Most visitors to Hot Springs in the Big Bend have noticed the colorful murals painted on the walls of the various historic structures there including the house on the hill, the visitors cabins and the old store/post office. But I wonder how many have ever been curious enough to find out who painted them? If you're one of the curious ones, here's the "rest of the story."
    The buildings at Hot Springs were originally constructed by J.O. Langford beginning in 1909 and have been occupied by several individuals over the years.¹
    In the late 1940s, Peter Koch and his wife Etta moved to the Big Bend from Ohio where it was hoped that Etta would regain her health in the desert climate. Pete was a newspaper photographer and planned to become a full-time producer of wildlife films. The family spent some of their time in the Big Bend at Hot Springs where, in the early 1950's, Pete was operating a photo concession. Pete and Etta Koch rented the Livingstone House at Hot Springs (the house on the hill). The house was one large room with a fireplace which served as living room, kitchen and general quarters including bedrooms and was in a "bad state of repair"._² 
    To brighten the place up, Etta and Pete decided to do some painting. In Etta's own words, "the huge plastered and cracked gray walls had been forbidding and stark. Even a sizeable picture, if we'd had one, would have left yards and yards of blankness around it. When Pete had the idea of painting the largest space, he bought a can of green paint which he swished on the ten by ten foot space to form a giant prickly pear - complete with buds - the prickly pear of our desert... Later I purchased more paint and put the thorns and details in place as well as the backdrop of Casa Grande." She continues, "This led to further painting activities... For the kitchen wall... I fashioned a Mexican boy kneeling beside his burro. The cracks in the wall became wonderful saguaro (cactus) specimens."³
    Maggie Smith, who was still running the trading post at Hot Springs at the time, was impressed with Etta's paintings and asked her to do one for her using some "old paint cans in the yard behind her kitchen". They found a small amount of red, blue, yellow and green. Etta painted her "Madonna of the Desert" fashioned after a Mexican woman she had seen washing her baby in the nearby Tornillo Creek. Maggie liked it so much that she asked Etta to paint her kitchen as well. "She liked my little Mexican boy with the burro, so up went the likeness." However, before the murals were finished the paint ran out and the murals remained unfinished but Maggie loved them nevertheless".⁴
    Etta Koch has written a wonderful book describing in great detail her life in the Big Bend and especially her time living at Hot Springs. The book, Lizards on the Mantel, Burros At the Door: A Big Bend Memoir, is available through the Big Bend Natural History Association and at several bookstores including Front Street Books in Alpine and Marathon. The book is well worth reading to get a very realistic glimpse of what life was like in the Big Bend at its very beginning as a National Park.
    Although she did not paint the rooms in the visitors cabins, Etta Koch says in her book that occasionally a visitor would feel compelled to brighten the interior of the cabin rooms with "colorful paint, calendars, and an occasional print or two. One individual added a special touch when she painted the head of a horse on the wall next to the bed."⁵ According to Ross Maxwell's book, Maisie Lee, an artist in Marathon was responsible for the murals on the visitors cabins walls.⁶
    In one passage of her book, Koch voices her amusement over comments made by a visitor from a "well-known institution" that the paintings on the walls of the rooms at Hot Springs were surely primitive Mexican artwork and should be "peeled" off the walls for preservation!⁷
    Shortly before publication of her book, Etta Koch revisited her home at Hot Springs. She found her house in disrepair and vandalized, with the roof missing and the fireplace destroyed. However, she was bemused to note that the paintings she and Pete had put on the walls, although sun bleached and faded were still there. She walked on to Maggie's store and although the paintings remain, they had been "retouched" with paints of different colors to the ones she had originally used.⁸ Still, the paintings remain as a lasting tribute to a woman who tried to make a crumbling one room stone house in the Big Bend a home. 
    Etta Koch lived and worked in the Big Bend from 1947 until 1959 and served for several years as secretary to Ross Maxwell, the first superintendent of Big Bend National Park. She moved to Alpine in 1959 and spent the next four decades serving her community there. She passed away in Abilene in 2004, having surpassed her 100th birthday.⁹