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Updated: May 17, 2025
After parting from Pecan Creek, with their faces set westward, they had a journey before them anything but easy or pleasant. On the contrary, one of the most difficult and irksome. For it lay across a sterile tract the great gypsum bed of North-western Texas, on which abut the bluffs of the Llano Estacado.
He was followed by Antonio and a pack-mule loaded with provisions. They passed down the valley, and struck out in the direction of the Llano Estacado. On the following day a new incident created a fresh surprise among the inhabitants of San Ildefonso, already excited by an unusual series of "novedades." About noon a party of lancers passed through the town on their way to the Presidio.
Wheeling his mount, he searched the landscape with his keen blue eyes. Behind him was broken country; ahead of him was the terrible land that men have called the Llano Estacado. The land rose to it in a long series of steppes with sharp ridges. Queerly shaped and oddly colored buttes ascended toward it in a puzzling tangle.
Without further discussion, this arrangement is decided upon; and the two parties commence making the preparations suitable to their respective plans. In less than half an hour after they separate; the settlers, with the women, children, and cattle, wending their way eastward; while the Rangers, guided by the renegade, ride off in the opposite direction toward the Llano Estacado.
This sand-belt is passable at one or two points, but horses sink to the knees at every step, and but for the water it would be a perilous experiment to cross it. Where is the Llano Estacado? Unroll your map of North America. You will perceive a large river called the Canadian rising in the Rocky Mountains, and running, first southerly, and then east, until it becomes part of the Arkansas.
Captain Gilliss, of the American navy, found the sand-hills of the Peruvian desert to be in general crescent-shaped, as described by Meyen, and a similar structure is said to characterize the inland dunes of the Llano Estacado and other plateaus of the North American desert, though those latter are of greater height and other dimensions than those described by Meyen.
The eastern boundary of the Llano Estacado is not so definitely marked, but a line of some three hundred miles from the Pecos, and cutting the head-waters of the Wichita, the Louisiana Bed, the Brazos, and Colorado, will give some idea of its outline.
But even at this age a New Mexican maiden is deemed old enough for matrimony; and Manuel, to do justice to him, has eyes upon her with this honest intent. For months he had made up his mind to have her for his wife long before their forced flight into the Llano Estacado.
About a week after this time an atajo of pack-mules nearly fifty in number loaded with buffalo-hides and tasajo, was seen struggling up the eastern ceja of the Llano Estacado, and heading in a north-westerly direction over that desert plain. The arriero, mounted upon the mulera, was a half-blood Indian.
Animals are rare upon the Llano Estacado, although the prong-horn antelope true denizen of the desert is there found, as also its enemy, the Mexican jackal, or coyote. In the canons of the stream the grizzly bear makes his haunt, and in times not long gone by it was ascended and traversed by the unwieldy buffalo. Of all the living things it is least frequented by man.
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