Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Lone Wolf Mountain
August 14, 2002

Not too far from Loraine, Texas, is a hill known as Lone Wolf Mountain. Cutting back and forth on red-dirt county roads west of Inadale, one can find the Lone Wolf Cemetery and the old abandoned Lone Wolf Store. Traveling north from Interstate 20 on Ranch Road 644, one can find a little rise on the left side of the road between county roads 4196 and 4176. That is the “mountain” – a term applied by flatlanders with big imaginations.

Lone Wolf Creek squiggles away to the southwest, running through Colorado City to join up with the Colorado River south of the railroad on the south side of town. I had cause to be in the neighborhood awhile back, having been invited by a rancher to do a plant survey on a place northeast of the “mountain.” The flat area north of Loraine forms the divide between the Colorado and Brazos Rivers, and Lone Wolf Mountain is a mountain only when looking up the divide from the drainage plain of the creek from the southwest.

Two cowboys who were day-working on the ranch told me about Lone Wolf, for whom the mountain is named. Lone Wolf was a Kiowa leader who buried his son on the hill. The cowboys told me that Lone Wolf had gone down to Kickapoo Springs in Edwards County where his son had been killed, hoping to bring the remains back home to Oklahoma. But the U.S. Army kept getting in the way and, to escape the soldiers, Lone Wolf had to bury his son’s bones on the hill.

Kiowas often traveled into Texas. They joined the Comanches on their annual raids into Mexico, including one that extended as far south as Zacatecas. Before the Civil War, an army patrol ran into a Kiowa out by the Guadalupe Mountains who was riding along with a monkey and a parrot. From 1800 until 1860, the Kiowa homeland extended all the way from the Arkansas River of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, but after the Civil War, they claimed the Washita River in Oklahoma. In November, 1868, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer attacked their camp, burned their teepees and supplies of buffalo meat, and forced them to march in snow and sub-zero temperatures to Fort Cobb.

A month later, Custer slapped Lone Wolf and Satanta into irons and threatened to hang them if the Kiowas did not leave the free ways of the buffalo hunter. By late February most did – so the two chiefs were released to eat the weevily flour and stinky, green beef of the reservation quartermaster. It was not a pleasant life, so folks kept wandering away to find buffalo. Opportunities for the young men to test their manhood would arise in the form of a lightly-guarded freight wagon train, or a solitary rancher found far away from civilization. As honorary Comanches, the preferred economic endeavor of Kiowas was the forceful appropriation of whatever they needed or wanted.

Like me, the cowboys I talked to that day love to read about the history of our homeland, and they chose their lifestyle as a way to honor that history. During the lunch hour, we sat on a rock overlooking a little spring right in front of some petroglyphs. We were less than 20 miles away, at the headwaters of one of the “brazos” of the Rio Brazos.

The two cowboys looked like they had stepped out of a time machine, transported fresh from the 1880s. Wearing stereotypical handlebar moustaches, heavy leather chaps, old high-crown hats, and jingling homemade spurs, the “fellers” settled into a session of shade-sitting storytelling that defines the pacing of conversation in rural Texas on hot afternoons.

“Here is the way I see what happened when Lone Wolf buried his son. Lone Wolf left his companions down where Lone Wolf Creek meets the Colorado. They took his horse, and made some dust and noise so the soldiers would follow them. Lone Wolf walked up the creek, carrying the bag full of his son’s bones. He knew he would have to leave them behind, so he kept looking for a good place. When he got to the spring, he drank and rested and watched for pursuers.”

“I can hear him sing a mourning song, and I can see tears running down his face. I am sure he cried for hours, and sang until hoarse. He grieved until he fell asleep, and in the morning he looked across the beautiful valley to Signal Peak over by Big Spring‘s’. He could see the hills beyond the ghost town of Silver. Gazing upon this vista, Lone Wolf decided that this was the view his son should see every day: green grass, buffalo, a little shining creek. So he found a crevice in the rocks and laid his son to rest. He gathered up a bunch of holy sage and laid it over the bones, and cut off his hair, so part of him would always be with his child. He left the burial site and started walking to Oklahoma. The first night he spent here, and carved that petroglyph.” The cowboy pointed at a faint scratching on the rock, but his moustache was twitching, so I knew he was just making that part up.