THE LEGEND OF STAMPEDE MESA
By John R. Craddock
[Of all the legends in this volume “The Legend of Stampede Mesa” shows most of native originality. Like all true legends, it has had a wide vogue, though I have never heard it in the cattle country of the border. A few years ago a young man from the Panhandle, named Roy Ainsworth, gave me this abbreviated variant of it. Back in the days when range men paid in coin rather than in checks, a certain cattle buyer on one of the big ranches of Northwest Texas is believed to have been murdered for his money and his body put away in a shack or dugout near the principal round-up grounds of the ranch. After the murder, whenever an outfit tried to hold a herd of cattle on these grounds at night, they were sure to have a stampede. Cowboys reported many times having seen the murdered man’s ghost wandering about among the cattle in the darkness and, of course, stampeding them. Naturally, the place came to be avoided for night herding.—Editor.]
Among cattle folk no subject for anecdote and speculation is more popular than the subject of stampedes. There has always been a certain mystery surrounding the stampeding of cattle. Sometimes they stampede without any man’s having heard, seen, or smelled a possible cause. The following account of how Stampede Mesa got its name, together with the legend, told in many variations, of the phantom stampede, is current among the people of the Panhandle and New Mexico. I was a mere child when I heard it first, and I have since heard it many times.
Stampede Mesa is in Crosby County, Texas, about eighteen miles from the cap rock of Blanco Canyon, wedged up between the forks of Catfish (sometimes called White or Blanco) River. The main stream skirts it on the west; to the south the bluffs of the mesa drop a sheer hundred feet down into McNeil Branch. The two hundred acre top of the mesa is underlaid with rocks that are scarcely covered by the soil, though grazing is nearly always good. Trail drivers all agree that a better place to hold a herd will never be found. A herd could be watered at the river late in the evening and then be driven up the gentle slope of the mesa and bedded down for the night. In the morning there was water at hand before the drive was resumed. The steep bluffs to the south made a natural barrier so that night guard could be reduced almost half. Nevertheless, few herd bosses of the West would now, if opportunity came, venture to hold their herds on Stampede Mesa. Yet it will never succumb to the plow. Scarred and high, [[112]]it will stand forever, a monument to the days that are gone, a wild bit of the old West to keep green the legend that has given to it the name, “Stampede Mesa.”
Early in the fall of ’89 an old cowman named Sawyer came through with a trail herd of fifteen hundred head of steers, threes and fours. While he was driving across Dockum Flats one evening, some six or seven miles east of the mesa, about forty-odd head of nester cows came bawling into the herd. Closely flanking them, came the nester, demanding that his cattle be cut out of the herd. Old Sawyer, who was “as hard as nails,” was driving short handed; he had come far; his steers were thin and he did not want them “ginned” about any more. Accordingly, he bluntly told the nester to go to hell.
The nester was pretty nervy, and seeing that his little stock of cattle was being driven off, he flared up and told Sawyer that if he did not drop his cows out of the herd before dark he would stampede the whole bunch.
At this Sawyer gave a kind of dry laugh, drew out his six shooter, and squinting down it at the nester, told him to “vamoose.”
Nightfall found the herd straggling up the east slope of what on the morrow would be christened by some cowboy Stampede Mesa. Midnight came, and with scarcely half the usual night guard on duty, the herd settled down in peace.
But the peace was not to last. True to his threat, the nester, approaching from the north side, slipped through the watch, waved a blanket a few times, and shot his gun. He did his work well. All of the herd except about three hundred head stampeded over the bluff on the south side of the mesa, and two of the night herders, caught in front of the frantic cattle that they were trying to circle, went over with them.
Sawyer said little, but at sunup he gave orders to bring in the nester alive, horse and all. The orders were carried out, and when the men rode up on the mesa with their prisoner, Sawyer was waiting. He tied the nester on his horse with a rawhide lariat, blindfolded the horse, and then, seizing him by the bits, backed him off the cliff. There were plenty of hands to drive Sawyer’s remnant now. Somewhere on the hillside they buried, in their simple way, the remains of their two comrades, but they left the nester to rot with the piles of dead steers in the canyon. [[113]]
STAMPEDE MESA, CROSBY COUNTY, TEXAS
[[114]]
And now old cowpunchers will tell you that if you chance to be about Stampede Mesa at night, you can hear the nester calling his cattle, and many assert that they have seen his murdered ghost, astride a blindfolded horse, sweeping over the headland, behind a stampeding herd of phantom steers. Herd bosses are afraid of those phantom steers, and it is said that every herd that has been held on the mesa since that night has stampeded, always from some unaccountable cause.
I have a tale connected with two of these noted stampedes that I will relate here in the words of Poncho Burall, who told it to me.
“It was in the fall of 1900. This country was just beginning to settle. I was working for old man Jeff Keister’s outfit then, taking a herd through to New Mexico. We’d been on the trail some ten days, I guess, when we came to a ranch in a valley down on the Salt Fork. Keister says a friend of his lives there, and he rides off. After a while two boys ride up and tell us that they will herd the cattle while the outfit goes down to the ranch to dinner.
“When we rode down to the house, Keister and an old man were sitting under a brush arbor that represented the front porch. First thing I noticed about the old man was that one of his arms is only about two-thirds as long as the other, and that he has to put it where he wants it with his other hand. We meets him and sets down to wait for dinner, not saying much but listening some.
“ ‘You’ll find a-plenty good places to hold ‘em nights, Jeff, but about the third night out you will be some’ers near Stampede Mesa. Don’t you try to hold them thar.’
“ ‘I’m aimin’ to hold them right there, Bill,’ Keister says.
“ ‘Now, Jeff, you ain’t forgot that stampede in ’91, have you? Well, maybe you have, but I hain’t. I carry a little souvaneer that won’t let me forget. There was phantom steers in that herd that night. You recollect as how them steers went over the steep side of the mesa, Jeff? I must a been a sight when you found me. It’s right nigh onto twenty year now, and I ain’t moved this old arm since.’
“Well, the wife called dinner just then, and the old man got strung out on something else, but that stampede business jest stuck to my mind.
“Along late one evenin’ old Keister and I were riding the [[115]]drag, when he puts the dogie he’s been a-carryin’ on his saddle down on the ground, and says, ‘Taint fer now, yuh kin walk. We are campin’ on Stampede Mesa, as they call it.’
“ ‘I guess yuh noticed that feller’s arm, back there in the valley,’ says Keister, jerking his hand back toward the way we come.
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, waiting for him to go on.
“ ‘Well, he got it up there on the south side of that mesa. Hoss went plumb crazy. Bill’s allys said they wuz ghost steers in that herd that night. I think I seen ‘em too. They jest came a-sailin’ through the herd and right past your horse. I don’t believe in hants, but it wuz scary.’
“Well, we drove ’em up on the mesa and let ’em graze. A feller and me took first guard that night. The herd settled down pretty soon, but I couldn’t get that stampede tale out of my mind; every time a cow moved I thought something was going to happen. It was a mixed herd, and they lay as quiet as a bunch of dead sheep. It got so quiet that I could hear my pardner’s saddle creak, away off to one side. The moon set, and it got darker. Just about then something passed me. It looked like a man on a horse, but it just seemed to float along. Then there was a roar, and the whole bunch stampeded straight for the bluffs. I rode in front of one critter like, and he jest passed right on, jest kinder floatin’ past me. Then some old cow bellered and we milled ’em easy—but they wouldn’t bed down again that night and it took every derned one of us to hold ’em.”
There are some who say that the phantoms of this legend are tumble weeds, blown by the wind. But there are many honest men who will tell you of the weird calls of the phantom nester and of the galloping phantom steers. Knowing the story, you cannot look at the mesa, branded by the white scar of the old trail, without a strange emotion.