stomp dance and seminole politics...

Luther rode up to the stomp dance near Wewoka, Oklahoma late in the night. Folks had been drinking and singing for hours.  Couple of Sac and Fox men with a long history of being with the same woman alternatively had a good fight and the crowd was laughing, taking bets.  Luther had heard that one of the Payne’s from Mexico was in the neighborhood. The Payne’s were one of the families that rode with Wildcat and John Horse back in the 1840’s. After Wildcat died in the mid 1850’s, a number of the Mascogos, the Seminole Blacks, had come back to Oklahoma and made a personal peace with the responsibility of trying to adjust to “civilized” behavior.

Luther’s wife, Maynee, was the daughter of the trader who sold Seminole products to a wider market. Her daddy had been adopted by the Seminoles, for his fair and honest dealings, and one of his wife’s closest friends was Alice Brown Davis, sister of the leader of the tribe at the time. Her mother was the daughter of the Boston missionary that joined John Bemo in schooling the just transplanted ex-Floridians in reading, writing, and “righting” (which meant religious instruction in a private family story.)

As Luther tied his horse to a wagon wheel belonging to C.M. Wilson (one of the Anglo ranchers married to a Seminole woman. He was looking for Isaac Payne who had come this time, so he had heard. The family in Oklahoma had sent word to Fort Clark that one of matriarchs was dying. Isaac was one of the patriarchs. Isaac had won a Medal of Honor saving Capt. Bullis’ life. The members of the Seminole Scouts  (both active and retired) served as a dispatch service between ranchers, bankers, army officials, and law enforcement.  (a nephew of Isaac, John,  would become a renowned fighter in the  exhaustive Villa years). 

One of his cowboys was yet another Payne family member. The Payne’s had been economically tied to Osceola’s people back in Florida, prospered and had many children who all came to Oklahoma and eventually even much farther beyond.  Samson Payne finished tying his horse and touched Luther’s shoulder and pointedly glanced at a lean figure in a Seminole turban leaning up against a blackjack oak at the edge of the clearing. Half dozen elder men and women were gathered there.

Samson pointed at some women cooking at some pots and both went and filled up bowls and found a place to sit to watch the dancing and the rest of the “going-ons.”  His wife’s mother wanted to see Isaac.  The Mexican government was moving the Mascogo people from Nasciemento to near Musquiz. Families had been raised in Nasciemento, and many of their people were buried there. The Catholic Church had even built a chapel for future encouragement to replace the people’s Gullah roots with a veneer of Christian indoctrination. People were contemplating moving to Oklahoma. His mother-in-law wanted to hear how many, and be sure to encourage her husband to lay in important supplies in case they arrived destitute.   

Samson and Luther went back for seconds, and then returned to their spot a third time after getting a small flask of whiskey from Samson’s older brother.  Some of Samson’s friends dragged him over to where folks were talking about some folks gone bad and taken to raiding other towns for things to sell at yet another town. Luther stuck the flask in his pocket.  Several men stopped by to talk, wanting to hear a report on who might be needing extra hands soon. They were farmers, looking for a few extra bucks when it was time to ship the herds being wintered for Texas cattlemen. C.M Wilson dropped by, saying that Bull Shannon from down near the old Fort Concho was getting ready to go to Kansas City and start dickering for the highest price. Luther had a few head thrown in with Wilson and helped him keep an eye on the herd all winter, and would soon accompany the herd to the KC stockyards. Wilson agreed to give him some money Maynee could come on the next passenger train.  It might be the best chance for a truly special honeymoon- like trip. 

They had been married a couple of years. Maynee was a big help, riding her big horse Ben would let  nobody else ride. Being and in love with no babies taking his best girl away from him had been the happiest time of Luther’s life. Things were about to change. Maynee had told him she was pregnant.

The stomp dance ended at daybreak. People headed home, back to milking cows, cutting wood, back to the everyday routine. Folks would move slow all day, but for the most part it had been a great time, exchanging news from up and down Gar Creek and a half dozen valleys in every direction.  After a while Luther and Isaac were about the only ones left.  Alice Brown Davis rode up in a surrey (Luther had been a surrey driver for a Seminole woman with an Anglo husband when he was a young teenager.) Both men recinched their saddles and slipped bridles on their horses, and swung up after brief polite greetings. 

the breaks trail for the people of Indian Territory

Maynee and Alice were the best of friends. Maynee was with her parents, Reverend John Lilley and wife Mary. Alice was with her family but she and her brother John Brown roamed along the wagon train on ponies, helping keeping stray stock headed in the right direction for a while, then galloping ahead to find out road conditions. Sometimes she and Maynee took messages to the Seminole Indians in the wagons from the handsome Army official Elijah Brown in charge of the move from Kansas by the Northern Seminoles back to their homes in Indian Territory after the Civil War ended. Maynee spoke Seminole and Creek, having been raised in her father’s Presbyterian mission school. She rode astride, as did Alice, much to her mother’s patrician dismay. Alice was Seminole.

The mission school had burned, but Reverend John Ramsey was opening a new school. She would teach there, after their arrival. Over a thousand of the Seminoles had died in Kansas during the war. Supplies from the government had not come in a timely fashion, and their quality had been horrendous. Sanitation had been inadequate, with resulting epidemics.  Many of them had left producing farms and solid homes when the Indian Territory had become a battleground between the North and South. Many Indians of many tribes had been enlisted on both sides.

In the late 1840’s many Seminoles had moved to Mexico. Some members  of their families had stayed in Indian Territory, and during the war had stayed put, eking out an existence labored with roving bands of gunmen looting and killing, and groups of militia from both sides that appropriated their food. The horrors of the last four years were finally coming to an end. Everyone was filled with hope for the future, although knowing that it was like starting over again, as they had in the late 1840s after the Seminoles were forced to leave Florida.

When they neared the North Canadian River, a rider from the south eased into the wagon train as it circled up for the evening camp. It was one of the sons of John Horse, who had been under Maynee’s mother care during an epidemic just after their arrival. John Horse was the leader of the black Seminoles (escaped slaves and their descendants) who had come with the Seminoles who had helped them survive the Floridian swamps.

When traveling from Mexico to the Indian Territory, the Seminoles and the Seminole blacks traveled up the Devil’s River, then down the South Concho River, up the North Concho, over the divide to the Colorado River, then thru the badlands to the Brazos, and on up to the little Wichita and Red, to the Wichita Mountains and home.  Traveling through Comanche territory along the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado was safer than along the roads of Texas and its slave trade and anti-Indian attitudes.

Their guest had been sent to help relatives who had gone with the Seminoles that had accepted the protection of the Union. It would be the first they had heard of their relatives in Mexico for three years. After he had been introduced to Army official Brown, Maynee went with him. His older sister had been captured by slavetraders as the black Seminoles headed to Mexico, but had managed to escape and return to Indian Territory. She had helped at the school and was another of Maynee’s friends.

After greetings, their guest told his story. He had some bad news, fresh on his mind. He had been with one of Wildcat’s sons, who had died on the way. To avoid the big winter camp of the Comanches at the head of the Colorado River southeast of Muchaque Peak, they had swung west, counting on the freshwater spring on Sulphur Springs Draw, and the seep springs at Tahoka Lake before coming down the Pease River. 

 At Sulphur Springs draw waterhole his friend had developed a great pain in his side, and died in agony the next day.  Maynee knew to call it appendicitis. Nothing could have been done. (The first appendicitis surgery came 25 years later.) She had to leave then, for Mr. Brown had requested her interpretative services. With the Seminole lands on the other side of the river, what would be the best course of action? Who needed help – who could manage on their own? For the next three hours she sat with the Seminole and Seminole black elders’, becoming more and more impressed with the officer’s respectful handling of his charges. He spoke with his heart, and carefully thought out his duties.

This is a fictionalized version of the beginning of my great-grandparent’s long relationship

1599 on the Llano Estacado

Fifty red and white tepees were clustered under the outer edge of the cottonwood grove.  The clamor of hundreds of dogs greeted Vicente de Zaldivar and the 59 men with him, as they rode down the Canadian River (just northwest of present day Fritch). In the year 1599, the mid-September air was cool, and the vast prairies they traveled after leaving the settlements near present day Espanola, New Mexico were delightfully adorned with many colorful flowers.  They had met a member of the band on the Gallinas River, as he headed home, and he had agreed to show them the way.  Zaldivar hoped to capture buffalo and domesticate them, as ordered by Don Juan Onate, the leader of the new settlements.

The Indians were Querechos or Vaqueros (later determined to be of Apache affiliation.)  The Indians used the dogs to haul travois – two poles with webbing in between then loaded with everyday essentials from the tipi covers to bundles of dried meat and dried medicinal plants.  They hunted the buffalo on foot, using the ancient tricks of wearing calf hides to enter the herds and shoot selectively, and sometimes organizing the exciting activity of driving the herd off of a cliff.

Their guide introduced Zaldivar and his officers to the head men of the village. In the conversation (in sign language), Zaldivar learned that a trading party had just returned from the Taos Pueblo, well satisfied with their cotton blankets, bags of dried corn, collection of pottery, and some beautiful turquoise jewelry.  They had delivered buffalo hides and dried buffalo meat, bags of buffalo tallow and suet, and bags of salt from the salinas of the Llano Estacado.

They indicated the first time their people had seen Spanish men and their horses was the expedition of Coronado 50 years before.  In more recent times, in 1581 the Rodriguez-Chamuscado expedition of three priests, nine soldiers and sixteen Indian servants had introduced the tenets of Christianity. After the expedition had left, the two priests who had purposefully stayed behind were soon killed in a pueblo to the west.  The priests had named the vast plains now known as the Llano Estacado “Los Llanos de San Francisco” after their Catholic order. The next year Antonio de Espejo’s expedition had confirmed their martyrdom.

For a month and a half Zaldivar tried to corral adult buffalo, and after failing at that, corralled calves, which struggled so mightily to escape they died. The expedition turned to killing buffalo, processing over a ton of tallow (along with dried meat and hides) to bring back to their struggling settlement in the valley where the Rio Grande meets the Rio Chama. Captain Gaspar Perez de Villagra took notes, and in 1610 published an epic poem in Spain about the beginning years of settlement and exploration with its first ever published description of the Llano Estacado; “All seems to be a peaceful sea, with no sort of valley or hill, where a man can in any way, limit his vision or rest it.”  

The expedition was idyllic. The Apaches were friendly, trading small items and were helpful at times. It was the first of almost 300 annual buffalo hunts by the Spanish settlers of Northern New Mexico. The men that did the hunting each year became known as Ciboleros, hunting the buffalo each fall with lances and bows and arrows, then processing the hides, meat, and tallow for transport, 

sometimes trading the products as far south as Chihuahua. For a hundred years they traded and fought with the Apaches, and in the early 1700’s the Comanches arrived and replaced the Apaches, who moved southeast or southwest or northwest to become the Lipan, Mescalero, and Jicarilla Apaches when the region became under United States control. The term “Llano Estacado” became the most used term for the region around 1800, where one had to bring stakes to tie horses from wandering away and to hang meat from ropes stretched between posts as it dried.

In the 1840’s Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg in “Commerce of the Prairies” described the Ciboleros as open and friendly, colorfully dressed, wearing flat straw hats, and with horse and weapons gaily decorated with tassels and pennants. They roamed the plains in groups of over a hundred men, with women and children along.

I have seen two museum displays about the Ciboleros, but I don’t remember ever seeing mention of them in any text book for primary or secondary level students. Why is this exciting economic endeavor of many years never taught to our children? It is our history!

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?"      

the Solanaceae

Dag-nab it, it has turned out to be another dry dry dry dry dry dry DRY spring.  The pastures are full of dead bladderpod carcasses beginning to shatter in the incessant hot hot hot hot HOT wind. What is a wildflower nut to do? Geez!

            Well, we end up in the bar-ditches, drainage ditches, and floodwater retention depressions.  We walk along singing “we are the ditchmen” instead of the Beatles’ “I am The Walrus” lyrics.

            On a recent traipse near our home south of town, we became fascinated by one particular family of plants (the second most common in the plant kingdom) of which we found eight members in bloom.  I am referring, of course, to Solanaceae, which includes scary and infamous poison plants, some wonderful medicinal plants which are still used in surgical applications today, and some of our most favorite food crops.

 Some members of the family contain powerful alkaloids.  These chemicals assist the plants that contain them in their never‑ending battle to protect themselves from herbivores.  The more potent the brew of alkaloids present in the plant’s constituents, the fewer the species of pests that can safely ingest it.  The most infamous member of the family is tobacco, but it also includes tomatoes, eggplant, and potatoes.

            If you have ever gardened in West Texas, you are familiar with “trompillo,” or Purple Nightshade.  The blooms are oh‑so‑pretty blue stars with yellow stamens, and it produces a pretty green fruit that turns yellow and then dries black.  Sounds nice?  Not with long spiky, gnarly, poky, nasty, horrible spines up and down its stem, and a root that just keeps going down‑down‑down.  It is nearly impossible to pull up, and when broken off, it sends two or three new shoots to the surface.  Wait -- it gets worse!  This demon is a shape-shifter that can make itself look just like any number of  plants it grows next to.  It is hated, vilified, yanked, sprayed, mowed, burned, stomped and cursed every day of every growing season, somewhere on the Llano Estacado. 

Another Solanaceae we found is Datura.  Atropine and scopolamine are two of its chemical constituents which have been used to produce surgical drugs.  Although the concentration of these chemicals varies from plant to plant in response to such stresses as heat, wind, hummingbird moth caterpillar damage, and soil types, it should always be considered poisonous.  Even so, it has been found to pull heavy metals from the soil and the government has done some experimental plantings of Datura in an effort to decontaminate soils that have been polluted with uranium and plutonium.

We also found a round‑leafed groundcover that is often the only plant growing on bare soil slopes:  the wild version of tomatillo.  Everybody knows tomatillo – sί?  Salsa verde con tomatillos may not be as popular here as in the Rio Grande Valley, pero la planta es muy importante to our multicultural heritage!  It has yellow, bell-like flowers hanging beneath its leaves, which later develop into many‑pointed, green, papery bladders that each contain a tiny replica of a green tomato.  Doves, quail, meadowlarks, and bossy curve-billed thrashers harvest the majority of the fruit.

We found three members of a genus similar to Physalis, to which tomatillo belongs.  Dr. Barton Warnock, who produced three wonderful plant identification books for west Texas in the early 1970’s called the Chamaesaracha “False Ground Cherry,” since tomatillo is also known as ground cherry.  Deborah and I call it Saracha because we like to shorten long Latin names into sweeter sounding slang names.  The three species are hard to tell apart.  All of them have hairy leaves and hug the ground, so they are usually half-covered with small particles of sand clinging to their leaves.  Instead of hanging down like the tomatillo, the pale yellow blossoms point straight up at the sky, bright, cheerful anomalies that seem to pop from a plant that otherwise looks dead from all the sand on it.

Along the ditch in tight, gravely soil, we found purple ground cherry, too.  Quincula has potential for use as a landscape ground cover.  Several Llaneros have attempted to decipher its horticultural needs.

The last member of the family we encountered was buffalo bur.  The yellow, star‑shaped flowers are pretty, but the plant is covered with spines.  The leaves, stems, and fruit are all covered with spines, too – and who knows?  Maybe the root is, too, but the heat of this ditch-trudge caused Deborah to declare that it was not worth testing that bit of hyperbole.

We did not find the brown-centered ground cherry, nor any Nicotiana.  Wild tobacco grew in Midland County in the drought of the 1950’s, during which my mom photographed it while documenting the flora and fauna of the county.  We looked for it in every drought since then, but never found it again.  Any time I find myself in an area with sandy, disturbed soil, I still look for it.

Next time you drive by a ditch, look for one these bizarre and wonderful members of the Solanaceae family.  It is a lot more fun than dismissing what is seen with one glance and grimacing, “What a bunch of ugly weeds.  Yuck.”

have rattlesnakes stopped rattling?

Because humans and feral hogs kill every rattler that rattles, the only rattlers left aren’t rattling anymore.”  I have heard that from lots of folks – from folks that call in to the radio show “The Rugged Llano Estacado” on KWEL1070 AM on Friday mornings at 8 a.m., in many emails to me, and from folks asking if it is true on my Facebook page.  Some of the people are very adamant about the truth of the statement. Somehow it has attained the level of “unimpeachable truth” for some people. I have always called it “urban myth.”

Deborah loves to make sure I am doing due diligence on my responses to questions from folks on our local ecology and history, so she went online and searched for opinions on the subject. She found heads of herpetological associations saying it was true, and other such folks saying no.  I love Deborah dearly – and her ability to mentally challenge me (and often times dance circles around me) is one of the many reasons! I am thankful for every time she “shakes a finger at me” and challenges me to verify what comes out of my mouth.

What follows is an excerpt from a story in Arizona;  “Steve Reaves, owner of Tucson Rattlesnake Removal, said rattlers have stopped rattling in recent years in order to avoid being killed. “Normally when a rattlesnake announces its presence, people kill it,” Reaves said. “The snakes that aren’t genetically predisposed to rattling are the ones that are left to breed. They rely on their natural camouflage and stay still so predators won’t notice them. Basically what’s happening is we’re breeding a rattlesnake that doesn’t intend to rattle.” Jerry Feldner, sergeant-at-arms in the Arizona Herpetological Society thinks he first noticed the non-rattling behavior six or seven years ago. “The rattlesnakes people see are the ones where they walk or hike,” Feldner said. “Snakes alongside the trails have learned that rattling gets them in trouble.”

Stéphane Poulin, curator of herpetology at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, said the theory that snakes have recently stopped rattling is a myth.“In the last 25 or 30 years I haven’t seen any change overall with rattlesnakes,” Poulin said. “Overall, rattlesnakes just don’t rattle very often. Most of the time they use their camouflage and try not to be seen. Rattling and striking are unconnected.  A snake can rattle all it wants without striking or strike without rattling.”

Randy Babb, a biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department says, “Most of the work that has been done indicates rattlesnakes actually seldom rattle,” he said. “Their primary defense is not being seen. As long as they feel they’re not being seen, they lie quiet and let whatever potential predator there is wander by. Only when the animal has been disturbed or it’s quite clear they’ve been spotted will they go ahead and rattle.”

On Facebook there are several “groups” mostly made of up of professional biologists, and at least one that is just for herpetologists.  I posted a query to one of the groups, as in – “is there any validity to the theory…” – and it was reposted to another.    Dr.  Harry Greene, professor of ecology at Cornell University, posted; “I don't think there's a shred of published evidence, though the idea has been around since the 19th century.” Dr. Ivan E. Parra-Salazar, who consults for a number of organizations and governmental agencies in both the United States and Mexico, commented; “There is also an individual "personality": siblings kept under the same conditions can have extremely different behavior. Most of the time, rattlesnakes do not rattle, unless they feel threatened.”

It appears there is a general consensus among academic biologists that it is unlikely that rattlesnakes have become quieter and have stopped rattling. Among the avocational herpetologists there seems to be a divided opinion. I couldn’t hear rattlesnakes for several years until I got some good hearing aids, but the few that I have seen since then have rattled when annoyed, but have not rattled if left alone. There is an old West Texas saying – “Never be the third in line walking down a trail. The first person wakes the rattler up, the second makes it mad, and the third person gets bit.”

5 species of squab...

AT the time of the settlement of Midland, only one dove species lived in the area. Mourning doves nested in the pocket forests of mesquite, soapberry, and hackberry in the draws. During the fall migration thousands upon thousands would land in the sunflower covered shinoak sandune habitat and stoke up for moving further south where the ancient oak mottes of the Pecos Canyons gave them winter succor. Their voice is a soft coo, sounding somewhat like an owl. West Texas has long been known as a great place to hunt doves.

In the late 1940s Inca doves moved north, establishing year around residences in towns with plentiful Siberian elm trees to nest in, and in thicker shrubbery. Inca doves are much smaller, and reddish under their wings. Their call has been portrayed as "cold cokes! cold cokes!" They did not colonize the pocket forests, and rarely went to an exurban yard in the cotton farming areas, and almost never to a rural ranchhouse.

In 1980 whitewinged doves also moved north, and again colonized the town. Inca dove and mourning dove populations began declining due to the fierce competition offered by the much larger white-winged doves. Mourning doves not only nested in the pocket forests of the draws, but also the huge prickly pear thicket on 1788 which originated with the cattle drives of the droughty 1930's where the cactus was brought on trucks as emergency feed, while the cattle waited to board trains to greener pastures.

In the late 1990s Eurasian collared doves arrived after escaping captivity in Florida only a decade before, but they first began nesting in cemeteries and exurban yards, before finally moving to the urban forest about 2005. Whitewinged doves still dominate, but the even larger collared doves are steadily increasing. Eurasian collared doves are legal to hunt year around, but by finding safety within the city limits, their numbers have increased.

Pigeons are doves, too, and came to Midland by the 1920's with pigeon fanciers, but not more than a few thousand have ever colonized the rooftops of the taller buildings, large billboards, and other man-made nesting and roosting sites. They have not nested beyond the constructions of man yet in West Texas.

All doves build flimsy nests. Rarely are the nests more than a few dozen sticks seemingly haphazardly thrown in a pile in a fork of a tree branch. They began nesting in March and nests have been found in November, indicating there might be as many as 6 sets of 2 young each year, which allows for the possibility of quick population growth. As a major prey species for several species of hawk, and as targets for tree-climbing mammals like gray fox and bobcat, doves in the wild have controls, but in town, only hawks do the work, and only in the winter. Few house cats learn to shinny out on the skinny limbs where the doves nest.

When the population of doves reaches a saturation point, all of the species are prone to respiratory diseases. Lots of people feed birds, and if the feeding areas are not kept relatively clean, their droppings "turn on them" and disease lowers their numbers -- a standard ecological response to overpopulation. Other birds, especially house finches (the males with red on their head and chest) often get the respiratory disease as well. Canker is a deadly respiratory disease characterized by the swelling in the throat and cheesy growth in the mouth of the birds. It is caused by a protozoan. 

Poor doves... their role is prey if the diseases of overpopulation do not get them. They also slam into windows, thinking reflected sky is safe.  No wonder the white winged doves sing que lastima all day!