A Grand Canyon
Leaving the endless miles of plains to explore Palo Duro by mule, I wondered, “What is this doing here?”
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Noting the length and sobriety of our exchanged stares, he decided wisely that perhaps we weren’t quite ready for that. Leaving the “scenic route” for another time, he led the strawberry-roan pack mule, Pumpkin, and disappeared around the switchbacks astride the sorrel. Reddy. Dorothy and I stumbled and slipped afoot and clung to our mules’ reins. The best thing I can say about that hike is that it didn’t take very long. At times I clawed at rocks with my gloved left hand and tried to fend off Stagger Lee’s sixfold weight with my right. (Pulling rank on the chain of being, I let him have the ledge.) He huffed and puffed in chorus with me and staggered often, misstepping with his right front hoof. “He’s going to step on me and crush me and kill me for sure,” I kept thinking, though in fact his occasional pressure was as tentative and considerate as a cat’s. Dorothy and her beast, Fat Mule, descended in the same heart-thumping fashion. I asked her later what she had been thinking. Her reply: “I am Lila’s only mother.”
A Hole That Consumes Itself
My first impression of the floor was the extraordinary redness of the exposed bedrock and soil. Interlaced with shining white veins of gypsum, which suggest the evaporation of a landlocked sea, the dominant brick-red shale is characteristic of the Quartermaster formation that geologists place in the Permian Age, about 390 million years ago. A third of the way up the walls the bedrock shale variegates into maroon, gray, and lavender patterns called the Spanish Skirts. The multicolored bluffs belong to the Tecovas formation, which derived from sediments of jungle swamps and streams. Together with the quartz and sandstone in the overlying Trujillo formation, the Tecovas shales contain much of Palo Duro’s wealth of fossils. Toward the rim the blond quartz, sandstone, and caliche represent the Ogallala formation. These youngest rocks are often the most resistant to erosion, which accounts for all the long-necked buttes and balanced pedestal rocks that geologists call hoodoos. Despite the jabbering excitement that marked our safe descent, as we rode across the canyon floor Dorothy and I both fell silent and simply stared. Palo Duro’s geological trademark is a three-hundred-foot pillar named the Lighthouse because of its shape. Always beyond some ridge, the Lighthouse vanished and reappeared as mysteriously as the moon.
Like the Grand Canyon, Palo Duro dug itself into being with the help of flowing water. Springs and red clay gullies make intermittent creeks and flood ravines that become a running stream, the Prairie Dog Town Fork; the Red River’s two-thousand-mile trek toward the Mississippi is born. Over 90 million years the Panhandle’s incessant wind has also played a part. But the erosion of Palo Duro is distinctive because so much of it works straight down. In a process called piping, surface water percolates downward, weakening and undercutting porous layers, removing grains of sand. Eventually the formations cave in on themselves. Boulders propped on the steep grades above the floor have the appearance of a stop-action landslide, and the effect is no illusion. In this form of erosion, the debris creeps, slips, and flows. The rapidity of the vertical erosion was apparent in the sad state of this ranch’s fences. Long sections sagged and twisted into strands of barbed-wire rope because the supporting soil had fallen away from the cedar posts. Palo Duro is a giant hole in the ground, forever consuming itself.
Yet for all its alluvial origins and oasis-like flora, Palo Duro suffers the scarcity of water so obvious on the plains. Rainfall averages only twenty inches a year; rock hounds liken the canyon to the Painted Desert. Still, Palo Duro makes splendid use of what little moisture it has. Scrub oak, catclaw, and mountain mahogany were abundant enough in the draws that to keep Fat Mule moving, my wife had to bang him often with her heels—befitting his name, he had a keen eye for delectable nibbles along the way. Though mesquite and occasional willows thrive on the canyon floor, the dark jade of juniper dominates the woodland hue. And it’s not just the pestilent growth that we call scrub cedar; that brush chokes the higher ravines and clings to the canyon walls. On the floor, Rocky Mountain junipers make splendid shade trees with trunks several feet thick. Palo Duro’s water supply is meager, but the seep springs are easy to spot. Set above and against the dark juniper, the cottonwoods’ green stands out as bright and cheery as clover. The cottonwood is the plains equivalent of its relative the mountain aspen. If you find cottonwoods on the arid plains, you find water, the roosts of wild turkeys, the soothing clatter of waxen leaves in the evening breeze.
The floor produces a strangely inverted sense of well-being. The ages of its habitation almost whisper. Coronado’s men, after making their own harrowing descent, encountered Teyas Indians, who hunted buffalo on foot, used dogs as pack animals, and foraged plums, berries, and grapes on the canyon’s floor. According to Coronado’s chroniclers, the aborigines were neither hostile nor friendly. They stared a lot. On one of the first evenings, the Spaniards watched storm clouds turn the green of copper above the canyon walls. The storm destroyed equipment, stampeded horses, and sent hailstones, which one writer claimed were as large as bowls, bouncing off the men’s plumed helmets. Still, the Spaniards never doubted that they were better off in the canyon than up there on the featureless plain. Running short of provisions during that fortnight, the bravest among them ventured out on the prairie and hunted buffalo, which the Teyas helped them make into jerky. Afterward, the Spaniards often crouched beside the carcasses until the sun’s descent created shadow—and direction—from the slain forms. At night their colleagues blew trumpets and lit fires on the canyon’s rim so the crazed hunters could find their way back. One of the friars with Coronado, Juan de Padilla, proposed a service thanking God for His mercy and bounty. He said the Palo Duro mass eighty years before the Pilgrims celebrated their Thanksgiving near Plymouth Rock.
Full-Tilt Boogie
The hunting shack that served as our base camp was nestled under cliffs in a thick grove of junipers and cottonwoods. Our mules approached a pool of the rust-colored creek thirstily enough but soon confirmed their reputation as finicky drinkers, turning up their noses at the gypsum taste. Nearing the house, Dorothy’s mule threw one of those balks that have won its kind fame or infamy, depending upon which lore you buy.
I helped Selden unload Pumpkin, whose initial performance as a pack mule had warmed her new owner’s heart. Once the saddles, traces, and pack frames come off, mules always like to take good roll in the dirt; even old U.S. Army manuals advised teamsters to indulge that whim. Because it wasn’t possible to corral Pumpkin, Selden’s fears of a fugitive mule weighed heavy on his mind, so he tied her to a tree. The prospect of an afternoon off wasn’t enough to diminish her mulish pique, though, and she pitched a lunging, heel-kicking fit that succeeded only in making shackles of the halter rope. “Are you through now?” Selden yelled at her, as she struggled to regain her feet. “Will that do?” Throughout our brief acquaintance, the mules had remained totally mute, except for the occasional, exerted snufflings of equine lips. But now, while we lunched on dried fruit and granola bars, Reddy extended his neck, bared his buck teeth, and voiced the cry that prompted Westerners to nickname mules Rocky Mountain canaries.
On the way out of the camp, Selden spurred Reddy across the shallows of the creek. “I wish I could have lived a hundred years ago,” he told us, then smiled at the quaintness of his remark. “As long as they’d let me keep penicillin.”
We came upon a windmill that hadn’t pumped water in a long time. Oases behind us, the absence of moisture thinned and stunted the trees. As the canyon widened and the sky paled with midday heat, the desolation of the rock formations seemed almost lunar. Though a few Herefords chewed their cuds and stared, the apparent lack of other animal life was unsettling. A lone buzzard lazed on the updraft. The wildlife was there, but in the presence of humans it tried to go unseen.
“Godamighty,” erupted Selden. “What an eye!”
He swung down off Reddy and snatched a fragment from the strew of rocks. It was an unfinished but well-crafted arrowhead that would have been used for large game. To the original inhabitants, much of Palo Duro’s magic lay in its splendor as a hunting ground. Ice Age Paleo-Indians hunted mammoths and giant bison here more than 12,000 years ago. Archaics established their culture about 5000 B.C., supplementing a diet of half-raw meat with vegetation foraged on the canyon floor. During the time of the early Christians, Neo-Americans hunted in Palo Duro but also made pottery and cultivated crops. As often happened, the barbaric villagers lost the choice domain to more warlike nomads. Apaches claimed Palo Duro for three hundred years before losing it in turn to their blood enemies, the Comanches. Both tribes relied wholly on buffalo, but hunting bison on foot was no easy task. The Indians were forever starting range fires, hoping to stampede the herds over cliffs. Palo Duro offered both a place to trap buffalo and a secure base camp for the hunts and warring sorties on the plains. The arrival of Spaniards on horseback revolutionized the lives of the Apaches. In addition to making them even more warlike, the borrowed horse culture meant they could match the mobility of their countless prey. They thought they would never go hungry again.
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