A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  At first glance, the Spaniards’ admiring description of Plains Indians sounds strikingly familiar. The natives’ statuesque bearing, hide teepees, and incomparable skill with bow and arrow were qualities that would later strike Americans in the nineteenth-century West. But one critical detail was different. In the sixteenth century, Plains natives had no horses. Instead, they harnessed dogs and loaded them with teepee poles and other possessions.

  Early Spanish image of a buffalo, 1553

  “When the load gets disarranged,” one Spaniard observed, “the dogs howl, calling someone to fix them right.” Unfortunately, the Spanish didn’t record the natives’ first impression of the animal that would transform them from foot-bound nomads into mounted warriors, the most formidable native fighters on the continent.

  CONTINUING EAST, THE Spanish reached the plainest of the Plains, a dead-level expanse of grass. Even the army’s Indian guides became lost, Coronado wrote, since “there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.” He sent ten mounted scouts “to go at full speed towards the sunrise for two days.” They couldn’t find their way back, or be tracked, because of the unbending grass. When the outriders were finally discovered, they reported having traveled for sixty miles and “seen nothing but cows and sky.”

  After that, scouts made piles of buffalo dung for the army to follow, like Hansel and Gretel, trailing manure instead of breadcrumbs. The Spaniards also gave one man the duty of measuring and counting his steps to calculate how far the army traveled, on average about fifteen to twenty miles a day. Later, the Spanish learned a trick from the Plains Indians. “In the morning they notice where the sun rises and observe the direction they are going to take, and then shoot an arrow in this direction. Before reaching this they shoot another over it, and in this way they go all day.”

  A month after leaving the pueblo country, Coronado encountered Indians who knew of his destination, Quivira. However, their description was very different from El Turco’s. Quivira’s houses were rude dwellings of thatch, not multistoried stone, and there was no gold, only corn. The Indians also said Quivira lay to the north, another forty days’ travel away. Thus far, El Turco had led the army east and south.

  “With this news I received the utmost pain,” Coronado wrote, “seeing myself in those tiresome, endless plains, where I had an extreme need of water.” The army’s supply of corn had also run out. (El Turco had told the Spanish to carry few provisions so they could reach Quivira quickly and be able to tote back gold.) Under questioning, El Turco insisted he had told the truth about his large, rich homeland. But Coronado decided to send the mass of his army back to New Mexico and continue on toward Quivira with only thirty of his best horsemen, as well as El Turco, who “was taken along in chains.”

  PICKING UP THE interstate soon after leaving the Flints, I sped east, gradually descending through mesa land to Tucumcari, where the distant line of flat-topped hills finally vanished. As I crossed into Texas, the time zone changed, from Mountain to Central, and so did the landscape. I crested an escarpment to see the Plains before me, a brown carpet patched with green, stretching to the horizon.

  As I navigated small roads through Deaf Smith County, the terrain turned even more level. There were no trees, no traffic, and no dwellings, just endless crew-cut fields. The roads ran dead straight for miles, then made perfect ninety-degree turns, as if drawn with an Etch-a-Sketch. I felt as though I were motoring across the world’s largest pool table.

  Deaf Smith County, named for a Texas scout, formed one edge of the territory Coronado described as “so without landmarks that it was as if we were in the middle of the sea.” Later Spanish travelers named this tableland El Llano Estacado—the Staked Plain—possibly because they planted stakes to mark their way across the featureless terrain. The Llano was a geological oddity, a deposit of silt and stone that had washed down from the Rockies millions of years ago and baked hard and flat—“a pancake plopped down in a skillet,” one Texas writer called it. Elsewhere in the Plains, there are rivers and undulations. In the Llano, the land barely changes for 32,000 square miles: a parched, almost perfectly flat surface larger than Maine.

  On my second day of driving through this numbing landscape, I was roused by a startling sign: “Welcome to Earth.” Then came shuttered shops, a broken stoplight, and a defunct movie theater whose marquee touted its final show: The Blob. I passed a church, “Mission Earth”; a gas pump, “Earth Station”; a closed newspaper office, The Earth News; and a sign saying “Try Earth First” beside what looked like a former bank. Earth might not have much life, but it seemed to possess a fertile sense of humor.

  Spotting a lone car by an insurance agency, I went in to ask about the origin of the town’s name. The agency’s owner, Fran, a big-haired woman with red fingernails, shook her head and said, “I’ve lived here my whole life and have no idea.” An older woman, Lavelle, didn’t know either, but said the town’s name was a cross to bear for its inhabitants.

  “You tell folks where you’re from and they always say something like, ‘I’m from Earth too’ or ‘Really? I’m from Mars.’ It gets old.” Lavelle sighed. “Some folks here call themselves Earthlings. That doesn’t help.”

  “It should be called Flat Earth, really,” Fran added. “When I get into the hills and woods of east Texas, it bothers me, I can’t see anything. I feel crowded. Guess this is just what I’m used to.”

  As Fran told me about the 1980s farm crisis that had killed commerce in Earth, Lavelle went to the hairdresser to ask if anyone knew the history of the town’s name. She called to report that it dated to the opening of the first post office in 1925. The postmaster submitted several names, but they’d already been taken by other Texas towns. He went for a walk around and all he could see was soil, so he chose the name Earth.

  “I guess it could have been worse,” Fran said. “Can you imagine saying, ‘I’m from Dirt’?”

  I DROVE ON, through Halfway and Plainview and on to Floydada, where the welcome sign said, “Pumpkin Capital USA.” Floydada looked as flat as Earth, but just a few miles from town the tableland suddenly cracked, revealing a broad ravine about half a mile across and a hundred feet deep—the first natural break in the landscape since I’d entered the Llano.

  The Spanish had been startled by the ravine, too, describing it as a barranca grande, or great canyon. While the army was camped in the gorge, a fierce hailstorm erupted, showering the Spaniards with stones “as big as bowls” and “as thick as raindrops.” Men held up shields against the hail while trying to control their horses, which tried to climb out of the gorge. If the storm had caught the army in the open plain, a soldier wrote, the horses would have run off and imperiled the expedition. As it was, the hail tore tents, dented helmets, and smashed all the crockery.

  Four centuries after that summer hailstorm, a farmer named Burl Daniel was digging a drainage ditch just outside Floydada, at the edge of Blanco Canyon, when his plow hit metal. Burl thought it was a wad of chicken wire, and tossed it in his truck with other junk. Then he noticed the metal was hand-shaped, with the last two fingers missing. So he sent it to a museum at the University of Texas, which identified it as an early Spanish gauntlet, or chain-mail glove.

  No one paid the discovery much notice until twenty-five years later, in 1991, when Nancy Marble was going through old newspapers at the Floyd County Historical Museum. “I just wondered how that Spanish glove ended up here,” Nancy said, when I met her at the museum, on Floydada’s town square. So she tracked down Burl Daniel and convinced him to sell the glove to Floydada’s museum for $500.

  She also told a local relic hunter to keep an eye out for metal around Blanco Canyon. He did, returning with what looked to Nancy “like a crushed pen.” She contacted the Coronado experts Richard and Shirley Flint, who identified the metal as the bolt of a crossbow, a weapon used by Coronado’s men but not on later Spanish expeditions. When the relic hunter uncovered more bolts, a professiona
l archaeological team came to survey the canyon. Excavations have since uncovered horseshoes, nails, crockery, and more chain mail—by far the largest trove of Coronado artifacts ever found.

  Most of it now resided in a jeweler’s case at the Floydada museum. “This is a young county, it didn’t organize until 1890,” Nancy said, showing me the museum’s pioneer displays, including a sod house. “But now that we know Coronado was here, I feel like we’re ancient.”

  I circled back to Blanco Canyon, just south of town on the road to Cone. It was easy to see why the Spanish had chosen the canyon as a campsite. A stream shaded by cottonwood trees ran along the gorge’s wide flat bottom, and the canyon offered shelter from the Llano’s relentless wind, if not from the hail. The Spanish later camped at two other canyons nearby, using one as a base for hunting buffalo and preparing jerked beef.

  “Many fellows were lost at this time who went out hunting,” one soldier wrote, “wandering about the country as if they were crazy.” Each night, the army tried to draw the lost hunters back to the ravine camp by firing guns, blowing trumpets, beating drums, and building bonfires. Even so, some of the riders never returned. It was a haunting image: well-armed horsemen who had survived the long voyage from Spain and even longer trek from Mexico, only to vanish in a sea of grass.

  SERENADED BY GRAIN reports and Christian radio, I followed Coronado north as he and his advance party of thirty horsemen rode on toward Quivira, through what is now the panhandle of Texas and Oklahoma, and then into the southwest corner of Kansas. This tri-state territory was the epicenter of the 1930s Dust Bowl, a disaster that Coronado and his men might have predicted. The Spanish regarded the southern Plains as a sandy-soiled, windblown, semiarid “desert,” suited only to buffalo, nomads, and tough short grass. But the homesteaders who poured in during the late nineteenth century brought modern tools and can-do American optimism. Within just a few decades, their plows and tractors and grazing cattle tore up the native grass that had held the soil in place and protected it from frequent drought and lacerating winds.

  When the rain stopped and the winds gusted during the “Dirty Thirties,” the unanchored topsoil simply blew away. At the Kansas line, I entered Morton County, the worst affected of any in the Dust Bowl; over three-quarters of its acreage had been seriously eroded by wind. Almost half the population fled, and the county still has fewer people than it did in 1930.

  This exodus, however, proved a boon to environmental preservation, which was why I stopped in Morton County. In the wake of the dust storms, the federal government bought vast stretches of “submarginal” land from ravaged farmers who wanted out. Removed from agricultural use, and reseeded with grass, these tracts gradually healed. One of the largest such plots became the Cimarron National Grassland: over 100,000 acres that had returned to something approaching their appearance in Coronado’s day.

  At the ranger station in the Morton County seat of Elkhart, I picked up a promising-sounding tour map labeled “Sea of Grass.” Driving as far as I could into the grassland, I got out of my car and started walking. For the first time since I’d entered the Plains, the landscape was completely free of barbed wire, telephone poles, the redolence of fertilizer, or other man-made intrusions. Knee-high grass swished against my jeans as I hiked for several miles in as straight a line as I could. With the late-day sun beating on my shoulder, it wasn’t hard to keep my sense of direction. But the bit of horizon I’d chosen as a guide-on didn’t get any closer. I seemed to be traveling without moving forward, as if on a grassy treadmill, tilted slightly up. Or, as one of Coronado’s men put it, as if I were in a vast, shallow bowl.

  Viewed from my car, the Plains had seemed flat and featureless. But on foot, I began to see subtle variations: gentle swales and dips, and in the distance, a stony outcrop that rose seventy or so feet above the grass. According to my map, this rocky “bluff” was the third highest point in Kansas, and had served as a lookout for pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail. In a landscape this level, even a bump seemed Himalayan.

  Life of any kind also loomed large. At sunset, quail and grouse darted through the dun-colored grass. I saw a box turtle and the burrows of prairie dogs—“animals like squirrels,” the Spanish called them. A rattlesnake darted its tongue in my direction before uncoiling and slithering off.

  One creature, though, was conspicuously absent. As late as the early nineteenth century, some thirty million buffalo roamed the Plains. “In terms of kilograms of matter belonging to one species,” observes the biologist Tim Flannery, America’s bison herds “formed the greatest aggregation of living things ever recorded.” Yet this massive population had barely survived the second half of the nineteenth century, when hunters with repeating rifles killed herds en masse: for hides, for tongues, for sport—and for the U.S. Army, which sought to drive Indians off the Plains by exterminating the buffalo on which they relied. The last wild buffalo in Kansas was killed in 1879, near where I now walked. By 1900, fewer than a thousand buffalo remained in all of North America.

  Careful breeding and preservation had since boosted the population to several hundred thousand. But despite constant queries, the only buffalo I’d heard about since entering the Plains were a few at a Texas state park. A ranger there told me not to waste my time. The buffalo could be seen only with a high-powered telescope from a viewing platform, and then only rarely. Creatures once so multitudinous that Coronado wrote “to count them is impossible” were now so scarce that they had to be stalked at remote sanctuaries, like rhinos on the Serengeti.

  I’d almost given up hope when I learned over a steak-and-egg breakfast in Elkhart that a retired farmer kept a few buffalo outside town. Keith Jarvis lived off a dirt road fifteen miles from Elkhart and more than a mile from his own mailbox. A burly man in blue jeans and a Kansas State Wildcats cap, he seemed amused when I pulled up by his tractor and explained my quest.

  “You’re welcome to look, and buy ’em, too, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. Keith walked me to a fence—“It’s hot,” he warned; “buffalo respect electricity”—and pointed to a clump of humped creatures, heads down as they grazed about seventy-five yards off. At this distance, they did resemble cows. But Keith knew different.

  “I’ll tell you about buffalo,” he said. “Try to corral or crowd them or force them in any way and they get all on edge. Cattle don’t do that.” He gazed at the herd. “People get all soft and fuzzy about buffalo, but they’re wild animals, they’ll never be your friend. They tolerate me because I feed them. But they’d just as soon gore me as not.”

  Keith unhooked the electric fence and we walked over for a closer look. We’d only walked a few yards when one of the buffalo raised its head and loped off with an awkward, bouncing gait. The others quickly followed. “They’re strictly herd animals,” Keith said. “Find one and you find ’em all.”

  As we hiked back to get his truck, I asked Keith how he’d come to raise buffalo. “Just the novelty of it, I guess. Picked one up for a thousand bucks—top of the market, which is when I always get into things.” He laughed. “Thought it would give me a little income, too. But I can’t hardly give the hides away, no one wants ’em. Grind the buffalo up usually, for hamburger.”

  Climbing in his pickup, we drove through a field of olive-gray sagebrush and into the middle of the herd. Unlike Coronado, I had a clear image in my head of what the creatures would look like, from pictures and from buffalo-head nickels I’d collected as a child. Still, it was easy to see why the Spanish found them so strange and amusing. Even Juan de Oñate, not a man I imagined as prone to merriment, became droll on the subject of buffalo: “No one could be so melancholy that if he were to see it a hundred times a day he could keep from laughing heartily as many times.”

  Up close, what seemed most comical was the buffalo’s frontloaded physique. Its weight and reddish-brown hair bunch around the shoulders and neck, with the torso tapering down to an improbably small bottom and skinny, piglike tail. The huge head is so shaggy that the woo
l almost covers the buffalo’s horns and small, sleepy eyes. And the legs, particularly the short, small-hoofed forelegs, look much too delicate to support so much bulk.

  “They may look funny,” Keith said, “but it’s no laughing matter when they pivot on those little feet and go over you or through you.” Still, he sometimes found his herd amusing, too. “The beard’s what I’ve never figured out. When they drink, it goes in the water, and when they run, it drags along the ground. Can’t imagine what good it does.”

  After I’d gawked for a while, Keith showed me the rest of his property, mostly fields of brown autumn wheat. “I wasn’t a good farmer,” he said. “Had these fields in hock more times than I can recall.” When I told him about Coronado searching for gold in these plains, he laughed. “Yeah, just like folks thought they could get rich quick growing crops out here. Dust Bowl cured that. Then folks started hunting oil and gas, not that I’ve ever found any.” Keith smiled. “Finally found my niche, though, which is doing nothing. Just glad to still have the house and land.”

  We circled back to the small house Keith had built from scrap lumber. As his wife, Beulah, silently sorted green tomatoes in the kitchen, Keith prepared me a plate heaped with slabs of grayish-brown meat. “It’s a day old, and not as tender as beef. Gotta cut it in small pieces.”

  I was still recovering from my sclerotic breakfast in Elkhart, and not entirely sure I wanted to eat part of the herd I’d just admired. But it seemed impolite to say no. Fortunately, the buffalo steak tasted very much as Keith described, a bit chewy and tough, like slightly overdone beef, but not bad.

  “It’s delicious,” I said, tamping the last piece down my gullet. At this, Keith went to the freezer and loaded a large plastic cooler with what looked like an entire haunch. “For the road,” he said, helping me haul it to the car. “In this country, never know when you’ll find yourself short.”