Chamuscando: prickly pear burning
in the old days

By Ernesto Uribe

Most of the old cowhands who worked cattle back in the 1940s and 50s no doubt had the experience of burning prickly pear at high noon in the summer heat, the chamuscadora strap digging into the shoulder as they burned the thorns off nopales, their awareness on high alert for a rattler slithering away from the just-torched pack-rat nest.
Ah, to go back to the days before root-plowing, buffel grass, cottonseed cake pellets, and the half-ton rolls of hay folks now buy to feed stock during drought, to be able to go back to the first part or at least to the middle of the 20th century, back to the days when pickup trucks, horn honking, and mascarrote were not how you moved the herd into a trap. Long gone are the days of popping cattle out of the thorny thickets on horseback, days when the cows were wild as deer and the ranch lands were thick with brush.
Back in the 1940s and early 1950s most of the brush country was still undisturbed and dominated by mesquite, huisache, chaparro prieto, ebano, guajillo, uña de gato, just to mention a few of the thorny bushes I remember. And then we had the cactus, prickly pear or nopal, cacanapo, tasajillo, perros (dog cholla) -- that wonderful little cactus that jumps up and attaches to your boot, or pierces your foot if you happen to be wearing tennis shoes, and all those treacherous little barrel cactus like manca caballo, peyote, pitaya, alcoche, fishhook cactus, and many more I can no longer remember.
During a drought, when the native grasses gave out, and the mesquite beans were exhausted, it was the nopal, the prickly pear cactus, that came to the rescue of many a rancher. After the thorns were burned off that succulent wonder, it became the primary food source that sustained many a rancher's cowherd until the rains came.
I was still a boy in the early 1950s when my grandfather Carlos B. Ortiz introduced me to the chamuscadora, my first prickly pear burner, at his ranch just a few miles northeast of Laredo. It appeared to be a homemade contraption, probably put together by a local blacksmith out of a small airtight tank, with a simple hand valve to control the flow of the compressed air and fuel mix that was jettisoned through a thin tube extending some five or six feet from the tank. The tube had a nozzle at the end that was covered with an iron cylinder that had to be heated so it would burn the raw fuel and distribute the flame evenly over the prickly pear pads to burn off the thorns. The leather or canvas sling attached to the tank helped support the burner as you worked. Burning pear during these dry, hard times was my after-school evening chore until I went off to college.
In those early days, we unscrewed the airtight top on the tank and filled it with several coffee cans full of kerosene, shut the top back on tightly with a wrench, and inserted a hand pump to a one-way air valve also attached to the tank, and proceeded to pump air until the pressure reached a point that it became impossible to push the pump handle down. The burner had no air pressure gauge.
Once you reached the patch of prickly pear you planned to burn that day, your first step was to gather wood and start a fire that would be burning well by the time you fueled and pumped up the burner. Once you had your fire going and your burner ready, you would place the iron cylinder that covered the nozzle over the coals and let it sit until it was white-hot. Once ready, you would open the valve slowly and adjust the flame, just like you would a blowtorch. You soon developed the skill to determine how long to hold the flame over a cactus leaf to just burn the thorns off without cooking it, and pass on quickly to the next one and the next one until your air pressure gave out.
To refill the tank, it was important to make sure all the air was out before you carefully opened the tank top for refueling and pumping up again for burning the next batch.
Even burning pear at midday, you always had watch out for rattlesnakes forced out of their hiding places by the heat and the roar of the pear burner. My grandfather warned that if you saw one rattler, you had to be on the lookout for a second, because they always seemed to come out in pairs.
It was in the mid-1950s that the root-plow was introduced in our part of the country, and as the brush began to disappear, it gave way to African grasses like Sudan and buffel that were being introduced. Cottonseed cake in pellet form and cheaper hay sources were also rapidly becoming the rancher's supplemental feeds of choice.
These changes reduced the need to burn prickly pear, but did not eliminate it altogether. As time went on, there were improvements in commercially manufactured pear burners, and most ranchers started using portable pressure air-tanks that they could fill at their local gas station.
It was not until after I had departed for Texas A&M that the butane pear burners became popular. I missed out completely on this innovation, for I was never to return to ranch work after I graduated from college. Decades later I can still smell the raw kerosene, hear the air hiss into the tank as I pushed down on the hand pump, and hear the cows bawling as they hungrily chomped on the still smoldering pear pads. Despite the heat and sweat and the occasional rattle snake, these were good days to remember.