Muchaque...

Mushaway, Muchaque, Muchakooga! Mushaway, Muchaque, Muchakooga! As I zipped down FM 669 a few miles south of Gail and 25 miles north of Big Spring, the inane chant kept repeating itself. The three words are different variations of the name of a big mesa just southeast of Gail. Gail is the county seat of Borden County. The town has 200 people. The county has less than 800 people. I drove over one afternoon not long ago, just to see the countryside. I noted the strange orange "tunas"' (prickly pear fruit) that are only found along FM 669, amazed they had not been eaten by Mockingbirds and Curve-billed Thrashers this late in the winter.

Before heading for Gail, I looked at "The Roads of Texas" and read the names of the water courses near there: Tobacco Creek, Grape Creek, Rattlesnake Creek, German Hollow Draw, Gunsight Draw, Bull Creek, Mesquite Creek. All of these creeks and draws, the headwaters of the Colorado River, originate at the edge of the Llano Estacado, and drain into Lake J.B. Thomas.

I needed to prowl the few roads of Borden County so I could give substance to some old tales I had just learned. I had been reading Don Biggers' "From Range Land to Cotton Patch" first published in 1904. Biggers and J. Marvin Hunter were itinerant newspapermen here in West Texas. Both were passionate about collecting the stories of the early-day Anglo settlement of West Texas.

My imagination had been piqued by Biggers' recitation of an account about Colonel Randell McKenzie's troops running into the 25-wagon train of the Comanchero, Jose Tafoya, in 1874, so I had spent an afternoon at the Haley Library running down any references I could find to Comancheros. From the early 1600s, Hispanic settlers of the northern Pecos River valley traded with the Plains Indians; first the Apache, and then the Comanche.

They traded metal items, panocha (sprouted wheat which was dried and ground), beans, corn, and blankets for buffalo meat and robes. Sometimes the members of two groups fell in love, which resulted in the "genizaro" (mixed-blood) settlements of northern New Mexico, such as Belen and Tome. Some joined the Comanches, such as Chief Sanchez, a Comanche chief of the early- to mid-1800s, painted by George Catlin and met by Captain Randolph Marcy.

At the Haley Library, two volumes of McKenzie's correspondence produced colorful information about the Muchaque country, hence my little afternoon spin in the country. I wanted to see the landscape, and then sit and imagine the scenes recorded.

Grape Creek crosses U.S. 180 west of Gail, and FM 669 south of town. I looked for any sign of "live" water. In McKenzie's reports, Grape Creek is noted as having a number of active seeps and springs, and mention is also made of a small marsh-edged lake. In this area, his troops found a winter village of 150 Comanche teepees. Comanchero Polonio Ortiz, shackled and "convinced" to help, guided the troops to the location.

From the late 1840s until 1874, a lively trade in stolen livestock existed. The Comanches stole thousands of Texas cattle, and then traded them to the Comancheros. In turn, the Comancheros would trade the cattle not only to other Hispanic settlers of the upper Pecos Valley, but also to U.S. Army forts, such as Fort Bascom. As many a million Mexican horses and mules passed by the region on their way to middlemen in Indian Territory to supply the plantations of the south and later, the 49ers.

At Anton Chico, they traded with a man by the name of Jennings. Ironically, he was an associate of the infamous Sante Fe Ring, which ended up appropriating the lands of the owners of the Spanish Land Grants. Comancheros were often the "pastores" who tended the sheep of the grandees of the grants.

Comancheros had built trading posts in several places on the breaks of the Llano Estacado, and the one in the Muchaque region served as a clearing house for the livestock the Indians had stolen in Central Texas. The trading posts were dugouts carved out of arroyo walls, with brush arbors in front of the dugouts. Some of the Grape Creek arroyos have steep walls, so there are many likely locations for the dugout, but I doubt its location is still known.

It may be that the Comancheros used the old Indian trail which winds up at Tobacco Creek, over to Cedar Lake near Seagraves, and on to Monument Springs near Hobbs as the avenue to transport the cattle to the Pecos River Valley. Another possible route would meander along the edge of the eastern escarpment up to Casas Amarillas (Yellowhouse Canyon) near Lubbock, where another Comanchero encampment existed. Trails to the Pecos River also led across the Llano Estacado from there and Los Lenquas Canyon, funneling the cattle stolen from northern Texas to the Pecos Valley.

Los Lenquas Canyon, near present day Quitaque, was the site of Jose Tafoya's trading post, the largest of the Comanchero encampments. McKenzie forcibly impressed Tafoya into the Army's service in 1874, which resulted in the final major defeat of the Comanches in the Palo Duro and Tule canyons. Tule Canyon is where McKenzie killed 1,500 Comanche horses after the battle. For services rendered, McKenzie gave Tafoya more than a hundred of the horses, and a like amount to his Lipan Apache and Tonkawa scouts.

When troops were in the Muchaque region, Lipan scouts informed the officers the area had been their wintering camp until the early to mid 1700s, when the Comanches had forced them southeast to the San Saba and Nueces River. What was the Comanchero role in that change of territorial possession I wondered? The Lipans made dozens of treaties with the Spanish settlers in Texas in the 1700s, hoping to gain Spanish protection from the encroaching Comanche. Did the Lipans have a long history of enmity with the Hispanic settlers of the Pecos River Valley?

Imagining the pre-Anglo history of our bioregional homeland is difficult. Most historians have focused only on the deeds of the soldiers and early cattlemen. Early writers, such as Biggers, reflect discriminatory attitudes about the Hispanic presence. Even today, Comancheros are imagined as caricatures of lowlife gangsters by many aficionados of history (especially Hollywood moviemakers), and not as everyday humans caught up by the forces of their time.

I parked at the end of the bridge over the dry channel of the Colorado River on FM 669 and walked down under the embankment. Under my feet the tiny purple blossoms of filaree opened to the midwinter afternoon sun. The filaree came with the Spanish to the new world, and has spread over every pasture from Central Texas to California. The ancestral seeds of the plants I stepped on were probably brought in the fleece of the 30,000 sheep that Jesus Perea brought to Tahoka Lake and Casas Amarillas in 1876, the year of the last big herds of buffalo. The seeds could have also come with Coronado in the 1540s, for he drove sheep to feed his small army.

When I left, the inane chant resounded again - Mushaway, Muchaque, Muchakooga! Mushaway, Muchaque, Muchakooga!

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