In all of the legends the valley is stocked with buffaloes, notwithstanding the fact that buffaloes were never in the Big Bend country.[1] The wild and inaccessible nature of this country, however, gives color to the idea of a lost canyon. Maps in the State Land Office at Austin still show a stretch of unsurveyed territory along the river. Akin to “Lost Canyon” must be the “Lost Mountains,” which are said to lie beyond the Davis Mountains. [[239]]
The idea of a “lost” land is probably as old as any legend of mankind; it luxuriates in the lore of modern seamen; but it may not be generally known that regions of the modern West other than the Big Bend also claim “lost” areas. No longer ago than February 2, 1923, the San Antonio Express published a news story to the effect that Zane Grey had discovered a lost plateau in Arizona inhabited by mustangs that had some secret pass, unknown to man, down to water in the valley. Six days earlier the same newspaper printed a dispatch from Scenic, South Dakota, descriptive of a legendary oasis in an uncharted Bad Lands. According to a tradition handed down by the Sioux Indians, inaccessible bluffs and walls enclose a garden-like place “rich in food, sunlight, warmth and pure running water.” Before the coming of the pale-faces this protected spot was the home of Wankinyan (the Thunder Bird), and no man has ever entered it to return. The story suggests that the legend of the Lost Canyon in the Big Bend may be of Indian origin.
There is a legend connected with another secret canyon of the upper Rio Grande country that seems to owe its existence to the Indians. Walter B. Stevens in his Through Texas, published in 1892, tells of “The Mystery of Diablo Canyon.”[2] The canyon, so the legend goes, was sacred to the Indians, and only a few of their number knew its nature. In it was an abundance of game and of pure water, but no white man could ever find the water. Dry hides, sprinkled with sod and covered with grass, concealed it cunningly.
II
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 [[240]]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 drouth 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 prospector killed one 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.