The Lost Canyon and the Impossible Buffalo June 25, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This fine ‘lost valley’ story comes from Texas, but the tale of the shepherd who accidentally walks through into a hidden dell or stumbles up, while chasing a lamb, onto an unknown plateau is probably as old as our Neolithic ancestors. This particular version was collected by J. Frank Dobie at the end of the nineteenth century.
West Burton of South Austin and I were on a hunting trip down below San Antonio. The talk had been, as usual, on old days and lost mines and trails. I brought up the subject of Lost Canyon. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I have heard of the place many times, but I never believed that it existed till I met an old prospector in Mexico who had once been in the place. This prospector was a broke man when I saw him, broke in more ways than one, but he could tell his story straight. He was prospecting down the Rio Grande in a skiff or canoe, putting in at various canyons and gorges to examine for minerals. At a certain rapids his boat got snagged so that he could not fix it, and there was nothing for him to do but to strike out afoot. He made up a small pack of a blanket and some provisions, and with a rifle struck north up a steep ravine, intending somehow to reach the Southern Pacific Railroad. The ravine that he took up was so narrow and rough that in some places he could hardly travel, but after a while it began to open out, and imagine his surprise when it spread into a kind of basin that stretched out farther than he could see. The grass in it was as green as a wheat field, though there was a drought on, as usual, and there were springs of pure, sweet water; but the thing that made him rub his eyes was a herd of buffaloes, perhaps a hundred or more.
The crucial point to note is that buffaloes are not known and have never been known in this part of Texas.
The prospector killed [a buffalo] for meat, and camped for two or three days by a spring, while he got a good fill of the meat and jerked as much as he could take with him. Then he set out towards the north again. He found when he tried to get out that the basin was rimmed in by a high bluff up which there was apparently no trail. But after he had trailed himself around a good deal, he discovered a kind of gorge that he climbed out through. No buffalo could ever get out or in through it, he said. When he got up on top of the rim he was in the Chisos Mountains, unfenced, even unclaimed, some of them, I guess. He was in a country that no outpost of a range rider ever comes into, that no trapper has ever entered. There’s no reason why a human being should go into that country. The wonder to me is that this prospector tried to make his way over it. His way was crookeder than a devil’s walking cane – if you have ever seen one of them. They are about the only things that grow in that country, you know. But he kept on generally north. He nearly perished for water, and only the moisture of the jerked buffalo that he had had sense enough not to salt kept him from parching to death. He threw away all of his pack but that jerkie. Finally, somehow, by the help of the Lord, he reached the railroad somewhere between Sanderson and Marathon, and as luck would have it, he stumbled right into the camp of a construction gang. The cook of the outfit was an old Mexican who had worked for his father and knew him. This cook gave the prospector only a little beef broth and would not let him have that except in sips. And so in a few days he got over his terrible experience.
But the hidden valley can never be found again.
From the camp he went on to Sanderson and actually raised an expedition to go back and find the canyon of buffalo. But he never could find the way back across to it. He says that he knows now that the only way ever to reach it is to enter it from the Rio Grande, up that narrow gorge.
There are lots of hidden valleys in folklore and quite a few in fiction. Are there any other, though, factual presentations of this type: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Chris S, 30 Jun 2017: Reading the Lost Canyon and the Impossible Buffalo made me think of the Moberly–Jourdain incident where two women had a time slip in France. Maybe this cowboy found a path to the deep past, like 10kya, when seas of bison ruled the continent. The lost valley being a when rather than a where. Just a thought.
Southern Man, 30 Jun 2017: I was thinking of some parks in Africa where animals are preserved in low lying areas and where particularly giraffes are not capable of mounting the slope. Is this so very incredible for Texas and buffalo?
