charlie goodnight and jose piedad tafoya

"El Llano Estacado es un mundo nuevo, Charlie -- no?" Jose Tafoya sadly shook his head. "I remember seeing this valley black with buffalo thirty years ago. On this trip all I saw was an old sign hanging loose, flapping in the wind, with the words "Buffalo Bones." Underneath the sign were fragments of bone turning to powder." Walter Prescott Webb later estimated five million buffalo ranged from the Arkansas River in the summer to the Concho River and beyond in the winter during Tafoya’s Comanchero days.

In 1893 Texas ranchers including Charlie Goodnight sued the State of Texas to recover the value of horses and cattle stolen by Comanches who traded them to Comancheros from northern New Mexico. Charlie and Jose might have hunkered down in the shade of one of the sapling courthouse trees in Clarendon the afternoon of Jose's testimony. Both had traveled the Llano Estacado and Pecos River Valley extensively when much younger. In the 1920's Goodnight told his biographer J. Evetts Haley, "Tafoya was a wonder, and knew the Plains from the Palo Duro to the Concho by heart." 

"The buffalo aren't all gone. Have you seen the buffalo I gave the Taos Pueblo? Mrs. Goodnight was sickened by the slaughter. In 1878 I roped a few calves and put them on Texas cows. They hated the calves. I had to walk into the pen carrying a fence post so they could get their clabber in peace. The first bull buffalo I had was “old Sikes,” and he busted every barbwire fence I put up. He'd come charging to the horse corral, hook his head under the gate and lift it off its hinges and get his fill of corn. The ponies stifled themselves getting away."

Tafoya cackled at the image. "More than buffalo are gone. One time when I was down between Lagunas Cuates and Laguna de Tahoka on my way back from Muchaque, I ran into thousands upon thousands of turkeys walking across the llano. The flock stretched from horizon to horizon and was a half-mile across. A dozen or more coyotes were flanking them like drovers, hoping for one to get tired. I decided los pavos were headed for the sandhills along the Valle de Simanola to feed on shinnery acorns. They might have been after the big swarms of migrating grasshoppers -- a little further west we found a place where the ground was bare, except for thousands of dead grasshoppers. One of my wagondrivers once thought a swarm of grasshoppers was a snowstorm without clouds, because of the way they glittered in the sun! Now neither the turkey nor grasshoppers migrate as they once did. It was a heck of a sight -- turkeys migrating like buffalo.

Tafoya smiled at the memory, and reflected about the last years of the buffalo. "The hunters chased the buffalo out of the breaks and up on the Llano. They used to only come up on it in wet years, but about the time you were fussing with old Sikes, George Causey was killing them as far west as El Bolson de San Simon and Los Medanos. (Near Hobbs, New Mexico.) A nephew of mine says there is still five buffalo down on the Pecos north of Fort Stockton. He's riding for the "W," living in the open and using his saddle for a pillow. His brother is riding for Add Jones on the LFD and says that old black cowboy knows more about horses than anybody. He says the big herds of pronghorn there are now heavily hunted. I can remember seeing herds of 500. Back in my trading days, there were many more antelope than buffalo on the western Llano Estacado."

Goodnight shook his head. "I hardly ever saw buffalo along the Pecos -- a few old bulls, mostly. Colonel Shafter said he found no sign of buffalo until he got past the sandy country north of Mustang Draw in 1875 -- of course he was there in a wet year!”

"Those bars of lead that Shafter captured on that trip in Los Medanos, the sanddunes below Blue Mesa, I'd traded to Mow-way just a few weeks earlier.  As I told the folks inside, I got most of my tradegoods off the commander at Fort Bascom and the fellow at the Hatch Ranch, including the lead. Mow-way met with Magoosh a few days before Shafter came along and they made a treaty. By teaching him the use of peyote, that old Lipan got Mow-way to agree to not kill him. Mow-way taught Quanah Parker, and Quanah is now the biggest "roadman" of the peyote church. When Quanah came to Ft. Davis in 1884 I was there. I stayed in the house the whole time for fear of my life -- he blames me for telling Colonel Mackenzie about the big camp in Palo Duro. He was visiting the oldest son of that Cibolero who sent 250 wagons full of dried buffalo meat to Chihuahua and Mexico City in 1876. He hired the young man to gather the cactus for him down along the Rio Grande."

Goodnight nodded. "Quanah says peyote has kept his people from getting ruined by drinking too much. I asked him how the old Comanche term for red-headed man became the name for the cactus. He didn't know, but said that for years a redheaded captive was one of their best warriors.

"Speaking of plants -- where did this new tumbling weed come from? This wasn't here before." Tafoya pointed down an alley where a drift of tumbleweeds lined a fence.

"Supposedly some Russians brought it in accidentally with some flax seed to North Dakota in the 1870's and it's been rolling south every winter ever since. There is nothing between here and there but prairie, and when the blizzards of winter blow just about everything heads south. A fence full of tumbleweeds becomes a sanddune after a sandstorm or two. When us cattlemen started putting up drift fences to keep the cattle from going down to the Pecos it caused antelope to become trapped by the fences and die by the thousands. What a sad sight -- critters that could jump the fences but don't -- never having needed such an instinct, they just don't understand. "

"I was talking with my nephew from the LFD, and he was telling me how some of the settlers to the east are killing the prairie chickens. He'd heard that a group of farmers got together during a drought and to make ends meet starting sending the prairie chickens to Fort Worth by the train carload. The farmers had already begun to hate the fat birds -- for they came out of the shinnery covered sanddunes by the thousands and ate up the seed they'd planted."

Goodnight stroked his graying goatee. "A surveyor told me a story about those prairie grouse. It was over in the Brazos breaks, south of Los Lenguas Canyon where you had your trading post "choza" (rock house that was half underground). A grass fire had blackened the country for miles, but a triangle of land between two creeks did not get burned. In that three-mile long strip, every prairie chicken for miles had come to forage. He said they acted unafraid -- they would walk up and clobber them with a stick to get a meal! Talk about fine dining, huh?"

"I like to eat another tasty bird -- those long-legged birds with long curved bills -- I think the word for them in English is curlew -- right?" Goodnight nodded. Tafoya spoke and wrote in Spanish and English, as well as being a fluent speaker of the Comanche language. "When we wingshot them, they fell to the ground and broke apart because they were so fat. I still see quite a few along the Pecos sacaton flats early in the winter, but it seems like there is not nearly as many as there used to be. Flocks used to number in the hundreds and thousands, but it is rare I see more than 50 at any one time nowadays."  

The two men sat silently for a few minutes, lost in personal memories, absently watching a freight wagon train roll past the courthouse. Tafoya suddenly straightened up and exclaimed, "That is Casimero Romero!" The man in question waved and hollered over at them in Spanish -- "I will join you two in a drink when we get settled in!" Tafoya glanced at Goodnight. "Charlie, you treated him with respect when you moved to the Palo Duro south of his sheep range, and for that, you are well thought of by our people. Some of the other sorry sons-of-bitches that came after you, though, I guess they will never pay for their treatment of "los pastores." Tafoya shook his head, and spat on the ground, emphatically punctuating his disgust.

Goodnight nudged Tafoya, "Did you see that pony he was forking? What a fine looking stud!

The Romero plaza at Tascosa was a grand place. He had a trunk full of fine crystal and lace that he said came from Spain over a hundred years ago.  I guess the stories are true, that he has switched to freighting, but I thought he did the Fort Dodge road… I wonder what he is doing here?"

"You ever eat horse?" Goodnight shook his head in the negative. "It is pretty good. The Comanches ate it, and sometimes served it like "fatted calf." They had so many horses… so, so many -- I can not remember the name of that one huge fat old Comanche who could no longer even ride a horse, but still he had over a thousand in his own herd." Tafoya chuckled at the memory.

Charlie kept passing along the news. “I have heard all the ponies that roamed the Wild Horse Desert a ways east of the Medicine Mounds have all been captured or killed. Burk Burnett is ranching that country, now, and has worked out a deal with Quanah to graze even more up on Comanche land near Fort Sill. I saw him at last year's Association meeting (Cattlemen's Association). He was full of stories of stallions that were hard to run down." That comment got Jose in a storytelling mood.

"Chacho Valdez was a mestenero from San Miguel del Vado on the Pecos. He used to come up on the Llano and walk the wild horses down, following them day and night until they were exhausted. Often he killed the stallions and kept the mares, which he crippled by cutting a ligament, then slowly herd them back and use them for breeding stock.  He told me a story about a white stallion at Casas Amarillas that refused to be caught -- have you heard it? It has become a tale told often at cow camps."

"The one that kept getting away from him, day after day, and finally he and his men had cornered on the bluff above the playa?" Tafoya grinned at Goodnight's question, and finished up the story.

"I love his description of how the stallion turned and watched as the men cut off all the escape routes, and then reared and pawed the sky over and over. He said the stallion gave the most anguished neigh he had ever heard from a horse as he stood facing them after the last time he reared. With a shake of his head and mane, the stallion turned around and ran faster than he ever had before and when he came to the edge of the bluff he jumped up higher than he'd ever seen a horse jump. When Valdez got to the edge of the bluff and looked down, the stallion was sinking in the salty mud and only his head was visible. As he told the story, the horse had somehow turned far enough around he was looking Valdez in the eye. Chacho said the pride in his haughty glare made he and his men weep. Chacho never went mustanging again." Both men sat reflecting on the story, until Charlie offered a more cheerful thought.

"I have heard of a handful of wild horses running wild, still. That big open country west of the Concho supposedly still has a few -- but how they live, I do not know. You know as well as I that wild horses rarely got more than five or six miles from water. Anytime you saw thickets of mesquite, you knew you were that close to water -- I guess sometimes that during droughts the wild horses had to eat mesquite beans and they caused it to grow that far out of the draws, leaving the seeds in their droppings as they searched for grass."

"I was amazed to hear the other day that mesquite was supposed to come to the Llano with Spanish cattle. How in the world did that story get started? Every valley with deep soil in the whole region always had mesquite -- and how in the world would that story explain the Ghost Forest of the Breaks?"

Goodnight sat up a tiny bit straighter. "Yeah -- I've never heard a story that explains the Ghost Forest. An old Tonk at Fort Griffin said that region of dead mesquite near the Double Mountains was there when he was a kid, and that must have been in the late 1700's. That region could be downright spooky when it was foggy -- riding among all those old trunks reaching 15 feet or higher, their branches sticking up like arms over the good sideoats and bluestem. One time when I was exhausted after chasing Indians during the Civil War, I rode through in a fog and it seemed like the old trunks were dancing."

"You and me, Charlie, we have seen a lot of things that are now ghosts, you know. How about the bears of the breaks? I bet they have all been killed by now. And the wolves, they too will become only ghosts of memory."

"The ghosts ride with us like that lobo I saw along the Pecos. It was the only wolf I ever saw along the Pecos.  On cattledrives I often would ride a couple miles or more ahead of the herd to pick the best route. That old lobo followed me for over a week, from Toyah Creek to the area along Seven Rivers where Ma'am Jones has her place. I decided it was lonely, and I bet ghosts get lonely if nobody knows their stories. I wonder if in a hundred years anybody will remember the incredible numbers of animals once here?"