Child of the Caprock

Abstract

In the depths of the Great Depression, I was born and raised at Turkey, a small town a few miles from the rugged eastern escarpment of the Great Plains in the Texas Panhandle. My earliest memories are of looking toward the west and seeing the purple face of the escarpment, the Caprock, stretching from Eagle's Point on the north to twin Quitaque Peaks to the south. This is an incredible land of rugged canyons whose crimson walls are streaked with bands of white gypsum. Pale green mesquites and dark green cedars cover the flats. In the deep recesses that cut back into the plains are gushing springs of sweet Ogallala water and pools filled with cattails and bordered by giant cottonwood trees. Bison and mammoth bones are scattered in every gully that cuts this breaks country at the foot of the plains. As one might expect in this ideal ecological niche, archaeological sites are encountered at every tum, and these are littered with flints in every color of the rainbow, with names like Alibates and Tecovas. How could a boy grow up in this land and NOT become an archaeologist? Aunt Willie Mae lived on Los Lingos Creek at the foot of the escarpment and had a sizeable collection of colorful Indian artifacts, every one of which had a story attached. We would ride the Doodlebug train over to spend adventurous weeks with her. On one such visit, she gave me a small arrow point and flint hide scraper in a little cloth Bull Durham tobacco sack, and I was hooked. I had to learn how to read these rocks the way she could.