Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Hispanic immigration to the Llano Estacado
April 21, 2004

As a person travels the roads of west Texas, the presence of Mexican-Americans is ubiquitous. As I have chatted with folks as I mosey about, I have heard a number of different “family sagas.” I met a man in Big Lake that could trace his family’s history all the way to when an ancestor left Spain 400 years ago. Another person, from Odessa, told me of his family’s intermarriage with Comanche, Jumano, Apache, and Tarahumara Indians during a similar period of time. I became interested in learning more about the reasons for and the timing of Mexican immigration, so I went to the books and to the Internet.

I quickly found out about Dr. Arnoldo De Leon of Angelo State University. He is one of the nation’s leading southwestern Hispanic historians. In the Journal of Big Bend Studies, volume 15, he co-authored a bibliography of what has been written about the Mexican-American experience in west Texas. It is just one section of his giant work “Bibliophiling Tejano Scholarship.” I have been working through the literature and found many stories of interest. I have also been going through the west Texas history books that the Sibley Center purchased with a recent donation from a supporter.

People of Spanish descent have visited the Llano Estacado and the surrounding regions since Cabeza de Vaca in the 1530s and Francisco Coronado in the 1540s, long before the first English settlement at Jamestown. The establishment of Spanish settlements in northern New Mexico in 1598 (nine years before Jamestown), along with the expeditions of Coronado, de Sosa, de Ugalde, and de Espejo began to create a mythos of the Llano Estacado as a “plain of wonders,” not a fearful immensity.

For the following three centuries the Spanish attached the names of saints, martyrs, and biblical references to the land. The religious connotations include the reports in the 1620s of the magical appearances of the Blue Nun in the Concho River Valley corresponding with the visions of Sister Maria de Jesus de Agreda in Spain. For a while, the Llano was named Los Llanos de San Francisco. In 1610 Gaspar Perez de Villagra composed an epic poem about the llanos. A translation of a few lines reads -- “All seems to be a peaceful sea, with no sort of valley or hill, where a man can not in any way limit his vision.” (An early version of “the sky is the limit,” don’t you think?)

Visitors came from as far away as Santa Fe, Chihuahua, and Ojinaga to hunt buffalo and trade with the Indians. The Comanches arrived in the 1700s, and after Governor of Sante Fe de Anza defeated Cuerno Verde in the 1770s an alliance between the “nuevomexicanos” and the Comanches developed. The name, Llano Estacado, became commonly used before the United States became a nation. The internal politics of the two societies relied on kinship and familial connections, which meant that as the two groups intermarried, the Llano Estacado became a territory filled with the stories, legends, and history of both cultures. It was not the “foreboding American desert, never to be civilized,” as the first visiting citizens and soldiers of the United States deemed it, as they followed the “carreta” roads of the ciboleros and comancheros that followed old Indian trails, guided by Jose Tafoya and other comancheros, or Chief Sanchez, Manuel, or other Comanche guides with Spanish ancestors.

Despite centuries of visitation, no Spanish settlements were ever begun on the Llano, not until the pastores (sheepherders) such as Casimero Romero, began building plazas on its northern reaches in the 1870s. Anglo cattlemen and soldiers and Hispanic and Pueblo Indian pastores got along well, intermarrying and enjoying communal fiestas for a decade. After Sostenes L’Archeveque’s outlawry (he made Billy the Kid look like a wimp) turned the Anglos against the pastores, and after the Sante Fe Ring “legally stole” the rights to the Spanish land grants of New Mexico, the pastores retreated to remote villages along the Pecos River, or became day laborers for the Anglo farmers and ranchers of the region. Some families, such as the De Bacas (descendants of de Vaca), did retain middle class standings, and helped preserve a multicultural society in New Mexico.

Fort Davis, Balmorhea, and Fort Stockton had Mexican settlers by the 1850s, who created flourishing irrigated farms along the water courses. Most of these folks had moved north from the Ojinaga region after developing kinship connections with the Mescalero Apaches of the Trans-Pecos Mountains. In many west Texas towns the family name Dutchover reflects this group of immigrants. Deidrich Dutchover was a guard on the first mail stage driven from San Antonio to El Paso in 1851 and later married into a family farming at Fort Davis. According to one website on the Jumano Indians, several family surnames common in west Texas (Jaquez and Zubiate among them) also reflect this centuries-long intermingling of cultures along the Rio Bravo del Norte (Rio Grande.)

Cesario Torres and his brothers came from the Uvalde area to create a complex of irrigated farms at Fort Stockton and along the Pecos River downstream of present day Girvin, supplying the soldiers at the fort with fresh produce or hay for the army horses. They also brought the south Texas tradition of the secular “fandango” (parties featuring food and music not on a saint’s feast day.) One of the Torres brothers succeeded Judge Roy Bean at Langtry. The English and Scottish sheep ranchers that filled the upper Llano River drainage in the 1890s often employed Mexican sheepherders from the Uvalde and Laredo brasada (brushcountry.) These men became the work force that strung most of the barbed wire as it was introduced at the turn of the century south of present day U.S. Highway 67.
Andrew Tijerina’s 1973 Texas Tech thesis ably documents Mexican-American emigration to the Llano Estacado through 1929. A number of the giant ranches of the 1880s and 1890s did have Mexican vaqueros, but the towns on the Llano Estacado itself did not begin to have many citizens of Mexican descent until cotton became a major crop a few years before 1910. The children of the dispossessed pastores and outmoded Comancheros of the Pecos River valley began to immigrate to the cotton fields of the Llano Estacado to hoe weeds and pick cotton for 35 cents a hundred pounds. During the winter, these farm workers grubbed mesquite for a dollar an acre and built fence for a dollar a mile. Others laid the brick pavement of the streets (that is now carefully preserved) and dug the sewer and water lines in the new towns. Many of these new residents of the Llano Estacado joined the Army and fought “El Kaiser” in the trenches of World War One. Cotton farming continued to boom, and the towns of the Llano Estacado advertised throughout the state and in northern Mexico for fieldhands throughout the 1920s. The bracero program of the 1940s and 1950s also brought new residents to the Llano Estacado.

As the Llano Estacado cattle fiefdoms were broken up in the early 1900s for farmland, promoters, such as W.P. Soash who bought C.C. Slaughter’s giant ranch, also formed companies to build railroads to bring the farmers to the land. With the political turmoil of the Mexican Revolution and oppressive economic conditions under the Porfirio Diaz regime, emigration swelled. Railroad companies went to the refugee camps along the river to hire thousands of laborers. New laws prevented the importation of more Chinese workers, who had built the first southern transcontinental railroads in the 1880s, such as the Texas and Pacific and Southern Pacific routes. The old “trunk” railroad roadbeds are visible all over west Texas, from along the Pecos River to the headwaters of the Red River. The old Fasken Railway along the “Telephone Road” (F.M. 1788) is such an example. New railroads were built within the region until the 1930s, when paved highways finally became the norm.

Throughout the development of the Llano Estacado, Mexican-Americans were treated as second-class citizens, rousted by the Border Patrol (even in homes they had owned for decades), kept in segregated neighborhoods, cemeteries, schools, and churches, and banned from stores with signs reading “No Dogs or dirty Mexicans allowed.” Despite the widespread cultural assimilation since the Civil Rights era and the days of “Chicano Power,” their centuries-long involvement with the landscape and their enduring and faithful contributions to the creation of the modern-day Texas are still not adequately recognized in textbooks and popular culture. I tip my hat to you, fellow countrymen and countrywomen, for your story is our story, as we all struggle to create a country that honors human dignity above all else.