Chapter V

              The Territory

At the southmost tip of Texas where the 1800-mile Rio
Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, lies an irrigated
area some 100 miles long and thirty miles wide. It is one of
the richest farming lands on earth. It is called the Lower
Rio Grande Valley.
    To this, destitute men and their families come from
Mexico. Burdened by their possessions, mothers carrying
babies with older children clinging to their wet clothes,
they wade into the black surging waters and desperately try
to reach the dim opposite bank to search for work in the
Texas fields.
    Climbing out on the American side, they become "wet-
backs, "always hiding from the U.S. Border Patrol, yet al-
ways looking for work in the open fields. Up to a hundred 
thousand have been caught and deported back to Mexico in
one month. In one year over half a million were hauled
back and dumped out. 
    In the beginning the Valley was covered with thorns
of mesquite, ebony and huisatche trees, with brush and 
with many varieties of thorny cactus. The hot, semitropical
climate and blistering sun did little to enhance the place.
The few ranchers scattered around the fringe of the "brush 
desert," sometimes had to burn the thorns off the prickly 

  -- 18 --

pear cactus for cattle feed. White bones lay exposed in the
open spaces and around what used to be water holes, grim
reminders of the long dry spells.
    Mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed over the brush tops
by day and by night.
    Goat farmers barely managed to stay alive. All others
either got out, or died.
    In time a few Americans from the north straggled 
down into the Valley and set up their "outposts" in the sea
of' brush that covered the whole region along the north
bank of the Rio Grande.
    Gradually, they developed the area, cut off the brush,
piled it up and burned it. The first corn, cotton, and other
crops were harvested and hauled to the port town of Roma,
about 150 miles upstream on the Rio Grande. The corn was
loaded on small steamers with two paddle wheels for ship-
ment down river to Camargo, Reynosa, Matamoros, and the
Gulf port city of Bagdad on tile Mexican side of the river.
There the corn was ground up and used to make Mexican
tortillas.
    Years afterwards, in 1904, the completion of the first 
railroad from the north opened the Valley up again to new
settlers, and re-connected it to the rest of the world. Now,
their cattle, cotton, and vegetables and fruit could be hauled
to northern markets.
    In the early days, mosquitoes were a plague to the Val-
ley, making life almost unbearable.  Much brush and un- 
cleared land, and occasionally a low place with standing wa- 
ter, made a perfect breeding place for mosquitoes.  At times
when the wind suddenly changed, swarms of mosquitoes 
would he blown along until even the goats would run for
the scant protection of the brush. 
    Ranchers had to build mesquite fires upwind their 
homes so that the drifting smoke would keep mosquitoes  
away at night and they could get some sleep. 
    Out of such unpromising beginnings, then, the magic 
sometimes tragic, Lower Rio Grande Valley was born and 

 -- 19 --  
 
nurtured to maturity. Hundreds of thousands of unknown,
unloved, unremembered Mexican wetback laborers cleared
the cactus, the mesquite, the thorn bushes to make it what
it is today one of the richest, most productive areas of
farmland on the face of the earth.

  -- 20 -- 


                         Chapter VI

                          Healing

  Frank Ferree was forty-eight years old when he first asked
  God for something. Up until that time his life had been
  filled. His active interest in everything and everybody had
  kept him busy. At times, of course, he had felt something
  was out of kilter, something off balance, something was ter-
  ribly wrong with the world as he observed it around him.
  But he had little time to go beyond that in his thinking. He
  was a thinker, but primarily, he was a doer.
      He had mainly wanted to absorb experience, draw his
  conclusions, bask in the golden sunshine, roll in the snow,
  rejoice in fellowship with his fellow humans.
      He was never the goody-goody sort of man. Intensely
  practical, he simply never took what was not his to take,
  and in most of his business transactions, he paid more than
  what was asked "to make a good deal." Money and wealth
  was not that important to him. Life was for the living, and a
  man could live very well indeed with little of life's material
  goods.
      He'd never thought much of marriage, either. He
  loved his freedom of choice and action far too well to bar-
  gain them off for a mess of pottage. Actually, he considered
  marriage somewhat of a bad bargain for man and woman
  alike, but in most cases, all things considered, "it was a

   -- 21 -- 

makeshift affair designed to solve a problem which none of 
us understand.
    He was a simple man, yet complex.  He paid attention 
to the smallest details, yet was fully capable of wrestling  
successfully with the most complex issues of the day. 
    But at the age of forty-eight he came down with a 
nauseating fever which lasted two weeks. Then he would 
get better, go back to work, and in a few months come 
down with the same intense fever. After nearly a year of 
such, he lay exhausted on his cot one night and said silent-
ly: "Lord, heal me. 
    In a matter of seconds the fever vanished and he went 
to sleep. Next morning he got out of bed and spend the day 
loading and hauling broken cement blocks to his place in an
attempt to work again on his house.
    From time to time he took off from his work and in- 
terested himself in music. He began to take music lessons 
and soon joined a large choir. From the anthems they sang,
he began to learn the words and meanings of the Scrip- 
tures.
    For the third time in his life he held a Bible in his
hands. And as he sang in church, he listened and he won- 
dered.
    He listened to the minister and he wondered why the 
preacher spoke so little of healing when it had occupied so 
much of the time and works of Jesus. As yet, there was noth-
ing particularly religious about his thinking. It was just a 
good logical questioning that required a good, simple; logi-
cal answer.
    Those also knew him then and now, have no doubt
about his mental acuity and perception.  His mind was just and 
is, easily able to encompass the factors of a situation and 
bathe it in logic, coming up with an original and helpful an- 
swer.
    About this time a retired minister of the Gospel came
in from San Benito, hobbling into Frank's massage studio 
on crutches.  Frank went to work. When he worked on the
 
  -- 22 --
 
crippled legs, his hand touched the minister's foot.
    "What did you do to me?' the minister asked, and sat
bolt upright.
    Frank looked up from his work. "What?'
    "You're using some sort of electrical gadget'
    Frank held out his empty hands. The minister looked
on the floor, searched the room. There was nothing.
    Two weeks later the minister walked seven miles from
San Benito to Frank's studio to tell him he was completely
healed of the large sores on his legs, and that he had
thrown away his crutches and could walk as good as any
man. 
    "So I lost a good customer," Frank later said dryly.
    Two months later a Jew who had Parkinson's disease
began to come regularly for a massage.
    "I was doing him some good, I suppose," Frank said.
"He kept coming back, so I must have been helping him
some. But that wasn't enough. I wanted to help him
enough that he wouldn't need to come back at all.
    "I kept thinking about what I was reading in the Bible
about cures and healing. I guess I've always been interested
in health and healing.
    "But mainly I was becoming interested in the Bible's
message. Either the Bible was totally right and trying to
tell us something of vital importance, or it was all a bunch 
of hokum. I felt it terribly important to find out once and 
for all.                                   
    "If the Bible was right, then it was by far the most im-
portant message mankind had received. And if it was right
its lessons would work. No ifs, ands, or buts. So I decided
to put it to the test."
    When he finished massaging the Jew that day he told
him to listen at eight that night for the whistle of the
passenger train which ran between Corpus Christi and
Brownsville. "I will ask Cod to heal you at that time,'
Frank said simply. "I will ask him to cure you."
    That night Frank sat down by his massage table and

 -- 23 -- 
 
heard the whistle at eight o'clock. He believed God would 
heal the Jew of heavy cigarette smoking and of the yellow 
spots on his back and of Parkinson's disease. 
    Two weeks later the Jew came back, not for treatment, 
but to show Frank what had happened. He was freed of his 
smoking habit and had no yellow spots on his back, and he 
felt no need for further massage treatments. He was com- 
pletely cured.  
    "By this time I had come to believe that sickness was 
not real," Frank explained. "I didn't believe a patient 
would die if belief in the mercy and goodness of God was 
present. I ministered to two babies dying with pneumonia 
who lived with their parents on the west side of my new 
settlement. God healed them both, quickly and com- 
pletely." 
 
 -- 24 -- 

                       Chapter VII

              By His Stripes We Are Healed

About this time Frank's eyes began to fail him. In the choir
he would miss the dots and the words of the sheet music
became blurred. He was about to give up and leave the 
choir on account of his vision. He told this to a fellow 
member of the choir, who set up an appointment for him 
with an optometrist. The choir member said he would pay 
for the glasses just to keep Frank in the choir. 
    But Frank never got around to going to the optome- 
trist. Instead, he decided to make a last desperate attempt 
to read the Bible through from cover to cover while he 
could, before his vision faded completely. 
    He read the Bible, beginning with; Genesis, and as he 
read, his faith improved and his eyes got strong again. 
    Today, at eighty-three, he can still read without glasses. 
In fact, he never uses glasses, doesn't even own a pair. 
    Frank became a true believer. He developed his own 
religious convictions, which he never mentions unless asked 
for them, nor does he ever attempt to foster his beliefs  
upon anyone else. But he came to the conclusion that in 
these days the world is power conscious, and the mind of  
man is completely alienated from the operations of God in  
carrying out his plan and purposes in the world. He feels 
that man in all his frenzied efforts to obtain power has 

  -- 25 -- 
 
failed to recognize and acknowledge the power of the writ-
ten word of God in the Bible which is activated by the
Holy Spirit through a Believer.
    Frank read and thought. He'd read in the Bible "and
these signs shall follow them that believe. In my Name
they shall cast out devils heal the sick." Frank interpreted
this as meaning that all this power is at the disposal of the
believer. He read where Jesus had said very clearly that
the believer would do even greater things than he Jesus
had done because Jesus was going to the Father. Frank
wondered about these greater things. How could this be?
He had read where Jesus had raised the dead; commanded
the wind and waves. Jesus had absolute dominion over
every existing force and this potentiality He had clearly de-
livered to the believer as soon as the believer submits to
the leading of the Holy Spirit.
    Frank's simple direct and powerful mentality had
reasoned that the supernatural power of God manifested
through the Book of Acts is meant for us today. To the be-
liever all things are possible as the Bible had clearly and
repeatedly said.
    Frank with the determination which has always been a
characteristic of his nature read on and OR, and thought
about what he had read. His was a voyage of discovery.
    In Isaiah 53:5 he had found that when Jesus had suf-
fered the stripes "we are healed." So his mind like a steel
trap began to work on that. If that is the ease what makes
sickness after Jesus had suffered His stripes for us?
    He came to the conclusion that perhaps it is necessary
to have the sick among us to give us an opportunity to use 
and develop God's power to heal thus glorifying God. 
Jesus had once said of the man who was blind from birth 
"Neither has this man sinned nor his parents but that the
works of God should be manifest in him" as Jesus healed
his sight. 
    At any rate Frank knew that the Bible had said that 
the true believer had all power through God. Yet the 

 -- 26 -- 

world was full of sickness and suffering. It must mean that
very few of the world's billions of people were true believ-
ers That is what Jesus had pointed out: Wide is the gate 
that leads to destruction, and few there be that find the
narrow gate to salvation.
    By now Frank had the feeling that something was
amiss in his work when he gave a patient medicine. Accord-
ing to his understanding of the Divine Plan, the power of
God would heal a person without the medicine.
    It was a dilemma, and his mind wrestled with the
problem day and night. A man had to know, one way or the
other. Sometimes, tired and exhausted after administering
to dozens of sick persons that came to his shack each day
he would think, "Penicillin will ease this child's fever in
twenty minutes and will soon cure it. God created the plant
life that made the mold to produce it. He created Sir Ar-
thur Fleming, the man that discovered the formula to pro-
duce it. Was it God's will to give the child the penicillin, or
should one lay on hands, pray, and believe the child will he
healed?"
    Then a friend told Frank about the "fig politics" of
Kings 20:7 "And Isaiah said, Take a lump of figs, and they
took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered "
    Well, if Isaiah could use a lump of figs, then Frank
Ferree could use penicillin. In Fact, Frank soon came to be-
lieve, he should use any and all means to cure the sick,
combined with the simple, strong faith of the true believer
No method should be shunned, but all used to get results.
    As Jesus said: "By their fruits you shall know them." In
other words, by their results you can tell the good from the
bad.
    Results were what counted.  And Frank began to use 
whatever and all means at his disposal to cure the ill and 
ease the suffering of those who came to him for help. 
    It was like a burden was lifted off his shoulders. He
decided to do something about the horribly handicapped  
persons that came to his shack seeking help. 

  -- 27 -- 

    He took a fourteen-year-old old boy with a crooked foot to  
the Shriner Crippled Children Clinic in Brownsville. With 
the child at his side, he talked to officials and kept after 
them until they did something to relieve the child of his 
affliction.  He was applying "fig politics," using anything that 
would work, anything that got the desired results, even if it 
required that he make a nuisance of himself. 
    Soon after that he found a little girl horribly deformed
in the face, with a harelip and cleft palate. Without hesita-
tion he took the girl with him to see Shelby Longoria of
Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from
Brownsville, Texas.   
    He pulled his old van into the circular driveway in
front of Longoria's luxurious residence, hauled his long
rambling frame out of the rattle-trap truck, went around to
help the ragged little girl out, and ambled up to knock on
the door. He looked like a tramp asking for a handout.
    "I have an appointment with Mr. Longoria," he said.
He wasn't lying. God, Himself, he felt, had inspired him 
for this appointment with Matamoros's wealthiest, most in-
fluential resident. God had made the appointment, and it 
held.
    Longoria took him into his trophy-filled hunting room.
Frank wasted no time. "I've found this girl. She needs
help. She needs an operation I have no money, but you
do. Yon can arrange to fix this little girl's face.
    He waited. He'd stated his case simply and directly.
    Only a monster could have resisted this bent old man
and this unfortunate little girl.
    Longoria paid for Frank and the girl to go to Monter-
rey, Mexico, for an operation by Dr. Oscar Ulloa-Gregorio,
who has since done dozens of plastic surgery operations for
Frank's "people."                 ..
    Longoria also paid for a new dress for the girl. A few
weeks later, she returned to the Border town minus the 
harelip and cleft palate,  She was a beautiful little girl for 
the first time in her life. And now she is a healthy, happy

 -- 28  -- 

teenager, growing more beautiful each year.
    Very soon  after that, Frank saw two blind men being
led by children in Matamoros. With his characteristic de-
termination he began to work on authorities for permission
for the two blind men to pass the U.S. Immigration Office
and come to Harlingen for an operation. For anybody else,
it would have been too big a job to attempt, but not for
Frank. When he got started on a project he never gave up.
He simply kept on working, bugging, molesting, insisting,
believing, until finally what he wanted was forthcoming.
    Eventually he secured permission for the two blind
men to come to the Asheraft-Kuppinger Eye Clinic in Har-
lingen. He learned that the Knights-Templar Eye Founda-
tion would pay for their cataract operations.
    On the way back to Matamoros, the two blind men
were fascinated by the sights they'd missed for so long.
"Especially the woman-folks," one of them joked.
    Within three years after he'd learned of "fig politics,"
Frank had arranged for some 300 examinations, operations,
braces, treatments, etc., by the Shriner doctors, and 200
plastic surgery operations for facial defects by Monterrey
surgeons. A dozen completely blind persons had their sight
restored to them. Today the numbers are even higher.
    Thus, by faith, he'd obtained the results promised in
the Bible. The blind were made to see, the crippled
walked, the poor were fed and clothed. He'd used any
means at his disposal, and God had created the miracles.

 -- 29 --


                      Chapter VIII

                 Men Eating Banana Peels

  Now, Frank Ferree turned his attention to others who
needed his help, the desperate thousands of starving wet-
  backs who swam the swirling river and haunted the dusty
  backroads of the Valley looking for work in the cotton
fields.
    He'd hired out with a surveying crew and it was while
making surveys along the Rio Grande that the first begin-
nings of his understanding of the wetbacks' problems began
to form up. 
    "We knocked of for dinner about a half mile from the 
river," he said "After we ate, we took a short siesta, then 
went back to work.  While we worked nearby I noticed a 
group of Mexican men, who had been watching us, move in 
and begin to pick among the scraps of food we'd left. They
even ate the banana peelings we'd tossed away.
    "It was then and there that I began to feel strongly 
that somehow our modern world hadn't provided
adequately for everyone I knew something was wrong I
didn't see yet how anything could be fixed about it, but I
knew something had to be done about man's inhumanity to
man, and then I remembered an all old Chinese proverb: 'It is
better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.'
    "I was only one man I could light one candle.  I re-

  -- 30 -- 

alized it was up to me to do what I could and not worry
about the rest. So I started."
    Frank divided the shack into rooms to make it a shelter
for the sick and hungry wetback families. He bought food
and medicine for his guests, and he spared no effort to hunt
down and unite separate members of families after the Bor-
der Patrol had deported segments of them.
    He divided his twenty-three acres up into small lots.
These he sold at moderate prices and gave the money to
the poor he'd managed to attract.
    In 1955, when the plight of the Mexican laborer was at
its worst, Frank Ferree, already immersed up to his neck in
a struggle to salvage what he could of the disordered mess
that had developed against the wetback, took time out at
night in his shack to pen a book. He named it Green Fields
of Wetback Land, and he dedicated it to the lonely, un-
happy, wetback and his family.
    Frank's dedication was to "the humble migrant tribe
whose fields were not so green to the spirits of the river's
victims who failed to reach the 'Promised Land,' who lie
unnamed in lonely graves along the Rio Grande.
    "It these words cause the public to pause and think of
the wetback and inspire Mexico's leaders to strengthen
their nation by providing for these homeless wanderers, the
nights and days spent in preparing this manuscript will
have served a useful purpose," he wrote. Not bad writing
for an eighth grade dropout.
    By Frank's own count, more than 1,000 wetbacks --
men, women, and children -- were found floating in the
river each month during cotton season. Not all of these died
in attempting to swim the river. Many were victims of
Gringo and Mexican "river bandits," people who robbed
those who asked to be rowed across, then tossed their
bodies into the river. Often, two or three bandits would
hold a man down under the water until he drowned, so as
to leave no marks on his body. Then they would take his
money and shove him out into the current, so that later,

  -- 31 -- 

when found, authorities would think he drowned trying to
swim the river, and no further investigation would ensue.
    Deep inside Mexico, on the large haciendas where
most wetbacks originated, pay was poor, very poor. Money
figured little in their way of life. Yet their manner of ex-
istence had many advantages which they took for granted.
For example, the hacienda worker was supplied with beans,
corn, wheat, lard, soap, fruit, and vegetables. At butchering
time, everyone shared in the beef, pork, and wild game,
and the men received the usual fifteen pesos a month cash.
    The system was not all bad. It had much to recom-
mend it and it had developed over a period of many years,
even decades and centuries.
    With such treatment, the peon never had to worry
about food. It was supplied. He didn't have much of any-
thing to worry about. And his fifteen pesos a month spend-
ing money was just low enough to keep him out of trouble.
A few beers in the canteen and his money was gone. There
was nothing to do but to sober up and go home.
    But since the turn of the century restlessness seems a
fact of life throughout the world. Men have somehow re-
cently been led to think that elsewhere things are better, or
that if one can do this or that, change this or change that,
things will be better. Usually they are not better, but actu-
ally become worse with a quickness that takes the breath 
away. And one comes to learn that the recommended
changes were recommended only because someone stood a
chance of making a profit.
    Such things came to be learned by many, many 
thousands of young Mexican families when they turned 
their backs on the land and customs of their birth to seek 
new riches and new lives among the northern land that had
an entirely different way of doing things. 
    Talk of high daily wages had turned the Mexican peons' 
heads. They knew nothing of the different customs across 
the river, of the Gringos' way of doing things, so different 
from their own. They only knew that the seventy-five cents
American money for a day's work from dawn to dark in

 -- 32 -- 

those days amounted to a peso and a half in Mexico, or
forty-five pesos a month, three times what they had made
on the hacienda. They never took into account anything
else. So they crossed into Gringoland.

    At first, deer and rabbits were plentiful around the
labor camps where they cleared the land of cactus, mes-
quite, and brush for planting. Wild life furnished much of
the Mexican family's food. But they had to buy other arti-
cles from the little stores, run by the contractor, crew boss,
or owner, and all these articles came with an incredible
price tag. Sometimes even their own countrymen, who had
come across the river years before, and now, having
learned their lessons from the Gringo, were out to make all
they could, and they raised the price of necessities of life to
a level of three or five times what the average citizen of
Texas was paying in town.
    But what could the wetback do? Complain? To whom?
If he rocked the boat, the owner simply called the Border
Patrol and he was hauled back to Mexico, without collecting
his wages. At times, a wetback would work a week or two,
and when it was time to collect his wages, he was told to
wait beside the road while the owner went to the bank for
the payroll. Ferree saw groups of wetbacks waiting beside
the road near his shack for two or three days for their
money which, of course, never came.
    Then they would pick up their tablecloth of belongings
and walk on down the road, looking for work on another
farm, hopefully with a more honest farmer.
    Some unscrupulous farmers would actually charge the 
wetbacks for the picks, shovels, grubbing hoes, axes, and
other tools he used.  The farmer would then keep the tools
after the Border Patrol had slipped the unhappy laborer 
back to his native land.
    Such things were taken note of by Frank Ferree, and
caused him to renew his efforts to find a solution to the
wetback's problem.
    While the men waited for jobs, they would go to the

 -- 33 -- 

market in town and look in the garbage cans for scraps of 
food. They would ask at cafes for work as a dishwasher
their only pay being the food they ate. Sometimes the cafe
owner would have some leftover dry tortillas that his regu-
lar customers wouldn't eat.  He would give them to the
gaunt, hungry-eyed, frightened men.
    Others would sit on the sidewalk and ask for a few
pennies At night they would gather on the river banks to
sleep and wait.
    Ferree, reading of such happenings, pondered what he
could do about them as he went about his daily duties of
helping the poor, the sick, and the crippled.
    He talked Shelby Longoria into donating a small build-
ing in Matamoros which he could use as a permanent clinic
for indigents suffering eye and skin ailments. He kept it
open night and day, dispensing medicine and food and cloth-
ing for the destitute. In time, he talked a couple of Mexi-
can doctors into coming by an hour or two daily to attend
to the sick.
    Shortly afterwards, Ferree received the donation of
another small building in Reynosa. There, in one month he
dispensed more than 30,000 pounds of vegetables and
bread and medicines to the sick and hungry.
    At night in his shack, Ferree put together messages to
both the Mexican and U.S. governments. He sent tele-
grams to Mexico City officials recommending a minimum
wage of thirty cents per hour for ordinary field labor.
    "Thats all the farmer can pay," he said. "By working
ten hours a day, the bracero would earn three dollars, and
he call get along on that."
    Ferree told the Mexican minister of Internal Affairs
that he believed the suggested rate would be "fair both to
the bracero and to the farmer. 
    "I believe the bracero will prosper, have money to
send back to Mexico, and have a fair deal under the thirty-
cent minimum," he said.
    He also proposed a rate of fifty cents per hour for trac-

 -- 34 --

tor operators, with cotton pickers to receive $2 per hun- 
dredweight on first picking, and $2.50 on second picking 
    "If this scale of wages is established by the Mexican
government, I believe the farmers here will start the fall
planting, thus creating work for thousands of braceros," he
said, also pointing out that the costs of supplemental ser-
vices, such as provision of housing, medical care, and insur-
ance would add an estimated ten cents an hour to the Val-
ley farmers' wage bill. 
    In December 1954, the Mexican government affirmed  
its confidence in Ferree's unselfish aid to the destitute 
along the Border. It gave him free passage across any and 
all international bridges, duty free. He also was given carte 
blanche on all Mexican bus lines and airways 
    True to Mexican unpredictability, though, in July 
1955, the government closed the border to Ferree and his 
shipments of food and relief supplies for needy Mexicans 
    Petitions were immediately circulated in Matamoros 
that the ban he lifted. More than 300 women signed the
petition, then went to the main plaza to demonstrate. They
later accosted Mexican immigration officials at the bridges
    Only six months before, Ferree had discussed his relief
work with Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, and had
received a personal signed order from the chief executive,
directing that Ferree's food and other supplies be allowed
to enter Mexico in any amounts, and duty free. 
    But a new order in July from the finance branch of the 
federal government refused to allow him to move a busload  
of bread, beans, and vitamin supplements into the country. 
It was destined for men, women, and children who had 
been deported from the U.S. as illegal aliens and who hud-
dled on the outskirts of town without food and shelter. 
    Ferree flew to Mexico City on Mexicana airlines. He 
returned two days later with presidential signed orders to 
allow him to cross trouble-free. The Hacienda and Credito 
Publico Department of the Mexican government on ex-
press orders from Cortines had issued Ferree copies of an 

  -- 35 --    

order allowing him to pass all necessities of life to poor and 
needy families without harassment from Border officials. 

-- 36 -- 


                   Chapter IX

              Roundup Time in Texas

Ferree prowled the backroads and hot fields, talking with
the unhappy wetbacks. They opened their hearts to him.
They had no rights. They sickened and died, and nobody
cared. Their beds were the fields, holes in arroyo banks,
paper shacks. If they were paid, they got twenty cents an
hour for backbreaking stoop labor.
    In the summer of 1954, the U.S. Border Patrol, under
federal orders, launched an all-out attack to clear the Valley 
of wetbacks. The patrol pressed into use airplanes, jeeps,
buses, trucks, railroad freight cars, patrol cars, ships. Air-
ground radio networks kept them on top of fleeing aliens.
    One United Press International news release started 
with "It was roundup time in Texas today a little early for 
cattle but just right for wetbacks." 
    Ferree interviewed hundreds of wetbacks, trying to 
understand their problems so as to formulate a plan that 
would be of practical help to them. 
    He learned that the typical wetback, out of his three
dollars for work from dawn to night, had to pay rental for
his cotton sack and outrageous food prices at the company
stores. After all, he was told, wetbacks are easy to replace,
and if he didn't like it, he could quit. A dozen others were
waiting to work as cheaply.

  -- 37 --          

    Ferree also heard of the tales of cruelty and death on 
the river. He learned of the man and woman and their 
three children who had drowned when a boat capsized. He 
listened patiently while a wetback told him a boatman took 
everything but the shirt on his back then tossed him into
the swirling water.
    He read about the pregnant woman pulled from the
river, of a nine-year old boy floating in the muddy water 
and of a thirty-five-year-old man who, anxious to return to 
his wife tried to swim the river and drowned. A raft cap-
sized near Piedras Negras and nine persons drowned like
rats.
    He saw the man whose nose was smashed two teeth 
knocked out his neck broken as he was recovered from 
the river and he saw the body of the twenty-year-old 
woman with only a wedding ring on her finger. He read  
about the six-year-old boy who drowned when the raft 
pushed by his father overturned in the rough currents of
the river. 
    And Frank Ferree wondered how many bloated bodies 
floated out into the Gulf of Mexico never to be heard of
again. 
    He haunted the wetbacks. He went home with them  
to their corrugated tin huts with no windows with a hole 
cut in the wall for a door that was always open. He saw 
them living in caves cut in canal banks or under sheds of 
thatched palm fronds propped up with rotting fence posts. 
Some lived under trees beside the fence cooking in a buck-
et or a pan over open tires using the earth as a floor ta-
ble stove bed and toilet. Some men dig holes in the 
ground and pulled branches over the opening for shade 
during the day and shelter from the wetness at night. 
    Ferree also went to the farmers and listened to them.
He knew that much of what the farmers said was true yet 
it offended his sensibilities as a human being. 
     "They're better off here than they were when they 
were in Mexico. Hell they're not worth what we pay 'em 

 -- 38 --  

anyway. They wouldn't even sleep in a bed if you gave 
them one. They're used to sleeping on the ground. Just 
leave them alone, let them keep earning their fifteen dol- 
lars a week and they're happy. It they weren't happy here, 
they'd go back to Mexico, wouldn't they, if they had it any 
better there? 
    Yet, to Ferree it seemed that the United States of
America could do better. Something was wrong. There 
ought to he a way to put things right. He thought about it 
day and night. 
    So he wrote, called, and wired every official he knew
or could think of in Mexico and the United States. He 
made several trips to Mexico City and Washington, D.C., 
and he kept harassing politicians for action. He was a com- 
plete believer in the old adage, "The wheel that squeaks
the most, is the wheel that gets the grease."
    Finally, officials in both countries got together and out- 
lined what they thought would be a fair plan for all in- 
volved. Ferree had always been careful to add, in his com- 
munications, his plans and thoughts as to what was needed. 
And while he was primarily concerned about the desperate  
wetbacks' plight, he was not prejudiced for either side. He 
recognized that Valley farmers had their problems, too, and 
wanted to see that farmers received a contract they could 
live with, considering their expenses and problems. Even- 
tually, both governments settled for a standard work con- 
tract requiring the farmer to provide, free to the bracero, 
hygienic lodgings, without overcrowding and with good 
sanitation. The farmer would also provide, at cost to the 
bracero, medical insurance, tools, supplies, or equipment 
for the bracero's work, plus free water and fuel. The farmer 
could not charge the bracero more than $1.75 for three 
meals and the bracero must be given the right to buy his 
food anywhere he wanted. 
    Not all braceros were saintly poor, either. Some were 
shiftless, were thieves, men out to take advantage of any- 
body they could, steal anything that wasn't nailed down. As 

  -- 39 --    

in all countries, races, and professions, there was a certain 
percentage of good and bad. 
    At any rate, there were enough abuses on the part of
both bracero and farmer that the governments of both
countries felt something had to be done, and they did it. A
new work contract had been written.
    And while his volunteer helpers fed and clothed those 
who had been classified as mankind's rejects and refuse, 
Ferree watched for signs of illness; he watched for the
lame, the blind, the feverish.
    A man named Salarnino Jaso came to Frank's clinic in
Reynosa. He was blind and he walked with two sticks in
front of him. His little daughter picked the way for him.
    Ten days later, he walked out of the Kuppinger Clinic
in Harlingen, seeing again, standing up straight, and wear-
ing glasses.
    A modern miracle, with God and Frank Ferree work-
ing together.

 -- 40 --   
   

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