Monday, February 09, 2009

It's All Trew: Indian trails full of mysteries

Delbert Trew writes in the Amarillo Globe-News:

Few things are more enjoyable to Ruth and I than prowling the Trew Ranch. Now in the family for over 60 years, the changes wrought by Mother Nature and time continually fascinate. Ownership history goes back almost to the end of the Red River Wars of 1875. The ranch abstracts show where Lewis Carhart, founder of Saint's Roost and Clarendon, sold land to Sir Alfred Rowe, an English rancher and founder of the RO Ranch and the town of McLean. He was also body No. 109 recovered after the Titanic sank in 1912. Our north boundary is marked by Old Trails Ridge where Indians traveled from the creek bottoms of Oklahoma to Tucumcari Mountain. This same ridge was chosen to place the Rock Island Railroad in 1900 to 1902. Even later, in 1927, the ridge was designated Route 66, one of the earliest highway crossings America. One short stretch of land 200 yards wide displays Indian trails, an old dirt highway, a coast-to-coast fiber-optic telephone line, the Rock Island Railroad right-of-way, Old Route 66 and both lanes of I-40. A 3-inch rain two years ago left a buffalo skeleton showing in a cutbank buried about 3 feet below the surface. It appeared to be a yearling-past with the hump ribs just beginning to form. Occasionally we find flint scrapers and arrowheads. More likely we find piles of flint chips where an Indian lookout watched over his group camping below in the canyon, while sitting on the cap rock watching for enemies or settlers...

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