Crossing Rio Pecos: Volume 16 (Chisholm Trail, 16, Band 16) - Softcover

Dearen, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0875651593 ISBN 13: 9780875651590

Verlag: Texas Christian University Press, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

The Pecos River flows snake-like out of New Mexico and across West Texas before striking the Rio Grande. In frontier Texas, the Pecos was more moat than river—a deadly barrier of quicksand, treacherous currents, and impossibly steep banks. Only at its crossings, with legendary names such as Horsehead and Pontoon, could travelers hope to gain passage. Even if the river proved obliging, Indian raiders and outlaws often did not.

Long after irrigation and dams rendered the river a polluted trickle, Patrick Dearen went seeking out the crossings and the stories behind them. In Crossing Rio Pecos—a follow-up to his Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier—he draws upon years of research to relate the history and folklore of all the crossings—Horsehead, Pontoon, Pope’s, Emigrant, Salt, Spanish Dam, Adobe, “S,” and Lancaster. Meticulously documented, Crossing Rio Pecos emerges as the definitive study of these gateways which were so vital to the opening of the western frontier.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Dearen is the author of six books, including Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier, Portraits of the Pecos Frontier, and When Cowboys Die, a novel. Formerly an award-winning reporter for two West Texas daily newspapers, he lives in Midland with his wife and son.

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The Pecos River flows snake-like out of New Mexico and across West Texas before striking the Rio Grande. In frontier Texas, the Pecos was more moat than river, a deadly barrier of quicksand, treacherous currents, and impossibly steep banks. Only at its crossings - with such legendary names as Horsehead and Pontoon - could travelers hope to gain passage. Even if the river proved obliging, its Indian raiders and outlaws often did not. Its banks echoed with the sounds of the mythic Old West - the war cry of the Indian, the blast of the cowboy's six-shooter, the crack of the stage-driver's whip, the thunder of the stampeding longhorn. While documented history was painting dreary lives for pioneers in many other locations, the Pecos stirred with color and drama and nurtured the stuff of legend. Long after irrigation and dams rendered the river a polluted trickle, Patrick Dearen went seeking out the crossings and the stories behind them. In Crossing Rio Pecos, a follow-up to his Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier, he draws upon years of research and relates the history and folklore of all the crossings: Horsehead, Pontoon, Pope's, Emigrant, Salt, Spanish Dam, Adobe, S, and Lancaster. Meticulously documented, Crossing Rio Pecos is the definitive study of these gateways which were so vital to the opening of the western frontier.

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Crossing Rio Pecos

By Patrick Dearen

TCU Press

Copyright © 1996 Patrick Dearen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87565-159-0

Contents

Foreword, 
River of the West, 
Pope's Crossing, 
Emigrant Crossing, 
Horsehead Crossing, 
Spanish Dam Crossing, 
Pontoon Crossing, 
Lancaster Crossing, 
Other Crossings, 
Epilogue, 
About the Author, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

River of the West

The story of the Rio Pecos in frontier Texas is really the story of its crossings, for generally these vital "gateways to the west" harbored man's only intimate contact with a deadly river otherwise walled by barrier banks.

The crossings frequently flowed red with blood and echoed with the sounds of the mythic Old West—the war cry of the Indian, the blast of the cowboy's six-shooter, the crack of the stage driver's whip, the thunder of the stampeding longhorn. At the very time that documented history was painting dreary existences for pioneers in many other locations, the Pecos and its crossings stirred with color and drama and nurtured the stuff of legend. Indeed, the modern perception of the mythic Old West comes closer to fruition in the frontier Pecos country than virtually anywhere else.

Formed one-half to one million years ago, the Pecos originates at 11,300 feet in the Sangre de Cristo range in northern New Mexico, a pristine stream splashing down through alpine forests and flower-spangled meadows. To the west of its headwaters, barely thirty air miles, flows the south-trending Rio Grande. Yet, the muddying Pecos sets a course to the southeast that will not see it intersect the Rio Grande for 926 sinuous miles. At the point where the Pecos enters Texas, it splits a parched land 300 miles wide and thirsting in vain for a sister river.

Drawn by the life-giving Pecos waters, the so-called Clovis people may have camped on its banks and taken shelter in its lower canyon overhangs by 9000 B.C. These nomadic hunters, the first New World culture identifiable through archaeology, included or were close ancestors of Midland Man, whose eleven thousand-year-old remains surfaced in Midland County, Texas, fifty miles east of the Pecos in 1953. By 8500 B.C., the Clovis culture had disappeared, and a new people, the Folsom, had emerged to leave their defining spear-point style in a mass buffalo kill in Mile Canyon near the mouth of the Pecos.

With the retreat of glaciers and the seasonal migration of buffalo to northern ranges by 7000 B.C., Folsom descendants chose to occupy the Pecos and live off the land. For the next 8,000 years, the lower canyon rockshelters nurtured these hunter-gatherers, who banded into family groups of up to thirty persons. Venturing throughout the Pecos country of Texas, these Indians hunted with the atlatl and spear, the bola (a thong with stones at either end), the curved rabbit stick, and, after its introduction in about A.D. 900, the bow and arrow.

Late-prehistoric Indians of Texas, whether facing the river's lower canyons or upriver flats, coveted natural fords such as Salt Crossing near modern Imperial. U.S. Army Brevet Captain John Pope, upon crossing the Pecos in March 1854, explained why:

The river below the thirty-second parallel [the Texas-New Mexico line] changes its character from a rocky bed, with occasional rapids, to soft mud bottom and banks. Fording-places below this parallel are very rare, and present in all cases a depth of water which, at any other than the dry season, absolutely prevents the passage of wagons or wheeled vehicles.... The banks are perpendicular, about ten feet high, and falling into the stream constantly—the deep water being uniform from one shore to the other.

Even for buffalo, the epitome of strength and endurance, the Pecos was a barricade. In 1684, Spaniard Juan Dominguez de Mendoza and his party killed more than four thousand head east of the river but reported only a few bulls west of it.

At the beginning of recorded history, the Pecos remained a magnet, luring Jumano Indians to its adjacent buffalo range and to nearby salt beds such as Juan Cordona Lake. This fringe Puebloan culture, dominant along the Rio Grande from the Rio Conchos to near El Paso, was an odd blend of gardeners and nomads, either content in their fields or restless for the chase. North and east of the Pecos, meanwhile, scattered bands of Tonkawas and Lipan Apaches trod a wilderness yet to see a modern horse.

It was into such an empire, drained by a lone river, that the Spaniards pushed in the sixteenth century, driven by dreams of conquest, converts, and consummate wealth. Cabeza de Vaca came first, crossing this "great river coming from the north" in his epic 1535 trek from the Texas Gulf Coast to Sonora, Mexico. In 1583, Antonio de Espejo followed the coils of the "Rio de las Vacas"—the River of Cows—or Pecos, from Cicuye pueblo near its headwaters to modern Texas. Probably at Salt Crossing, he met three Jumano hunters, who pointed his expedition and its horses and mules southwest to the Jumano settlements. Seven years later, Gaspar Castano de Sosa, terming the Pecos the "Salado" or "Salt," struck it near its mouth and forged upstream to Cicuye. Although Spaniards later would refer to the river as "Puerco"—pig-like or dirty—by 1599 the name Pecos—a word of indeterminate origin—had come into use.

Finding no precious minerals along the Texas stretch and few Indians willing to be proselytized, Spain retained little interest in the river. Soon, the Pecos and its desert gained a reputation that would endure until the late nineteenth century–as a forbidding land through which to hurry, not tarry.

With 7,000 horses, including breeding stock, introduced to the Southwest in 1598 by future New Mexico Governor Don Juan de Oñate, Indians gradually acquired the animals through straying, thievery, and trade. As early as 1659, Apaches north of the Pecos headwaters were a horse people, raiding New Mexican settlements, and within a few years the Comanches had become horse warriors without peer. In 1705, Comanches took to plundering Spanish settlements near the upper Pecos, and by the middle of the century, they had wrested the Southern Plains from the Apaches (who had absorbed the Jumanos into their culture) and driven the Lipans to the lower Pecos and Mexico. For the next 125 years, the Pecos River in Texas marked the southwestern boundary of Comancheria. Even the Comanches shunned its banks and elected instead to establish their rancherias far to the northeast and to push down each fall to cross at Horsehead Crossing and raid deep into Mexico.

On into 1821, when Spain's dominion ended, and on through Texas's fifteen years as a province of Mexico and a near-decade as an independent nation, the Pecos remained little known to white men. Snaking through a hostile wilderness far from settlements, it drew few pioneers other than carreta freighters, who claimed Juan Cordona Lake as the principal salt supply for northern Mexico.

The river's reputation as a gateway west began in 1849, four years after the United States admitted Texas to the Union and immediately after news of a California gold discovery filtered back east. Spawned by military and emigrant needs, three routes quickly opened up across the Pecos country—the Lower Road, which crossed at the Indian ford of Lancaster Crossing sixty-five air miles above the river's mouth; the Upper Road, which crossed another fifty-five miles upstream at Horsehead Crossing; and the Emigrant Road, which...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Texas Christian University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0875651593
• ISBN 13: 9780875651590
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 196
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar