In 1980 historian/author Patrick Dearen went looking for the last of these aging icons who had emerged from the wellspring of cowboying in Texas and eastern New Mexico. He found Tom Blasingame at a line camp in the Palo Duro Canyon. Others he visited in their modest homes, on sunlit porches, in grassy yards, or small-town cafes where he was able to capture the stories otherwise destined to disappear like the need for night horses or lead steers. From these honest-to-goodness cowhands who stood tall in the saddle as the prototypes of an American myth he collected priceless, spellbinding stories of a simpler era when a man's word was his bond and a cowhand rode hard and lived harder. A beckoning sunset was inevitable for even the saltiest cowpuncher, but one and all have now found a new dawn in these pages.
Pecos Bill was raised by wild coyotes, had a vicious horse named Widow Maker and could ride a twisting tornado, to name just a few of his attributes. His folktale legend of course is not true but after reading this book you might be convinced he really existed, or at least understand how his legend took root.
I've crossed the Pecos River on my way to the Davis Mountains and it's not very impressive. It's stagnant and sluggish, and if you don't look real quick you'll miss it altogether. Is this Salt Cedar-choked creek the river that inspired the Pecos Bill myth? Mr. Dearen explains that this brackish stream is a mere shadow of what it was in the 1800's. Back then it was not dammed up or diverted for farming. It began its pristine journey in the snow-capped mountains of New Mexico and traveled its merry, often violent way down to the Rio Grande. Cowboys, cattle and Indians had reason to cross it and this is where the stuff of legends was born.
Mr. Dearen retells many fascinating stories about this dangerous, twisting river that could make or break a cowboy. This was the river that helped shape the successful lives of cattlemen like John Chisum and Charlie Goodnight. They avoided the Comanche tribes entrenched in the Texas Panhandle by swinging their cattle drives south to follow the Pecos westward to the New Mexico markets.
For several hundred miles, the Pecos River had only 6 crossings: Pope's Crossing, Emigrant Crossing, Horsehead Crossing, Spanish Dam Crossing, Pontoon Bridge and Lancaster Crossing. Crossing the Pecos proved to be a major undertaking with its muddy and swift currents that often hid deadly quicksand. Many steers were trapped in these sandy bogs. The banks at places were so steep that a thirsty animal could spend half a day looking for a place to get a drink. The Comancheria ranged through it as well and if the river did not cause the cowboy much grief, the Comanche warriors would willingly oblige. Their 100-200 warrior raiding parties could easily pick off a 10-15 cowboy cattle drive.
If Pecos Bill grew up in this place where a river runs through it, then you could say the mighty Pecos River made him what he was, a mighty hero. It also made those hardy West Texas cowboys true legends in their own time and ours. Whatever you choose to believe about the Pecos cowboy, one thing's for sure-- Patrick Dearen's book is a rambunctious ride back to the days of wild unfettered rivers and tornado bustin' cowboys!
Patrick Dearen's A Cowboy of the Pecos is not about one cowboy, but about all the cowboys who rode, roped and herded cattle along the Pecos River from northern New Mexico to the Rio Grande during the late 1880s and early 1990s.
"He rode hellbent-for-leather along a Southwest river likened to hell and entered the myth of the West.
"He was a cowboy of the Pecos," the 252-page non-fiction paperback begins.
"With skills tailored to the river's unique demands and with character honed by a no-man's-land in which `pecos' also meant murder and `pecos swap,' theft, he was a breed of cowhand unlike any other," Dearen writes.
While land along the Pecos was called cowboy's paradise, the Pecos River was so treacherous it was known as the "graveyard of the cowman's hopes."
Dearen skillfully captures the essence of the old West from the first Goodnight-Loving trail drive to the 1920s when cattle trucks and pickups snatched away the last hope for the cowboys way of life.
Vintage photographs, some from the Barney Hubbs and West of the Museum collections, support the well-documented true stories.
Midlander Patrick Dearen has written three previous books of Pecos country lore and legend. A member of Western Writers of America, his When Cowboys Die was a finalist for the Spur Award.
Dearen based the book on a review of archival documents, interviews with long-time area residents, and personal experiences. The book chronicles the legends and true stories of men and women who crossed the Pecos.
The Time It Never Rained is Elmer Kelton's classic novel of the how the drought of the 1950s affected the lives of people living in West Texas. The book traces the story of West Texas rancher Charlie Flagg and his efforts to keep his ranch going through the worst drought in Texas history. Flagg saw how the drought killed his livestock, caused his heart attack, and drove his best friend to commit suicide, but it could not force him from his land.
Few Texans know much about the Pecos River country, but Midland's Patrick Dearen is the best expert around.
After writing three books and helping to produce a video about the unpredictable river and the flat, dusty plain through which it flows, Dearen has gleaned enough material from his stockpile of notes to produce a fourth book.
``A Cowboy of the Pecos,'' recently published by the Republic of Texas Press of Plano (266 pages, $12.95), has been in book stores since mid-December.
The trade paperback was Dearen's second book to be published in 1996. The other, ``Crossing Rio Pecos,'' was released last summer by TCU Press of Fort Worth.
This latest effort to catalog as much history about the river and its impact on western Texas chronicles cowboying on the Pecos from the early trail driving days through the 1920s.
``An 1886 newspaper termed the Pecos River of Texas and southern New Mexico the cowboy's paradise,'' Dearen says.
One cowhand ventured a bit further and declared the ``Pecos boys were the most expert cowboys in the world'' because before the turn of the century the river was so treacherous it was best known as the ``graveyard of a cowman's hopes,'' a moniker that trail driver Charles Goodnight put on the river after taking a herd of cattle along its banks in 1866.
``It was a river cursed with a vengeance by all, and few cowhands would have disputed the buffalo hunters' claim that when a bad man dies, he goes either to hell or to the Pecos,'' writes Dearen.
Dearen, a former reporter for the Standard-Times and the Midland Reporter-Telegram, has tramped the Pecos River from its headwaters in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains through the desert flats where it pours its bitter liquid into the Rio Grande on the Mexican border near Langtry some 900 miles away.
Along most of its Texas stretch today, the river has been reduced to a polluted trickle, squeezing through a jungle of salt cedar brush that choke its banks, Dearen says.
In the 1880s, however, the river was something for cowboys to reckon with since it was generally four to 15 feet in depth and could be 40 to 60 feet wide in the flats. Its banks were so sheer that an animal could wander along its banks for a half-day before finding a place where it might get a drink of water.
Much of Dearen's information comes from interviews with men who rode the Pecos and from private papers and other historical documents in various archives and newspaper files across western Texas and New Mexico.
Dearen's book also touches on early-day ranch operations, trail drives, Indian fights, cattle drifts, open-range grazing and the changes brought about by barbed wire.
The book, documented and supported by many vintage photographs from the J. Evetts Haley Collection and the Clayton Wheat Williams Collection, both at the Nita Stewart Haley Memorial Library in Midland, will carry readers on a rip-roaring romp through the Old West. It is an outstanding regional history source.
From 3,000 feet, the Pecos River looks just exactly like it has been described -- a rattlesnake wiggling across the barren West Texas landscape.
With friend Jim Guleke at the controls of his twin-engine plane, we had just crossed the Pecos at roughly 140 miles an hour.
"To tell you the truth," Guleke said later, "I was kind of disappointed in the Pecos."
No doubt, it isn't the river it used to be. Much of its flow siphoned in New Mexico before it even gets to Texas, the Pecos is a salty, polluted, salt cedar-choked stream hardly befitting the designation of river.
But what a river it once was. Swollen from thawing mountain snows, it rushed across much of New Mexico and West Texas to rendezvous with the Rio Grande. Merely crossing the Pecos back then was an accomplishment.
To know just how hard it was to get across that river in the days of horses, mules and wagons, read Midland author Patrick Dearen's fine new book, "Crossing Rio Pecos." Published by Texas Christian University Press.
The Pecos was a major obstacle on the way west. Indeed, the principal southern route to California cut across West Texas to the Pecos and then beyond. Even before men and women of European descent struggled to cross this river, the Comanches annually splashed across the river on their annual forays into Mexico to steal horses, mules, women and children.
The Comanches did this at a place called Horsehead Crossing, which we were circling above in Guleke's airplane (fittingly, a Comanche.) The crossing was so-named, Dearen explains in his book, for the skulls of horses and other animals which once littered its banks. Since getting to this place necessitated a long, hot walk, animals often stampeded to the river as soon as they could smell it and drank too much of the salty water too fast. The result was death for them and one of Texas' more colorful place names.
Dearen devotes a chapter to Horsehead and each of the five other major crossings of the Pecos, with a seventh chapter on the assorted minor crossings. Though the focus is on these crossings, "Crossing Rio Pecos" is the history of the Texas portion of the river.
So why should anyone care about the Pecos River, other than its significance as an obstacle to early westward transportation? Though narrow and winding in reality, the Pecos is a much larger river in that place which exists only in our imagination, the mythical West. It was the home of Pecos Bill, the folk character and the setting for many a piece of Western fiction. Plenty of real history happened along its banks, too, from Spanish exploration to cattle drives.
"Crossing Rio Pecos" is a thoroughly researched, well-written collection of history and folklore, a good book to have in your saddlebag next time you cross the river. Just don't get it wet when you do.
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