The Making of the LLano Estacado, Staked Plain.
The broad sea, ancient beyond imagination, had been created so long ago that even the sun had forgotten it had ever shone upon its birth. The sea had come into existence when the breast of the continent had subsided and the great oceans of the earth flooded in to fill the depression.
Seventy million years ago, the sea was shoved away to the south as a tremendous force lifted and buckled a broad section of the earth's mantle. The force continued to torture the crust of the earth, thrusting the rocks upward until a mighty mountain range with a north-south axis pierced the sky.
On the west side of the mountains, a grand river came to life, fed endlessly by the countless streams pouring with awesome violence down the mountains' steep flanks. The strong current of the river rushed away to the south until it reached the far-off sea.
On the east side of the mountain range a myriad of streams tumbled down from the high ramparts. As the grade of the streams flattened on their lower reaches, they slowed to wander in meandering courses, dropping their load of eroded mountain debris. The valleys of the streams became choked with swamps and shallow lakes as thousands of cubic miles of sediment were spread in an ever-thickening layers over the land.
The millennia passed, score after score, adding to millions of years. During the long epoch a broad plain was built at the base of the mountain and extending to the east and south for hundreds of miles. So flat was the land surface that the larger animals could see each other for great distances, to the limits of their vision.
Twenty million years ago on the bank of the grand river, and near where it entered the sea, a hungry lizard raced down the bank to capture a fish that was stranded and floundering in a shallow pool of water. The lizard's tail left a small scratch in the mud. From that tiny scar in the dirt during the next rainstorm, an incipient streamlet was born.
The rivulet had inherited the hunger of the beast that had created it. Within a foot, the rivulet cut into the course of another trickle of water and beheaded it, adding that miniature flow to its own body. Then it captured another streamlet, and another. Swiftly the rivulet grew to become a creek.
The new creek greedily ate its way north across the plain, in its journey encountering the channels of many streams. A battle was fought each time to determine which stream would die. The hungry offspring of the lizard won every battle.
The creek grew to become a river flowing in a wide valley. Its headwaters had reached the very summit of the mountains far to the north. Now there were two large rivers, with a mighty mountain range rearing high into the sky between them.
This is the way a tribe of men, migrating from a distant place far north of the mountains, found the land when they arrived twelve thousand years ago. The people liked the flat plains and the two rivers, and the abundant buffalo, elk, and antelope, and they stayed, their numbers increasing.
Thousands of years later, barely a tick of time as measured on the geologic clock, a second tribe of men arrived, moving cautiously up from the south. They also found the land of plains and the rivers most pleasing. These men called the flat land the LLano Estacado, and the rivers the Rio Grande and the Rio Pecos. They settled there with their women and children.
Time ticked again, and a third tribe of men came hurrying onto the land. They came from the east and their numbers were many. They made savage war upon the first two tribes. They made even more terrible and bloody war between factions of their own tribe.
The events of this story happened during the days of the third tribe's civil war.