-Texas is changing fast, and it's changing a lot.

[ Dramatic music plays ] And I think as a writer, you do have this unique vantage point because you're not stationary.

You'd see those changes on a larger scale.

-Reporting in different parts of the state has been a way for me to really think about the future of Texas's identity.

-I think that's a tension that many Texans are grappling with right now, is what makes us unique and how do we hold on to that?

[ Music builds, ends ] [ Down-tempo music plays ] -This is a story about one of the most unique places in America and certainly in Texas, a place that was full of eccentrics and artists and desert rats and people living in caves and people living according to their own lifestyle.

And the reason I was drawn to it was because if Terlingua was changing, this most remote and difficult place for people to live, then all of Texas was changing.

My name is Peter Holley, and I wrote "Farewell to the Last Frontier" for Texas Monthly.

Around the first or second year of the pandemic, we began hearing about small towns being hit with an influx of outsiders.

I think I got a tip that something similar was happening in Terlingua, and that struck me as bizarre.

Like, how could people be flooding into one of the most inhospitable places in Texas?

[ Music continues ] The first thing that I experienced when I drove into Terlingua was actually anxiety.

As you get closer and closer, you feel yourself pulling away from civilization.

It's located right here, in deep West Texas.

It's been lost to history.

It's hot.

There's no water.

It looks like a Martian landscape.

It kind of feels prehistoric at times.

There's no infrastructure.

There's no police officers.

There's no one looking over your back.

That's always been part of Terlingua's magic sauce.

You feel free to do whatever you want.

-There's just something about getting out here in the middle of nowhere.

You know, you just clear your soul, your head.

-Ninety-nine percent of the people live here solely because they fell in love with it.

And that makes a really special community.

[ Harmonica, guitar playing ] Our local population has grown tremendously.

-♪ Hold on to your rosary beads ♪ ♪ And leave me to my... ♪ -There is a new generation coming in.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] -In 2010, the census records indicated that there was around 300 people living in southern Brewster County.

When I was reporting my story, that number had reportedly ballooned to over 1,000.

That's three to four times the size that it was 10 years ago.

That doesn't include tourists and kind of the day-to-day traffic.

As the pandemic hit and people had this rush to get outside of cities, more and more people were flooding into Terlingua and building these haphazard structures, typically for Airbnb or for themselves.

Terlingua became this place to experiment with temporary shelter.

-It's so bittersweet, the lack of regulations here.

I just wish people took advantage of that in a more beautiful way rather than plopping a bunch of sheds everywhere.

-My uncle, who used to come down here in the '70s, he was like, "Man, there was nothing.

Now all you see is little white dots."

Teepees, the little campers that people buy and then abandon -- There's a lot of that out there.

-There are also luxury mansions built into the rock side.

And I remember crawling up to one.

I probably wasn't supposed to be there, but I went anyway.

There was a Tesla charger and this infinity pool overlooking the mountains.

It blew my mind.

-The power goes out all the time.

-Maybe 'cause they installed a hundred AC units on this one line that weren't here before, you know?

-The place was transforming from this remote haven to a vacation town.

-Whoo-hoo!

I think this is like a Disney World that needs to be built.

It's a diamond in the rough.

-The transplants have been accused of treating Terlingua like a Western theme park as opposed to a real community.

Moving to Terlingua, it's always been the case that locals were resistant to you arriving there.

They're staunchly independent, very outspoken, the kind of person who will actually poke you in the back and say, "You need to leave town," which is actually what happened to me when I was there.

Terlingua was initially a mining community in the early 20th century.

The mining community disappeared, and for a long time, there was a ghost town there.

Then around 1983, a man named Bill Ivey, who was from the area, decided to revitalize the ghost town and create a community.

-Terlingua is its own spirit.

It has its own spirit.

I hear that from folks all the time.

-Bill refers to Terlingua as "the last frontier."

-We're not on the way to anywhere, and we're on the edge of nowhere.

I grew up out here, and it was one of the last places to get electricity and telephones.

We all remember Terlingua as a ghost town.

And I think it's important.

That's why my father and I bought it, was to preserve that so that it wouldn't change.

We left as much original as we could.

And then over the years, it's been restored little by little.

I mean, the building that we're in right now didn't have a roof.

And that's how it got its name, the Starlight Theatre, 'cause we still had dances and parties and stuff.

In fact, Jerry Jeff Walker played a dance here one night.

We had to pour concrete up against the walls to fortify them.

And then, when we took it away, it kind of looked like a silhouette of some mountains.

So I hired a local artist to come in and turned it into a mountain scene.

-When he started doing that in the early '80s, people thought he was crazy.

But he saw a vision for a community that nobody else did.

And he's now known as the Godfather of Terlingua.

Bill has been very aware of the change for years.

-There's nowhere for anybody to live 'cause they've all been turned into Airbnbs or whatever.

I went on Airbnb the other day just to see what was there, and somebody was renting a piece of dirt.

Nothing there except a sign that said "No smoking."

[ Laughs ] -As the cost of living has skyrocketed, longtime locals have been forced out, and there's less and less of them who arrived in the '70s and '80s.

-I am a little scared.

The people that have helped build Terlingua or make Terlingua what it is, hell, they're getting old, like me.

-Even since I was out there reporting, the changes have continued, an the most recent one is this fight over a plan to build a Dollar General.

-There's this Dollar General moving in next door to my liquor store.

I'm terrified.

You get big business coming in, and it's a scary thought.

-We all need to make money, but it's different when you live somewhere and make money and you infuse that capital back into the community as opposed to using Terlingua as another investment vehicle.

-Do I want a dollar store down here?

No.

I mean, they're not gonna sponsor a Little League team.

-The fear is that Terlingua is gonna turn into any other small town, a place with big-box retail chains, RV parks, and a whole bunch of tourists who don't care about the history or the culture.

My personal opinion is that we're all drifting through, like, a monoculture in the United States.

Places are becoming less distinctive.

And Terlingua was always the most distinct place, the place that was most independent.

And losing that means losing an example of another way to live.

-This was a very close-knit community because your neighbor was your entertainment.

Now you can walk in Starlight, you can sit out on the porch, and everybody's on their phone or they've got an iPad out.

And that's the world we live in.

♪♪ No, I don't want to see it change.

But change is inevitable, and being on the last frontier makes it more noticeable.

And change doesn't have to be bad.

-I think a lot of people moved here because they wanted change.

It was such a small town in the beginning, and it as was slowly grew over time by people who wanted something different.

I hope the people that move here embrace the artistic creativity that can happen here.

-I hope that the dark skies stay dark.

-Used to, I could step out on the porch and see about five lights between here and Study Butte.

Now they're everywhere.

It's a sea of little lights.

So it's changed.

But I can still look past those lights at the mountains.

The mountains didn't change.

[ Laughs ] [ Down-tempo music plays ] -There are places where, really, there's a kind of spirit and a life of its own inside made up of all the different people who are a part of it.

But if places like these vanish, I think humanity really loses something.

♪♪ It just makes the world a little poorer.

[ Music builds, continues ] My name is Lea Konczal, and I wrote "Inside America's Last Ninepin Bowling Enclave."

When I was in college, I took a sociology class and we read an excerpt of Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone."

It's about kind of the decline of American community.

I got the idea, like, "What if I write a journalism article looking at an actual bowling league and see what kind of community there is there?"

One day I came across the existence of ninepin bowling, this old German sport, and I just thought it was fascinating.

I was like, "I have to write about this."

[ Indistinct conversations ] It was like this step back in time.

Half the alleys still allow smoking.

A lot of them still take score on chalkboards.

I mean, there's human pinsetters.

-It is totally a team sport, because, as you can see, there is no individual scoring kept.

Everybody's added together, and it comes up to one cumulative score.

-The point of the game is to knock everything down, kind of like tenpin.

But with ninepin, if you get just the red one standing, you get three extra points.

-It's just this totally different species of bowling that has survived for so long.

Ninepin bowling has roots in Germany.

Germans started moving here in the 1830s, and they brought ninepin with them.

At its height, ninepin was in pretty much every major city in Texas.

It came to the point where we are today, where there are only 18 ninepin alleys that I know of left in the whole U.S., and they're all clustered in the rural areas around the city of San Antonio.

I spent like half a year at least just going to league nights, going to tournaments.

And the more I learned, the more fascinating it got, because I started learning about some of the challenges that were not obvious on the face and some of the biggest threats ninepin is currently facing.

-There just hasn't been any money, so... -A lot of bowling alleys are really losing that bridge to the next generation.

♪♪ They still have pool nights there, but the bowling hasn't happened since 2012.

-It was family.

They got close.

They got close.

It was like a family gathering.

♪♪ Now it's...what it is, I guess.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Some of our problems with trying to keep this place open is the property taxes keep going up.

-The areas around San Antonio, many of them are growing astronomically.

And with that, the local property taxes are going up.

-If taxes get too high where we cannot keep our head above water, we will have to close this place.

-There is a real danger that some of these clubs may close and ninepin may go extinct if they're not able to adapt fast enough.

-Sorry.

Our cooler went out.

[ Laughs ] I left town for about a year and came back.

And that is one of my key things about not leaving the state is I'm gonna not have ninepin bowling.

I'm not gonna have the group of friends, even from this bowling alley, along with all the other ninepin bowling alleys.

I've been competing against them since I was 7.

-When something has been around for so long, there's just not really a way to replace that.

It's just really the loss of a community, and people can find community in other ways, but it's harder, and it's not always gonna be the same.

In order to stay afloat, ninepin clubs have to innovate.

[ Up-tempo music plays ] In my reporting, there was really one club that stood out because it has done probably the most to try and appeal to a new demographic.

-When I joined Turner Club, I said, "What's going on?

Hey, this building's about to fall down."

They said, "I know.

We've been trying to move."

"Well, why haven't you?"

And they said, "Well, we haven't been able to.

We can't find a spot, and we don't have the funds for it."

I said, "I'll tell you what.

Let's get going.

I'll move this club.

If it takes me my entire life, I'll move it."

-The club today has many Hispanic members.

It was by the River Walk for many years in downtown San Antonio and successfully recruited the people living in that city.

-My name's Louis Cabrera.

I've been bowling ninepin for about a year now.

I got invited just by a friend here and fell in love with it.

-Also, the president took a big gamble by building 16 separate automated tenpin lanes.

And the tenpin side really acts as a pipeline for interest to the ninepin side.

Turner has successfully transitioned into the next stage of evolution.

A lot of its members are basically new people who have discovered the sport.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] I definitely think one reason I may be interested in exploring community is that I'm an introvert and by nature a loner.

Before this story, I didn't really understand the full depth of community that these places had.

I felt incredibly welcomed into the ninepin community, which is why I ended up joining a league.

Our team name is The Lords of the Ringers, because in ninepin, if you knock down all the pins at once or all the pins except the red pin, that's called a ringer.

Sorry.

I have to explain the team name.

[ Laughs ] Our team is in last place, but it's a lot of fun.

Places like these, they're more than just buildings.

They're history, family... ♪♪ ...and community.

♪♪ [ Dog barking in distance, horse neighs ] -Land has always been a big part of Texas's identity.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] We are a place of wide-open spaces and giant Texas skies.

♪♪ It's not just dirt for us.

It's us.

And there are forces threatening that now.

-This is...It's real bad.

-The idea of losing that connection... that is so terrifying to me.

I'm Emily McCullar.

I'm a senior writer at Texas Monthly, and I wrote the story "The Panhandle Is Burning."

My family has some land in central Texas that has been in my family since the 19th century.

I was raised out there.

It is a huge part of not just my day-to-day way of life, not just, you know, some of the work that I do.

It is part of my identity.

A couple of weeks ago, I was out here and I was just driving around in the truck.

♪♪ I was thinking about my grandfather driving around here, like, when he was a kid, in the '30s and when he was, like, an old cowman in the '50s and '60s.

My mom died when I was 10.

Both her parents were gone before I was born.

So there's a lot of people on that side of the family that I just didn't know.

[ Insects chirping ] They feel like they're here.

♪♪ In August of 2020, I got a call from my dad that there was a fire out near our ranch.

♪♪ The fire that burned here and burned, like, on multiple properties over here was 10,000 total acres.

So, like, all of those grayish trees, bushes over there, that's all fire damage.

Those are all trees that burned in 2020.

Once the fire got more contained, my dad and I drove out here.

I think it's the only time I've seen him speed was when we got to a point where we could see the smoke, and he just hauled ass.

It was wild.

The fire that we had in 2020, that made me wonder what those ranchers up in the Panhandle were dealing with.

There were five fires that ignited in the Panhandle at the end of February 2024, and the Smokehouse Creek fire ended up being the largest one.

[ Dramatic music plays ] [ Fire crackling ] ♪♪ The Smokehouse Creek fire was the biggest fire in recorded Texas history.

In the end, it burned over a million acres within Texas and Oklahoma.

I remember when the fires were burning and following along with the Forest Service Twitter, seeing the news as it was growing and growing and growing.

It was just terrifying how big and unwieldy this one could become.

♪♪ I couldn't even fathom the size of the fire and that there were people up there whose homes were there, who were trying to run family ranches out there.

Ranching is part of my family's identity and not something to easily let go of.

[ Fire crackling ] And if you are a Panhandle rancher who is rebuilding or starting over from scratch, what do you even do?

♪♪ The Smokehouse Creek fire burned kind of all over the northeastern part of the Texas Panhandle, but a lot of my reporting was centered around Canadian, which is pretty close to the Oklahoma border.

♪♪ Cattle ranching is a big deal in Canadian.

It's just a central part of the community.

-It's a good place.

Canadian's a good town.

Yeah, it brought everybody pretty close together, 'cause most everybody was dealing with the same thing.

You know, it hit everybody pretty hard.

-When I got up to Canadian in the summer, a few months after the fire went through, even though these ranchers, they were past the immediate trauma, they were starting to look toward the future... but they were in an existential crisis.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] Fire is not new to the Panhandle.

The Panhandle has burned for millennia.

That's kind of how the ecology of the Panhandle was born.

What is different now is that there have been three huge fires in the past 20 years -- in 2006... ...in 2017, and 2024.

The last time there was a fire that big was 1906, and there have been three in the last 20 years.

-But yeah, it's getting way too to be much of a normal thing around here, I feel like.

[ Engine starts ] -So you have infrastructure from electrical companies and oil equipment.

That's the match.

But climate change is creating the conditions that can take ignition into something absolutely uncontrollable.

♪♪ Like the Smokehouse Creek fire.

♪♪ One rancher, Adam Isaacs, shared a lot of footage that he had taken as the fire was rolling in.

At one point, he's standing in a field, trying to get his yearlings and his horses somewhere where maybe they'll be okay.

These ranchers had been through multiple fires.

They'd been through multiple red-flag fire warnings.

But the speed with which it got to them this time was pretty hopeless for them.

♪♪ They met up with Adam's parents in a wheat field that was far enough away, and they were sitting in the car, watching the camera that they had set up on the front of their house right as it breached the fence into their front yard.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] I talked to one rancher, Craig, who was out helping other ranchers and local firefighters try to keep the fire at bay.

[ Indistinct talking on radio ] -It is the worst one I've ever seen.

It'll be over a million acres by the time it gets done.

Just keep praying.

This is...It's real bad.

♪♪ -I had never seen video like that.

We all understand fire.

Like, we all see it.

But, like, a raging fire, that's a monster.

♪♪ I mean, the trauma of watching a fire come towards you and barely escaping with your life, like, that's enough of a thing.

The aftermath is a whole other nightmare.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] It's estimated that 15,000 cows died in total.

Some of those were burned and killed by the fire, but a lot of those had to be put out of their misery by ranchers.

-The connection with the cattle is something that's -- It's hard to explain or describe if you're not with them every day.

Basically, your whole life is taking care of them.

[ Siren wails ] ♪♪ It was sickening, you know, to see all that labor and that hard work and just the animals you cared for their whole life burned up in a horrific way.

It was horrible.

I wouldn't wish it on anybody else.

♪♪ The ranch has an excavator, and we use it to grub cedar brush and mesquite.

And we brought it down here after the fire 'cause we knew we needed to dispose of these cattle that we lost and ones we had to put down, so... Dug a big old pit here, and we just started hauling them up here just to get rid of them.

I don't really like coming up here.

♪♪ -Emotionally, logistically, financially, I mean, that's when the real trouble begins.

-To go replace a cow is really expensive right now.

They're high, I'm hearing.

I know a lot of people had to sell out after a lot of this.

So I hope people can eventually rebuild it, but at the price they are, it's gonna be a slow process, I feel.

♪♪ -Herds take years to build.

These are genetic lines that these ranchers have built over generations of cows.

If that gets wiped out by the fire, not only did you lose the literal value of the individual cows you lost.

You lost 20 years of work on a genetic line, just up in 20 minutes.

[ Metal creaking ] In the ag industry, profit margins are pretty thin.

You're beholden to a lot of forces outside of your control.

So it's already a struggling community.

[ Indistinct conversations, engines idling ] It's hard enough when it's not burning.

How can you do it when you burn every six years?

There weren't any easy answers for how they can build back and what do we do to make their lives better, what do we do to stop these fires from happening.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] There's nothing really easy and quick for that.

♪♪ -This is Tino.

We raised her on a bottle.

She'd calved like a couple weeks before the fire, and she actually lost her calf in the fire.

♪♪ We were down on the west end looking for cattle a day or two after, and she came up out of there.

Came right straight to us and started eating cake out of our hand.

That was a bright spot in all this.

Yeah.

No, I don't feel deterred by the fire.

I think my love and hope for the land and this way of life is even stronger because of it.

I don't think I could do anything else.

I don't think I'd be truly happy if I did.

It's a great place to raise kids and our family and couldn't imagine taking them anywhere else but right here.

-Something I heard over and over again was even though the idea of rebuilding or starting over from scratch, even though that was daunting and difficult and sometimes unfathomable, they were going to rebuild.

♪♪ There was no question, because that's what they do.

I understood that because when I think about my ranch, there is no other option for me.

Leaving and walking away isn't on the table.

For the people of Canadian, it wasn't just land.

It wasn't just cows.

It was family.

It was history.

-The last five years, Texas has been undergoing dramatic changes to the things that always made Texas Texas.

One of the downsides of the change is that it's making Texas less distinctive.

-But what I've seen in my reporting, there will always be places that endure, places where people carry on traditions.

And so when I see those, I have hope that Texas will never become just like anywhere else.

[ Dramatic music plays ] One of the great gifts of being a writer is that you begin to see these archetypes emerge that repeat.

-As journalists, of course, we're going to be interested in people who are doing something new or interesting or controversial.

-With Texas, the way things are constantly changing, people like that are really inspiring.

They're kind of a reminder -- If I don't like something, I can do something about it.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -I really love stories where an ordinary person sets in motion extraordinary things.

The hero, like, "I was just doing what anybody else would do."

What they're doing in some sense may be ordinary.

Yet the fact that they did it, they made the effort, they went the extra mile, that's what makes them extraordinary, and it can make them an inspiration to all of us.

♪♪ My name is Forrest Wilder.

I'm a staff writer for Texas Monthly, and I wrote "Ghost Wolves of the Gulf Coast."

[ Chimes ringing, dog barking ] It was 2008.

Ron Wooten, a longtime Galveston resident, let his dog, Scruffy out, a little rescue.

Scruffy went off and never came back.

-He ran across the ditch near our house, and he was attacked and taken off into the field by a pack of coyotes.

I went over and chased them away from his body.

-A lot of people at that point might have reached for their gun.

Ron went and got his camera.

He just became really curious about these coyotes, and as he started documenting them, he noticed that there was something kind of different about them.

-They had longer ears, bigger heads, rounded eyes, and their coloration was much different than what I'd seen in previous coyotes.

[ Shutter clicks ] -These animals had, like, reddish fur.

They were bigger.

Their features were very wolflike.

A lot of people would think, "They're just weird coyotes."

But Ron thought, like, "No.

These look like red wolves."

-I was a bachelor of wildlife and fisheries at Texas A&M.

So I thought, "Maybe we got some red wolves stuck on the island."

-This would be a huge discovery.

The red wolf used to be abundant across much of Texas and much of the Southeast.

But through habitat loss and hunting, they were basically driven to the brink of extinction.

There's something like only 20 red wolves left in the wild.

Ron's trying to figure out whether, in fact, these coyotes on Galveston Island are red wolves or carrying a lot of their DNA.

If they have red-wolf DNA, it would be a major breakthrough for conservation programs.

Eventually, he got the attention of two scientists, Kristin Brzeski, and Bridgett vonHoldt, who are some of the top researchers in the country on canids.

-I responded, saying, "Yeah, I agree.

These pictures do look interesting.

They look different.

But to really do something, I'd need some genetic samples."

-They were able to get samples from Ron, and the results were astounding.

-The Gulf Coast canines on Galveston Island retained really distinct genetic information.

So they have what we would classify as red-wolf genetic ancestry.

-It confirmed that Ron was correct.

It turns out Galveston Island is this genetic hot spot for animals carrying a lot of red-wolf DNA.

-But on top of that, they have this really interesting, important component of ghost ancestry.

-These canids have a decent amount of DNA that I can't identify what it belongs to.

And I've tested everything.

Is it dog DNA?

Is it gray-wolf DNA?

And it fits nothing.

This is actually ghost genetics, which is something we know exists.

They carry it, but we don't quite know what the identity is.

And our hypothesis is that this is pre-extinction red-wolf DNA.

-It's a ghost in the sense that, like, it comes from some point in the past where there was some intermixing.

-Stuff that was bred into whatever was down here in the red-wolf time.

-Because they are carrying this powerful and ancient and rare DNA, they're referred to as ghost wolves.

The discovery of the ghost wolves opens up tantalizing possibilities for conservation.

-As we track these animals, we're looking at their movements.

We're looking at relationships... -...came here, and then they jumped over there.

-...and trying to correlate that with their genetic ancestry.

-That's a scat.

-That's poo.

It allows us to really understand the value of these animals and relay that to the local officials -- that there's denning sites and pathways, these corridors that get them safely from one green patch to another.

-There's also different methods that could be utilized to try to capture that lost ghost ancestry -- cloning or genome editing to capture that variation, to help both red wolves persist but then also understand how these animals are persisting.

-These coyotes are essentially carrying this repository of red-wolf DNA that could revive the species to a healthy population with good genetic stock for the future.

-We can use these different new tools and then good old fashioned breeding to restore the historic animal.

-Galveston prides itself on being its kind of own world.

It's quirky.

It's an island.

That's part of the charm of the place.

And so what better than having some weird, you know, critter named the ghost wolf running around?

Ghost wolves of Galveston Island.

That just sounds like a cool animal.

♪♪ The problem is that's in competition with this growth imperative.

Galveston has been just booming.

The real estate market has been very vigorous, very healthy.

But a lot of that green space and just habitat in general is being replaced by condos or other types of development.

There's not that much left.

-This is another den habitat.

Or it was.

There was trees over here.

There was more trees over there.

There was high shrubbery in here.

And it provided some protection for them.

-They don't have as many places necessarily to den.

It's forcing them out into traffic.

They're getting hit.

-One got hit right across the street from one of these big developments on Seawall.

That animal was looking for a place to cross over, but they had put a fence over there.

Once development comes on this island, the habitat's gone.

[ Birds chirping ] [ Down-tempo music plays ] -The ghost wolves are part of this larger conversation that's happening, frankly, all across Texas where you have a lot of population growth and urbanization.

How much nature, how much wild spaces do we leave versus how much do we pave over and turn into homes and parking lots?

Those are the questions that I think people are asking as these last kind of green spaces are being enclosed upon.

What does this place want to be, and what's it all about?

There's so many questions people want to answer about these animals.

And so this is the beginning of this story, not the end of it.

I kind of wonder, if not for Ron Wooten, would we even be talking about these ghost wolves?

-Ron was all in.

He showed us the different habitats and the denning locations.

-He's a co-author on our paper, the very first paper of discovery, 'cause he's such a pivotal, central person in all of this.

-He's a wonderful poster child for, like, the citizen scientist, and I think he deserves a lot of credit for bringing this to light.

[ Shutter clicking ] -I always like to remind myself that just because something is the way it's always been doesn't mean that it's right.

And I think that there are people throughout history who have looked around, seen the way things are, decided that they aren't right, and decided to do something about that.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] The way she speaks about Black hair is with this really deep love.

She describes herself as someone who challenged the ways that Texas thinks about Black hair and Black culture.

[ Shutter clicking ] Learning about her background, her getting arrested, how she'd helped change the laws in Texas -- This was a part of my history that I didn't know until I heard her name.

My name is Doyin Oyeniyi.

I am a senior fact checker and writer at Texas Monthly , and I wrote "Her Crowning Glory."

One of the key figures and advocates for natural hair rights in Texas is a woman named Isis Brantley.

♪♪ One of my editors at Texas Monthly came to me with the story idea, and I'd never heard of Isis Brantley before.

-Yes, ma'am.

Okay.

Let's do a video.

-Peace and love, everyone, and welcome to Naturally Isis.

Peace and love to all my beauties out there.

-How to describe her?

Okay.

Yeah.

My first impressions is this person is so bubbly and, like, radiant and confident.

Growing up with a mother who braided hair, learning about Isis put a lot of my own experience into context.

And so I wanted to know more about her and to help get her story out there.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] Isis Brantley was born in 1958, and she grew up in a historically Black neighborhood in Dallas And experiencing the richness and the support of that culture.

-Braiding on the porches in the community was... It was beautiful.

And that's really how we learned at a young age.

I loved it.

I absolutely loved it.

Even though it wasn't the style that you could wear out if you wanted to get a good job.

-Isis was studying theater at what is now the University of North Texas.

She started to braid the hair of her classmates and quickly realized that this was a way to build economic stability for herself.

♪♪ So in 1981, Isis Brantley opened up her own hair salon.

[ Indistinct conversations ] In the '80s and '90s, she was someone that people would travel from all over the state to have her do their hair.

One of her well-known clients is Erykah Badu.

As part of her salon, she was also teaching people how to braid and using it as a way to help other women create economic stability for themselves.

However, the whole time that Isis was braiding hair, she was, unknowingly, doing it illegally.

At the time, in Texas, to braid hair, you needed a cosmetology license.

To have a cosmetology license, all of it would have been a lot of time and money spent to learn skills that she would not be using in her practice.

Texas cosmetology schools weren't even teaching hair braiding.

Being told that she could or couldn't practice it by people who didn't even understand what she was doing, it felt like another form of enslavement to her.

She continued braiding, thinking everything was good on her end.

[ Music builds, ends ] Unfortunately, that was not the case.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] The police set up a sting operation at her salon, arrested her in front of her clients, took her to jail.

-It was scary.

All my community was saying, like, "It would be better just to go and get the license."

You know, "Don't fight this."

But my other peers and colleagues that were fighting injustice against braiders across the country said, "Whatever you do, stand up for your rights."

♪♪ [ Shutter clicking ] -I am not at war with the state of Texas.

I just want my civil rights to be respected, and I want that to leave to the next generation.

I want to pass this gift down.

-As I was learning about Isis's story, I was thinking of my own mother.

My mother actually used to own a beauty-supply store in Garland, and she would also braid hair on the side, including mine and my sister's hair.

For customers, she would braid their hair in the back of the store or sometimes at her house.

And it wasn't until I was learning about Isis that I started to understand why she might have not done it so openly before she got her license.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] In 2015, the court rules that the regulations for hair braiding are essentially nonsensical and thereby unconstitutional.

And that same year, Isis partners with the Texas legislators to pass a House bill that deregulates hair braiding in Texas.

-We are deregulated.

We are free to practice our cultural art.

People are opening up businesses catering to their people, their community.

-I feel really grateful to Isis.

Every time I talk to her, I feel a newfound, kind of deeper appreciation for my hair, my Blackness, my own cultural background.

-I don't think she gets the acknowledgment that she deserves, because she really started this.

♪♪ She's like a superstar, Like, "Isis does your hair?"

And I was like, "None other."

-As we continue to push, piece by piece, piece by exhausting piece, for more progress and understanding and freedom, I don't want people like Isis to be forgotten.

♪♪ [ Insects chirping ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] -The Big Thicket is unlike any other place in North America.

But having lived and grown up in that area and moved away, I find that most Texans that I encounter really don't know about the Big Thicket.

[ Birds chirping ] I don't think I truly appreciated the Big Thicket until I grew a little older, and I wanted to revisit that story and the heroes who really saved that space for all of us.

My name is Tess Coody, and I wrote "The Mild-Mannered Librarian Who Saved the Big Thicket" for Texas Monthly.

On October 11, 1974, Gerald Ford signed legislation that actually preserved the Big Thicket, the first national preserve.

But getting there was a multi-decade journey.

So, when I first started researching the history and the folklore of the Big Thicket, in anticipation of its 50th anniversary, I came across a really fascinating individual, the last of a cast of characters who helped save the thicket.

Maxine Johnston.

-You're gonna have to be tolerant with a 95-year-old... -[ Laughs ] Of course.

-...who's had leaks.

[ Laughs ] -A true Southern woman.

She greeted me with a pot of coffee.

-I put out four cups for you guys.

Come on in.

-She told me story after story of her experiences with congressmen and timber executives and naturalists that represent a lifetime of advocacy and experiences that most folks will never have for even a day in their life.

-I feel sad because I'm the last one.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -Maxine was born in Arkansas, but as a young girl who had lost her mother, she moved to Beaumont in 1942 to live with her sister.

She left behind creeks and woods on her family farm, where she'd hide and read books, and she landed in Beaumont and looked out over this really stark landscape, and she felt adrift.

♪♪ It's pretty stark and open, and it was distinctly different from what she'd experienced as a young child.

So, soon after arriving, she went to school -- South Park High School in Beaumont -- and she had a really important encounter.

-My English teacher introduced me to Lance Rosier, who was Mr.

Big Thicket.

[ Laughs ] -Mr.

Big Thicket, Lance Rosier, a self-taught naturalist who was regarded as the authority on the thicket.

And through his eyes, she began to develop a deep appreciation for not only its beauty but its preciousness to humanity.

♪♪ -Went on several trips with him when he was taking groups and fell in love with the whole place.

It's a wonderful place with so much diversity.

[ Birds chirping ] -In the Big Thicket, you're experiencing everything from arid sandy lands to deep baygalls and marshes.

There are more than 1,300 species of trees, shrubs, vines, over 1,000 species of invertebrates, at least 300 species of birds.

Four out of five of all carnivorous plants are in the Big Thicket.

-I mean, if you can name it, it's probably out here.

-Everything is picturesque and lovely, and it changes with every season.

♪♪ That's it.

-She felt like she was home again.

♪♪ So, the Big Thicket before Western civilization kind of started having its way with it, was estimated to be around 3 million acres, of all this biodiversity.

But as timber companies found these precious resources available in the Big Thicket, they practiced what was called clear-cutting.

[ Saw buzzing ] After experiencing almost 100 years of intensive logging, the thicket had been whittled down from millions of acres to just a few hundred thousand acres.

It was upsetting the delicate balance of those woods.

When we see pictures of it now, it looks as if it were a scene from a world war.

After she graduated from high school, Maxine went into work as a librarian at Lamar University's library in Beaumont.

She lived in Batson, which is a small community in the thicket, and would commute into Beaumont for her job at the university.

And, of course, along that commute, she would encounter logging trucks barreling past her, knowing that around 50 acres of that precious forest is disappearing every day It created a real sense of urgency for her.

Something needed to be done, or the flora and the fauna are gonna be gone.

So in 1964, a group of local leaders founded what would become the Big Thicket Association in an effort to get the state or the feds -- somebody -- to do something to save it.

And quickly, because of her particular skills, her professional skills and her personality, she became their chief clerk.

-That's the only reason I get all of this damned attention, because I was the clerk.

[ Laughs ] -She deflects that she did anything, but she was the ultimate organizer and diplomat.

-In her capacity at the library, she was the person who had access to scientists and biologists.

She was the place journalists and elected officials, politicians would go to get the facts.

And because she had the ability to move between all those worlds, folks began to trust her.

On the ground, where clear-cutting is happening and conservationists are active, there was actual conflict.

As a librarian and as a person, Maxine had that right combination of humility and diplomacy that enabled her to build really important relationships with folks like timber executive Arthur Temple or Congressman Charlie Wilson and keep the conversation moving forward.

-He actually did say, "Maxine was stubborn and aggressive and a sweetheart."

[ Laughs ] I couldn't believe it.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -At some point, it became clear that something was going to get preserved, but how many acres and where raged for years.

Maxine assisted a gentleman named Billy Hallmon, who she calls "the architect of the Big Thicket," to designate boundaries that would ensure the most important parts of its biological diversity were captured and preserved.

-We would send the maps to Charlie Wilson, and then Charlie would in turn send them to all the timber companies and say, "Do not cut in these areas, please."

We saved a lot of acres.

-Eventually they landed on the 84,550 acres that were in the original legislation, which Gerald Ford signed to create the Big Thicket National Preserve.

But the work is not done.

And while it's no longer the timber companies that are as present, the dangers are real.

There is considerable risk to the thicket by way of new development, TxDOT expanding highways and infrastructure, -We picketed in front of TxDOT.

Maxine was there.

She spoke.

And they only give you three minutes, and then the judge's buzzer goes off.

Well, Maxine doesn't hear well, so the buzzer went off, but Maxine just kept talking.

And they weren't about to tell her that her time was up.

-I came to understand through this story it takes the loud voices who yell and it takes the quiet voices who compromise to get big things done.

It takes that person who's willing to give everything to achieving something bigger than themselves.

-They made the effort.

They went the extra mile.

I think that's what makes them extraordinary, and it can make them an inspiration to all of us.

-Because this is all a foundation for how we can be better as a state or a country or a world.

♪♪ -I don't know why we're doing this.

[ Laughs ]