LEGENDS OF THE SUPERNATURAL
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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.