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Updated: June 17, 2025
The distance is two very long days' journey. Our first day's journey was called fourteen leagues to Estacado, and the second seventeen to Luxan, near Mendoza. The whole distance is over a level desert plain, with not more than two or three houses. The sun was exceedingly powerful, and the ride devoid of all interest.
Soon after most of the ricos and fashionables left the saloon, but some tireless votaries of Terpsichore still lingered until the rosy Aurora peeped through the "rejas" of the Casa de Cabildo. The "Llano Estacado," or "Staked Plain" of the hunters, is one of the most singular formations of the Great American Prairie.
The man was talking and seemed to be in authority. He was dressed in a red Mexican coat, rich silver-trimmed pantaloons, and carried a brace of gold-mounted pistols. His face was covered with a mask of black velvet. Instinctively Kid Wolf knew that he was looking at the dread scourge of the Llano Estacado The Terror of the Staked Plains!
Steep and difficult as it was, it could be scaled by the black horse; and, once on the wide plain of the Llano Estacado, Carlos could laugh at his soldier-pursuers. The only time his enemies could have reached him would be during his hours of sleep, or after darkness had fallen. But Carlos was not afraid even then.
Therefore the early Spanish called it El Llano Estacado the Palisaded Plain; but the Americans believed that the name was given because the only trails across it were marked by stakes. In later days it proved to be a vast range for cattle and horses; in the older days it was the stronghold of the Comanches, who knew every water-hole and every cave.
But the trouble was to reach the Pecos across the ninety intervening miles of waterless plateau called the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain. This plain was christened by the early Spanish explorers who, looking out across its vast stretches, could note no landmark, and left behind them driven stakes to guide their return.
This part of it had been established by a couple of Hardin County pioneers who got lost in the forty-mile prairie between the Iowa and Cedar Rivers about three years before I came in and showed their fitness for citizenship by filling their wagon with stakes on the way back and driving them on every sightly place as guides for others an Iowa Llano Estacado was Grundy Prairie.
It rose in shrill crescendo, to die away in a sobbing wail that lifted the hair on the listener's head. Again and again it came a moan born of the frightful torture of mortal agony. Giving his mount a touch of spur, the horseman turned the animal westward toward the Llano Estacado. So horrible were the sounds that he had paled under his tan.
The speaker indicated the trail which he had halted to examine, and continued, "Very probably we'll find the herd among the spurs of the ceja yonder." As Carlos said this, he pointed to a number of ragged ridges that from the brow of the Llano Estacado jutted out into the plain. They appeared to be at the distance of some ten miles from the crossing. "Shall we push on there?" asked Don Juan.
The wigwam of the Osage chieftain was similar to those which may be found to-day on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, in the depths of the wilderness along the Assiniboine, on the shores of Athabasca Lake in the far North, and beyond the Llano Estacado of the South.
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