Incident at Antelope Springs
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Frontis: “Trail of the hide hunters.” Buffalo Lying Dead in Snow, 1872. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. The mountains were burning and the rivers going dry and the heat rising higher and higher. Last summer, much of America was on edge and on the move. I was on the road too, crisscrossing the plains where I grew up, trying in vain to outrun the long-haul hollowness of breakdowns and breakups and a final betrayal by the man I resembled more with every passing season. Looking back on that dreamlike journey now, it seems that my mind’s eye was unwittingly drawn to traces of past destruction, as if coming closer to those absences might offer some clue about how to make a viable future from the missing pieces of the present. But I can no longer say what exactly caused me to slow on the melting asphalt of an empty highway and turn south onto a pale road that led across No Man’s Land somewhere in the vicinity of a place once known as Antelope Springs.1 The vault of sky flattened the land. High-altitude smoke from wildfires blanched the heavens. Heat and light and wind filled the space. None of the original shortgrass remained. All had been supplanted by farm fields. They alternated among dormant pasture and yellow stubble and scalloped dirt and columns of green corn. The temperature in the truck read 109 degrees. The heat felt alive. It moved and pushed and blurred horizons. The vault of sky flattened the land. Photograph by author. The road passed dozens of unmuffled motors. Photograph by author. Around us stretched the Plains. Photograph by author. It was so hot that I could not keep my thoughts straight. I wonder, in retrospect, if the overwhelming heat caused my impulsive detour as much as the sense that Antelope Springs was somehow associated with the feeling of respite that eluded my ever more desperate grasp. Although I held no memory of it, the source of this association was surely to be found in several lines buried in the middle of the Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon, a 1914 book based on stories Olive King Dixon reportedly heard and then transcribed in the first-person voice of her deceased husband Billy, the famed nineteenth-century shooter of bison and men. Olive’s stories of Billy’s stories of his feats were later compiled, edited, and printed by Oklahoma-based journalist Fred Barde, who died shortly after the book was released. In this triply ghostwritten account, Antelope Springs appears as a refuge set against the exterminations that characterized this region’s recent past. It was also a fulcrum for Billy’s protagonisms in the final extirpation of bison from western Kansas, the illegal but officially sanctioned slaughter of the remnant herds, the invasion of treaty-protected Native lands in what is now known as the Texas Panhandle, and other legendary episodes that constitute the mythology of eradication and partly hide it from awareness at the same time. In one exceptionally detailed passage, the narrator recounts how Antelope Springs first appeared to Billy in 1874. It was a chain of deep pools of dark and steely clearness, according to the author’s own words and phrases, chillingly cold even in hottest midsummer. The channel was lined with steep, precipitous banks, along which waved an almost impenetrable growth of reeds and wiry grass. The pools were said to teem with fish, great and small. The air was scented with a fragrance Billy found exquisite. Countless songbirds beautified this cool place with their calls and colored plumage. Millions of migratory waterfowl descended every autumn and spring to disport themselves and rest before continuing their peregrinations.2 Nomadic peoples including Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache camped here for millennia while Navajo, Puebloan, and Hispanic hunters were said to have arrived via a well-worn trail from beyond the western mountains.3 When this region was still wild, the narrator recounted, immense bison herds lined the aguada for miles, so many that they had to crowd and fight their way to the life-giving waters.4 The past and future jostled against each other in the narrator’s idea of Billy’s imagination too. Upon arriving to Dodge City after the arduous return from Antelope Springs, he told the populace that a hunter’s paradise awaited them. His reports galvanized the invasion of the panhandle by a group of hide hunters and merchants determined to transgress what they called the Dead Line beyond which white incursions were forbidden.5 They hauled tons of lead in high-sided wagons and established a rude headquarters at the rebuilt ruins of Adobe Walls, a trading post some ninety-five miles east of Antelope Springs. It was there that Billy made the so-called Shot of the Century, in which he may or may not have shot a Native man who may or may not have been named Ton-han-kah with a .50-caliber bullet at a distance of what may or may not have been 1,538 yards during the third day of a battle where twenty-eight hunters and one woman were besieged by an intertribal force of some unknown hundreds under the leadership of Quanah Parker and a Comanche visionary later disgraced by the failed siege.6 The hunters believed that Billy’s bullet caused the retreat of the Native warriors. Almost immediately, the projectile was imbued with the historical momentum of unilineal social evolution. Over time, it grew into a settler talisman that evidenced the miraculous consecration of what otherwise was just murderous savagery. It should come as no surprise, then, that the shot remains the object of public curiosity and scientific study.7 Even today, there are places where one can become inducted into the Billy Dixon Society of a local sharpshooter club by hitting a metal silhouette bearing the crude outline of an aquiline nose and feather headdress at a distance greater than 1,200 yards, or choose to join one of the several competitions hosted by gun clubs in the United States and in England where participants vie to replicate the killing achievement. Perhaps this recursive trajectory is why it was almost possible that day for me to imagine Billy’s bullet hovering over these lands in a state of suspended animation from which it might erupt at any moment with deadly speed intact. Distortions of time and space are commonplace in these regions. During my Plains childhood, I often marveled over the mirage effect in which the heat and light could allow mundane objects like tractors and silos to metamorphose into fantastic apparitions that float or approach or disintegrate only to reappear in an entirely new shape as if by magic. Billy himself is said to have perceived the light of the untrammeled plains as a noise that resembled a gun shot. The dawn broke with such dazzling splendor, he recalled, that I always had the feeling it came with a thunderous sound.8 As I traveled those same lands 147 years later, I heard the rapid-fire popping of irrigation motors that eddied across the swelter. The road passed dozens of unmuffled motors. Each room-sized installation was complete with floor and pipes and portals and unguents like a metallic diorama of some distant factory. Roaring, they pump the cold waters of the Ogallala aquifer onto sunbaked earth where they become dark stains that evaporate so quickly their vanishing can be seen by the naked eye. Head swimming, I began to wonder whether there might be as-yet-undiscovered atmospheric conditions that could reveal a hidden form of these motors, but when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw only the dissipating clouds of dust that billowed up in my wake. I realized that I had no idea where to go. Digital maps were less reliable than myopia. Some aspect of this region remained obscure. Even without the aid of eyeglasses, a clump of trees was visible some distance to the east. They appeared larger and denser than the windbreaks typically grown around the farmsteads of that area. I stopped at the first house after leaving the highway. A young woman and a toddler walked through sharp weeds with the polite wariness of those encountering a stranger in a sparsely populated land. They were there to feed the neighbor’s dog but it was gone. In such open country there was no use looking. It would either decide to return or it would not. The woman left some food just in case and directed me several miles east to a brown pipe gate with Antelope Springs Ranch spelled out in white metal letters welded to the bars. The entrance gate was festooned with no trespassing private property signs and a chain of interlaced padlocks. A tiny motion-activated camera was strapped onto the electricity pole. I turned and looked over the flatlands and the slight depression that marked the draw. A glowing composition of sky and line and wave extended in all directions, more presence than terrain. Another house five miles to the southwest would be the last try to locate the springs. Two men were working in cottonwood shade. The guy I should talk to was out checking cattle. A blond teenager in the patterned dress and kapp of Mennonite farmers brought out a pitcher of sweet tea. We stood, rattling cups and speaking little, until a gray pickup with a trailer turned into the drive. The driver, who appeared to be in his early 70s, was tall and strongly built. Dressed in typical attire of cotton shirt and mesh cap over jeans and boots, the man resembled the plainsmen I had known in my youth. He pushed a four-wheeler off the flatbed. As the gear whine faded he came to get some tea. We stood in a loose knot. My companions made courteous talk about the intense drought that gripped the land. The falling water table often occupied their thoughts. It had not rained for months. After a short while, I asked about Antelope Springs. The residents demurred but the other visitor did not. “Oh heck,” the driver of the pickup said. “I can get you in there if you wanna take a look real quick. It’s pretty neat.” We got into his truck. Halfway back to the pipe gate, he swerved into the bar ditch and pointed a thick finger across a parched pasture with no distinguishing features that I could perceive. “That’s Indian Springs.” “Where?” “East of that windmill. You can’t see it until you’re right there.” He said it had no water in it but he could remember when it did. My guide had leased the grass in the past. This year was the first in decades that he had no cattle at all. The drought was to blame. There is nothing for them to eat. Look at that grass. They’d starve. And you can’t buy that much hay. Following the customs of the land, he asked me few direct questions. Instead he told stories while we bumped through the empty pasture towards that abnormally large stand of trees. Only months later, when I recovered enough to listen to the voice notes I recorded shortly after the visit, did I realize that this was the moment when he must have mentioned that his ancestors had arrived at this place more than a century earlier from Old Greer County, a formerly disputed border area that Texas long sought to annex from Indian Territory. This detail registered only because I had recently stumbled across familial ties to that very region within the previously lost archives of my grandmother Fern, an amateur historian born in southwest Kansas who spent decades compiling genealogies and files of notes for books she never wrote. Her Greer County ancestors were so prolific that their graves nearly fill a cemetery of the kind often found along plains backroads, clusters of tombstones strewn with plastic flowers—a vanished settlement’s only remains. The more I into my the more I that her Greer County ancestors were with those of my I even in the of one and about a to that might have in some of the past. these dry lands water is than I came to with a called Springs miles of Antelope Springs. the that me to the waters of the came from the same As we the large of trees I did not if any on the had dry decades before I was this up was Her my was for the irrigation that Around the same time waters he had for later as her to that through of her almost always caused I say whether ever on how the of the aquifer to mirror the her were and But her archives that she never spent her years trying to the vanished waters and her place in the I have how of her into by Fern, I that what once in the of the plains was more than water It Billy spent months at too. in the he the road of an early settler I later my first and trading post grew into the where the of Antelope Springs grew until I could no longer that I was to Antelope Springs by of water and and and that my as much of a in as it did in the time of the visit, no such thoughts were in my I only felt of as we Antelope Springs. We over the shortgrass and an that was in the to a for feed and around a house and past a gray the of a with an that Springs water made it known at of century as a great with and a before we the dirt road where a house stood with and The must have like an of and return on when it was the headquarters of the cattle by a along with the of and the of In it as one of the few places where men could almost up to through and and and and trail the once appeared like any other plains on the of It was by a of cottonwood trees by early in the deep the resembled the of some but on look I the had from many in and the man said the trees were of The water table had the of their I a The road over and then into by cattle. we from the of trees into the A before We along the The of through the open the of the draw. of were no more than A of the Each was filled with dirt and lined by yellow was The only visible water was a into the channel from a plastic pipe to the irrigation off to the the driver the truck. We at the traces of the many in this he said as if the of his “I never this place until I was I never the first time. It was of There was water from the back there to that of The water stretched a or like it was a or a finger The was of and As my guide and I began to fill the space. to real or made up, and they to until it was to say where they came from or to they stories into a set of over visible It was possible to the long of the country like by and and the of It came as a to that once sought these waters to and the so that they could in the of their remained by the of this was a of the was a is what they called the of the springs. There one could on the and the sweet waters up in an of that as they the I to imagine this and to that which was or or a which even now in my memory and which I still to the that we in the pickup and at about the was The no longer the stories of None of the dry were My could not say which might have been the I could not It was as if the water had been in place all it, the once of the were somehow in time and space. The feeling me that the place we occupied was and was not the same where a had vanished without a or where the believed an descended into the deep later that only some kind of could have off the and up these once found it entirely was the the man said. in more and They are it out as as they They make that much off the corn. And some even have new that can get all the way to the last It me so But there is nothing I can about must have seen it In the drought year of at Antelope Springs at a They that the water had never failed in recorded for irrigation had the by southwest Kansas, this of the Texas some of the of Antelope Springs dry at a before my the water the by the of Plains In retrospect, it is the as long as they did. “I can the water is my guide after a long it that long to I remember it like it was he said he to at the and his imagination and his would fill in the absences until he could almost a of these In those he felt at It is to how the of the future imagine what such places were like to me and As I at the that marked the for what was we stood at the where a the last of Texas bison around nearly decades after the rest of the had been such a of the had grown to in and They had no of their great They had never the open some memory of this place must have among them. I if it was only the of water that them back for a final or beyond my to perceive. A short distance several trees marked the where the channel My asked if it might still have a in When we arrived there was no I got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the like held up the brown Dead a short the of the the The heat a motors I my After an I to the truck. We in a slow the in and The man to a slight There Billy died and was buried for years before his remains were up and the public that the at Adobe His were gone. were the waters and the they and some greater of The were a to this off and to and nearly We back the draw. in own we The were a the beyond As we the of the pasture I asked my what he could still be He the truck and had to he said in a because the water was of the much are not going to The would just more local the would it out on their might be a I realized that we so much but might have been of the the of can too. it is nearly my believed that I was the Around us stretched the that moment they were no longer a but a of time that within it the of and these the are a of what a of future The of and and is the of closer to traces of might us locate within the absences of the future and of these absences may When I back into my he was the only real future he could imagine was the past. he to about the country to the of the with just enough of the aquifer left to and a few In time he the motors would and the shortgrass over the until the plains would as if they never vanished but were the for that was the one of us the would be to see the A to be to that take us before the day But who when you have grown of the the you in You in a of all that is Each day is own You to the and to the You You to the out of the a stranger you questions. Her her you guide her to the the to they to what it felt like to in the moment before the water was gone. You not to be the of her You the Instead you take her to place where the she with such and may be into the earth and sky and the plains of her own When that day I you back and remember places you once or just that be that be is in the Department of at the of He is the of the A of Life of and In of on the Plains This was by from and It could not have been without by my guide and who have me about the are to the of the as as to the of the for and I to those who this with and
Source: The American Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhad184
Author: Lucas Bessire
Institution: University of Oklahoma
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,400
OpenAlex ID: W4381610838