Bead-Camp Holland Olive Stone TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos in the travel bug logs are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

Medium Stone Stone Donut.  While the TB owner lives on the Southern High Plains in the Panhandle of northwest Texas, he has spent considerable time in what many Texans would call Far West Texas.  It remains a favorite part of the state.  Much of it is the Chihuahuan Desert.  In the desert are remotes outposts of civilization and even mountains that rise high enough to harbor junipers and pines.  This travel bug commemorates a favorite place in the region, partly because the history and partly because of memories.

Vieja Pass is in the Sierra Vieja is on private land twelve miles west of Valentine in the Sierra Vieja in Presidio County.   The Pass is historically an avenue of traffic between the Rio Grande and Mexico to the west and the US interior to the east.  ZH Canyon (the entrance to the Pass) has a good supply of water and grass.  In 1880, the pass was the scene of the last Apache attack in Presidio County; on that day four Pueblo Indian scouts and Lt. Frank H. Mills of the Twenty-fourth United States Infantry fought off twenty Apaches.  
 
Camp Holland (sometimes called Fort Holland)  is at the entrance to ZH Canyon.  It was constructed in 1918 at the mouth of ZH Canyon after raids on the Brite and Neville ranches by Mexican bandits.  The location effectively blockaded Viejo Pass.  The buildings of the camp were made of stone and wood.
 
Although soldiers seldom lived there, Camp Holland had two barracks that could house up to 400 men, four officers' houses, a mess hall, and a guardhouse. The soldiers' everyday needs were met by a bakery, a corral, a blacksmith shop, and a quartermaster store. Since the area afforded a good supply of springwater, the camp had a sewer system and a shower house. However, by 1921 the army began phasing out border patrols in Presidio County.  Camp Holland was closed and leased to civilians including Texas Rangers and customs and immigration border patrols.  Many of the deserted buildings are still standing today.

The writer conducted research in the canyon in the 1960s and 70s.  There were many occasions, night and day, when he and illegal aliens surprised each other.  And, as an aside, there is no other location in Texas where so many bat species (15) may be observed.