The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange by Jan Jarboe Russell

Harrison, Roosevelt’s new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, stood, on the morning of November 6, 1942,in a place so strange that it might have appeared imaginary to him. Before him stretched a desolate prairie of dusty soil, dry cactus, and a variety of wild, dense shrubs. The small town of Crystal City was named for a vast stretch of artesian springs, now dangerously dry due to a drought. The landscape was incongruous to the town’s name. Thirty-five miles to the west, the flat, bleached-out land emptied into the Rio Grande, and across that river the land stretched wide into Mexico. Locals called the region the Wild Horse Desert. It had a between-worlds feeling, not quite Mexico, not quite America.
    Sixty-five million years before, in the Late Cretaceous era, this desert was the floor of the ocean. When the waters receded, deposits of oil and salt domes were left, grown over by grasses, plants, and trees. Small, peaceful groups were the first to live on the land. For sustenance, they gathered roots, hunted deer, and fished in the Gulf of Mexico. Apache and Comanche, warring tribes, followed them. The first European—Cabeza de Vaca—didn’t arrive until the sixteenth century. De Vaca was so struck with the loneliness of the land, so vast and so barren, that he named it El Desierto de los Muertos, the Desert of the Dead.
    When Anglo settlers streamed into Texas in the 1820s, most colonistssteered cleared of this forbidding brush landscape, calling it “heartbreak country.” Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas settlement, preferred the rich, wooded lands of East and Central Texas. After a trip to Matamoros, Mexico, Austin wrote of the land near the future Crystal City, “It is generally nothing but sand, entirely void of lumber, covered with scrubby thorn bushes and prickly pear cactus.” On March 2, 1836, Austin and other Texas colonists, many of them slaveholders and secessionists, formed an independent republic. The new Republic of Texas had its own Texas Constitution, capital in Austin, and flag. Texas was its own nation—unto itself. Nonetheless, South Texas, where Crystal City was located, continued to function as it always had—as a direct channel into Mexico. As late as 1839, the Texas maps described South Texas this way: “Of this section of country little is known.” In those days, maps of Texas stopped in San Antonio, even though Texas extended farther south, all the way to the Rio Grande River and into Mexico.
    One hundred and twenty miles from San Antonio sat the small Texas town of Crystal City. Large ranches dominated the border area. On both the US side and the Mexican side, vaqueros , Mexican cowboys, worked cattle on horseback. In 1905, two bankers from San Antonio, Carl Gross and E. J. Buckingham, bought a ten-thousand-acre ranch and platted the town site of Crystal City. They subdivided the ranch into ten-acre farms and set about selling the area to unsuspecting outsiders as a Garden of Eden. With other owners of large ranches, Gross and Buckingham invested $345,000 to build a rail line to connect San Antonio, Uvalde, and the Gulf of Mexico. The SAU&G line originated in 1909 in Crystal City and Uvalde, and by 1914 was extended between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. By 1914, the line, nicknamed the Sausage, was completed. Before the railroad arrived, Crystal City had a less-than-thriving population of 350 souls and no reliable connections with the outside world. The culture was built around cattle. With the arrival of the railroad, small farmers, many from the Midwest, made their way to South Texas. Most of the new residents broughtfarming methods and equipment unsuitable to the arid land. They introduced sheep, which ate closer to the ground than cattle, causing overgrazing and ferocious conflict between the ranchers and the sheep owners. Yet over time, progress came to Crystal City. Fields of Bermuda onions and spinach were planted. Cotton gins hummed. In 1928,