From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   1   
   The Wanderer   
      
   They had been on the road for six days, a clan of five bouncing along in a   
   tired wagon, when Bam White woke to some bad news. One of his horses was dead.   
   It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a flat tire, except this was the   
   winter of 1926. The    
   Whites had no money. They were moving from the high desert chill of Las   
   Animas, Colorado, to Littlefield, Texas, south of Amarillo, to start anew. Bam   
   White was a ranch hand, a lover of horses and empty skies, at a time when the   
   cowboy was becoming a    
   museum piece in Texas and an icon in Hollywood. Within a year, Charles   
   Lindbergh would cross the ocean in his monoplane, and a white man in blackface   
   would speak from the screen of a motion picture show. The great ranches had   
   been fenced, platted,    
   subdivided, upturned, and were going out to city builders, oil drillers, and   
   sodbusters. The least-populated part of Texas was open for business and riding   
   high in the Roaring Twenties. Overnight, new towns were rising, bustling with   
   banks, opera houses,    
   electric streetlights, and restaurants serving seafood sent by train from   
   Galveston.With his handlebar mustache, bowlegs, and raisin-skinned face, Bam   
   White was a man high-centered in the wrong century. The plan was to get to   
   Littlefield, where the    
   winters were not as bad as Colorado, and see if one of the new fancy-pantsers   
   might need a ranch hand with a quick mind. Word was, a family could always   
   pick cotton as well.   
      
   Now they were stuck in No Man's Land, a long strip of geographic afterthought   
   in the far western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle, just a sneeze from Texas.   
   After sunrise, Bam White had a talk with his remaining horses. He checked   
   their hooves, which were    
   worn and uneven, and looked into their eyes, trying to find a measure of his   
   animals. They felt bony to the touch, emaciated by the march south and   
   dwindling rations of feed. The family was not yet halfway into their exodus.   
   Ahead were 209 miles of road    
   over the high, dry roof of Texas, across the Canadian river, bypassing dozens   
   of budding Panhandle hamlets: Wildorado, Lazbuddie, Flagg, Earth, Circle,   
   Muleshoe, Progress, Circle Back.   
      
   If you all can give me another two or three days, White told his horses, we'll   
   rest you good. Get me to Amarillo, at least.   
      
   Bam's wife, Lizzie, hated the feel of No Man's Land. The chill, hurried along   
   by the wind, made it impossible to stay warm. The land was so threadbare. It   
   was here that the Great Plains tilted, barely susceptible to most eyes, rising   
   to nearly a mile    
   above sea level at the western edge. The family considered dumping the organ,   
   their prized possession. They could sell it in Boise City and make just enough   
   to pick up another horse. They asked around: ten dollars was the going rate   
   for an heirloom organ    
   — not enough to buy a horse. Anyway, Bam White could not bring himself to   
   give it up. Some of the best memories, through the hardest of years, came with   
   music pumped from that box. They would push on to Texas, twenty miles away,   
   moving a lot slower.    
   After burying their dead horse, they headed south.   
      
   Through No Man's Land, the family wheeled past fields that had just been   
   turned, the grass upside down. People in sputtering cars roared by, honking,   
   hooting at the cowboy family in the horse-drawn wagon, churning up dust in   
   their faces. The children    
   kept asking if they were getting any closer to Texas and if it would look   
   different from this long strip of Oklahoma. They seldom saw a tree in Cimarron   
   County. There wasn't even grass for the horse team; the sod that hadn't been   
   turned was frozen and    
   brown. Windmills broke the plain, next to dugouts and sod houses and   
   still-forming villages. Resting for a long spell at midday, the children   
   played around a buffalo wallow, the ground mashed. Cimarron is a Mexican   
   hybrid word, descended from the Apache    
   who spent many nights in these same buffalo wallows. It means "wanderer."   
      
   A few miles to the southeast, archaeologists were just starting to sort   
   through a lost village, a place where natives, seven hundred years earlier,   
   built a small urban complex near the Canadian River, the only reliable running   
   water in the region. People    
   had lived there for nearly two centuries and left only a few cryptic clues as   
   to how they survived. When Francisco Vásquez de Coronado marched through the   
   High Plains in 1541, trailing cattle, soldiers, and priests in pursuit of   
   precious metals, he    
   found only a handful of villages along the Arkansas River, the homes made of   
   intertwined grass, and certainly no cities of gold as he was expecting. His   
   entrada was a bust. Indians on foot passed through, following bison. Some of   
   Bam White's distant    
   forefathers — the Querechos, ancestors of the Apache — may have been among   
   them. The Spanish brought horses, which had the same effect on the Plains   
   Indian economy as railroads did on Anglo villages in the Midwest. The tribes   
   grew bigger and more    
   powerful, and were able to travel vast distances to hunt and trade. For most   
   of the 1700s, the Apache dominated the Panhandle. Then came the Comanche, the   
   Lords of the Plains. They migrated out of eastern Wyoming, Shoshone people who   
   had lived in the    
   upper Platte River drainage. With horses, the Comanche moved south, hunting   
   and raiding over a huge swath of the southern plains, parts of present-day   
   Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. At their peak in the   
   mid-1700s, they numbered about    
   twenty thousand. To the few whites who saw them in the days before   
   homesteading, the Comanche looked like they sprang fully formed from the   
   prairie grass.   
      
   "They are the most extraordinary horsemen that I have seen yet in all my   
   travels," said the artist George Catlin, who accompanied the cavalry on a   
   reconnaissance mission to the southern plains in 1834.   
      
   The Comanche were polygamous, which pleased many a fur trader adopted into the   
   tribe. Naked, a Comanche woman was a mural unto herself, with a range of   
   narrative tattoos all over her body. From afar, the Indians communicated with   
   hand signals, part of a    
   sign language developed to get around the wind's theft of their shouts. The   
   Comanche bred horses and mules — the most reliable currency of the 1800s —   
   and traded them with California-bound gold-seekers and Santa Fe–bound   
   merchants. In between, they    
   fought Texans. The Comanche hated Texans more than any other group of people.   
      
      
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