Cat's Musings

A melancholy road to BabyHead Mountain

Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this.

Texas isn’t as backward as you would think. Every summer, my parents would bring me to San Antonio to go to Sea World. My parents, thrilled to have an inquisitive child, saw that I went to NASA and the Natural Science Museum in Houston. And I must’ve gone on a field trip to Texas A&M at least once a year in elementary school. They were cloning lambs there. We had an NPR station. And we could see the light pollution from Houston just south of us.

But go out west past San Antonio and Austin. The gentle rolling gulf plains gradually give way to more dramatic topography of the Texas Hill Country. East of San Antonio, you can expect to find some civilization every ten to fifteen miles. The space between towns (and gas stations) steadily increases the further west you drift. Here, the light pollution from the Texas metros steadily dissipates. Cacti mingle alongside post oak. And you get a good look at what it means to be ‘deep in the heart of Texas’.

Almost as central as you can get in central Texas is the Llano Basin. There, you will find the small town of Llano, Texas - the seat of Llano County. But just ten miles north up Texas Highway 16, you will find a common green highway marker for the uncommonly named BabyHead Cemetery.

BabyHead Cemetery on Texas Highway 16, just outside Llano, Texas

Not the most pleasant name.

BabyHead Cemetery derives its name from the now extinct community of Baby Head. According to local folklore courtesy of Atlas Obscura, in the 1850s a young girl was abducted and murdered by local Native Americans, and her head displayed on a pike on top of a nearby mountain. This grisly tale gave the rocky hill its name - Baby Head Mountain - and the name of the community around it: Baby Head. All that remains of this once vibrant community is, ironically, the cemetery. A Texas historical marker provides a brief explanation.

A brief history provided by the Texas Historical Commission.

I originally learned the sorrowful tale of Baby Head Mountain through an article from a website called Fort Tours written by Michael Trevis. I was in high school (so, the early to mid 2000s) when I discovered it while looking for Texas ghost stories. It was a formative piece that shaped not only how I see history, but also urban legends and ‘real’ ghost stories:

”It is possible that we may someday solve the mystery of Babyhead Mountain. But during the process of digging out historical data in an effort to come up with the "truth," it is all too easy to fail to see the real, heart-rending truth -- that a valuable life met an undeserved end there on that rocky, remote hill today known as Babyhead Mountain.” (Trevis, M., circa 2005).

This one line haunted me for years. It brought me to that grim setting, and made me feel the loss of life deep into my soul. It made me see history not as numbers and events, but as the human experience.

I eventually went to visit it in myself - the pictures in this blog post were taken by me.

It was a windy day in mid-March in 2021 when I made my pilgrimage to Baby Head. It is truly isolated - open pasture, interrupted only by an occasional farm house. The actual cemetery gates were firmly locked, with a ‘No Trespassing’ sign, presumably to deter vandals. While I didn’t see any myself, apparently people will sometimes leave doll’s heads on the cemetery fence in a crass display of irreverence. I had intended to find and hike Baby Head Mountain, but I believe it is the hill that you can see in the background of my picture, once again behind a gate.

There is an unsettling feeling there, but no more than any rural cemetery. I considered returning by night - not to trespass, just to revisit the spot on the highway where I had pulled of. In the end, I figured that whoever lived out there would probably prefer I not. In total, I spent maybe 15 minutes there, gathering pictures, walking a little up the highway, and trying to imagine the people who had stood where I was standing generations before.

Stories (especially those that are primarily shared through word of mouth such as the story of Baby Head Mountain) are dulled by the passage of time. The stories change as they are told, and retold. We know there was a community named Baby Head. We know that there were tensions between settlers and Native Americans in the central Texas frontier. But we don’t know if there was a murder. We don’t even know if there was a little girl. However, stories allow us to ascribe feelings to the events of the past. They allow us to understand and remember that history is more than events and dates.

There may not have been a murder. But from the story of Baby Head Mountain, we can see a glimpsed into the life of 1850s Texas: A lonely place on the expansive frontier where Indigenous Americans and Anglo settlers existed in a cycle of retributive violence. Even what is left unsaid - namely, the perspectives of the Indigenous Americans who lived then and there - gives us a peek into the world that gave us the legend of Baby Head Mountain..

History is what we choose to remember. Folk lore helps those stories survive so that the human experience can resonate with us through time and space.

Thank you for reading, if you made it this far.

#adventure #halloween #rambling