Seminole Canyon
COMSTOCK, TEXAS
ABOUT TWELVE MILES NORTH OF DEL RIO ON THE TEXAS Pecos Trail we reached the bridge over the Rio Grande impoundment named Lake Amistad. The Amistad Dam project had resulted from a cooperative undertaking by the American and Mexican branches of the International Boundary and Water Commission a half-century earlier. It began when U. S. President Dwight Eisenhower and Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos signed the initial agreement in Ciudad Acuña in 1960. A few years later, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz stood on the International Bridge nearby to inaugurate the project. Presidents Richard Nixon and Díaz Ordaz dedicated the completed Amistad Dam in 1969. The impoundment created a lake that extends well beyond the international boundary on both sides today.
Maker of Peace, a bronze sculpture by Bill Worrell, stands in the Seminole Canyon Texas State Park.
As we drove across the bridge, Hope and I talked about how ironic the word “Amistad”—friendship—now seemed. The shared waters, once a diplomatic act of good faith, had become a policing problem, and Homeland Security viewed the open lake with no fence across it as a challenge because it has been used for drug trafficking by boat and thus armed police boats must patrol it. No one hears “Amistad” used to refer to any U.S./Mexico projects today. The wall, of course, is unilateral. No presidents stood together to inaugurate its beginning. The only thing most U.S. politicians say about it now is that they want more miles of it, more technology, and to make it higher. Forget Amistad. Mexican politicians aren’t even asked to participate.
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ROUTE 90 FOLLOWS more or less the “Old Spanish Trail” used for hundreds of years as an Indian trading path and then followed by the first European explorers. The modern road, first built in 1915, was touted as the shortest driving route between the Atlantic in Florida and the Pacific in California. We drove westward along it some twenty miles from the lake before turning south into the Seminole Canyon Historic Site entrance. Arriving at the small museum headquarters, we paid for our tickets and found Ranger Tanya Patruney preparing to lead the morning’s only tour.
Shortly thereafter she led our small group of seven out the back door. Passing through a small cactus garden outside, we stopped at the striking bronze sculpture by artist Bill Worrell of a tall human/animal figure called Maker of Peace. Ranger Patruney explained that we would see human figures with deer heads like this in the cave paintings below us. The statue holds in one hand an Aztec atlatl and a long spear, and in the other a staff from which a large bird, maybe a raven or hawk, takes wing.
Down inside the canyon, we walked to the edge of a small stream where we talked about the importance of water and food grown from it by the first inhabitants. “They farmed corn and beans to supplement their hunting,” lectured Ms. Patruney, who then demonstrated how to use an atlatl to launch a spear. After a few practice tosses she threw the spear forcefully well over a hundred feet in the air. It could have taken down a deer at that distance.
We climbed the rock ledge from the creek up to the massive stone overhang known today as Fate Bell Shelter. People had lived there perhaps twelve thousand years ago, she said. Red paintings dating back six thousand years or more were all over the back wall. Particularly striking were the human figures with antlers painted with upstretched arms as if in ecstasy—the ones Worrell had gotten his inspiration from. There were also ancient red handprints on the back wall, looking as if they had just been made. Outside the cave was a boulder scarred by generations who butchered meat and ground seeds and herbs on it.
Early hunters bearing their rock-tipped throwing spears and atlatls traveled the region tracking mastodons and eventually bison. Though the arid landscape is quite harsh for humans or large animals to survive in today, the prehistoric place was dramatically different. Rain was plentiful then and the canyon was green with grasses and trees. As the climate changed to the arid conditions familiar today, the inhabitants continued to grow corn along the creek, which helped them sustain their small communities in the same location for centuries.
Humans first moved into the canyon well after the stream had carved out the shelter in the rock. The overhang afforded a safe place to sleep, cook, and store food inside. The winter sunlight stretching to the back wall warmed their quarters, which faced southeast. Their designs on the ceilings and back walls of their rock dwellings are known today as Pecos River–style paintings. No one knows exactly why they painted; perhaps as high praise to powerful gods, perhaps to document their history, or maybe they were just artistic musings or graffiti. Regardless, the illustrations show just how imaginative these canyon dwellers were. Paintings in the nearby Panther Cave have been carbon dated to approximately seven thousand years ago. Archaeologists have discovered over two hundred other pictograph caves in the same style, all showing that ancient people living there shared a multifaceted life in this small canyon known today as “Seminole.”
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THE NAME GAVE ME pause at first, as I was sure it had nothing to do with the people who made the art. “Seminole” was a name given to Native Americans originally from Florida and later exiled to Oklahoma by Colonel Gadsden and others, and I knew they were not related by kinship to any indigenous group in the Southwest. But I was wrong about the name being unrelated to the history of the canyon.
The Seminoles had gone there after all, but only in relatively recent history. It turns out that Seminole Canyon is named for U.S. Army Seminole-Negro Indian scouts stationed at Fort Clark, a garrison once near present-day Brackettville on Route 90 east of Del Rio. Their work was to make military forays to fight Apaches in the place the park occupies today.
A photo and short description of the Black Seminole scouts feature in the Seminole Canyon Historical Park brochure. The brief write-up portrays them as protectors of the west Texas frontier—fighters against marauding Apache and Comanche bands between the years 1872 and 1914. The scouts, it says, were “known for their exceptional cunning and toughness.” None of them was “ever wounded or killed in combat, and four earned the prestigious Medal of Honor.” The brochure left out, however, the fact that the scouts’ years of service spanned both Reconstruction and the worst years of the segregated period known as Jim Crow.
The brochure also could have mentioned that the Black Seminoles had indigenous ancestors who had intermarried with African Americans after slaves escaped and found refuge with the Indians. Although the soldiers may have appeared phenotypically black and spoke a Creole similar to Caribbean dialects, they were also Native American and likely spoke Seminole as well. Thus when they were transferred from Fort Clark in Brackettville to track and fight against the Apaches and Comanches, they were engaging populations in some ways similar to their own ancestors, many of whom had been transferred to Oklahoma from Florida by Gadsden.
The peoples the Black Seminoles fought against were equally complex. Although some histories of the border region encourage us to think of the Apaches and Comanches entirely as outlaws, a deeper reading into their past shows that their raids were a survival tactic used by a landless group in a region of scarce resources. It helps to know they were not just warriors but whole communities of people made up of children, women, and men, old and young. Think of family groups huddled together in back canyons hiding from columns of well-armed U.S. Cavalry troops guided by Seminole scouts. It is true that the Apaches and Comanches raided civilians in Mexico and the United States, stealing food and supplies and sometimes killing to get them. But there are other facets to that story. The Apache’s version of American history is something else entirely, and it starts with their having been there first, long before Manifest Destiny had been invented.
As the tour ended, I stood on the ledge of the canyon near the present border in Seminole Canyon where an indigenous community once fed itself by farming, hunting, and gathering and thought of modern indigenous peoples from rural Mexico and Central America who had recently been making their way across the border to help feed their families—and us. I realized anew that migrations and the conflicts surrounding them are as present today as ever in human history. As we turned back toward the park office, the prayer-maker statue at the back door of the visitors’ center greeted us again—an eons-old symbol of upstretched hands reaching upward asking for help and giving thanks at the same time.
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LEAVING THE SEMINOLE Canyon Park, we took a short detour off Route 90 to the overlook at the Pecos River. The side road ended at a high cliff near where the highway crosses the highest bridge in the State of Texas, a structure rising 273 feet above the Pecos where it runs through a 2,180-foot canyon. Pulling off at an overlook, we peered straight down to the river and also gazed upstream at the replacement for the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Pecos High Bridge built in 1892. The older bridge, now gone, had been an award-winning engineering marvel in continual use until 1944. Near that point in 1883, railroad company representatives drove their silver spike into the last railroad tie, completing the final link in the southern transcontinental railroad. The southern rail line was nicknamed the “Sunset Route.”
Gadsden never realized his dream of building a slave railroad. Instead it was Collis Huntington who built the bridge and owned most of the line linking the southern borderlands to New Orleans and California, and who brought high hopes to the south Texas region and profits to his own bank account—all this after slavery ended. Though the original bridge is gone and the trains no longer pass through Del Rio as they once did, the abutments are still visible from certain points within Seminole Canyon today. They are down inside the canyon by the muddy Pecos, abandoned.