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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In an enervated way, our culture maintains that tradition. Hunters start leasing the ranches of Palo Duro about the time the golden eagles arrive with the northers. Selden, who doesn’t need much excuse to head for Palo Duro, volunteers to guide the hunters too. He loves to see them coming in their camouflage windbreakers from Abercrombie and Fitch. They are often unprepared for the excruciating cold of the nights—Palo Duro’s windbreak qualities are offset by the cliff-shortened days and restricted quota of warming sun. The autumn hunters take some wild turkeys but mostly train their scopes on the canyon’s mule deer. After those seasons expire, the hunters return in January for the trophy horns of the aoudads, exotics from North Africa that were first introduced in Palo Duro during the late fifties. Numbering several hundred now, the nimble Barbary sheep are best seen about sundown along the canyon’s rim. Enterprising sorts, they clamber up the rock walls and dine on nearby fields of wheat.
Our ride wore on with telling effects. The mules were lathered and gaunt. Dorothy’s carriage in the saddle reflected ample hours of youthful riding experience, but she was up against the friction of her denim seams. Blue jeans are blue jeans, right? Wrong. She quickly discovered why the inside seams of Levi’s are sewn outward and ride far back against the inner thighs. The more sightly, hidden seams of her Liz Claibornes rode precisely on the contact points of her saddle and knees, scraping two large and painful strawberries. My ouchy sacroiliac was batted like a Ping-Pong ball every time Stagger Lee broke a trot. Still, I was getting the hang of it. The mule’s natural gait is a driving, long-stepping walk. The saddle rhythm is comfortable, almost sensual. Circling back toward the hunting shack, we rode through a broad dry creek with chopped rock walls. A characteristic formation of great intrigue to Palo Duro geologists, the exposed gypsum sagged and buckled like a worn-out mattress. We paused and commented on the prettiness of a salt cedar in frail lavender bloom. A songbird twittered.
I was thinking that it takes a long while to begin to hear the quiet. In the city your hearing throws up a selective barricade against the freeways and trucks and all intrusive sound. On the way to the airport the day before, I had come close to my first fistfight in seventeen years. My opponent was an earnest young man with all the right liberal causes on his bumper stickers, and the serious issue in question was whether I had any right to honk my horn at a van backing blindly from a post office parking space. “Civilization!” I was thinking, “By golly, rural is better.” As we came up out of the creek bed, I slouched in the saddle, enjoying the mule’s rhythm. Slow dance, Stagger lee. I removed my gimme cap and wiped my brow, holding the reins loosely with the other hand. I was writing, as writers are wont to do—gone to the Bahamas, my wife puts it. I was writing this paragraph, without the least suspicion of how it was about to end.
It may have been a rattlesnake. Perhaps it was the urban vibes and prose style. But all at once the long black ears jumped erect, swung about, flared with alarm, and I was off to the races on a runaway mule. Stagger Lee’s full-tilt boogie caught me by such surprise that I lost one rein, which hardly enhanced pulling him up. I’m not sure how the gimme cap wound up back on my head. But leaning over his neck, trying to grab the flopping rein, I had mortal vision of how much this fall was going to hurt. The hard ground and pointed rocks may in fact have kept me aboard. I’m certain the adrenaline helped. For at least five seconds, I rode the hell out of that mule. All the time, I was yelling, “Hyeeeaaah! Hyeeeaaah!” having once found the method effective in the discouragement of an overwrought Doberman pinscher.
“Try ‘Whoooooa!’” our guide suggested from afar.
With both reins finally in hand, I leaned back, pulled back, and released not much at all. “Whoa,” I soothed Stagger Lee, who shuddered and rolled his eyes unhappily. “It’s alright. Whoa.”
“‘Hyeeeaaah.’” Selden chided, grinning at my wife. “I think that’s Samurai for ‘giddyup.’”
That Comanche Moon and This One
Long after the cottonwoods and hunting shack fell deep in shadow, the sun was resplendent on the blond cliffs. Dorothy and I dragged our chairs outside and eased our soreness with whiskey scavenged from hunters’ trash. Watching the darkness gather, Selden told us about his great-grandparents, who settled in the Panhandle in the late 1870’s. Preparing for bed one pleasant spring night, they laid an infant niece in her crib and cracked the door to let some air in. Attracted by the light, a rabid skunk ran inside and attacked the child. The shattered man wrapped his niece in a blanket and, using two horses, rode nearly two hundred miles without stopping to the nearest doctor, in Dodge City, Kansas. The doctor told him there was nothing to be done. He returned home but kept on riding, far south into Texas, to locate a madstone, a hairball found in the stomach of a buffalo. Plains Indians believed that the hairballs had magic medicinal properties. The child died, of course. It was a sad story, movingly told. Selden’s point, I think, was that we have a rather petulant way of exaggerating our hardships now. Somewhere off in the woods a whippoorwill sang its blue cry. We propped our chairs back and admired the orange rise of a big moon, almost full. Little more than a hundred years ago, that benign romantic vision would have struck terror in our souls. A Comanche moon.
The Comanches started out as Shoshones—short, thick, broad-jawed people who lived in the Rocky Mountains and were despised for their crude tribal lore and pitiable dietary pursuits by their more lordly neighbors, like the Sioux. In 1705 the Spaniards first encountered these people, who had feuded with kinsmen and moved down onto the plains. That meeting of cultures revised the status of Comanches almost overnight. They became the continents elite horsemen. At the peak of the tribe’s prestige and power, an ordinary Comanche male might own 250 horses, his war chief 1500. Because of their skill at breeding and stealing horses—and pack mules—their Shoshone dialect became the trade language of the aboriginal plains. Raiding deep into Texas and Mexico, they like to ride in the warm months, when the grass was long and rich in nourishment. They timed their raids to coincide with the waxing moon; with plenty of light, they could attack the settlers while they slept and then be fifty miles away by dawn. Hence the chilling term “Comanche moon.” Comanches didn’t just kill and scalp. They stole children, raped and mutilated women, slowly tortured men to death. Paramilitary bands of Texas Rangers fought back with blood and atrocity in their own eyes. Among other things, the Comanche wars perfected the new American art of proximate murder by handgun. Five national governments made various claims on the Southern plains, but savages on horseback blocked settlement for 150 years. The Spanish term stated reality in that 240,000-square-mile area—“Comanchería.”
But by the summer of 1874 Comanchería had dwindled to a string of renegade encampments in Palo Duro Canyon. Quanah Parker, the young firebrand whose mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was the most famous of the children stolen and raised in Comanche captivity, led one band of kinsmen, but probably there were Kiowas and Cheyennes as well. Palo Duro had become the badlands stronghold of all warriors on outlaw leave from the Oklahoma reservations. They were hiding out from soldiers under the command of General William T. Sherman, better known for his Civil War march to the sea. Sherman had applied his theory of attacking the enemy’s commissary to the Indian campaigns. In violation of an 1868 treaty that had first brought the Comanches into the reservation, Sherman authorized buffalo hunters in Kansas, who were busily meeting the demand for cheap leather back East, to kill bison wherever they found them. Even in the Texas Legislature, conservationist voices were raised against the wanton slaughter, but Sherman knew that if the hostile tribes lost their ancient food supply, they would have to accept their fate as farmers and wards of the state. Quanah Parker’s beleaguered gang understood commissary too. Because of its sheer rock walls, Palo Duro was one of only three places on the Southern plains where buffalo in any numbers had escaped the hide hunters’ .50-caliber guns.
Within a generation, Comanches as a cultural entity would cease to exist. They had no written record of themselves, and ethnologists asked no questions until it was too late. Though Comanches held Palo Duro for most of two centuries, we don’t even know what they called it. Comanche faith was individualistic; they had taboos but no dogma or respected priestly caste. Comanches invoked visions to discover their names and forever sought the magic that would bolster their natural strength. Particularly toward the end, warfare was their religion. However awed and stirred they may have been by the look of the place, it is unlikely that Comanches ever attached to Palo Duro the kind of totemic significance that, say, the Sioux ascribed to the Black Hills. Had Comanches discovered some of the mammoth fossils in Palo Duro, that surely would have inspired earnest mystical conversation. They believed that mammoth bones were the remains of their horrific tribal bogey, the Great Cannibal Owl. But Comanches seem to have been practical folks. They chose Palo Duro as the base camp for their last stand because of the military security that comes with inaccessibility. They knew the only safe trail down—in the Tule branch of the canyon, a few miles southeast of our borrowed hunting shack.
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