Close Calls: Jan Reid's Texas
Close Calls: Jan Reid's Texas by Jan Reid, published by Texas A&M University Press
Part 1
The Texas Character
Legacy of Courage, History of Violence
The last Comanche and Kiowa bands were whipped and banished and barbed wire etched its rectangles across the plains by the 1880s. Yet the ethos of the frontier continues to define us. I have trouble believing Texans are any more violent than comparably diverse and populous groups of people in the United States. Violence is a national problem and condition, not a provincial one. The hardiest vestige of the Texas frontier exists not in dusty little towns and wide open spaces—à la Hollywood—but in our inner cities. From the first query I mailed to an editor, I spent years chasing the tail of violence. I reflected on the fixation that Texans have with guns, and the article set off a furious storm of complaint. I rode in squad cars with Dallas street cops who ushered me into a world of pimps and junkies and bar fighters—a straitlaced city's raw, gritty, and humorous underside. A year later, one of the Dallas cops I had profiled got into a savage hand-to-hand fight with a nineteen-year-old black kid, and killed him. The shooting threatened to ignite Dallas race relations that had smoldered for decades, and I was the only reporter the beleaguered cop chose to talk to. Emotionally I couldn't take a constant diet of that. A time came when I felt I was dwelling too much on the dark side of human experience, so I withdrew from it.
Or so I thought.
Texans freed themselves from Mexican rule with acts of violence, and those whose homesteads pushed back the frontier lived with the knowledge that any day ferocious aborigines might come. The courage born of facing dire harm and peril is a large part of our legacy. But physical bravery is just one kind of courage. It can sustain the faith and culture of a tiny, impoverished tribe of Kickapoo Indians in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico. It can drive the days and nights of sisters who try to save their historic family ranch from the might of real estate developers and the state's corps of road builders. And courage can distinguish a lonely, defeated old politician who with courtesy and grace hangs on to his principles in the face of a young, dismissive, and cocksure majority.
A Grand Canyon
I grew up in North Texas and am naturally drawn to that region's lore. The plains were the site of the Texas' and soldiers' last, furious wars against the Comanches and Kiowas, and the Indian wars corresponded with the first and bravest of the cattle drives. The names and adventures of Quanah Parker, Charles Goodnight, and Ranald Mackenzie have thrilled and fascinated me since I was a boy. The Comanches' pivotal defeat came in Palo Duro Canyon. And the plain's first great cattle ranch took root there just one year later.
When an editor asked in 1985 if I would write about Palo Duro, I jumped at the opportunity. But the question soon became, How? My wife, Dorothy Browne, who then worked for a civil liberties organization in Austin, said she knew an Amarillo lawyer who sometimes did pro bono work for them. He was kind of a cowboy, she said, and he rode mules in Palo Duro Canyon. My long friendship with Selden Hale was born—as was my admiration for the mule, a historically neglected but essential creature of our frontier past. I prefer not to inject myself into magazine stories, but on this assignment it was unavoidable. For the first time, Dorothy went with me on a story assignment. Our adventure was dwarfed by the awesome human events that once transpired in the canyon. Still, it was a mule ride to remember.
Nowadays the Nile-green plain of the Panhandle abounds with distant compass points: windmills, telephone poles, ranch houses with strands of cottonwoods and elms. But when Coronado's expedition wandered across that barren in 1541, the Spaniards were lost in a shortgrass sea. No hills, no trees, no shrubs, nothing but moving brown herds of shaggy bison. The only features of terrain were the dry, shallow lakebeds now called playas (the Spanish word for shores) and smaller depressions that came to be known as buffalo wallows. In those low spots rainwater gathered and stood, the theory goes, and over the ages the buffalo millions deepened them by rolling in the mud and dust. Sweating under postfedual armor and Panhandle heat, the conquistadors were, in modern vernacular, as spooked as they could be.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the well-married colonial governor, led a mass migration of cavalry, infantry, priests, and Indians—fifteen hundred of them in all—along with thousands of horses, cattle, and sheep. In search of Quivira, the richest of the seven mythical Cities of Gold (an intoxicating myth, considering that the first had proven to be nothing more than a Zuñi pueblo), the Europeans were lured on by a captured Indian slave they called the Turk, because he looked like one. "Just ahead," he kept telling them. One of Coronado's officers, Don Rodrigo Maldonado, was dispatched eastward until he could find something—anything—to report. He tried to line his way back to camp with piles of rocks and buffalo chips. The land offered no inkling of what he was about to see. From a distance of three hundred to four hundred yards, the horizon of pale grass may have shown its first sign of parting, a glimpse of the underlying caliche. And then, suddenly, he was on the stunning brink of it—a vast chasm extending thousands of yards across, a subsoil mountain range snaking and broadening in the distance for miles, dropping off from the prairie five hundred feet and more. Straight down.
The rock cliffs were hued downward in beige and yellow, grays becoming olive and lavender, maroons approaching vermilion on the canyon's floor. On the walls boulders perched at precarious angles. The crags and mesas suggested the profiles of camels, humans, apes. The cheeks of the earth's rock face wore a stubble of clinging juniper; among glens of grass, trees grew thick trunked and tall on the canyon's floor. Mexican traders later named the canyon Palo Duro, which means hard wood. Coronado's scout gaped at a geological fluke that had begun as a simple erosion gully about a million years earlier. The rock formations tell anteceding stories of Ice Age horses, saber-toothed cats, dinosaurs, and the landlocked Permian Sea. Don Rodrigo Maldonado had no clear sense of that, of course. He was probably thinking that if they could just find a safe way down, here at last was shelter and water. But after seeing nothing but miles of the eerie uniform plains, standing on the rim of Palo Duro produces a vertigo that suggests the epochs and transcends mere centuries. How could this netherworld of utter contrast be here?
Four hundred forty-three years later, my wife and I sat on saddled mules and peered down over the canyon rim. Ordinarily, we embarked on camping trips with chilled asparagus, a marinated lamb, my stepdaughter, Lila, and the family car. Having left with apologies and a promise of souvenirs to the child, this morning we wore boots, thick shirts, leather work gloves, stylish trim-line chaps called chinks, bandannas, and gimme caps (hers a USS New Jersey, mine a Bell Helicopter). We were dudes with a mildly daring recreational plan.
You can drive through a well-maintained state park at the mouth of Palo Duro, but to really appreciate the canyon you have to see the upper regions owned by private ranchers, one of whom had granted us access. I was a dilettante historian on muleback—not the most swashbuckling self-image—and Dorothy was along for the ride. Against the backdrop of Palo Duro's past, the cushy triviality of our little adventure had me feeling sheepish. But now the rock-hard fact of the place had my heart in my throat.
I do not wish to exaggerate the dimensions of Palo Duro Canyon. Seen from the air, it loses much of its mystery. Wrinkled with gullies, the plain deteriorates into a raw scrape of erosion, the brakes of the heavily silted and aptly named Red River. The headwater ravines sprawl 120 miles across four counties south of Amarillo. Geologically, Palo Duro's rock formations are said to approximate those along the rim of the Grand Canyon—a good mile above the massive Arizona canyon's floor. On the scale of comparison, that will do. But the schizophrenic dislocation and euphoria born of first seeing Palo Duro have not diminished since Coronado's discovery. The plain goes straight to the brink, then picks up and extends with the same monotony beyond the divide; it would not be a good place to stub one's toe in the dark.
While the dry creek and wooded meadows below were handsome, at the moment I couldn't call them inviting. Our host rancher, like most of his neighbors, had brought in bulldozers to grade crude roads down to the floor. Locally the Caterpillar operators have reputations and renown comparable to those of Alaskan bush pilots. Using the blades for brakes, they essentially skidded down the cliffs, prepared at all times to bail out. Some of that heavy machinery landed upside down on the canyon's floor. Safe and easy ways down are Palo Duro's scarcest feature.
My Library
