Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Bats give purpose to a Wild Kiowa-Apache Woman
June 13, 2007

It is amazing how dreams work. Gail Barnes of Lubbock is coming to the Sibley Nature Center on June 16th, 2007 at 1 p.m. to present a program on bats. We had recently been donated a book on Kiowa-Apaches and I had also recently read about a “wild woman” in one of the journals in the Midland Archaeological Society library at the Sibley Center. All of it came together at 5 a.m. when the sadness of the following dream awoke me.

Llana awoke as the bats came back to the cave before daybreak. She blew on the coals of her fire and added small sticks to get it going again, then added larger pieces of wood. After the light from the fire brightened the anteroom of her domicile, she walked to where she had smeared a sweet hackberry paste on a rock. A circle of sticky tree sap surrounded the paste. She plucked a number of moths and other insects from the sap, putting them on a slab of wood. She carried the slab (and the insects) back into the cave.

She reached into a crevice and pulled out a bat with an injured wing and carefully fed it a selection of yummies from the slab. She held it gently, and after the bat grabbed each insect, she carefully stroked the creature, first on its head, then on its belly. As she fed the bat, she quietly talked to it, telling it how pretty it was and asking how it was feeling. “Little one, your friends are back.”

For the last fifteen years Llana had lived alone in her cave. If anyone approached, she hid. She did not like people anymore. As a girl she had just met and felt the first ecstasy of falling in love with a nice young man from a neighboring band when she had been captured by a group of men from a tribe far away and forced to become the wife a cruel man. After enduring years of abuse she killed him and escaped. On her way home, men from yet another tribe again captured her. At her first chance she had killed one of them and escaped yet again. She traveled by night for over two months and when she arrived at her band’s territory, she found them all dead of the spotted disease that had come to the plains with the white men.

Llana was a Kiowa-Apache (Naishan-Dene). After the Spanish had arrived in northern New Mexico in 1598 the Apache groups living on the plains had become traders with neighboring tribes, trading metal implements and cloth. By 1700 the Comanche had arrived, armed with guns that Pawnees had gotten from French traders. Most of the Plains Apache left the buffalo grounds – the Jicarilla had gone west into the mountains north of the Spanish settlements. Another group became the Llaneros living in the sanddunes west of the Llano Estacado (and finally becoming the Mescalero farther west and south), and the Lipan had moved south to seek assistance from the Spanish in Texas. The Naishan-Dene moved north in the 1690’s to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The Naishan-Dene found another group of people there, who had become known as Kiowa. Kiowa people speak a language very similar to Tano Puebloan. For that reason, some modern researchers believe the Kiowa were originally Jumanos from Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico (and specifically a band known for their proficiency in the art of trading, as well.) There, around 1690, the Naishan-Dene “found” sacred bundles, much in the manner of the sacred bundles of the Kiowa. The Naishan-Dene became allies (by marriage) with many of the Plains Indians (Arapaho, Cheyenne, Arikara, and even the Crow) but most often with the Kiowa. By 1800 the Naishan-Dene and Kiowa had moved back south and become allies with the Comanches in Texas and Oklahoma.

Llana had received her name from her Hispanic father who traded with the Naishan-Dene for most of his life. He came alone once or twice a year with a string of mules with panniers stuffed with trade goods for the Naishan-Dene women. (She did not know it, but she had a dozen half-siblings among other Naishan-Dene bands and among other tribes, as well.)

Llana also did not know that the “nice young man” from long ago had recently seen her. He had recognized her despite the changes brought by over 20 years of travail. He was known as Indian Joe and lived alone not far away in a log cabin. The soldiers at the reservations to the north and east called upon him from time to time to serve as a tracker when a group of Comanche or Kiowa left the Oklahoma Territory to raid into Texas. Long ago, when Llana had been captured he had trailed her captors, for he had felt the glories of falling in love as well. Some of her captors had waited to see if they were followed and had ambushed him. Despite three bullet wounds he had survived because of the kindness and skill of a missionary’s wife at the Indian Agency near the fort. As he healed, he learned the English language, and to repay her kindness had become a helper at her husband’s mission.

Indian Joe had been married, but his wife had died in childbirth. Believing that any woman he loved would be taken from him again, he never married a second time. Because of his language skills he often found employment as a scout and interpreter for the army or for the different missionaries. When Indian Joe saw Llana she had been harvesting acorns to grind into meal. When he followed her after she had filled her baskets she disappeared. Whenever she returned to her cave she went by a circuitous route that passed through a dense thicket of sapling oaks and junipers and then followed a ledge of rock along a hillside so that she would not leave tracks.

After he had seen her, Indian Joe spent many days trying to find her again. His employers at the reservation agency began to worry about him, as he became quiet and skinnier. He did not come to seek employment as often. Several times, when someone had a special job for him and went to his cabin, they could not find him.

Over a year passed. Indian Joe saw her again, and when she again went into the thicket he scaled a nearby hill to see where she came out. This time he saw her walk along the ledge and go over another hill. When he reached where she had gone out of sight. He hid himself so he could observe the valley below and after several days saw her again, disappearing behind a huge old juniper against a cliff. When she did not come out again until the next day, he realized he had found her home.

The next morning, before daybreak, he approached the juniper and then sat at its base waiting for sunrise. He watched as she lit her fire and fed the bat. She finally became aware of him and stared at him for several minutes. She recognized him, finally, and motioned for him to join him. They sat talking for hours, exchanging their life stories. What might have been a storybook ending to a sad story was not to be, however. They discovered that they were brother and sister, children of that wandering trader. They continued to live as they had, she in her cave, he in his cabin, until she died a few years later.