Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

Arrowhead hunting is a traditional daytripping adventure for West Texans
March 8, 2006

"A few years back I would go arrowhead hunting as many times as I could, and sometimes I went as much as four times a week." Sammy Hunnicutt of Big Spring and I were bouncing down a rough ranch road in Borden County, out visiting some of his old stomping grounds. Sammy's dad was raised on the ranch we were on, and had cowboyed as a teenager during World War II when most of the older cowboys were overseas. Sammy has been an arrowhead hunter all of his life, and has become a serious amateur historian, constantly searching out old and new books and historical journal articles to increase his knowledge of his "home country." (His great-grandparents once lived in Fluvanna, and later on our journey I was treated to a tour of the town, identifying who had lived in some of the old windowless and weathered old houses still standing.)

"This draw always has bones sticking out of the cutbank. My dad found quite a few buffalo skulls back in the 1930s, since this was only a few hundred yards from the house he lived in as a kid. Look at that – a big worked flint core, and look over there, a good bunch of burnt rock. We know this region was where Quanah Parker surrendered in 1875, and was a winter camp for the Comanches the year before. The evidence shows an incredible history – for example, this place has been picked over by arrowhead hunters for years and years, and there are still artifacts here. Every rancher has his show collection of his best points and a half-dozen manos and metates in the front yard."

Sammy and I continued down the draw, which was cut through Triassic clays where little vegetation could grow. "I have heard this called squally ground – places where almost nothing grows. On the east cutbank, lodged in a old mesquite root was part of an old windmill, the blades bent like pretzels. "You can sure see how incredible the force of the water is, can't you?" Sammy turned around and pointed into a crevice on the other side of the draw. "Didn't you hear the rattlesnake?" I could not even see the rattler!

We walked over to within five feet of the rattler, and realized that it was two snakes coiled and looped together. Their coloration was darker than normal – probably a local phenotype developed over eons to be more camouflaged on reddish soils. Sammy pulled up an old sunflower stalk and waved it at them, and they backed up and disappeared. "I know folks that would be back in the truck by now, and so many people would have gone ballastic in the effort to kill one – grabbing a big branch and whanging away until the snake is pulp. I respect them, and fear taking a misstep, but I quit killing them on sight maybe 6-7 years ago."

Another hundred yards down the arroyo a trickle of water began running on the surface, so we walked above the mud, among some old cockleburs around a bend, and then had to squish our way across the water to continue further. The cutbank on the west fell away as we approached a big curve in the arroyo, but to the east the cutbank was over 15 feet tall. The surface water disappeared at a bend under the high cutbank, and as we approached, a big great horned owl swooped out of a steep feeder arroyo.

"This is where I found the big bone I think might have been a mammoth." Sammy headed towards the owl's arroyo and started sinking into quicksand – not bad quicksand, mind you, but his boots sunk in three inches or so, and when he lifted his foot it created a vacuum and the sound of the suction echoed out of the side arroyo. He clambered up a ways and reported, "nothing left but bone shards, now."

"I am taking a sit-down, Sammy. I like to take the time to become absorbed with a particular place, to look at it more closely. A place like this, with artifacts dating back thousands of years, is a special place. I don't know how to describe the process of absorbing the place, other than the fact that the sit-down gives me time to let my imagination go rampant." I soon spotted the owl, glaring at us from a hundred yards away. I looked across the broad valley and could see where we had first stopped earlier in the morning, when low clouds and fog had shrouded the region, enhancing the mysteriousness of the area.

We had first stopped at an old tumbled down rock pen tucked away under a promontory of the edge of the Llano Estacado. Sammy had measured the pens, and then we circled the site, looking for artifacts. His grandfather had believed it to be a buffalo hunter corral, but Sammy and I agreed it was more likely a pen built by one of Jesus Perea's pastores in 1875. The pen was of the same size as one I had seen in Mottley County last month, in an almost identical situation – protected from the cold north winds of winter, and out of sight of the casual passerby, and near a prominence that could serve as a lookout. Sheepherders from northern New Mexico used much of the Llano Estacado before the free-range cattle barons drove them out by the early 1880s.

"There is another explanation for this site, though," Sammy had commented. We know the Comancheros traded with the Comanches along Grape Creek southwest of Mushaway Peak. I have read that sometimes they would leave a balance of their trade goods hidden before approaching a Comanche camp, and leaving some men to guard the goods. Notice that this pen has an opening on the east, where a carreta or wagon could have been rolled through it." The northwest corner of the pen had a line of rocks sticking into the pen, and I wondered if they had not built a small three-sided choza – putting a roof on it with juniper branches, grass and mud.

"I need to bring a metal detector to this site – and with luck we might find an artifact that could give us a hint to the time of its use, and that is probably the only way to know for sure."

A thorough professional archaeological investigation takes years and thousands of hours of tedious cataloguing, and with limited money for such endeavors, it would take uncountable years just to process the sites presently recorded. Arrowhead hunters often become knowledgeable in ways an academician cannot, so local archaeological societies are where the responsible amateur and professional meet. (The Midland Archaeological Society just hosted a two-day prehistorical ceramics workshop at the Sibley Nature Center, for example.)

Get involved, and go out exploring our rich archaeological past!