You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before and like them I lived happily…. —excerpted from John Graves’s Goodbye to a River
The Comanche trail defines human habitation in West Texas. Their route extended from their villages in southern Colorado, Kansas, western Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle south through Big Spring, TX. From Big Spring, the trail forked with the western forks going through the iconic Persimmon Gap in Big Bend National Park, where the current National Park entrance exists today, and Presidio, Texas, which has been a Spanish-American settlement since 1682. From the Rio Grande, the routes fanned out into raiding trails deep into Mexico.
The Comanches, or “The People,” as they called themselves—as if there were no others—were the Vikings of the Great Plains. Like the Vikings, they were brutal to those outside of their tribe and even to those outside their clans. Also like the Vikings who build the innovative oared longboat that enabled their expeditions to the Mediterranean, the Volga heartlands, and the New World, the Comanches were innovators, a previously bipedal branch of the hunter-gatherer Soshone tribe. When they met the horse, introduced to them in the late 1600s, they adapted to this new form of transport and became equine experts of the plains, using the horse to chase the buffalo and dominate an empire that stretched from Kansas to deep within Mexico. Even at their height, they numbered only a few thousand, but their reach was vast and they dominated powerful but less mobile tribes.
Here at Texas Wild West, we follow the progression of these “Vikings of the Plains” along their raiding paths. Our hiking trips increase with difficulty the further we travel toward Big Bend Country from the DFW area, just as the danger, exhilaration, and plunder increased for the Comanches the further they ranged from their summer base camps. At TWW, we also approximately follow the Comanche War Trail from close to the Red River down to Mexico. We hope that we can learn from these ancient, daring people how to be versatile masters of their domain and to savor the natural beautify of it as they once did.