Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  Life in West Texas has never been easy, and the idea that people might choose to live in such hard country has always seemed improbable. In the sixteenth century, when the Spanish first passed through the area defined by the confluence of the Devils River, the Pecos, and the Rio Grande, they encountered hunter-gatherers living in small groups and saw no profit in the land. When the Americans came through, three centuries later, they saw this canyon country as just another dangerous obstacle on the way to California, a desolate march between Fort Clark and Fort Lancaster best left to outsized characters like Jack Hays and Bigfoot Wallace. Military maps all noted the presence of Indian paintings, ghostly reminders of those who had been here before and were no more.

  Westering migrants and settlers in the 1850s often entertained the pretty pseudoscientific fiction that human activity would somehow stimulate the rains. They believed that civilizing moisture would follow their wagons and herds as they pushed into what was then known to cartographers as the Great American Desert. When Texas cattlemen, among them Perry Wilson, drove their livestock into the open rangeland along the Devils River, they found what many called a stockman’s paradise. Cliffs along the Rio Grande and the Pecos made access to water difficult for livestock, but the Devils was more approachable. Before long, the high grasses in its ambit began to fail as drifting cattle damaged the thin mantle of fragile soil. Herds of sheep soon followed, grazing the native short grasses, and when the hard desert thunderstorms came, little by little, the soil washed away. Perry and his cattle stayed on the Devils for three years and then moved on. T.A. returned with his wife, Bettie, and their young children. Some of us are there still, but the rural society and economy that nurtured generations of my family is mostly gone, swept away by the abstract forces of globalized economics, the vagaries of the commodities markets, and the brutalities of a desert climate. By the time I was wandering on horseback along the Devils River, the glory days of the sheep and goat industry were behind us. Grasslands had given way to the invasive mesquite and cedar, and drought was just a way of life.

  The passage of the ranching world was swift. Not so the world of those who came before us. Humans first left enigmatic evidence of their presence there at sites like Bonfire Shelter, the oldest and southernmost example in North America of a bison jump, where pre-Clovis hunters drove their prey off a cliff, and Cueva Quebrada, another shelter where the butchered bones of Pleistocene mammals were found in deposits dating to some fourteen thousand years ago. As the rainfall gradually diminished over the millennia, and the big game disappeared, people either adapted and endured or moved on. Those who stayed developed an ingenious hunter-gatherer economy based on desert plants and small animals and the occasional deer. Eventually, they died out or moved on as well. Some left paintings as a record of what they had learned about life in this place.

  Growing up here, I had little awareness of those ancient people, though signs of their presence, their flint-knapping sites and earth ovens and wickiup rings, were all around me. I heard about Indian paintings, but as a child I never paid them much attention. I had no idea that a complex of rock shelters just miles from my family’s ranch contained one of the most significant bodies of rock art in existence. Still less could I have suspected that those paintings, created for mysterious reasons some four thousand years ago, might speak to us today.

  I arrived at Seminole Canyon on a cool, windy morning in late March. The plan was to meet up with a group from the Shumla school, an archaeology and educational center near Comstock, and spend a week studying the rock art of the Lower Pecos. I hoped to learn more about the deep history of the landscape in which I was raised, about the ways humans had tried, successfully and not, to live in it. Rain had been falling all across the state, and there was some hopeful speculation that the drought might be drawing to an end. I was doubtful; the last year had been so dry that even the cedar was dying. I asked Elton Prewitt, a Shumla archaeologist, if he thought the drought was over. Paleoclimatology, it seemed, had some hard lessons to teach us. “What people don’t understand,” Elton said, “is that from around eighty-five hundred to about forty-five hundred years ago we had two back-to-back two-thousand-year droughts out here that were much more severe than anything we have experienced in historic times.” These droughts were separated by a moist interval of perhaps a hundred years. “That’s the way it goes out here. You get a brief cool moist period and you get hot and dry, with flashy spring-summer rains, which of course creates erosion and floods.” We talked about the big 1954 flood, a “one-in-over-ten-thousand-year event in this country,” which scoured many of the local canyons but didn’t reach any of the major pictograph sites. The Pecos River people were no strangers to heavy weather.

  Seminole Canyon

  Once our group of professional archaeologists and amateur rock art enthusiasts had gathered, greetings and introductions behind us, we hiked down into Seminole Canyon, which feeds into the Rio Grande gorge a few miles to the south. Scarlet ocotillo blossoms stood out in pleasant contrast against gray skies and gray limestone. Clumps of green thorny shrubs, black brush and catclaw, prickly pear and sotol, dotted rocky hillsides almost devoid of grass or anything resembling soil. Looking up and down the steep canyon, I saw two great cavities in massive limestone cliffs, where water, cutting its meandering way through the sedimentary bedrock, exploiting joints and weaknesses thereunder, had over time carved out spaces where humans and other animals might find shelter from the sun and wind. Early settlers and ranchers used such shelters as well, both as dwellings and as ready-made barns for livestock.

  Pictographs came into view as we approached Fate Bell Shelter, reached by a narrow trail along a jumble of boulders and small trees, Gregg ash and persimmon among them. Spilling out of the shelter was a talus slope of burned rock, untold centuries of household garbage. The largest pictographs were massive—one is about twenty-eight feet tall—and when these paintings were in full, vibrant color, about four thousand years ago, they would have been visible from across the canyon. Most of them had faded over the centuries, and dust from excavations and looting still clung to their surface, but many remained vivid and distinct. These were mostly Pecos River–style pictographs, which appear in a dizzying variety of shapes and sizes. Figures of deer, a mountain lion spitting blood or speech, a winged anthropomorph sprouting antlers from his head, and strange ghostlike creatures covered the wall in what at first appeared to be a chaotic jumble, with images running into and over one another. Carolyn Boyd, Shumla’s executive director, pointed out the careful lines and the challenges that faced the ancient artists. Slowly, I began to glimpse the planning and skill that must have gone into these paintings.

  Interpreting ancient rock art requires hard physical evidence as well as an openness to the possibilities of visual communication. The paint itself provides clues. Using pigments derived from local minerals such as manganese, limonite, hematite, and ocher, the artists needed something to act as a binder, like egg white or blood. The most likely candidate, Boyd believes, was animal fat, specifically deer marrow, mixed with a soapy liquid extracted from yucca root. That combination not only works, she said, it makes a gorgeous paint. From the archaeology of these dry rock shelters we also know quite a bit about what these people ate. By the time the Pecos River style suddenly appeared, roughly forty-two hundred years ago, the climate was far too dry for the buffalo, and the people mostly lived off wild food plants, the sotol and lechuguilla they cooked in earth ovens, native onions and oregano, wild fruits like persimmons and grapes. They ground acorns and mesquite pods in their rock mortars, several of which we could see right here in Fate Bell. Their fossilized feces, known as coprolites, reveal that grasshoppers were a staple, as were minnows, snakes, lizards, and any other small creatures they could catch. They organized group hunts in which rabbits and deer were driven into snares or natural traps, but meat was evidently not a large part of their diet. It was hard country, especially during the long dry spells.

  “When I fir
st started working out here,” Carolyn said, “I was told that the paintings were graffiti, or that it was something that they did only in their leisure time. Well, if they were using animal fat, they were sacrificing food off their plates, because fat was a precious commodity. In the desert you’re not going to find a lot of sources of fat, so that was a group sacrifice. When a deer was caught, which was rare, it was a communal sacrifice to make the paint. That shifts our understanding away from what you do in your leisure time to what you do before you do anything else.” It’s possible they spent all year collecting materials, making paint cakes that could be used for some special festival or ceremony when the whole community would come together.

  But who were these people? And why did they consider these paintings so important? If Carolyn was right that the paintings were narratives, that they could be understood as North America’s oldest surviving books, what were they communicating? Was it possible that we could decipher the messages?

  For many years, archaeologists had little to offer in the way of an explanation. The pictures were beautiful and intriguing, but they were hard to understand, and no scientific methodology had been established for working out their meanings. One prominent theory was that the Pecos River–style pictographs were shamanic visions, records of hallucinogenic trances, journeys to the spirit realm. Others thought they depicted warfare. Ultimately, the meaning of the artwork was thought to be lost. Scholars claimed that it died with the culture that produced the paintings. Soldiers and railroad workers had little interest in what seemed to be primitive graffiti; often they simply added their own names to the wall or used them for target practice. Landowners, preoccupied with making a living, were usually content to leave the paintings alone.

  When Carolyn first encountered these images in 1989, she was an amateur, a professional artist fascinated with Indian paintings, but she was unable to reconcile what she was reading about the pictographs with what she was seeing in the shelters. As an artist, she thought it obvious that the panels were conceived and executed as compositions. They weren’t just random indigenous graffiti or an anthology of individual shamanic visions, but she was equally sure that the archaeology profession would never listen to an outsider like her. So she went and got her doctorate in archaeology from Texas A&M and wrote her dissertation on the rock art of the Lower Pecos. Since then, she and her colleagues at the Shumla center, which she founded in 1998, have transformed the study of these astonishing paintings.

  Carolyn’s methods are painstaking. She and her team have recorded the pictographs in dozens of sites, drawing them herself and repainting them to scale, quantifying their motifs, then comparing her data and the iconographic patterns that she has identified with the ethnographic record. Her research has led to the discovery, after decades of hard work, that the Pecos River pictographs seem to be depicting certain archetypal myths of the great Mesoamerican civilizations, the Aztecs and the Mayans, and especially the Huichol, a culture whose religion has remained remarkably free from Christian influence to this day. Linguists and anthropologists have long surmised that some common linguistic and cultural ancestor must have existed to account for the profound similarities of language and religion among the Mesoamerican civilizations. They call the original cultural strain Proto-Uto-Aztecan. (Uto-Aztecan languages include those of the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Huichol, as well as those of northern cultures such as the Ute, Hopi, Shoshone, and Comanche.) Many scholars believe that the Proto-Uto-Aztecan culture would have originated in what is now the southwestern United States, possibly in the Great Basin region, before spreading outward across the continent. One strand of that migration seems to have passed through the Trans-Pecos, leaving behind paintings that represent the archaic core of what eventually developed into the Mesoamerican religions. It may very well be the case, Boyd surmised, that “the origins of those belief systems are first documented in the rock art here on the Lower Pecos, four thousand years ago.”

  White Shaman Shelter

  Carolyn received powerful confirmation of her thesis in 1999, when she took one of her renderings of the White Shaman panel to Real de Catorce, in northern Mexico. She showed the painting to a Huichol man there, and “he became very quiet, and he said, ‘That’s our pilgrimage,’ and proceeded to tell the story of the peyote hunt using that panel as the storytelling device.” Years later, in 2010, a Huichol shaman came to Shumla and told Carolyn that his people had traveled along the body of the great serpent and that the serpent passed through this place.

  The central ritual of the Huichol religion is the peyote hunt, a pilgrimage to Wirikùta, the Huichol spiritual homeland near Real de Catorce, that reenacts the birth of the sun and the creation of the peyote cactus. The Huichol say that their ancestors, wolf people who were neither human nor fully animal, were led out of the cold dark west and through the underworld by the deer, who sacrificed himself when they reached their destination in the east, Dawn Mountain. When the wolf people slew the deer, his body became peyote, which they ate, and the sun rose for the first time. According to Huichol traditions, peyote still grows in the tracks of the sacred deer, and they believe the life-giving rains follow the deer as well. Indeed, for the Huichol, deer and peyote and water are all symbolically indistinguishable. Other stories tell of a Sacred Deer Person who flew down from the sky with peyote in his antlers. When the sun sets in the west, he then rides through the underworld on the back of the deer, gathering water as it goes, water that the sun will give to the people and the land when he reaches his zenith, during the summer rainy season. When the Huichol perform their pilgrimage today, they do so to ensure that the sun will rise anew each morning and that he will gather up rainwater from the underworld, without which the world will surely die.

  —

  Later that first day, after settling into our tents on the Shumla campus, we hiked past the remains of prehistoric earth ovens on the uplands, to a small shelter known as Javelina Grid. On the way, Elton showed us how to recognize the signs of middens resulting from those ovens, the mounds of earth and the fractured and heat-darkened limestone. Cooking sotol and lechuguilla for several days to make the plants digestible required a huge investment of time and labor in return for a meager amount of nourishment. And yet for thousands of years these foods were a staple. Stories I’ve heard, from my father and others who lived through the hard times of the 1950s, when livestock were obliged to eat ground sotol, appear somewhat differently when considered in that light.

  We picked our way along the slope of the canyon. Wild oregano grew thick and unbelievably fragrant alongside native tobacco. Javelina dung carpeted the ground inside the shelter. We found room for just two or three people to crouch below the smoke-blackened ceiling. Several moments passed before I was able to grasp what I was seeing: an abstract grid pattern had been incised everywhere, all across the ceiling and walls of the shallow depression. Elton pointed out that similar sites are found up and down the Pecos. No one can say for sure who made these carvings, or when, but the same patterns were found on incised stones at the Gault Site in Central Texas, an important source of artifacts from the Clovis culture, once believed to have been the first to inhabit North America. Jim Keyser, a rock art specialist from Oregon, spoke cautiously about “entoptic phenomena,” visual patterns that reflect the structure of the optic nerve. They show up in the early stages of a hallucinogenic trance. Unlike the massive figures we saw at Fate Bell, which were very public, communal, and probably required the construction of scaffolding, this art was private, best experienced by one or two individuals, perhaps as part of a vision quest.

  Over the next week, as we hiked into shelters on the Devils River, the Pecos, and neighboring canyons, we saw much of this odd scratching, both on its own and among the more dramatic large-scale murals of the Pecos River style. Many of the paintings had been deliberately scarified, as if someone were trying to collect chips of paint. In some sites the chipping, scratching, incising, or rubbing was everywhere; at others it was highly s
elective, as if the figure that was singled out were a special source of power or an object of fear. Often it was the antlered figure of the Sacred Deer Person, his tines adorned with peyote buttons, who was scratched most aggressively. Perhaps those chips of paint were used in rituals to summon the rain, or to start new batches of paint, to be used in rituals to ensure the sunrise.

  One day, after a harrowing night of thunder and wind threatened to carry off our tents, we all climbed into pickups and headed out on Texas 163 north of Comstock. Leaving the blacktop, we drove through one ranch after another, carefully unlocking and locking gates as we bounced down fourteen miles of dirt roads, until we came to the magnificent canyon of the lower Devils River, just above its confluence with Dead Man’s Creek. We waded the river, stepping over deeper channels cut in the smooth bedrock as monstrous carp coursed up and down the swift stream at our feet. Our destination lay miles upriver, so we walked carefully along the eroded limestone, among shapely grooves and terraces and overhangs. We examined veins of chert, and Jim Keyser explained the techniques used by the Indians to mine that glassy silicate mineral used for knives, scrapers, and projectile points.