The far West Texas desert is not a subtle place, and the flora that live there aren’t subtle either. If plants could talk—cacti such as the prickly pear, the horse crippler, and the Chihuahuan fishhook; thorny shrubs like the ocotillo and the allthorn; rolling balls of thistles like the tumbleweed—they would all say one thing: Stay away or I will hurt you.
And so, if you’re like me, you keep your distance. You wear gloves and boots. You don’t walk barefoot in a cactus patch.
You also don’t walk barefoot in your home. Because out in far West Texas, there’s a plant that is sneakier and more insidious than the ones with the dramatic names. This plant bears a fruit that hides in plain sight where you least expect it. This plant, a simple weed, is as inescapable in this region as the wind.
It is known as the goathead, as is its offspring: a small, spiked bur whose two (or occasionally three) prongs resemble a pair of horns. Goats have long been associated with Satan, and many West Texans curse the plant as the devil’s weed or the devil’s eyelashes. Botanists know it as the puncture vine or Tribulus terrestris, which is Latin for “caltrop on the ground,” a reference to a spiked metal device that armies once scattered on the earth to stymie enemy cavalry.
The first member of our family to encounter this botanical landmine was our ten-year-old dog, Charlotte. My wife, Liz, and I have been traveling to West Texas from Austin since we got married in Alpine in 2000. We talked forever about buying a house in the area and finally did two summers ago, in Marfa. It’s a small cottage that needed a lot of work. The yard looked like a moonscape—brown silt, a couple of dead trees, several stumps. As we walked through the dirt, I scrutinized the pitiful clumps of grass and weeds. Charlotte sniffed around—and pulled up after twenty feet, appearing confused and holding up her right front leg.
There was something sharp in her paw. It was the size of a common sticker bur—but hard and brown, with two spikes. I pulled it out. Charlotte walked off—and almost immediately pulled up again. This went on for a while.
Where were they coming from? I inspected the moonscape. There were tall green-and-red stalks crammed with dozens of regular old sticker burs—the kind that have long bedeviled barefoot children throughout Texas—but she wasn’t bothered by those. There were also adolescent thistles, which will one day be tumbleweeds. Not those either.
Then I spied clusters of green plants with long, spindly arms covered with green leaves and dotted with little yellow flowers. They looked like any other weed until I pulled up an arm—it was about a foot long—and peered underneath. There they were: a couple dozen green spiked burs. I reached down to where the plant met the ground and pulled it up by the root. It looked like an octopus, if an octopus’s wavy arms were lined with spikes rather than suckers.
I gazed out over our wretched brown yard. The plants were everywhere, many of them clumped together in what resembled a small green rug with yellow highlights. Our property was infested.
Donning thick leather gloves and armed with a shovel, I began a search-and-destroy campaign, pulling the plants up by their long taproots and throwing them in a wheelbarrow. I tried to be efficient, covering one quadrant at a time, but on my way to the garbage can I’d spot some baby plants growing separately from the others—and pull them out. Underneath each supple branch were tiny baby goatheads, with soft, hairlike tendrils.
After a couple of days of this, Charlotte was still coming up lame, and I realized that years’ worth of goatheads had detached from their plants and were lying in the dirt and below the surface, like so many jellyfish in the sea. I dragged a piece of old carpet through the yard, picking up dozens of them, but it didn’t really help. Every day we brought them into the house on the bottoms of our shoes, and Charlotte brought them in on the pads of her feet. When she jumped onto our bed, so did the goatheads. When I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I would step on a goathead in the bath mat. One spike dug so deep into my foot I had to dig it out with a needle and a pair of tweezers. We tried taking our shoes off at the front door and wearing slippers. Still, they got in.
As it got colder in the fall, the mother plants died out. But the goatheads, having already fallen to the ground, remained. They popped the tires on my bike and kept making their way into our house. I cursed them and made them a promise: I will wipe you from the face of the earth. Or at least our tiny slice of it.
Far West Texans have been living with Tribulus terrestris their whole lives. Residents of Presidio call them toritos, or bullheads. Junie Villarreal, a Marfa musician and electrician, knew them as goatheads. As a boy he grew up pulling them out of his feet, and he and his friends learned to install an extra layer of rubber over the inner tubes in their bicycle tires. He remembers dogs extracting burs from their paws with their teeth. “Every day you have to deal with goatheads,” he said. “You learn to live with them—like you learn to live with the train going by. This is West Texas!”
Fran Christina, a musician in Marfa who spends a lot of time landscaping, fights them constantly. “Goatheads are a bigger problem here than rattlesnakes. I have more problems with goatheads than with scorpions. Sometimes one gets in the sole of your shoe, and you can’t pull it all the way out—the spike stays in, so all day long it’s stabbing you in the bottom of your foot.” Christina and his wife, the artist Julie Speed, built their house from the ground up and planted a dozen varieties of cacti, shrubs, and native grasses around the property. Still, goatheads found their way in. “They live where other things don’t grow. It’s a constant battle.”
This noxious weed survives just about anywhere. “Goatheads are colonizers,” says Jason Crosby, a habitat specialist who until recently worked at the Borderlands Research Institute, at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. “They’re invaders. A plant like the goathead can often gain a competitive advantage. They drop a taproot down, they can get pretty deep, pretty quick. Within weeks, you’ve got a root that can reach soil moisture that other plants can’t reach.”
Jim Martinez, a Marfa soil scientist, garden designer, and author, has been dealing with goatheads his entire life. “They are survivor plants. I always tell people, we have plants that require a lot of care, a lot of fertilizer, a lot of food. And then there are others that can live with nothing.”
The goathead bur, nurtured under those long arms, starts tiny and grows into a large, almost dime-size seedpod, green and bulbous with spikes, sometimes shaped like an Iron Cross. As the pod matures, it turns brown and divides like a cell into four or five smaller units with two or three spikes apiece, each a seed ready to continue its malevolent journey. Once the goathead gets into the soil, it’s a patient little creature, awaiting the kiss of water to resurrect itself and continue the life cycle. A goathead can wait for five years. After a soaking rain, it will go crazy.
“They’re really prolific seed producers when the conditions are right,” says Crosby. “One plant can produce anywhere from two hundred to five thousand seeds. The goathead is very good at distributing its seeds, because almost anything that walks by it or over it, the seed sticks to it—and then is deposited somewhere else.”
Goatheads aren’t found just in West Texas; they sprout throughout New Mexico and Arizona and on up to Oregon and Washington, where, in Wenatchee, one can find the Goathead Warriors, a volunteer organization dedicated to creating “Goathead Free Zones.” (Its mission: “No more flat tires. No limping paws. No more spreading seeds.”) The truth is, goatheads, like Satan himself, have been around forever. For centuries, traditional Chinese and Indian healers have believed that the plant can be used to treat dizziness and kidney stones, among other ailments. Some maintain that the goathead can make men more manly; a supplement called Tribulus Terrestris is marketed as a method of “improving athletic performance, increasing libido, and supporting male reproductive health.”
I, however, get my kicks from killing Tribulus terrestris, not consuming it. Of course, I am not alone. West Texans deploy various methods of destruction. Some use strong vinegar to kill the plants; others apply herbicides such as oryzalin or glyphosate. I’ve read about desperate homeowners using propane torches and prickly pear burners. Some have found success with weevils. “The little weevils worked perfectly,” a user wrote on one of the numerous websites devoted to eradicating goatheads. “Female weevils chew into the side of a young (green) puncturevine bur, deposit eggs into the seed and seal it with fecal material.” Of course, fecal material. Why didn’t I think of that?
Martinez likes to look at the big picture. It takes years, he said, but you can get rid of them—first by pulling them out individually, then by planting native grasses, which are fierce competitors. “The grasses eventually shade them out and end up taking all the moisture.” One of his tricks is to carry a small bag of blue grama grass seeds and, as he’s pulling up the goatheads, fill each hole with them. “It takes about five years. It’s a process. You have to be resilient. You have to be persistent. And you have to do the work.”
Marfa, like the rest of far West Texas, suffered from drought all last spring, and the goatheads hid in the ground, waiting for their fiendish resurrection. Liz and I left Austin to work on the house every month or so, and though the ground had spawned some other weeds, we didn’t see any pretty yellow flowers.
That changed after the summer thunderheads began rolling in, drenching the area. When I came out toward the end of July, much of our barren yard was jammed with miniature forests of green weeds that were maybe an inch long, each with tiny green buds and the occasional yellow flower. They looked innocent, but I knew better.
I got out my gloves and my wheelbarrow. I was amazed at the plant’s will to survive—the roots on even the tiniest specimens were at least two inches long, and some were four times that. Occasionally in my zeal to pull them out I took off my gloves—and got stabbed in the finger by a brown goathead camouflaged in the dirt.
I continued my quest for total destruction through August and September, the heart of goathead season. Every visit I would find forests of the weed, especially in areas around the cacti and grasses we had planted and watered. I took great pleasure in pulling up the larger plants, each with a dozen or so tentacled arms, under which lay scores of light green seedpods, some plump and round and almost as big as my thumbnail. Occasionally, oddly fascinated, I would pluck the largest ones and lay them on the pavement, where they broke into four pieces, each with sharp horns.
By then I had a ritual—every day I tossed the goatheads into the wheelbarrow, which I pushed to the backyard and their final destination: a firepit. Then I waited until everything was good and dry and lit a match. I won’t tell you whose face I saw in the flames.
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Hellweed.” Subscribe today.
