Y., but then Smith won't be in Mount Kisco, N.Y. one year from now. He will be in Alpine. He was enchanted by the country where his lynching was to take place, so he bought a piece of land not far from Sul Ross State College. Soupy Smith is building a home in the Big Bend.
First, H. Allen Smith's article from Holiday magazine:
NOBODY KNOWS MORE ABOUT CHILI THAN I DO
When I was a boy of ten in Decatur, Illinois, my mother gave me twenty cents every morning—half of it for carfare to school, the remaining dime for my lunch. I could have spent that dime on candy or ice cream, but I can’t recall that I ever did, because it was at this magic and benign moment in time that I discovered chili.
Day after day I went to Chili Bill’s joint a couple of blocks from the school, sat at a scrubbed wooden counter, and for ten cents got a bowl of steaming chili, six soda crackers and a glass of milk. That was livin’!
I have been a chili man ever since those days. Nay, I have been the chili man. Without chili I believe I would wither and die. I stand without a peer as a maker of chili, and as a judge of chili made by other people. No living man, and let us not even think of woman in this connection, no living man, I repeat, can put together a pot of chili as ambrosial, as delicately and zestfully flavorful, as the chili I make. This fact is so stern, so granitic, that it belongs in the encyclopedias, as well as in all standard histories of civilization.
That is the way of us chili men. Each of us knows that his chili is light years beyond other chili in quality and singularity; each of us knows that all other chili is such vile slop that a coyote would turn his back on it.
My brother Sam believes that he should be given the Nobel prize for chili-making. He and I didn’t speak for a year and a half because of our clash of views on chili-making. Word got to me that Sam was telling people that our Pop had called him the greatest chili-maker in all Christendom. I knew this to be a falsehood; my father has said that I was the greatest. My sister Lou tried to deescalate our feud by saying that pop actually had remarked that he was the greatest chili-maker in the civilized world.
Brother Sam has gone along for years making chili without so much as a whiff of cumin seed in it, and cumin seed is as essential to chili as meat is to hamburger. I was at Sam’s house once and in a moment of fraternal feeling ate a spoonful of his foul chili. I remarked helpfully that it had no cumin seed in it and Sam said that I could leave his fireside and never come back. “One bowl of your chili,” said I, “would pollute the waters of the Great Salt Lake.” And off I stomped.
Thus began the feud, and it came to an end only after news reached me that Sam was warring on another chili front. He and I both believe that proper chili should be soupy, with lots of broth. He has a friend named VanPelt who composes thickened chili, Texas style. My chili and Sam’s chili are eaten with a soup spoon; VanPelt eats his from a plate with a fork. Sam and VanPelt broke off relations for a while after a highly seasoned argument over thin-versus-thick. Van Pelt contended that Sam’s chili should be eaten through a straw and Sam said that VanPelt’s lavalike chili could be molded into balls and used to hold down tent flaps in a high wind. I was proud of my brother after that; he stood firm against the wretched sort of chili that is eaten from a plate with a fork.
I voted for LBJ in 1964, but I now renounce that vote, for I didn’t know of his evil ways with chili. Down on the Pedernales, the President has his chili put together by Mrs. Zephyr Wright or that piebald old character Walter Jetton, who spends his time at the ranch barbecuing up a storm and talking in an ignorant fashion about chili. Miz Wright serves chili without beans. Walter Jetton has two recipes: in one he ignores beans, in the other he adds beans and then thickens things with cracker meal. There’s an old Texas saying that originated in the cow camps, concerning any range cook whose grub was consistently miserable. Of him the cowhands would grumble, “He ain’t fit to tote guts to a bear.” That, precisely, is what I say of Mr. Cracker Meal Jetton.
You may suspect, by now, that the chief ingredients of all chili are fiery envy, scalding jealousy, scorching contempt and sizzling scorn. The quarreling that has gone on for generations over New England clam chowder versus Manhattan clam chowder (the Maine legislature once passed a bill outlawing the mixing of tomatoes with clams) is but a minor spat alongside the raging feuds that have arisen out of chili recipes.
A fact so positive as the fact that chili was invented by Texans will, by the very nature of its adamantine unshakability, get shook. Lately it has become fashionable to say that chili—contrary to all popular belief—was first devised by Mexicans and then appropriated by the Texans. Some of the newer cookbooks come right out and say that chili is the national dish of Mexico. In Elena Zelayeta’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking it is asserted that the popular Mexican dish, Carne en Salsa de Chile Colorado—meat in red chili sauce—is much the same as the chili con carne of Texas. “It is a famous Mexican dish,” says Señora Zelayeta, “that has been taken and made famous by the Lone Star State.” This lady, one of the most respected of contemporary authorities on Mexican cuisine, then proceeds to destroy every shred of her authority by suggesting that a can of hominy goes well in a pot of chili.
On the other hand, if there is any doubt about what the generality of Mexicans think about chili, the Diccionario de Mejicanismos, published in 1959, defines chili con carne as “detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.” The Mexicans in turn get told off in a 14th Century English Herball, or General Historie of Plantes, in which is written of the chile pepper: “It killeth dogs.”
I am a frequent visitor in Mexico, and once, in a sportive mood, I decided to introduce chili into Mexico, get the Mexicans to making it in their homes and setting up chili joints along the highways. I have a good friend, once a novice bullfighter that failed at that trade, who is maître d’hôtel of a large restaurant. When he found out what I was doing, he spoke to me in soft and liquid accents: “If I ever hear you spick the words of chili con carne one more time in our beloved raypooblica, pues, I am not in the custom of spitting in the eye of gringos, but I will spit in your eye with glory and speed and hardness.” He didn’t make it with the bulls but I felt that he could make it with me, and so I gave up the chili-con-carnization of Mexico.
One present-day dabbler in chili lore has come up with a shocking discovery which he believes is proof that chili con carne had its origin in Mexico. Cited as the classic work by Bernarl Díaz del Castillo, which chronicles the invasion of Mexico by Cortez and his conquistadores in the 16th Century. Díaz reports that he witnessed a ceremony in which some of his Spanish compadres were sacrificed by Aztec priests, and then butchered; chunks of conquistadore meat were thrown to the populace, and these people rushed home and cooked them with hot peppers, wild tomatoes, and a herb that apparently was oregano. That, my friends, is seriously set down as the true origin of chili. I dislike having to say it, but if you are going to adopt this recipe, it must begin, “First, catch yourself a lean Spaniard.”
I know of only one Texan who has the facts straight on the origin of chili—Charles Ramsdell, author of an excellent history of San Antonio. It is clear from his delvings, as well as my own, that chili con carne had its happenings in San Antonio. Was it a dish contrived by Mexicans of old San Antonio de Bejar? No. Was it put together by white Texans? Not at all. You’d never guess in eight centuries. Chili was invented by Canary Islanders. In the 1720’s the Spanish were in command of the town, which they had founded, but the French were pushing in from the east, and an appeal went out to the King of Spain to send some settlers. The king obliged half-heartedly, shipping sixteen families out from the Canary Islands. They established themselves in rude huts on the spot now known as the Main Plaza. In their homeland, these people were accustomed to food made pungent with spices. They liked hot peppers and lots of garlic, and they were acquainted with oregano. So they looked around to see what was available in foodstuffs in their new home, and they came up with a stew of beef and hot peppers and oregano and garlic and, I make bold to believe, tomatoes and onions and beans. It is my guess, too that they managed to get hold of some cumin seed, which comes chiefly from North Africa. That’s the way it happened, and any Texas historians who dispute me can go soak their heads.
There are fiends incarnate, mostly in Texas, who put chopped celery in their chili, and the Dallas journalist Frank X. Tolbert, who has been touted as the Glorious State’s leading authority on chili, throws in corn meal. Heaven help us one and all! You might as well throw in some puffed rice, or a handful of shredded alfalfa, or a few Maraschino cherries.
Let it be understood that I am well disposed towards Texans and enjoy visiting their state; I’m tolerant of all their idiotic posturing, of every one of their failings, save only this arrant acclaim of superiority in the composing of chili. Mr. Tolbert of Dallas, who appears to be spokesman for the group called the International Chili Appreciation Society, declares that acceptable chili should contain no tomatoes, no onions, and no beans. This is a thing that passeth all understanding, going full speed. It offends my sensibilities and violates my mind. Mr. Tolbert criticizes Lyndon Johnson’s chili recipe because it leaves out beef suet and includes tomatoes and onions. Yet the President’s chili contains no beans. To create chili without beans, either added to the pot or served on the side, is to flout one of the basic laws of nature. I’ve been told that when I was a baby and it came time to wean me, I was fed Eagle Brand milk with navy beans frappéed into it. Thereafter, all through childhood and adolescence, I ate beans three or four times a week. If Chili Bill, back there in Illinois, had served his chili without beans, I would surely have deserted him and bought chocolate sodas for my lunch.
Texas has at least one chili scholar owning a glimmer of intelligence: Maury Maverick, Jr., son of the former Mayor of San Antonio and Rooseveltian Congressman. The younger Maury is a lawyer, and a true chili man in one respect—he speaks out against other chili cooks saying, for example, of California chili: “With all that goddamn sweet stuff in it, it’s like eating a strawberry sundae.”
As for Southern California, my friend Fred Beck, a gourmet and semi-professional wine taster, adduces evidence to suggest that Los Angeles is the chili capital of the world. (The title, by the way, is claimed by San Antonio and by the little town of Terlingua in the Big Bend country, and lately by Dallas.)
Mr. Beck tells me that chili was once called “size” in the town known to him as Lil-ole-ell-ay. “Size” came into usage by way of one Ptomaine Tommy, once proprietor of the largest and best-known chili parlor in the city. Ptomaine Tommy served straight chili and an epical Southwestern variation, a hamburger smothered with chili. He had two ladles, a large and a small. When a customer ordered straight chili, he got out the large ladle. When he wanted the other, he usually said, “Hamburger size.” So Ptomaine Tommy put up one sign that read HAMBURGER SIZE 15c, and another that read CHILI SIZE 20c. Other chili joints followed suit, and before long chili was know throughout Los Angeles as “size.”They’d say, “Just gimme a bowl of size.”
Mr. Beck speaks, too, of the era when the architecture went kooky in Los Angeles, and commercial structures were designed to suggest the nature of trade conducted within. There was a building on Pico shaped like a coffeepot, with steam issuing from its spout. A weenie stand on La Cienega was a large and hideous representation of a frankfurter. Then came the chain of Chili Bowls. It was quickly noted by the always perceptive Angelenos that these structures were shaped like giant chamberpots, sans handles, so it became customary to say, “Let’s drive over to the pot for a bowl of chili.”
During my probings into the story of chili I stumbled on a fact that made my heart leap. There is a town called Chili in my state, New York. Texans pay not even lip service to their chili, for they have no town of that name. As for the New York community, just west of Rochester (there is also a North Chili nearby), I was soon disillusioned.
I telephoned my friend Judge Ray Fowler of Rochester, “Why did they call the town of Chili by that name?” I asked him.
“Never heard of it,” he replied. “How do you spell it?”
I spelled it.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “ you mean Chy-lye. The early settlers named it in honor of Chile’s breaking away from Spanish rule.”
“So,” I said, “they misspelled it and then mispronounced it. And it has nothing whatever to do with chy-lye con carne?”
“Nothing at all.”
Just writing about this makes me disconsolate, so let us pass on to the chy-lye that comes in a bowl. The secret of making superior chili lies first in the ingredients and second in the genius of the cook. Nothing should ever be measured. Experimentation is the thing. Those blessed Canary Islanders in San Antonio wouldn’t have known a measuring spoon from an electric carving knife. Spanish cookbooks never issue peremptory orders, for that would not be polite. They speak of “maybe fifteen centavos’ worth” of parsley, a handful of so-and-so, and maybe a bunch of butter, and a few “teeth” of garlic if you have some in the house.
My daughter follows my haphazard methods and turns out chili that is the sensation of her set. She says she passes my recipe along to her chili-loving friends, and converts the ignorant to it, and all hands proclaim it to be the best of all possible chilis. That’s what she tells me. Whenever I hear those heart-warming reports I feel so bucked up that I give her a trip to Mexico or Puerto Rico. Much the same thing happens in the case of my son, though he tells me he composes my chili with the doors locked and the shades drawn. He lives in Texas. For a time I wanted to establish that lovely tradition, the old family recipe, a secret that wild horses couldn’t drag out of my descendants. A family is not a true entity unless it has in its archives a fabulous secret recipe. But my formula is out, and rapidly spreading, so I give it to the world.
CHILI H. ALLEN SMITH
Get three pounds of chuck, coarse ground. Brown it in an iron kettle. (If you don’t have an iron kettle you are not civilized. Go out and get one.) Chop two or three medium-sized onions and one bell pepper and add to the browned meat. Crush or mince one or two cloves of garlic and throw into the pot, then add about half a teaspoon of oregano and a quarter teaspoon of cumin seed. (You can get cumin seed in the supermarket nowadays.) Now add two small cans tomato paste; if you prefer canned tomatoes of fresh tomatoes, put them through a colander. Add about a quart of water. Salt liberally and grind in some black pepper and, for a starter, two or three tablespoons of chili powder. (Some of us use chile pods, but chile powder is just as good.) Simmer for an hour and a half or longer, then add your beans. Pinto beans are best, but if they are not available, canned kidney beans will do—two 15-17 oz. cans will be adequate. Simmer another half hour. Throughout the cooking, do some testing from time to time and, as the Gourmet Cookbook puts it, “correct seasoning.” When you’ve got it right, let it set for several hours. Later you may heat it up as much as you want, and put the remainder in the refrigerator. It will taste better the second day, still better the third, and absolutely superb the fourth. You can’t even begin to imagine the delights in store for you one week later.
I deem it a pleasure to have given you my recipe for chili. I can only say in conclusion that some people are born to the tragic life. There are three distressing physiological mistakes made by nature: the vermiform appendix, the prostate gland, and the utter inability of many people to eat chili because of delicate digestive tracts.
I really bleed for them. H. Allen Smith
Here is the article about the first chili cookoff in Terlingua that Gary Cartwright wrote for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
THE GREAT CHILI CHAMPIONSHIP FIX by Gary Cartwright
Justice was never an issue: Texas chili had been defiled. Yet the world championship chili con carne cookoff ended in no contest October 21 when the Dallas-based CASI (Chili Appreciation Society International) got cold feet.It started as a routine Saturday afternoon lynching. Author-Humorist H. Allen Smith had waived caution and had submitted himself to CASI's plot to call attention to itself, hence to the chili recipe it is sworn to protect. Smith's attraction was that he fixed his name to an August story in Holiday magazine titled: Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do. From a hook that large, CASI could hang a Brahma bull. When Smith allowed himself to be coerced from his home in Mount Kisco, N.Y. to the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas, in the remote Big Bend country-there to cook burner to burner against CASI's chief chili chef, Wick Fowler—he had played into the hands of his enemy.
Texans for historical reasons believe that any chili that isn't theirs is trickery. A man who orders chili with beans would probably put catsup in his coffee. Beans are another matter entirely. So are fresh tomato, sweet bell pepper and other ingredients of Smith's school of chili. CASI is a self-appointed police force against such practices. In 1962 CASI Founder and Chief Chili Head George Haddaway attacked the chef of the Dobbs House kitchen at Houston International Airport because some infidel included Boston baked beans in his order of chili. The police came and, according to CASI records, berated the cook.
For the chili challenge, CASI selected the perfect battleground: Terlingua (pop. 9), in sprawling, barren Brewster County, which has a land mass equal to the combined areas of Rhode Island and Connecticut, but a population of fewer than 7,000. Only foolish pride or an incurable dope habit would force a man into this country to take a chance he knew he didn't have. CASI did not care which it was with H. Allen Smith.
Founded in 1951, CASI is an indefinite number of middle-aged, middle-class chili lovers. They are publishers, newspaper editors, prosperous attorneys columnists, local television personalities and ranking public-relations men. They have granted chapters to Los Angeles, Mexico City (Chino Ortiz, former Mexican ambassador to Chile, is a card-carrying CASI member), Tokyo, Saigon, Danang, Kansas City and to the National Press Club in Washington. But the nerve center of the organization is Dallas. Members of CASI prefer their chili thick, and they demand that it be hot. They are proud to burn in the name of chili con carne.
In the week preceding the contest, the chili war attracted front-page notice in papers ranging from The Austin-American Statesman to The Wall Street Journal, which billed the cookoff as the "Chili Bowl." Prodded on by The Dallas Morning News Columnist Frank X. Tolbert, the cookoff took on the aspects of a bitter political campaign.
Wick Fowler is a 255-pound sometime newspaper reporter who packages and sells his own chili mix and travels extensively (he recently returned from Vietnam) in the name of CASI. His recipe is the
outgrowth of a bunch of fun-loving pals dumping personal theories in the cook pot aboard his houseboat; but he believes it to be so surefire that he brought along a package of his two-alarm mix to use in the preparation of his entry. His Caliente Chili, Inc. of Austin will package and sell 200,000 batches this year: together with two pounds of lean, coarse-ground meat, one eight-ounce can of tomato sauce and some water, each package makes 1½ quarts of chili (the alarm number is optional) and costs $1 by mail.
Fowler admitted that he had never tasted Smith's chili, but added, "I saw a punch bowl of it recently. It makes a very clever centerpiece."
Smith heard this and called Fowler "hen-headed." He observed further that a "fowler is a despoiler of little birds. A wick is a hunk of rag stuck in a container of oil. It burns with a flickering, smelly flame. This Wick Fowler. I believe, will burn with the searing flame of ignominy at Terlingua next Saturday at high noon."
Columnist Tolbert—once threatened with expulsion by CASI for championing a greaseless chili favored by LBJ's doctors, but more recently, on publication of his book, A Bowl of Red, elevated to the position of a poet laureate of the society—jumped on the story.
What incensed Tolbert and his cronies was not the title of Smith's magazine article, which could be dismissed as eastern stupidity, but Smith's references attacking the revered chili pepper on which the Texas recipe hinges ("It killeth dogs") and the Texans' habit of thickening their boil with masa flour ("You might as well throw in some maraschino cherries").
What is more, Smith's recipe called for vegetables and, God help him, canned pinto beans. Tolbert wrote that Smith's recipe put him in mind of "a chili-powder-flavored low-torque beef gruel."
Smith got into personalities, firing off a letter describing his antagonists as a bunch of "childish, semirumped, Rotarian-type cracker breakers...."
"I have read most of Smith's books...in fact, all the dirty ones," retorted Fowler. "He is a very funny man. The funniest thing he ever wrote was that chili recipe."
To insure that the judgment would be a fair-and-square victory for Fowler and Texas, CASI asked each contestant to select one judge. The society appointed the balancing judge. He was Dallas Attorney David Witts, who is half owner (with Auto Racing Impresario Carroll Shelby) of the 200,000-acre Terlingua Ranch on which the ghost town is situated. Witts also happens to be one of three "kitchen helpers" in CASI's hierarchy. Fowler's advocate was Floyd Schneider, vice-president of a San Antonio brewery; H. Allen Smith puzzled the enemy camp by naming a Texan, Mrs. Hallie Stillwell of Alpine, as his judge. Mrs. Stillwell is Peace Justice of Precinct 1, Brewster County. Her court is in Hell's Half-Acre, Texas, an hour's ride from Stillwell's Crossing. It was much later that CASI learned she is H. Allen Smith's cousin, but that was a paltry concession, under the circumstances.
It was apparent that if Fowler didn't wear down his opponent, the land would. The Big Bend is a lonely, hostile, strangely beautiful land. At times it is like the wildest parts of Arizona; at times the wind wails across the moonscape, and a ghost light winks down from the Chisos (Spanish for ghost) Mountains. It changes personalities constantly. The mountains go from purple gray in the deep shadows of morning to a soft sand in the glare of the day, and they are arranged in a hundred shapes and sizes. In some parts the ranges are long and spiny in the silhouettes of sleeping dinosaurs. Others break off sharply; one resembles a reclining profile of George Washington. Still others are blobs, swirled at the peaks like fresh soft candy, or pinched at the sides to suggest Smokey Bear hats. Landmarks have such fetching names as Hen Egg Mountain (elevation: 5,002 feet), Squaw's Tit Peak and Dirty Women Creek.
"This land is unlike anything I know," says David Witts. "It's scraggy, violent, colorful, friendly, brutal, a paradox at every turn. You wouldn't think you could raise cattle out here, but we had 4,000 head last spring. There are places in Texas where cattle literally die from overeating. Out here there is not much to chew on, but what there is has a very high mineral content."
When Witts bought the land he didn't know he was getting a ghost town in the bargain. Inspired by Dallas Public-relations Man Tom Tierney, a city government was elected. For the first time in three decades Terlingua had a mayor, David Witts. Tolbert was elected water commissioner. In time most members of CASI found titles for themselves. Shelby is chairman of the Terlingua Racing Authority. His Cobras race all over the world under the banner of the Terlingua Racing Team. Europeans, says Shelby, are instantly impressed with the fact that the Terlingua Racing Team insists it was founded in 1860, some years before the invention of the combustion engine. The team emblem is three feathers and a jackrabbit holding his hand against the sun (allegedly saying. "Hold the peppers"), and among other racing titles currently on display in the Terlingua archives is the 1967 Trans-American Sedan Series championship.
Like the vast country where it hides, Terlingua is a town of contrasts—the most obvious being that it lives a lot for a ghost.
Until the mines watered out, Terlingua was the largest producer of quicksilver in the U.S. There was a time when maybe 5,000 boomtowners lived here. Now the population is given as nine, although Terlingua Post Master Daisy F. Adams (the post office is three miles from town) estimates the figure at closer to 20. "The number don't vary a bunch," cackles Daisy, showing off the single tooth remaining in her mouth, " 'cause every time a baby is born around here, a man leaves town."
The Terlingua Inn, the one-room jail, the church and the old Perry Mansion still stand more or less as they were at the turn of the century, when Chicago promoter Howard E. Perry had the spot jumping. The opera house next to the inn is four walls and sky. Several dozen crumbling adobe and bleached mud structures protrude in ruins from the scrubby hills, and one corner of town spills off into an 850-foot open mine shaft, where the town met its final irony: early miners abandoned Terlingua because of its heat (up to 120°) and its drought; their successors quit because the richest vein of all was submerged in an underground lake 850 feet below the earth's surface.
The town is laced across a jagged mesa sunk between the Chisos (pronounced to rhyme with Jesus) Mountains to the southeast in Big Bend National Park, and the Christmas Mountains to the north, where some prospectors "got lost and didn't get out till Christmas." In early times three Indian tribes—the Apaches, the Comanches and the Kiowa—would gather here, form raiding parties and sweep west across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The Indians called the place Tres Linguas (three tongues) and the cowboys corrupted that into Terlingua.
An old Indian named Marcos Hinojosa sometimes appears and sells warm beer to tourists who find their way to Terlingua. Hinojosa says that everything in the Big Bend "sticks, stings or stinks," but nothing really stinks now that the mines are closed. Dry lava beds curl through the dusty green sagebrush, through the century plants and Spanish daggers. There are no trees. The tallest living thing is the ocotillo, a desert shrub whose thorny ash-white arms reach higher than the head of a man or a bear. Mountain lions, bobcats, jackrabbits, rattlesnakes and enormous centipedes and scorpions have the land to themselves. The nearest center of commerce is Study Butte (pronounced Stewty Butte locally), five miles to the east. There a single resident named Maggie-Maggie operates a gas station-general store-beer hall. She wears ankle-length Indian dresses and carries a loaded pistol in her long bloomers for when the boys come to town. Tooter and four other cowpunchers who work the Terlingua spread do their regular drinking at Maggie's because the next closest center of civilization is Alpine, 79 miles north and across the Del Norte Mountain Range.
Nearly a full week before burn of if time, H. Allen Smith mysteriously appeared in Alpine and checked into the Ponderosa Inn. There on Thursday night he met Fowler for the first time.
"Mr. Smith let Mr. Fowler do all the drinking and most of the talking," reported Cocktail Waitress Jean Page. "Then Mr. Smith picked up the check."
Friday at noon Fowler's backers threw a cocktail party at the Holiday Inn near Dallas' Love Field, then herded their chili heads and a band of newsmen and cameramen into three chartered planes for the flight to Terlingua. Two hours and 30 minutes later, while a four-piece country and western band brought in from Fort Stockton played in the swirling dust, the planes touched down on the graded runway they call Terlingua International Airport. By Saturday there were 20 private planes parked in the brush. Shelby had flown in with his own contingent from Los Angeles. It included a bogus monk introduced as Father Duffy, and a young man wearing the cap of a Los Angeles policeman.
Father Duffy arrived fortified with two women friends. This appalled the Dallas delegation, which had piously insisted the junket be stag. CASI delegates feared their wives would find out. They did, anyhow. A group identified as the Terlingua Women's Auxiliary chartered a small plane, which buzzed the Terlingua Inn at the close of festivities, spraying the ghost town with 16,000 yellow cards. Engraved on the cards were such messages as: "Congratulations, you get the children" and "We'll arrange the alimony to fit your budget." One wife also told The Dallas Morning News she put crumbled crackers in her husband's sleeping bag.
CASI members pride themselves on enduring traditional frontier hardships: hot chili isn't the only pain they bear. Sleeping bags and toothbrushes were the only luggage permitted aboard. Several members carried pocket knives, and one Dallas attorney wore his duck-hunting suit. An enormous supply of beer was flown ahead. Witts and Shelby furnished other liquid refreshment at ranch headquarters, and Walter Jetton, Lyndon Johnson's personal barbecuer, was hauled along to do the cooking.
The delegates clambered into two bar-equipped red school buses which would ferry them first to the ghost town, then to the ranch where they would make camp. The trip from Terlingua to the ranch is 35 miles and takes about an hour. One bus barely missed a mountain lion. The other bus encountered no lions, but CASI members counted one horse, two cows, a Pearl beer can and any number of rabbits, hawks and eagles. A Dallas photographer smuggled along a length of rope because he knew that rattlesnakes will not attack a sleeping man who is surrounded by rope, then abandoned the idea when it was called to his attention that scorpions love rope.
Nights in the Big Bend are cold and damp, and the ground is hard. Animals move in the night. By Saturday morning it was assumed at CASI Camp that H. Allen Smith was dead, but the room clerk at the Ponderosa Inn assured the sore, red-eyed chili heads that that wasn't the case.
Tooter the Cowboy was there, representing the rank and file of Terlingua society. Tooter is a wiry, hell-raising drifter who looks something like an insensitive Montgomery Clift. When he is sober he trains horses for Ranch Manager Harold Wynne. Tooter wasn't sober this particular weekend. He was what Wynne called "mean drunk." Tooter drank and played poker until the last chili head fell out, and he was waiting on horseback, a beer bottle in one hand, when CASI delegates staggered to the outdoor breakfast tables of Walter Jetton. While chili heads spooned their eggs and asked each other what could be worse than a hangover, Tooter showed them what, galloping his cutting horse between the crowded tables and over the sleeping bags where some of the frontiersmen were still crumpled.
The following night Tooter took more money from the Dallas folks and terrorized Father Duffy and his friends. Ranch Manager Wynne explained that Tooter sometimes has trouble sleeping. This time the trouble was two Mexicans, brothers of a boy he had pistol-whipped in Study Butte, who were hoping to shoot him.
By high noon Saturday an estimated 500 chili fanciers had materialized out of the desert and pushed up to the front porch of the Terlingua Inn. They were overwhelmingly pro Fowler. They had come to drink free beer, sample chili and inspect firsthand "the elderly challenger H. Allen 'Soupy' Smith of New York," as Tolbert called him—though, in fact, it was CASI that had issued the challenge.
Smith appeared fit and rested. He wore a fresh open-neck sports shirt and had a sidearm strapped low on his hip. Fowler had slept in a garage under the ranch house and had been sick all night with a virus. While he made jokes about Smith's ancestry, particularly about the fact that Smith learned about chili in Decatur, Ill., his heart wasn't in it. Fowler, who at 58 is a year younger than his opponent, started appreciating chili during the Depression, when a bowl of red cost 5¢ in south Texas.
"It was cheap and greasy, and it saved my life," he says doggedly.
Precook ceremonies opened at 11:35 a.m. with a blessing originated years ago by a Negro cowpuncher and chuck-wagon cook named Bones Hooks.
It begins like this:
"Lord, God, You know us old cowhands is forgetful. Sometimes I can't even recollect what happened yestiddy. We is forgetful. We just know daylight and dark, summer, fall, winter and spring. But I sure hope we don't never forget to thank You before we is about to eat a mess of good chili. We don't know why, in Your wisdom, You been so doggone good to us. The Chinee don't have no chili, ever. The Frenchmens is left out. The Rooshians don't know no more about chili than a hog does about a sidesaddle. Even the Meskins don't get a good whiff of it unless they stay around here. Chili eaters is some of Your chosen people...."
When their praying was done and Master of Ceremonies Bill Rives had led the 500 in the singing of Hello, Terlingua, a song of his own composition, Rives tossed off a couple of one-liners accusing Smith of violating several city ordinances and read a letter from the governor making Smith an honorary citizen of Texas—an honor that Smith declined.
At noon they got with it. For two hours two pots boiled, two reputations simmered. The contestants watched their pots and posed for pictures, offering ladles of chili to Father Duffy or holding their noses at the misfortune of being so close to their opponent's entry. The hot Texas air was thick with spice. At one point Smith seemed dispirited. "What chance do I have?" he asked. "Last week Tolbert claimed in his column that a Texas Baptist preacher invented the airplane. Before this is over he'll be saying that Wick Fowler invented caviar in Swampnose Park on the Pecos River. There is no end to what these people will do."
He was wrong, happily, for judgment was swiftly approaching. The Fort Stockton plowboys laid down their instruments. Two amateur chili makers from Abilene who had been distributing free bowls of red under a tent in the shade of an adobe ruin stood at attention. Daisy F. Adams said this was the most dramatic thing she had witnessed since they no-billed Whet Thompson for gunning down a wetback at his front gate. In grand silence the three judges stood blindfolded on the porch. And while Matchmaker Tom Tierney did a vote-by-vote over the public address, they tasted.
Mrs. Stillwell voted for No. 2, giving Smith the lead. Floyd Schneider made it one-all, lining himself with Fowler.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. Tie-breaker Witts allowed someone to guide a spoon of chili to his mouth, and promptly spit it all over the referee's foot. Then he went into convulsions. He rammed a white handkerchief down his throat as though he were cleaning a rifle barrel, and in an agonizing whisper Witts pronounced himself unable to go on.
"I have to see a doctor," Witts explained. "I declare a one-year moratorium in the world championship chili con carne cook off."
The world will never know which bowl of chili maimed Witts. Texans take the chauvinistic view, assuming it was Smith's batch with the Kimbell-brand pinto beans and a tart sweetness like Walter Jetton's barbecue sauce with a sprinkle of chili powder added. Smith says flatly that Witts was stricken "by that vile scalding mud Texans call chili."
The world may not even care.
What CASI has in mind is a rematch one year to the day in Mount Kisco, N.Y., but then Smith won't be in Mount Kisco, N.Y. one year from now. He will be in Alpine. He was enchanted by the country where his lynching was to take place, so he bought a piece of land not far from Sul Ross State College. Soupy Smith is building a home in the Big Bend.
