Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
Charlie Goodnight and José Tafoya meeting – 1893
March 9, 2005
"El Llano Estacado es un mundo nuevo, Charlie -- no?" Jose Piedad Tafoya sadly shook his head. "I remember seeing this valley black with buffalo thirty years ago. On this trip all I saw was an old sign hanging loose, flapping in the wind, with the words "Buffalo Bones." Underneath the sign were fragments of bone turning to powder." Walter Prescott Webb later estimated five million buffalo ranged from the Arkansas River in the summer to the Concho River and beyond in the winter during Tafoya’s Comanchero days.
In 1893 Texas ranchers including Charlie Goodnight sued the State of Texas to recover the value of horses and cattle stolen by Comanches who traded them to Comancheros from northern New Mexico. This story is what I imagine Charlie and Jose might have talked about during the hearings of that lawsuit. They probably hunkered down in the shade of one of the sapling courthouse trees in Clarendon on the afternoon of Jose's testimony, after he had recounted the numbers of cattle he received from the Comanches and later sold in New Mexico to settlers and the U. S. Army.
Both had extensively traveled the Llano Estacado and Pecos River Valley when much younger. In the 1920s Goodnight told his biographer J. Evetts Haley, "Tafoya was a wonder, and knew the Plains from the Palo Duro to the Concho by heart." (Some of Goodnight’s dialog in this essay comes from the Haley book.) Tafoya was fluent and literate in both Spanish and English. In the 1860s and early 1870s he had 250 wagons rolling on the Llano Estacado, hauling buffalo meat and trade goods. Tafoya became one of the U.S. Army’s most sought-after scouts in the mid to late 1870s.
Goodnight bragged a little. "The buffalo aren't all gone. Have you seen the buffalo I gave the Taos Pueblo? Mrs. Goodnight was sickened by the slaughter. In 1878 I roped a few calves and put them on Texas cows. They hated the calves. I had to walk into the pen carrying a fence post so they could get their clabber in peace. The first bull buffalo I had was “old Sikes,” and he busted every barbwire fence I put up. He'd come charging to the horse corral, hook his head under the gate and lift it off its hinges and get his fill of corn. The ponies stifled themselves getting away."
Tafoya cackled at the image. "More than buffalo are gone. One time when I was down between Lagunas Cuates and Laguna de Tahoka on my way back from Muchaque, I ran into thousands upon thousands of turkeys walking across the llano. The flock stretched from horizon to horizon and was a half-mile across. A dozen or more coyotes were flanking them like drovers, hoping for one to get tired. I decided los pavos were headed for the sandhills along the Valle de Simanola to feed on shinnery acorns. They might have been after the big swarms of migrating grasshoppers -- a little further west we found a place where the ground was bare, except for thousands of dead grasshoppers. One of my wagondrivers once thought a swarm of grasshoppers was a snowstorm without clouds, because of the way they glittered in the sun! Now neither the turkey nor grasshoppers migrate as they once did. It was a heck of a sight -- turkeys migrating like buffalo.”
Tafoya smiled at the memory, and continued to reflect about the last years of the buffalo. "The hunters chased the buffalo out of the breaks and up on the Llano. They used to only come up on it in wet years, but about the time you were fussing with old Sikes, George Causey was killing them as far west as El Bolson de San Simon and Los Medanos. (Near Hobbs, New Mexico.) A nephew of mine says there is still five buffalo down on the Pecos north of Fort Stockton. He's riding for the "W," living in the open and using his saddle for a pillow. His brother is riding for Add Jones on the LFD and says that old black cowboy knows more about horses than anybody. He says the big herds of pronghorn there are now heavily hunted. I can remember seeing herds of 500. Back in my trading days, there were many more antelope than buffalo on the western Llano Estacado."
Goodnight shook his head. "I hardly ever saw buffalo along the Pecos -- a few old bulls, mostly. Colonel Shafter said he found buffalo once he got past the sandy country north of Mustang Draw in 1875 -- of course he was there in a wet year!” A big tumbleweed rolled into the courthouse square, headed straight at the two men.
"Where did this new tumbling weed come from? This wasn't here before." Tafoya grabbed the plant and started stomping on it to reduce it to a matted pancake.
"Supposedly some Russians brought it in accidentally with some flax seed to North Dakota in the 1870's and it's been rolling south every winter ever since. I saw the first one here on the Llano a year or two ago. There is nothing between here and there but prairie, and when the blizzards of winter blow just about everything heads south. A fence full of tumbleweeds becomes a sanddune after a sandstorm or two. " Goodnight grimaced.
The two men sat silently for a few minutes, lost in personal memories, absently watching a freight wagon train roll past the courthouse. Tafoya suddenly straightened up and exclaimed, "That is Casimero Romero!" The man in question waved and hollered over at them in Spanish -- "I will join you two in a drink when we get settled in!" Tafoya glanced at Goodnight. "Charlie, you treated him with respect when you moved to the Palo Duro south of his sheep range, and for that, you are well thought of by our people. Some of the other sorry yahoos that came after you, though, I guess they will never pay for their treatment of "los pastores." Tafoya shook his head, and spat on the ground, emphatically punctuating his disgust.
Goodnight was still reflecting on the changes of the Llano Estacado, and modestly changed the subject. “I was amazed to hear the other day that mesquite was supposed to come to the Llano with Spanish cattle. How in the world did that story get started? It has started to spread up further up out of the draws, now that windmills are popping up everywhere. Every valley with deep soil in the whole region always had mesquite. You know as well as I that wild horses rarely got more than five or six miles from water. Anytime you saw dense thickets of mesquite, you knew you were that close to water. During droughts wild horses had to eat mesquite beans, leaving the seeds in their droppings as they searched for grass."
"You and me, Charlie, we have seen a lot of changes, and we saw things that are now ghosts. There are no more bears in the breaks of the Canadian, Red, or Brazos. And the wolves, they too will become only ghosts of memory. I have heard a story that not long after the buffalo were all killed that most of them migrated off the Llano going northwest in a huge group.”
Goodnight nodded. "The ghosts ride with us like a lobo I saw along the Pecos. It was the only wolf I ever saw along the Pecos. On cattledrives I often would ride a couple miles or more ahead of the herd to pick the best route. That old lobo followed me for over a week, from Toyah Creek to the area along Seven Rivers where Ma'am Jones had her place. I only saw it in the area where Oliver Loving suffered so badly. I decided the wolf was lonely, and I bet ghosts get lonely if nobody knows their stories. I wonder if in a hundred years anybody will know how the Llano Estacado looked when we first saw it years ago?"