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Hide, Robe, and Tongue
Hide, Robe, and Tongue
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The near extinction of the Southern Plains Bison and the decline of the Wild West
“One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings.” – Ursula K. Leguin, Kinfolk A keystone species of the American western frontier endures in the conservation area of Caprock Canyon State Park. The park is situated in an area of Texas called the “Big Empty,” a swath of eleven counties in a state of post-industrial rurality and population decline since the 1930s.
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLOTTE FOREMAN
Estimates suggest that the number of bison in the Great Plains, a broad expanse of flatland spanning the Central United States, once numbered almost sixty million1. On their infamous expedition, Lewis and Clark reached the Great Plains in late August of 1804, and reported that the tremendous herds “darkened the whole plains.” William T. Hornaday, one of the co-founders of the American Bison Society, attests, “They lived and moved as no other quadrupeds ever have, in great multitudes like grand armies in review, covering scores of square miles at once. They were so numerous they frequently stopped boats in the river, threatened to overwhelm travelers on the plains, and in later years drained locomotives and cars.” As late as 1800, bison numbered almost 20 million. Even by 1850, less than 10 million still roamed the Great Plains, and yet by 1890, the Great Plains population of bison dwindled at less than a thousand. It took about thirteen years, from 1811-1883, to bring the animal to near-extinction2. Not only a testament to the rapidity with which the United States economy industrialized, the mass slaughter of the bison on the Great Plains also sounded the death knell of the Old West as we knew it:
a frontier founded upon self-sufficiency, individualism, small-scale agriculture, and mythic American democracy in praxis. The region is known as “the Big Empty,” a large swath of the Texas state “moving towards oblivion,” its population steadily declining since 1930. The region’s bison remain nominal, especially in regards to those of pure breed, and many are sequestered to conservation areas or commercial herds. While Caprock Canyon State Park in Quitaque, Texas houses around 200 Southern Plains Bison – the Texas State Bison Herd, comprised of descendents of the original Charles Goodnight herd – conservation efforts that reintroduce bison to their former range are often purely nostalgic, as it has proven difficult to reintegrate the bison as a productive member in its environment. A facsimile of the old frontier remains amid the vestiges of the Wild West – a “scene of rapid and lawless resource extraction” where “quick profits, quick exits” drove it into its very dissolution3 .
While indigenous Comanche people did hunt the bison for many years before Euro-Americans arrived on the Plains, they were much more resourceful in their use of the animal, and their hunting techniques only allowed for a few bison to be killed at a time. The introduction of horses as a hunting technology improved upon specialized bison-hunting techniques, but it wasn’t until Euro-American professional hide hunters arrived on the Plains that the mass slaughter truly began. With weaponry superior to the Comanche’s spears, they were able to kill over 100 bison at any one time, only to harvest their tongues, hides, and at times, their bones, for fertilizer4. That is, the Euro-American hide hunters did not have sustenance as their goal; rather, they sought to turn a profit on the coveted bison hide and robe. A single hide would sell for about $2.50 each, translating to about $68.00 today, meaning that in a single excursion, a band of hunters could earn the equivalent of about $10,0005. Bison hides would be made into machine belts, and their robes into rugs or blankets. Tourist potential in bison hunts also encouraged the slaughter of the bison. For privileged Easterners and European royals, the nostalgic value of the mythic frontier drew them to buy into extravagant bison hunts, where grazing bison made easy targets from the windows of newly-built railcars. The Northern Pacific Railroad especially capitalized on patrons’ interest in and sentimentality towards the bison, and sometimes served surplus bison meat slaughtered in Montana in their dining cars. “The buffalo is the most profitable farm animal in America today,” Charles Goodnight attested, accounting for why Euro-American development of the western grasslands was largely incompatible with the preservation of the keystone species of the pre-conquest plains6 .
Without the initial preservationist impulse of Mary Ann Goodnight, the wife of cattle rancher Charles “Chas” Goodnight, we would not have a pure Southern Plains Bison alive today. Charles Goodnight is known for bringing the first herd of cattle to, and starting the first cow ranch in the panhandle of Texas, the rectangular piece of land
It wasn’t until Euro-American professional hide hunters arrived on the Plains that the mass slaughter truly began. With weaponry superior to the Comanche’s spears, they were able to kill over 100 bison at any one time, only to harvest their tongues, hides, and at times, their bones, for fertilizer. That is, the EuroAmerican hide hunters did not have sustenance as their goal
at the top of the state. In early news publications, he is described as profoundly interested in the progress and advance of civilization, and a friend of the indigenous Comanche who first populated the area. Goodnight is largely responsible for the area’s development, in early correspondence encouraging business partners in New York to come out to the Texas panhandle, assuring them that if they didn’t strike it rich in oil, they were sure to find a great profit in land and cattle. In an article about Charles Goodnight, James W. Freeman writes:
“At the close of the Civil War, Mr. Goodnight knew every watering place in West Texas, and was so well acquainted with the topography of the country that he could direct his way anywhere over a vast region even by the light of the stars. He never had a compass, and was never lost on the prairie, although hundreds of times he was alone, many miles from his companions. In his opinion, a woodsman is born, not made.”7
To be sure, Charles Goodnight appeals to our modern-day imagination of the American cowboy: independent, self-sufficient, spirited, courageous, and full of grit and a knowledge of the land. He is often celebrated for his work in the Texas panhandle, most notably for his conservationist efforts to save the Southern Plains Bison and early experiments in cross-breeding the bison with cattle to create a hybrid herd. More optimal for beef production, he called this hybrid species a “cattalo,” now more commonly known as “beefalo.” However, not all agree that Charles should be credited for the formation of the Goodnight bison herd. In her early literary production entitled “She Saved the Buffaloes,” Annie Dyer Nunn calls for us to credit Mary Ann for the conservation of the Southern Plains Bison, rather than Charles. Nunn writes:
“Picture in your mind a rude log cabin in the heart of the Palo Duro Canyon, a place of appalling loneliness where the deep rumble of the roaming buffalo or the howl of a coyote was the only sound to break the stillness, and you will have some idea of the first Panhandle home of Mrs. Charles Goodnight, the woman who saved the Buffalo for Texas.”
Mary Ann was the first white woman to settle on the frontier of Texas, at first leading a lonely life in the sprawling expanse amongst livestock and roughhewn men, but eventually she came to love her life on the plains. “Range code” allowed ranch residents to leave their doors unlocked, as it was understood that cowboys would come by unattended homes and help themselves to the food inside8. Mary Ann grew to love playing hostess for these men, and extending friendship toward the native Comanche and Quanah by offering up lunch or supper to weary travelers. Disheartened by the decline she saw in bison numbers on the plains, Mary Ann asked her husband to capture some orphan calves from the southern herd in 1878. Charles
thought the idea to be wholly impractical, but he too was sympathetic to the bison’s plight; laying in bed at night, the couple heard orphan bison calves bawling, “crying for mothers slaughtered during the day.”9 By then, the millions of buffalo that comprised the Southern herd were gone – all that remained were a pitiful group of about 150, that had fled to a secluded corner of the Palo Duro Canyon. He successfully captured several calves, and raised them on JA Ranch, where he worked at the time. While Charles first doubted Mary Ann’s idea to safeguard some members of the Southern Plains Bison herd, the Goodnight herd came to be one of the largest and best known bison herds in America. After Mary Ann and Charles passed, the Goodnight Ranch and herd changed hands several times, and there was even talk of killing the final members of the herd in a “last great buffalo hunt.” Public outcry thankfully halted this effort, and the herd remained in the Palo Duro. Occasionally, the bison escaped the canyon, and after this had happened enough times, they were permitted to stay on the JA Ranch. In 1994, German conservationist Wolfgang Frey contacted Texas Parks and Wildlife, having calculated that the Goodnight herd held a rare genetic marker that indicates they are the last group of Southern Plains Bison remaining in North America. Later that year, Texas Parks and Wildlife accepted the donation of fifty head of bison from the JA Ranch, a herd that came to be known as the Texas State Bison Herd, housed in Caprock Canyon State Park. Since then, the park has undertaken conservation efforts to not only preserve the Southern Plains Bison, but also return their habitat to its natural order, through vegetation studies, grazing control, prescribed fire, and the injection of herbicide into invasive species.10
In his 1893 thesis, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner asserts that the core values of American democracy and individualism are rooted in the rugged conditions of the western frontier, rather than in the business deals struck between privileged Easterners over boys’ club luncheons. It’s no small coincidence that the values of the American West reflect those of American patriotism at the height of the Revolutionary War, the very values that the United States was founded upon. The same penchant for rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, courage, grit, and democracy allowed Euro-American settlers in the northeast to even conceive of statehood outside the British Empire, let alone set course along a path toward independence in a sprawling continent, barely yet explored by the Europeans. In fact, Anna Tsing writes that the development of a productive frontier heavily relies upon settlers’ blind faith, the very impossibility of its conception. She writes, “Frontier culture is a conjuring act because it creates the wild and spreading regionality of its imagination...A distinctive feature of this frontier regionality is its magical vision; it asks participants to see a landscape that doesn’t exist, at least not yet…”11 To be sure, America in its entirety was at once a kind of frontier – the prospect of development and advancement in an otherwise seemingly unoccupied place. Of course, after the genocide of native people upon European settlement in North America, we now know this to be a perilous train of thought, but it cannot be denied that imagination played heavily into the very possibility of a United States, and so too the Western frontier. An investment in the myth of American individualism inspired Euro-Americans to expand into the western frontier, and an investment in the very same ideas of self-sufficiency and grit keep families in largely abandoned, rural towns in the Plains today. These families endure against the odds of hardscrabble land, a merciless climate, and continual decline and depopulation as towns relinquish their residents to surrounding larger, urban areas.
These are the conditions of the Wild West today, in a state of slow decay in the shadow of a rapidly industrializing economy. A shift from small-scale, family farming, to large-scale, mechanized commercial farming, means that modern-day farming requires only a small percentage of the human labor it once did. Many farmers have been laid off or been forced to take up service jobs in town to sustain their livelihoods. Yet, the imagination of the frontier is so powerful that the legacy of the West endures as the image of American heritage. The keystone species of the bison, as he is preserved in Caprock Canyon
State Park, is symbolic of the decline of the Wild West. The conservation of the Southern Plains Bison is nostalgic for a time when the bison was integrated in Plains life, before his very survival was antithetical to ideas of modern progress and industry. That lore lives on, heavily reliant upon a tourist economy, showing just how precarious, just how outmoded, those values our country was founded upon really are.
When we entered Caprock Canyon State Park, we saw no bison. We had just made the seven-hour haul up the Texas state highway, fueled by gas station burritos and Monster energy drinks, and gray skies loomed overhead: the enemy of the budget tent camper. Uninspired to pitch our tent in the drizzle that began not too long after we checked in, we decided on a scenic drive around the park, binoculars in hand, to see if we could spot one out in the canyons and bluffs. These “red beds” are so-termed after the terracotta, orange, and white hues of the shales, sandstones, siltstones, and mudstones of the geologic formations exposed by headwater erosion through the canyons. The park is located along the Caprock Escarpment, a long, narrow rocky formation as high as 1,000 feet that forms a natural transition between the flat, high plains of the Llano Estacado to the west and the lower Rolling Plains to the east. Shaped by the wind, rain, and streams that course through it, the canyon system boasts almost 230 million years of geologic history: layers upon layers of caliche; sediment; fossils of giant amphibians, sabertoothed tigers, shovel-jawed mastodons, giraffe-like camels, and three-foot long tortoises; petrified wood; reptilian teeth; and veins of minerals, including gypsum, calcite, geodes, and jasper. One can’t help but imagine textbook reproductions of T-rexes and stegosauri stampeding the place. Yet here we were, in four-wheel drive, seeing the ancient expanse from the comfort of our SUV. 12,000 years ago, the giant bowls of these canyons held now-extinct mammoth and giant bison, as well as camel and horses – the very same terrain on which our fellow campers were hurrying to hook up their campers, grill cheeseburgers, and crush beer cans beneath their boots before the evening storm.
We had come to see the Texas State Bison Herd, a conservation effort in Caprock Canyon State Park to preserve the last of the true Southern Plains Bison. If you’ve never heard the classic cowboy song “Home on the Range,” the “unofficial anthem” of the American West, it goes a little something like this:
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam, Where the deer and the antelope play, Where seldom is heard a discouraging word And the skies are not cloudy all day
The Southern Plains Bison are the very same alluded to in the verse above (I should mention that in Northern America, the terms “bison” and “buffalo” are used interchangeably, despite the fact that the only true buffalo – Cape buffalo and Water buffalo – are found only in Africa and Asia). Other Southern Plains Bison do exist outside the park, in mostly commercial herds, but they’ve undoubtedly been crossbred in the past hundred years. Railroad construction between 1867-1883 separated the heart of the buffalo range, resulting in two different herds, the Northern Plains Bison and the Southern Plains Bison12. The fragmentation of the herds had a drastic impact on genetic diversity, especially as the herds were hunted to near extinction and preservationists, while probably saving the bison from extinction overall, crossbred bison just to keep the numbers up. This began the trend of bison conservation with a goal of preserving the species not as a functioning part of the plains environment, but as a curiosity, a tourist attraction.13
We’d driven the whole stretch of winding road through the park, and still hadn’t spotted a single bison. The rain by then had let up, so we decided to go set up camp, thinking we might then have time for a short hike before dark. Piles of bison poop, the size of dinner plates, in the brush behind the site – unnerving, but promising. The sheer size of its shit is a clue to the bison’s hulking size, which can be anywhere between 815-910 kilograms. A Southern Plains Bison can run
up to 48 kilometers an hour, and a fourteenth pair of ribs (one more pair than standard cattle) supports its hump, the huge shoulder muscle that supports its head and allows it to plow through deep snow in winter. Bison wallows, bowl- like depressions in the earth made when bison roll around on the dry ground to alleviate skin irritations, prevent insects from biting them, or to cover themselves in a layer of dirt to shield themselves from ticks and lice, create mini-wetlands, enhancing the growth of prairie vegetation that require moist conditions. Even their hoofprints, when they collect water, are large enough to host these alternative habitats.14
We hiked out about a mile and a half into the exposed sandstone of the canyon. Early Mexican travelers who passed through the area had a common saying: “Hay sierras debajo de los llanos.” There are mountains below the plains. It was true; steep inclines preceded rock and earth slides down the other side, the path winding through hills of red shale. The moist clay beneath our feet dampened the sound of our footsteps. Every once in a while, we stumbled across a stream through the canyon, one that had clearly been there for thousands, if not millions of years, judging by residual grooves in the stone and mud, and the accompanying chains of alluvial vegetation. If there is anything a canyon system teaches, it is that the earth is a workable mass, as subject to influence as we are to nature’s delegation. Earth talks to itself, and earth answers back. The canyon system is the terrific evidence of that argument, a network of relations.
Every quarter mile or so, we spotted another pile of bison excrement. We glanced around nervously, as if the colossal thing could be hiding in the surrounding brush, just waiting for some young urbanites to spook. By five in the afternoon, we were disheartened. We’d finished the hike, and still not one bison to speak of. Time for a drink, we thought. We decided to drive into town, a generous term for the municipality of Quitaque that houses Caprock Canyon State Park. Pronounced “kitty-quay,” the town derives its name from an indigenous language, meaning, “the end of the trail.” A 2010 census enumerates a total population of 411 inhabitants. We climbed into our car and wound our way towards the entrance of the park, where we almost choked on our Gatorade. The bison. At least a hundred of them, in a swath of pasture near the park headquarters, gnawing on prairie grasses: blue gramma, sand dropseed, and little bluestem. A few of them rolled around in the dirt like huge puppies. It was almost comical to see the tricked-out pick-up trucks entering the park in the distance behind these ancient things. We joked the reason the park kept telling us to keep our forty-five meters’ distance wasn’t because they are easily aggravated, but because we might discern their gigantic puppethood. I mean, they just looked so prehistoric – those horns? The calves were scattered about the field like kids around a television after school, listlessly awaiting their parents’ return from work. The bison did move incredibly languidly, as if they were salaried to graze the sprawling expanse in time with the sun, migrating from a designated prairie maintenance area in the east by morning, to the pasture adjacent to the park headquarters in the west by night. Because they feed mostly on grass species and selectively avoid other plants, bison have significant influence over prairie biodiversity. Because of their selective eating patterns, they leave certain areas ungrazed, allowing for a broader representation of plant species on the prairie. Their waste acts as a natural fertilizer, and promotes the continued growth of native prairie grasses. Near
eradication of the bison, whose grazing favored the dominance of short grasses, allowed invasive, taller grasses to expand westward. Part of Caprock Canyon’s conservation efforts for the Texas State Bison Herd include prairie restoration initiatives to repair the deleterious environmental effects of the near-extinction of the bison on the plains. These efforts aim to return the prairie to the conditions closest to what they were when bison dominated the plains prior to the late 19th century, and are integral to decreasing the presence of invasive species like juniper and mesquite, woody vegetation that the bison shies away from when grazing.15
The fact that we discovered the bison exactly when we weren’t looking for them is actually quite telling of the bison’s migratory patterns. Migratory animals move in predictable, often seasonal patterns to well-defined food sources or places for specific activities, such as breeding or calving. For the bison, this is not so. Often called “grassland nomads,” bison move in ways that appear almost random for human observers, in search of food or other specific needs. They will travel ridiculous distances in search of grass, a behaviour that is probably largely responsible for keeping them from domestication and exploitation through breeding efforts.16 These endeavors are thwarted by the fact bison totally resist human control, a fact that has earned them the title of “monarch of the plains.” William T. Hornaday, who spearheaded the American Bison Society in 1905 with Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Harold Baynes, was the chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian, and understood the compromised ethicality of keeping the bison in such confined captivity. “In captivity he fails to develop as finely as in his wild state, and with the loss of liberty he becomes a tame-looking animal,” he wrote in 1887. Even with a total expanse of 300 acres in the original grazing area, Caprock Canyon decided to emancipate the bison herd from these confines so they could graze the entirety of the park freely in 2004.
Caprock Canyon’s decision to release the Texas State Bison Herd from their designated grazing area is critical in distinguishing modern-day conservationist efforts from those initial efforts of the American Bison Society. Original advocates of bison preservation were western ranchers who hypothesized ownership of the last remaining bison could be profitable, and elite easterners who had an interest in replicating the mythic, masculine frontier. That is, the interests of the American Bison Society were not ecological, to an end of saving the bison itself, but rather economical and zoological. To the American Bison Society, the bison was symbolic of untamed nature, the frontier, and masculinity, and their central objective was to
“bring men back to nature.” In the late 19th and 20th centuries, an aggressively masculine pop culture arose in reaction to the mechanization of life in an industrializing society. Because of this, preservation efforts became predominantly seen as a male concern; preserving the grit and valor perceived as central to American identity demanded a certain manliness. Privileged easterners romanticized the “hardier days” when bison roamed the plains, a sentiment Teddy Roosevelt evoked when he asserted, “The preservation of one icon of the old west – the bison – would help to preserve another – the cowboy – at the very time when some Americans feared that the disappearance of frontier conditions threatened American culture.”17 On the other hand, Caprock Canyon’s decision to release the bison from a small grazing area and into the larger expanse of their natural habitat prioritizes the needs and comfort of the bison, as well as maintains as its goal the restoration of the naturally biodiverse Great Plains. The Kent Wildlife Trust’s initiative to bring a European relative of the now-extinct steppe bison back to the United Kingdom after a 6,000 year hiatus also exhibits this same commitment to the welfare of the species and bioabundance of the country. By spring 2022, the Wilder Blean project will encourage reintegration of the bison into the wild woodland environment by placing several initial bison into a 150 hectare (370 acres) area in Kent, which will come to span a 500 hectare (1,236 acre) area as the herd grows.18 This environmentalist project demonstrates a worldwide shift in conservation efforts from those that center human interests and exploitation, to those that prioritize kinship with other organisms as a philosophy of conservation.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, one of the leading historians of the American West, also undertakes an analysis of bison conservation revolving around the symbology of the bison in Euro-American and indigenous tribal cultures. She argues that every culture has some kind of creation myth that speaks to its members’ origin and why they’ve been “chosen by providence for a special destiny.”19 For indiginous Plains tribes that roamed western Texas, such as the Comanche, the bison was a symbol of prosperity – all life revolved around the animal, for which as high as eighty-seven non-food uses have been recognized. When the Comanche slaughtered a buffalo, the meat was eaten; the hides were made into footwear, clothing, flooring, and sleeping mats; the sinew was used for sewing and binding; and the bones were reshaped into needles, eating utensils, and other tools. On the other hand, for Euro-Americans, the bison, “the living lion of the American West,” was a symbol of old frontier life, a masculine project that prized self-sufficiency and expansion westward through Manifest Destiny.
Frederick Jackson Turner expounds upon the centrality of colonization and settlement westward in American identity in his thesis, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” stating, “Up to our own day, American History has been to a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner does well to introduce the idea of the frontier as a subject of conceptual analysis. The predominating narratives about the western frontier speak about it as then-unsettled land to be conquered, developed, and annexed as part of Euro-American civilization. These narratives perpetuate the historical erasure of indigenous histories and ameliorate the insidious actions that early Euro-American settlers undertook in order to seize the Plains lands. The very idea that land yet to be settled by Euro-Americans is land for our taking, is early American exceptionalism at work. “So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power,” Turner writes.20 Consideration of the frontier in the context of American exceptionalism can help us understand the continuity of the United States’ ongoing imperialist project, and how this project has located itself as the nexus of American identity since the country’s very beginnings. In her book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna Tsing describes
the idea of a frontier as, “an imaginative project capable of molding both places and processes...not a philosophy but rather a series of historically nonlinear leaps and skirmishes that come together to create their own intensification and proliferation.” Indeed, a frontier is not solely a physical site or a philosophy alleging the promise of geographic expansion or ideological innovation. Geographic discourse about place often insists that humans be at the center of human geography discussion and that controlled, rational discussion about place is less productive than more phenomenological approaches that afford subjective analyses of place. Pragmatists, who insist that ideas like “absolute truth” and “ultimate reality” are not very useful, also doubt that there is a single way a place can truly be. Therefore, for the pragmatist, inquiry about place is less about identifying an objective reality and more about “finding creative solutions to human problems within a given social and cultural situation.”21 Place, then, we can consider also as the summation of narratives that surround it, as well the gaps between those narratives. Besides its conditions as a geographical site, the frontier is the ideological prototype of the American exceptionalism that would characterize American politics for years to come.
In the case of the western frontier, Manifest Destiny, a 19th century belief that the expansion of the US across both American continents was both deserved and inevitable, was the driving force of Euro-American violence on the Plains. In 1835, Dr. Lyman Beecher wrote, “It is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West… let no man at the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West...her destiny is our destiny,” (Turner). In 1870, the paradoxical idea arose that the bison, albeit a revered symbol of the American West, was a barrier to Manifest Destiny – because the bison was the main life source for the Plains tribes, once the bison was eradicated, native people would be forced to starve or relocate to reservations. Native people would abandon their “nomadic, warlike ways” and the prairie would become an accessible resource at Euro-Americans’ disposal. Hunting bison was duly an effort to thwart Plains tribes’ subsistence on buffalo, which allowed them to “resist all efforts to put him forward in the work of civilization.” That is, if the bison was a gateway to self-sufficiency for the Plains tribes, then spelling the end of the animal would mean a forced domestication of native peoples by the white man, into his idea of a productive, capitalist society. Turner describes the American West as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” a semantic dichotomy that always dignifies the priorities of Euro-Americans over those of the Plains tribes, specifically the Comanche, who bore the brunt of settler violence and forced assimilation into Euro-American society.
A result of the confidence derived from the declaration of independence from the British Empire, as well as the conquest and settlement of the East, the brazen philosophy of Manifest Destiny has not expired with the successful annexation of the West, but merely translated into contemporary American exceptionalism. This insidious idea that America is inherently superior to other nations and therefore responsible for “bettering” the world has permitted a low-grade colonialism to continue in the modern day. The annexation of Hawaii and interventions resulting in expanding dominion over Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam are all exemplary of this attitude. The period following 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War saw the reinvigoration and justification of this idea amongst the American public and media. “American Empire: Get Used to It,” reads a New York Times Sunday Magazine headline from January 3rd, 2003. The phrase “American Empire” appeared over 1000 times in news stories from November 2002–April 2003, justifying invasion and disruption of foreign states by dint of our supposed superiority.22 The frontier in transformation and intensification always inheres disturbance or destruction to satellite parties. Never is the frontier more active than when it is threatened
or when adversary forces obstruct its use and proliferation. The project of western expansion had as its cost the forced assimilation and slaughter of the Comanche and Quanah people and the near-total extinction of Plains bison. Similarly, the prospect of the new “technofrontier” has as its cost the livelihoods of the blue-collar workers in the Big Empty, a collection of small towns without quite as many service industry opportunities to transition into as larger urban areas a few hours away.
Upon arrival at Caprock Canyon, I spoke with the park interpreter, Le’ann Pigg, to introduce myself and the piece I was working on, and see if she had any insight she might be able to share from her years working at the park. Le’ann studied anthropology in college, and started working at the park as an intern under the previous park interpreter eleven years ago. She has been working at the park ever since, and was promoted to park interpreter several years ago. The goal of the park interpreter is to develop an emotional connection between the park, trails, natural resources, and visitors, through various activities including programs, signs, and exhibits. I spoke to Le’ann in the park gift shop before a life-size replica of a bison, complete with faux fur. I could tell the run-down she gave me was one she had done many times before – I prodded her for more information, including details about the park’s relationship with JA Ranch, a subject that seemed to leave a bad taste in her mouth, but that she did not expand upon. After I explained the goal of my research, she said decidedly, “I know exactly where you oughta go.” She explained that a replication of the Goodnights’ house still stood as a tourable historic site in Claude, Texas, about an hour from the park. Our mission was clear. On our way out of the park, I spotted Le’ann in a field of prairie dogs, gesturing wildly to a group of families with small children. The bison chomped boredly at the field in the distance.
We first passed through Quitaque, a sleepy little town consisting of a few old houses, a chain gas station called Allsups, a baseball field where Little League now gathered, and a single kitschy lunch counter called the “Bison Cafe.” Each town we passed through on our way to Claude boasted the same eerie, off-white water tower with the town name in bold, black letters. The next town’s read “TURKEY,” introducing Turkey, Texas, a small, derelict town with streets lined with abandoned storefronts. On some properties, windows were shattered, vegetation cropping up inside, and others seemed as if the owners had shut up shop one day and just never returned, chairs stacked on tables as if to sweep at the end of the night, a film of dust coating the entire interior. Operational businesses were few and far between. Tony’s Ice Cream also peddled Mexican dishes, cheeseburgers, and the southwestern staple, “Frito pie,” and Hotel Turkey offers a lodging option for those visiting Caprock Canyon State Park who do not care to camp. Several churches also populate the town and seem to be operational. Turkey is located in Hall County, which demarcates the start of the Big Empty, and seemed to be a model of each of the towns we’d pass through between sprawling cattle ranches, expanses of canyon, and earth slides. Every forty kilometers or so, we’d come up on another desolate town predominated by corporate chain restaurants, gas stations, and churches. It was clear that job opportunities at these national chains were the economic safeguard to communities that formerly subsisted off of small-scale farming. If residents had not yet relocated to larger,
Park interpreter, Le’ann Pigg
urban areas to find a job outside of agriculture, they had transitioned into one of a handful of local service positions. Kilometers upon kilometers of abandoned or inactive ranchland and roadside crucifixes constructed of PVC pipe signalled a landscape in a state of irreversible decline, reliant upon a trust in higher providence and an investment in the myth of rugged individualism to endure the inevitable death of place.
“The Big Empty” is a term first coined by Jim Corder in his 1988 memoir, Lost in West Texas, to describe the area in Texas west of the Cross Timbers, east of the Caprock, north of the Colorado River basin, and south of the Red River. The area encompasses eleven counties in the Great Plains region of Texas that have been in irreversible decline since the 1930’s. Down to a quarter of their population sizes in the heyday of the early to mid-twentieth century, these counties are on the precipice of total abandonment, their residents barely “wringing a livelihood from the wind-blasted plains of north central Texas.” To be sure, residents of, say, Hall County – once numbering 16,966 inhabitants in 1930, down to 3,353 in 2010 – do not remain to turn a profit off the once-rich soil, or the grazing capacity of the sprawling plains. In the age of the technofrontier, that boundless expanse made possible by industrial technology, post-industrial rurality in these counties has seen the economic transition from productivist agriculture to, “a service economy heavily reliant on government employment and subsidy and to multinational dominion over extractive industry and agricultural production. In 1982, average farms in the Big Empty counties were twice what they were in the ‘50’s, and the number of farmers had dropped drastically, as large-scale, commercial farming became increasingly popular. Layoffs in the oil field and uncertainty in family farming drove residents to cede family ranchland, passed down for generations, to multinational corporate farms, and take up jobs as attendants at chain gas stations, hardware store clerks, mechanics, or other service work. Yet, these residents, beat down by the scarcity of the plains in the time of increasingly mechanized farming, choose to stay. But why?
“When capital has moved on, the importance of place is more clearly revealed,” Raymond Williams writes in “Decentralism and the Politics of Place.” Many claim familial ties keep them in towns with populations numbering in the hundreds, schoolhouses teetering on the brink of closure, and the nearest grocery store some thirty miles away. These individuals express an obligation to “work the family land,” even as the reality of earning a livelihood from
this occupation becomes increasingly untenable and nostalgic. An affinity for country values – the sense of mutual obligation, where one’s word is vow; intimacy with one’s neighbors; the centrality of the family; and a sense of self-sufficiency – keep these Americans from the talons of urban anonymity. Even while often in a position of dependence on government to subsidize their livelihoods, these residents convey a “latent petit bourgeois disdain for government intervention and progressive politics,” prizing a perceived individual liberty, personal privacy, and self-sufficiency out on the Great Plains.23 Certainly, there are still those American citizens who traverse the Wild West, who believe in the abundance of the mythic frontier – a fantasy no more or less real than the promise of prosperity on Wall Street.
When we arrived in Claude, the replica of the Goodnight house was closed, so we decided to drive out to the Goodnight cemetery, where Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight are buried, along with many of their relatives. The cemetery was aptly situated between ranch houses and green pasture, the cattle bucking at our Subaru – clearly, folks didn’t come down here all that often. Their tombstone towered over all others in the cemetery, paying respects to the couple that first settled this region of the West, befriending the native Comanche and Quanah people, and salvaging the vestiges of the near-extinct Southern Plains Bison. Their tombstone, as well as those of their relatives, were fenced off, and a series of old bandannas tied to the chain links – in lieu of flowers – wavered in the wind. The gravesite was modest but dignified, and it was evident that although not many knew about the Goodnights, they were revered within their own community to this day. “After each shot the animal fell but got up again looking for trouble, until the fatal shot was fired,” an early publication narrates the brutish endurance of the bison.24 As the frontier buckles under the weight of its own intensification and proliferation, the myth of the American West perseveres, shape-shifting nostalgically to weather the conditions of the hunt.
1 Dolph, James A., and C. Ivar Dolph. "The American Bison: His Annihilation and Preservation." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 25, no. 3 (Summer 1975): 14-25. | 2 Lueck, Dean. "The Extermination and Conservation of the American Bison." The Journal of Legal Studies 31, no. S2 (June 2002): S609-S652. | 3 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. 9th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. | 4 Lueck, "Extermination and Conservation." S609-S652. | 5 Dolph and Dolph, "Annihilation and Preservation," 14-25. | 6 Isenberg, "Nostalgia, Profit, and Preservation," 179-96. | 7 "Literary Productions concerning Mary Ann and Charles Goodnight, undated." Box 2Q74. Charles Goodnight Papers. Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. | 8 Carnes, Rebecca Jan Bright. "The Modern Cowboy Folktale in West Texas." Master's thesis, Texas Tech University, 1989. | 9 Cogdell, Toy. "Caprock Canyon Travel Guide." Caprock Canyon Travel Guide. | 10 Roe, Russell. "At Home on the Range Again." Texas Park and Wildlife, March 2011. | 11 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. 9th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. | 9 Cogdell, Toy. "Caprock Canyon Travel Guide." Caprock Canyon Travel Guide. | 10 Roe, Russell. "At Home on the Range Again." Texas Park and Wildlife, March 2011. | 11 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. 9th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. | 12 Cogdell, Toy. "Caprock Canyon Travel Guide." Caprock Canyon Travel Guide. | 13 Roe, Russell. "At Home on the Range Again." Texas Park and Wildlife, March 2011. | 14 Cogdell, "Caprock Canyon Travel Guide." | 15 Cogdell, "Caprock Canyon Travel Guide." | 16 Lueck, " Extermination and Conservation," S609-S652. | 17 Isenberg, "Nostalgia, Profit, and Preservation," 179-96. | 18 Carrington, Damian. "Wild bison to return to UK for first time in 6,000 years." The Guardian, July 10, 2020. | 19 Isenberg, "Nostalgia, Profit, and Preservation," 179-96 | 20 Turner, Frederick Jackson, and Harold P. Simonson. 1963. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. | 21 Underwood, Robert Reed. "Memory and Continuity amidst Irreversible Decline in the Texas Big Empty." Master's thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. | 22 Lake, David A. "Escape from the State of Nature: Authority and Hierarchy in World Politics." International Security 32, no. 1 (July 2007): 47-79. | 23 Underwood, "Memory and Continuity amidst Irreversible Decline," Master's thesis. | 24 Letter, "Goodnight-Seymour Letters 1917-1929," n.d. Box 2R1. Charles Goodnight Papers 1882-1939. Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
