Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Mustang Springs
September 25, 2002

If a person 150 years ago tried to go due west of the Big Spring (now the site of the town of Big Spring) water was infallibly available only at two places in the next 100 miles. Mustang Spring (about six miles west of Stanton) and Willow Springs (the ponds in the dunes 11 miles north of Kermit) were almost in a straight line on the way to the Pecos River. The springs were of life-saving importance.

Jumanos, Comanches, Lipan and Mescalero Apaches, Kiowas, considered any permanent water on the Llano Estacado as holy places. They knew of another watering hole on the same draw system. All one had to do was to go up the draw about 50 miles, past the junction with McKenzie draw and past where Monument Draw and Seminole Draw become Mustang Draw, and up Seminole Draw dig in the sands of the draw south of present day Seminole, in what old-timers call 7-wells Draw.

Native Americans often observed the edict – never camp within a quarter mile of the water. To do so would scare the animals, which is of utmost stupidity for people surviving on what can be hunted. Teddy Stickney of the Midland Archaeological Society tells me that several hundreds yards north of the Mustang Spring site the ground is almost paved with burnt rock and broken stone tools and broken arrowheads.

Every September for 150 years the Comanches headed to Mexico to raid for horses and captives. They headed southwest from Mustang Spring and on to playas that a person can see from FM 1788 south of Midland International Airport, and then on to the playas on Stan Smith’s Buffalo Basin ranch west of the old Pegasus oil camp, before finally reaching the Pecos River. In dry times that would be 90 miles without water; which is doable on horseback, by starting out at sundown and riding all night.

I visited the site recently. Anyone can. Stay on the north access road of I-20 east of Midland and go 3.8 miles east of the Business 20 exit. Turn north on FM 1208 and go 5 miles to FM 1212 and go one mile east. A somewhat new looking historical marker is on the south side of the road. At this crossing Mustang Draw is 12 feet deep and 900 feet across. On private property 500 feet south of the stone marker is a low depression of several acres extent within the draw. Hand dug water wells dating from the 2500 year drought of the Altithermal have been found in this area.

This low area once held water two to three feet deep, with many cattails, spikerushes, sedges, and bulrushes lining the edges. This description was provided by Captain Randolph Marcy when he visited the site in 1849 while surveying possible routes to the gold fields of California, thereby establishing (in ethnocentric history books) him as the “discoverer” of the ponds.

Because he was the “discoverer”, the name he bestowed upon the waterhole is the only name by which it is now known. When I tell stories to kids I tell them its Cibolero name was Ojo de Zopilote because buzzards often have a roost near an important watering site. In other stories I tell the children its Comanche name was Aatakii, or Grasshopper, because I pretend that once they found the pond ruined with a million dead grasshoppers floating in it.

Marcy found it because Black Beaver, his Delaware Indian guide, showed it to him on the way back from El Paso. Black Beaver had learned of it by talking to dozens of Comanches a number of months before as the expedition moved west through the Wichita Mountains of Indian Territory.

I spent an hour of this fall’s first cool afternoon walking up and down the roadside, peering over the fences, with binoculars, camera, and notebook all in hand. On the south side of the road a dozen patches of old man’s beard clematis “seed froth” glistened in the sun, surrounded by tawny alkali sacaton grass that filled most of the draw. Small mesquites and hackberries speckling the grass gave the bottom of the draw a lush “savannah” appearance, (lush to my poor eyes that daily see the drought stricken bare soil of the Sibley Nature Center.) I even found blue grama and sideoats grama grasses in bloom – ice cream grasses to cows and their ranchers.

The intense sweet smell of sawtooth daisy bubbled up to fill the air. Small flights of mourning doves repeatedly zoomed overhead and into a large patch of sunflowers on the north side of the road. Each time the doves clumsily blundered in, a half-dozen lesser goldfinches twittered with upper-register frustration. A black saddlebags dragonfly zoomed over to join the party, and nearby a young cottontail rabbit lifted its hindleg to scratch behind its ear from its lemony bed of shrubby pectis.

On the northeast slope of the draw crossing is an old caliche pit behind a massive thicket of lotebush. A rock wren spotted me from deep in the pit and after bowing twice, it flittered up the walls of the pit to land in the feather dalea/javelina brush knee-high thicket ten feet away. It bounced around, hopping from the cover of mimosa catclaw to saltbush to wolfberry and finally flew up to sit three feet from my hand that clasped an old cedar post of the fence.

After the rock wren’s blessing, a pair of scissortails flew west, back towards FM 1208. I took it as a sign my visit was at an end.