Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Indian and Texas Ranger fight near Big Lake
August 28, 2002

Thanks to the Sibley Nature Center columns in the Midland Reporter Telegram I get the chance to meet quite a few folks from Pecos to Post to Ozona to Seagraves with an intense interest in the natural and human history of our bioregion. Now I am hoping someone has some information for me. As far as I can figure, by looking through reams of notes I have taken over the years, I think six different books or magazine articles each tell tiny pieces about one brief battle near Big Lake. In August of 1875 Captain D.W. Roberts, Sergeant Thomas Gillespie, soon-to-be Sergeant Jim Gillett (these three men all wrote about their experiences as Texas Rangers) and seven other Texas Rangers had a running battle with eleven Indians near the huge playa south of the town.

Leading the Indians was Magoosh, a Lipan Apache, and among his warriors were two white boys, Herman Lehmann, and Dutch Schultz, (both of whom also later wrote about their lives with the Indians.) Years later, Historian Eve Ball interviewed Willie Magoosh (Magoosh’s son) and a brief mention was made of Rangers pursuing Magoosh in “Ma’am Jones of the Pecos.” (Of all the references, as I recollect, only Captain Roberts located the battle near the playa known as the Big Lake.)

As I said, I have not read all of the references recently, but over a twenty year period. Recently I read Gillespie’s version of the fight in a May, 1963 True West that retired Lee High School baseball coach Ernie Johnson copied for me. After I read it I realized I had read the story as a kid, while reading my father’s collection of the same magazine. I will paraphrase it for you and give an interpretative living history storyteller’s version.

“The night before, at the head of the South Concho, we found where the Indians had stopped and removed all the horseshoes from the stolen stock. They placed the horseshoes in a group next to a cross made of two strips of blanket. About seven the next morning, after we had been in the saddle for an hour, Captain Roberts stopped us and pointed far ahead. A few dark specks were ahead of us on the plains, moving slow. Captain Roberts told us to form a single line and keep exactly between the rising sun and our goal. We got within 600 yards before they discovered us.”

“ The Indians scattered by twos. Our shots did more damage to the horses, and when one horse would go down, the other Indian would circle and pick up his friend before we could get near. We fired a dozen shots at two Indians, and one horse fell, trapping his rider underneath him. Gillett was about to kill the rider when Ed Sicker shouted. “Don’t shoot – it’s a white boy!” We rode on, and killed the other horse and rider, but when we returned to check on the white boy, he was gone. The chase occurred on an open flat plain, where only a few mesquites and the grass less than 6 inches tall grew. Somehow that boy hid himself in that open country so that we never found him, despite hunting for him for an hour.”

For years, as a child, I read everything about Native Americans that I could find. I believe that my intense interest in such matters originated in the childhood reading of the Gillespie article as an eight year old child and then imagining being Herman Lehmann. I remember imagining I lived a long time ago, living the life of an Indian. I practiced walking “toe-down first,” and followed my cats or the local bunnies, pretending I was hunting with a bow-hunter’s stealth. I believe my childhood interest in botany originated by wanting to learn to know what wild plants were edible, as part of that imaginative exercise.

By the time I was in junior high I knew the ecological components of this area, partly because it seemed that native Americans were deeply familiar with their surroundings, and I was doing my best to learn the lessons they had to teach. I was also absorbing my mother’s consuming interest in the natural world of the Llano Estacado as well. I even took the pursuit of knowledge a further step, and after my junior year in high school I spent a month backpacking alone in the Colorado Rockies. There I did a version of the Plains Indian four-day vision quest fast, as a means to further investigate the emotional and psychological teachings offered by Native American philosophy.

As I grew older, the interest grew and matured into an interest in the history of our region, as well. Now I am firmly convinced we all should be intimately familiar with our homeland of the Southern Llano Estacado, knowing its most common plants and animals, its geography, and its history. We modern humans need to regain a sense of place, to feel that we belong. To me, this knowledge is “what patriotism is all about.”