The Callahan Divide is named for James Hughes Callahan, a
soldier and officer during the Texas Revolution and the war with Mexico in
1845. The term is loosely used to describe all of the hills from near MaryNeal
all the way to Baird. On the southside of the divide rainwater joins the
Colorado River, while on the north all waters flow to the Brazos River. The
Divide has also been divided by cartographers and resource managers into the
Nolan Divide (from Buffalo Gap to just south of Sweetwater,) while the
westernmost hills from there to a few
miles west of MaryNeal have been called the Champion Divide.
The northside of this range of hills is a place of
surprising diversity of plant and animal life. Plants from Hill Country and
even East Texas grow within yards of plants that are common on and near the
Llano Estacado and Stockton Plateau to the west. Until the mid to late 1600’s
the area was home to tribes that are grouped together as Jumanos, who farmed
and lived along the rivers and hunted in the hills. From then until 1750 it
became the territory of the Lipan Apache, when the Comanche pushed them further
south. Near the end of this trail is a
wide flat open area, where hundreds of arrowheads have been found, indicating
that the spring here was a favored camping ground. The Lipan Apaches and Comanches may have had fall camps near the spring as
they hunted and dried the winter’s supply of buffalo meat. The buffalo wintered
a little further to the south in colder winters, but may have stayed in the
Brazos drainage until winter’s cold sent them south with a blizzard.
Plants are full of stories, as well as serving as food,
medicine, dye, and material with which to build.
1. The first
plant we will look at is Cowpen Daisy. Its story was invented by the Navaho
Indians who live in the 4 corners, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New
Mexico meet. In the Civil war the Navahos were imprisoned at Fort Sumner in
eastern New Mexico, along the Pecos River.
An elderly vaquero who lived near Imperial, Texas, told me the plants would cause lightning not to hit his house, which is
the point of the story the Navahos told so far away. How the story traveled 300 miles down the
Pecos, is unknown.
Here is the story; There was a little boy who was mean. He
talked back to his parents, hit his little brothers and sisters and stomped
every bug, lizard, frog, or turtle he saw. He was far from his home one day, when
a thunderstorm grew quickly. Hail was falling between his home and where he
was, and the thunder followed the lightning immediately. He became scared, and
he began to panic “Where will I hide? “ A voice answered him, under the cowpen
daisies. He looked around and saw no one. Lightning struck within a few feet.
“Hide under the cowpen daisies.” He obeyed immediately. He lay under the plants
crying and shaking as lightning struck all around. After what seemed forever he
heard the voice again, “It is okay, the storm is passing.” He opened his eyes
to see the source of the voice, and there was a horny toad right in front of
his nose, and the lizard was nodding his head up and down. Ever after that the
little boy behaved his parents, and was
nice to his brothers and sisters, and only killed animals for the dinner table,
not for fun
2. Early settlers
made jelly from the bright red berries of algerita every May. Their tart juices
gave the homesteaders a good dose of Vitamin C, after a long winter without fresh
green vegetables or fruit. Algerita
bushes are planted by birds (by pooping the seeds as they sit in a bush already
there) You will often find cactus, algerita, sumac, hackberries, and moonseed
vine growing under a tree or larger shrub. The wood at the base of algerita is
a bright yellow, and was used by woodcarvers among the Indians and settlers.
The bark has berberine in it, and was used in herbal medicines. Algerita is the
West Texas name, but south of the Colorado River it is known as agarita, while
down in the brush country south of the Edwards Plateau it is known as agrito, a
Spanish word that means “the little sour one” in English. Many of the first
generation of Anglo ‘s that settled the western Callahan Divide were people
from Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and drawled more than the earlier
Texans to the south and added “ls to
words. Until the 1930’s most people lived in the country, and not in the towns
and cities, and everybody in the area knew about algerita and its great tasting
jelly. The new yellow wood was used as a medicinal tea for stomach ailments,
and when eyes and noses were running.
3. Everybody here should know the mesquite. It grows
almost everywhere in West Texas. It has big thorns. Folks use it in their
barbecue pits for flavoring, and woodcarvers make everything from gunstocks to
rolling pins with its wood. The Indians used it for food, grinding up the beans
into flour that tastes like applesauce. The flour was mixed with water made
into flatbread (we call them tortillas today), or added to stews to thicken
them. Further west in Arizona were places Indians pruned the mesquite to make
the harvest easier. If the Indians let
the water and the flour ferment, tiswin (an Apache word) was the result – a
mild beer like drink. The sap of the tree was cooked down until it formed a
very sticky paste, which was used as glue, especially in fletching feathers to
arrows.
4. Hackberry is a common tree in the draws of the flatter
land north of the Callahan divide, but which live all over the rocky hill
slopes, as well as in the canyon bottoms. Before the Spanish came in the late
1500’s to New Mexico, honey bees were not present. By the 1700’s the canyons
had many wild bee colonies, some of which still exist to this day. If the early
Indians wanted something sweet, they had to process fruit. Hackberries, though
small, when boiled for a long time, made a sweet paste, which was poured on
rocks to let the sun dry. The fruit leather could be chewed, or added to stews.
The fruit attracted turkey, especially to where groves of hackberry were found,
providing an ease in hunting during the season of fruit fall in the winter.
5. Soapberries have much larger berries, but are not edible.
If the berries are added to a pot of hot water, soon suds would begin bubbling
over the edge. Along with yucca,
soapberries kept the Indians clean. Since you cannot see yucca here, and this spot was a favored camping ground,
surely the Indians used the soapberries as they bathed in the spring water. The
saponin (the chemical in the soap) floated downstream, they discovered it would
“stun” the fish. Comanches ate fish, sometimes, but the Apaches never did. The
Jumanos ate fish.
6. When Anglo settlers settled the Divide they found a
rockwall near the spring. It may have been a sheepherders camp, from the mid
1870’s, when Hispanic pastores
(sheepherders) from northern New Mexico took advantage of the declining powers
and numbers of the Comanches and brought
in thousands of sheep that grazed the Llano Estacado and the breaks (headwater
canyons and valleys of Colorado, Brazos, and Red Rivers). Rock walls have been
found in the breaks of all of the rivers that headwater on the Llano Estacado,
for they helped keep the sheep close during storms and the night time. By the
early 1880’s Anglo ranchers claimed most of the land, and the pastores
retreated back to New Mexico. For
relaxation, and to honor the pastores, Temple Dickson built these rock walls
during the 1980’s and 90’s.
7. In the wide open
spaces of West Texas, Indians, Hispanic pastores, and Anglo settlers all
learned to look for cottonwoods if they needed water. A person could see the
tall light green trees from many miles away, and know that water would be
available there (even if they had to dig in the soil or gravel.) All of the
people throughout the region’s history probably purposefully planted cottonwood
along most of the streams in the region. The Comanche found that the inner bark
of the cottonwood (and the willows) made a good survival food for their horses
in long cold winters and dry times when grass did not grow. Cottonwood has a soft wood, so some Indians
would carve dolls and kachinas, painting and dressing them up, either for
children’s play, or for storytellers to illustrate their stories and
myths.
8. We have finally reached the spring. The springhouse to
the right was were the earliest settlers here kept their food cool before
electricity reached this remote area, which was as late as the 1930’s for many
people in this region. Bottles of milk, produce, and even meat were cooled in a
springhouse. Early settlers often planted watercress in the streams on the
north side of the Callahan Divide. The small leaves that rest on the surface of
the water. Like the algerita berries,
it was another source of needed nutrients, especially in the spring.
9. Many of the streams along the Callahan divide also have
colonies of mint planted by the early settlers. It could make gyppy or salty
water taste good enough to drink, as well as being a great addition to salads and
some stews.
10. We will swing up to the cactus along the fence. The
prickly pear cactus fruit (known as tunas) are tasty to eat, and make great
jellies as well as a refreshing drink, when mixed with other plants, like the
mint. The pads themselves are edible, after being cut in strips and soaked in
brine. The result is known as Nopalitos, which are great in huevos rancheros
(scrambled eggs)! Bags made of the skin of the prickly pear (with the prickly
spines removed) have been found in caves in Texas along with artifacts from
8000 years ago.
11. If you look close at the prickly pear pads, you will see
that some have lots of white stuff (like cotton) on the pads. If you remove one
of those white fluffballs and roll it in your hand, your fingers will turn bright
red. This is a great dye. Once the Spanish discovered it in the 1500’s (being
grown in vast plantations in Mexico by the Aztecs), they made millions of
dollars selling the dye to the church and other rulers in Europe. A ship full
of cochineal dye was worth more than a ship of gold! It was the first red dye that would not wash
out of cloth after every washing. Eventually
the English stole the prickly pear and the bug from the Spanish and started
producing the dye as well. Early American settlers on the east coast had to
fight the redcoats (English) in the 1770’s to make the United States an
independent country.
12. We will swing
back down to the creek and stop at one of the pecan trees. Pecans are native in
the Concho and Colorado River bottomlands to the southeast and southwest and in
the Brazos river bottoms a little further northeast. Indians would plant the pecans along creeks,
spreading its range. It was the source of trade, both before the Spanish
arrived in Northern New Mexico, and after.
In the 1600’s mule loads of pecans from the Colorado River went first to
Santa Fe and then south, sometimes all the way to Chihuahua City in Mexico. The
Dicksons planted these pecans, but there may have been a few in the Callahan
Divide before settlement. Being excellent wood, many pecans were used as
building material; so the range before Anglo settlement is not known, as not
many settlers wrote down what sort of plants were on their property before the
resources were utilized until they vanished.
13. Cattails fill the streambed. Cattails are also edible –
the roots when cooked tastes like potatoes, while the pollen makes great
pancakes. The leaves make great mats,
not only to sleep on, but the Jumanos and Apaches often built wickiups of
willow and draped mats of cattail over the willow framework, and added old
animal hides when rain was coming. The cattails in front of you could feed all
the kids here today for a week! The new male bloom shoots at top are fine to
eat raw. The fluffy seeds made a soft lining for the diapers of Indian babies,
and were stuffed in life jackets in World War II when the Japanese took over
the kapok plantations in the south Pacific.
14. The grass to the
right with the long nodding seed heads is wild rye. The seed is large enough to
grind into flour. Where ever there is rock in West Texas, sooner or later
mortar holes can be found, some dating back 8000+ years ago. Sometimes the pestle will be found, too. Wild
rye only grows in moist canyons and draws.
15. On the slope to
the right are young junipers (most folks in the Callahan Divide call them
cedars). It is another great wood for burning (like mesquite) for the campfires
of the Indians and the chimneys of the early settlers. The berries were harvested to add flavoring
to teas and stews by the Indians, but Anglo settlers made gin with the berries
(a strong alcoholic drink.) When barbed wire came to the region in the 1880s,
thousands were cut down for fenceposts, some of which still stand, with the
original barbed wire. In the Colorado river valley to the south free range
ranchers cut the fences of the wealthy landowners who put the fences up, and
for about two years masked men rode the countryside destroying fences.
16. The trees with the slender leaves along the creek are
willows. Every culture in the world knew to make a tea of its bark when you had
a headache. In the 1880’s Dr. Bayer (in Germany) distilled what we now know as
aspirin from the tea. (Remember what the Apaches used willow for? They also
used the bark in baskets, too.) You may notice buttonbush mixed in with the
cattails and willows, too, with its round black seedheads. When it is blooming
thousands of insects (butterflies, wasps, flies, and more) come to feed on the
pollen.
17. We have walked for a little ways, and we will stop here
to look at two plants with silvery leaves. Look close at both species…and
figure out what makes them silver colored.
It is hair, isn’t it…it helps this plant survive drought, for the
stomata on the underside of the leaf are not exposed to the wind, so less water
is lost. This big patch is “Holy Sage.”
When Indians of many tribes prayed they offered dried and ground sage to the
six directions before praying. When they took a sweatlodge steambath as a cleansing
ritual after warfare, they rubbed the fresh leaves on their skin, and drank tea
made from the plant. The tea settles your stomach, and somehow helps you sweat
even more.
18. Not too far away is Horehound. It is not native, but
came on the Mayflower and on Cortez’s ship before he attacked the Aztecs. It
has spread over almost all of North American. It was brought, along with
Mullein, for medicine to treat coughs. Folks still make horehound candy, to
ease the pain of a sore throat, and to stop coughs, because it works! Out of
the 300+ species of plants growing wild on the 69 ranch at least 60 are plants
from other places. We are always accidently carrying seeds when we travel. Can
you figure out some ways?
19. Underneath the corner Pecan in this little grove that
Mr. Dickson planted, you see small plants (about a foot tall) with gray leaves
and blue blooms. This is trompillo, or purple nightshade. If you take the green
berries and drop them in milk, it splits the milk into curds and whey. Pour off
the whey and put the curds in cloth and wait a couple of days, and you have
asadero cheese, and if you have ever
eaten a quesadilla you have eaten asadero! What makes it marvelous is that if
you eat the berry it is poisonous, but the poison is not transferred to the
cheese (you pull the berries out of the curds.)
20. Turning back to the creek, you can see a thicket of wild
plums. Until the Anglos settled, the bears would have been thick in the
thickets when the fruit was ripe. The bears were quickly all eliminated, but
they seem to be “invading” the Hill Country in recent years. In another 30
years, there may be bears here again. Wild plums make great jelly, as well as
fun to eat off the bushes. People planted the wild plums in the new towns
before the railroads arrived. Some ranchers maintain a patch to make jelly
every year.
21. Before getting on
the trailer, look across the creek at the little cliff. Looks a little snaky,
doesn’t it? You should be mighty careful, if you were thinking about going
there. We are stopping here, and going back to the house. If you are a little hot, hunker down in the
shade for a moment, and drink some water! You have only walked a quarter miles
and discovered lots of things. A person can walk this trail every day for 50
years and always see something new. If
you get interested in learning about the out of doors you will never be bored
again!
22. As you ride back
on the trailer…keep looking on the left side of the trailer until you see the
cane cholla. A local folk tale claims that these were planted by early Indians
as trail markers, leading up the eastern side of the llano estacado, point the
way to good water. Other folks say they arrived with sheep, especially in the
1950’s when many ranchers had to switch to sheep to survive. In the 1940’s bed
side lamps made with the woody skeleton of the cactus were popular items sold
at stores specifically built to sell to tourists in many southwestern U.S.
towns.
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