Old cemetery in Lajitas, Texas, a tiny town that abuts Big Bend National Park in southwestern Brewster County, on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande River in the northern part of the Chihuahuan Desert, The name Lajitas is Spanish for "little flat rocks" and refers to the Boquillas flagstone of the area. The region was inhabited by Mexican Indians for many years. They were driven from the area by the Apaches and later by the Comanches during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anglo-Americans first arrived in the mid-1800s.In the late 1890s quicksilver was discovered nearby, and a rapid influx of people followed. At the same time a number of cattle ranches and mining enterprises appeared in northern Chihuahua and Coahuila. These activities increased commerce across the Rio Grande into Texas; consequently, by 1900 Lajitas was designated a substation port of entry. Farming along the narrow floodplain of the river served to bring in more families, and by 1912 the town had a store, a saloon, a school with fifty pupils, and a customhouse. The crossing, a smooth rock bottom all the way across the river, was the best between Del Rio and El Paso. But the mines played out, and the population dwindled. Beginning in the 1990s, though, the area became a popular site for "western" movie filming. Lajitas, according to one producer, was just about the only place where "you can shoot 360 degrees," since Santa Fe and Sedona were "used up." At that time a TV miniseries, Streets of Laredo, starring James Garner, was being filmed in Lajitas.