Indians of the Jornada-Mogollon culture on the Llano Estacado – 1100-1300 A.D.

Water Wolf had just endured another long painful night, unable to sleep soundly because of his aching shoulder.  During the wee hours he had risen from his bed, being careful to not disturb his wife of thirty years. He went out of the door of the pithouse and sat down, facing the east, waiting for sunrise. A half-dozen other pithouses were nearby, dimly visible in the starlight. Two of them belong to the families of his daughters – his sons had married girls in other communities along the salty river to the west, on the other side of the sanddunes.  The other houses belonged to his wife’s sisters and their families. One structure was reserved for storing ceremonial equipment and attire, and the last structure was a community storehouse.

Thirty years before, he had convinced his wife and her sisters to move closer to the plains where pronghorn were plentiful, and buffalo sometimes roamed in the rainiest years. He and his brother’s-in-law hunted in the fall, harvesting far more meat than they could use. They took the excess to the settlements on the salty river for trade, their dogs dragging travois laden with the dried meat and hides. Their community also served as a waystation for traveling traders.

Sometimes a trader would go no further than the community – especially the traders from the grass house peoples far to the east. Once a year a trading party from far to the southwest, from a great city known as Paquime, stopped overnight on their way to visit the grass house people far to the east. They returned to their home via a different route. These traders told incredible stories, stories that stuck in the mind. Water Wolf had painted two giant horned serpents in the ceremonial house as a mnemonic device to remember some of their stories. Horned serpents guarded water – especially springs.

Water Wolf had received his name for roaming the sand dune country and finding water in many places. He discovered that water could be found by digging near certain plants, and then waiting overnight – and he found where animals maintained “wells” in the dunes. Until he had, few of the people in the communities along the salty river ever ventured into the dune country. He had disproved some of the stories told about the “bad spirits” of the dunes.

Some of the settlers along the salty river believed that the people that left the giant spearpoints among the bones of giant buffalo in the region of his community would someday return. They believed that Water Wolf’s community would be destroyed. Water Wolf decided that the relicts were very old – he had found the artifacts deep in the soil along one of the draws that led to one of the salt lakes of the region. If the artifacts had been buried that deep, it would have had to happen many lifetimes ago.

Water Wolf’s shoulder and arm hurt all the time, and would make the rest of his life miserable. Once he had been known for feats of strength. He could chop wood day with a stone axe to shape the timbers for the pithouses from the junipers along the edge of the plains. His bow was strung tighter than bows of most other men. He used a bow made from the orange-wood tree of the grass-hut people, and the bow was famous among the people of the salty river. It hung in his house, unusable, now. He hated not being able to use his arm – to raise his arm above his head would bring pain to him that sent him to his knees.

This fall he would not be going with his sons and their cousins on the fall hunt. One of his brother-in-laws would not be going either, due to a knee that no longer allowed him to run. On the fall hunt, the group would run for a full day to the east, to a large playa with a spring. A small herd of buffalo was always there, even if the lake basin did not have standing water. They had found the bones of the giant buffalo there, too, along with the curved tusks of some giant animal, tusks longer than a man. Other old bones were there, too – a giant cat with huge fangs, along with other bones that belonged to no animal that existed today.  

The one elder that would be going on the hunt was not a good leader. He told his oldest son-in-law to go along with the elder, but to realize that he may have to convince his cousins to disobey their father if the elder made a bad decision. The group would be leaving not long after daybreak – so Water Wolf began praying for their success when the morning star cleared the horizon.

 Water Wolf did not worry about the village being attacked while the hunters were gone. The plains to the east were a formidable barrier. It was a featureless expanse of grass that took a five-day walk to cross, where travelers went with out water, if not guided by someone who knew about the hidden waters.  In the draws of the plains, there were places a person could dig and let water seep into a hole, and some of the playas had small springs at their edge.

To the west were people of his culture. Water Wolf had heard stories from the traders that some of the farming people in the big towns far to the northwest were in the middle of a war fueled by religious differences. A new religion, the kachina religion, had begun, influenced by the Paquime traders. He did not think that his little village would matter, even though they had begun worshiping in the manner of the kachina religion. The traders from the northern towns did not pass through his village. They went to visit the grass house people by going along the river that bisected the plains in a canyon far to the north.    

********** This story is set in the 1200’s. Water Wolf’s people were the eastern Jornada-Mogollon Indians. When pottery shards are found on West Texas ranches, it is evidence that the Jornada-Mogollon people may have utilized the landscape. By the 1300’s the pithouse villages along the Pecos and Hondo River were abandoned. (One village, west of present day Roswell, was destroyed by warfare.) Some of the people became Jumano Indians, following a similar lifestyle, and others became people that followed the buffalo that became more plentiful in the region at that time. Remains of small pithouse settlements have been found along the western edge of the Llano Estacado, and even near some of the playas on top of the Llano.