The Sea of Grass: Llano Estacado

Stand anywhere on the Llano Estacado and you will understand why Francisco Coronado's soldiers thought they had reached the edge of the world. The year was fifteen forty-one. The Spanish expedition had crossed what is now the Texas Panhandle searching for a mythical city of gold called Quivira, and instead found something that unmade them, a flat tableland so immense, so uniform, and so windswept that the soldiers drove wooden stakes into the ground behind them simply to find their way back. The name Llano Estacado means, roughly, staked plains, and that origin story is among the most plausible explanations for it.

Coronado wrote to the king of Spain in language that has never quite been improved upon. He described reaching plains so vast that he could not find their limit anywhere he went, though he traveled over them for more than three hundred leagues, with no more landmarks than if he had been swallowed up by the sea. There was not a stone, he wrote, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.

The Llano Estacado is one of the largest flat surfaces on the North American continent. It rises from roughly three thousand feet above sea level in the southeast to over five thousand feet in the northwest, tilting almost imperceptibly westward. Its eastern edge is the dramatic Caprock Escarpment, a sudden cliff of three hundred to one thousand feet where the plains drop into broken canyon country below. From the canyon floor that escarpment looks, to Spanish eyes, exactly like a palisade or stockade wall, which is the other leading theory for the name.

For most of recorded history the grassland above the caprock belonged to the Comanche, who had pushed the earlier Apache people off it in the early seventeen hundreds. The Comanche were mounted, organized, and extraordinarily capable at managing the southern plains buffalo herds. For a hundred and fifty years no European or American power successfully challenged them here. That is the context inside which everything that happened after eighteen seventy-four must be understood.