Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Cochran County was the last frontier of Texas
March 14, 2007

“An old man from Scotland lived here alone for 40 years.” David Crum and I were standing at the edge of 75 acres of blue grama grassland. Around the beautiful pasture low vegetated sandhills were visible. To the south was a depression that appeared to be a section of a draw now blocked off at both ends by the sandhills, a long and narrow trough in the landscape. An old elm tree stood over us, half-dead, with broken branches littering the ground and half-covering rotted old boards from the long-abandoned house. “He never married, and when he finally got old, he went home. For a couple of years afterwards he would send a letter to the new owners every few months berating them for cheating him out of 97 cents of the sale price. He farmed with a mule team and ran a few cows.”

About five miles east along a farm to market road a historical marker informs the rare passerby that this region of Cochran County was “Surratt’s Territory.” From the 1880s until the 1920s the Jumbo Cattle Company owned by Nick and John Beal and F.G. Oxsheer leased the 55 sections of the “territory.” The county had a population of 0 in 1890, 25 people in 1900 and only 67 in 1920. (Less than 4000 people live in the county at the present time.) The old Scotsman had been an “inholder” within the cattle range.

The new owners hired a couple to raise hogs at the old homestead. Four railroad boxcars were hauled in as barns. The old rolling stock is still there, the roofs shedding water, and the doors work on at least one. I photographed the boxcars (but later accidently deleted the shot.) “Within a year, the owners caught the couple cheating them and fired them. Nobody has lived here since.”

Crum is the ranch manager for the absentee landowners, the heirs of those “new owners.” He oversees the income producing endeavors, which include leases for the grazing, hunting and mineral rights. Crum also arranged contracts with the Natural Resource Conservation Service for brush control to improve the wildlife habitat. We drove on out into the middle of the blue grama pasture. As we stood surveying the scenery, I notice some “largish” birds flying.

Noticing the direction of my gaze, David commented, “The prairie dogs are coming back. About fifteen years ago there were hundreds here, but they mysteriously died out except for the handful at the edge of the mesquite to the northeast of this pasture. Their numbers did not increase until 2006.” At four hundred yards I could not identify the birds (but wondered if they were long-billed curlews) and asked him to drive in their direction. When we neared the prairie dog mounds we found that the birds were burrowing owls.

The prairie dogs had four “centers of activity.” Each grouping of burrows probably represented separate “coteries.” Each coterie is the territory of an older female and all of her female offspring and their young. The male prairie dogs are welcome only during breeding season and when their young reach maturity, the females chase them away so they will not breed with their own offspring. The males live in their own holes between the coteries. The four coteries were separated by at least 50 yards.

After I spent some time photographing the vegetation and holes of the prairie dog town for a future photoessay on the ecology of prairie dog towns, David and I drove north a mile or two to another location on the ranch. A pumpjack pad (the flat area paved with caliche around an oilwell) had been placed on the side of a hill. “Take a look at the soil profile above the pad.” We got out of the truck and ambled over. He waited for my observations.

“This is interesting – there is a band of gray dirt between two bands of red soil.” David grinned and nodded, “And the gray soil is usually found near a playa, where it has blown out of it, usually to the east and northeast, right? So, if we are reading the land correctly, this would indicate a period when there was a playa that annually filled up with water and then dried up. Such conditions appeared to have lasted for a finite period of time.”

Crum walked up the hill, then bent over, picking up “burnt rock.” “This looks like caliche that has been heated by fire. There is this grouping of burnt rock here, and over here is another one, maybe 75 feet away.” As he walked along he again stopped and picked up a tiny pottery shard, then another one, and finally found a piece of worked flint. “The artifacts are found at the top of the gray soil, and higher.”

I photographed the findings. As I did, he asked me for my interpretation. “Finding the pottery tells me that they must date sometime between the 1100s to 1300s. This was during a time when a number of people came eastward. Archaeologists have named some of the pottery after the early Mimbres and Mogollon pueblo cultures. A site over at Maljamar (fifty miles southwest) has such pottery. Although other parts of the southwestern United States suffered extensive droughts during that time period, it seemed to be a period of increased rainfall on the Llano Estacado. I believe that archaeologists feel that these people lived here seasonally.”

“My personal interpretation is that they came in July and maybe stayed for several months. I believe that they would come to harvest the shinoak acorns. Shinoak acorns only have to be boiled once to remove the tannin. Indians from California to New Mexico harvested acorns for use as a staple food. The late summer monsoons would have followed, filling the playas. Deer, pronghorn, and buffalo would come to water at the playas. After “reaping the bounty of the land” they would go back west, to trade with people did not have access to buffalo meat. Maybe shinoak acorns were an epicurean delight and meal made from them was a highly prized trade item, too.”

As we began the drive back to Midland, we mused about the incredible adaptability of humans, from the long vanished Indians, to the old Scotsman, the early ranchers, and then the farmers that settled the county in the late 1920s. In Cochran County during the dust bowl of the 1930s, after just one sandstorm, dunes 25 feet tall were deposited. The eastern two thirds of the county is still mostly farmland, but the western third is still the home of shinoak, lesser prairie chickens, and pronghorn.

• Related essay: Indians of the Jornada-Mogollon culture on the Llano Estacado – 1100-1300 A.D.
  
  
• Related photo essay: Lesser Prairie Chicken