Through Time and the Valley

1. The Canadian River of Texas: June, 1972

1 The Canadian River of Texas "You can comprehend a piece of a river. A whole river that is really a river is much to comprehend." - John Graves, Goodbye to a River Itwas summer. It was June. It was the morning of the day we began our journey through time and the valley. Bill Ellzey and I watched as the pickup and stock trailer climbed the last fifty yards of caliche road and disappeared over the rim of the caprock, leaving behind a haze of white dust and a silence that spread from horizon to horizon. We were alone now, 1 2 - Through Time and the Valley just the two of us, with two horses and a mule and enough dried food to keep us alive for fifteen days. We had come to the old ghost town of Plemons to begin a fifteen-day horseback trip down the river, which would take us to the Oklahoma border and then back to the town of Canadian. It was not going to be a casual ride or just a camping expedition. Bill and I had been preparing for it for almost a year. It was our intention to experience "a piece of a river," as John Graves put it, and to record the characters and stories, the beauty and flavor of an isolated region in the northeastern Panhandle. Bill's medium was photography, mine was the written word, and this book is the fruit of our labors. My material was not gathered entirely on the trip. By the time I climbed on my horse that morning in Plemons, I had spent many hours in libraries, newspaper files, and courthouses all over the Panhandle, trying to bring together everything that had been written about the Canadian River between Borger and the Oklahoma line. That in itself would have made a slim volume, however, because from a strictly historical point of view, not much has happened here in the last three hundred years. Nor did I want to write a book that was strictly historical. I wanted to get the facts, but I also wanted to get out of the library, see the country from horseback , and meet the people as I found them. For that reason, I had conducted about a hundred interviews in the field between August of 1971 and July of 1972. What I gathered in these interviews was something less than scholastic history and something more than common gossip. Perhaps "yarns" would be the best word for it. I would not care to blur the distinction between history and yarn, because there is a place for both-and I have used both in this book. I suppose we could say that history is that body of knowledge which can be verified by written records and tangible artifacts, while a yarn carries only the authority of the storyteller. If his memory is good, then The Canadian River of Texas - 3 the yam may be historically correct; if his memory is poor, or if his imagination is active, the yam may prove entertaining though not necessarily accurate. I have tried to follow history as far as it would go, and have provided chapter notes at the back to document these labors. But where history has stopped, I have not hesitated to use yams, and to me the yarns are justas important as the history. While facts and dates capture an event and hold it in a particular time and place, yams are timeless. They add flavor and spice to what might otherwise be a tiresome recital of data, and provide us with living flesh to cover the bones of fact. If yarns are not history, neither are they a poor substitute for history. They have their own function and integrity. Ifit is the function of history to inform, then it is the function of yams to entertain . We should not expect history to entertain in all instances or yams to give us scientific data. Once we undertstand the value and limits of each, then we can employ both to describe a people and a place, and our final impression will be more complete than if we had relied on just one or the other. One final word on the yarns in this book. I grew up in Perryton, thirty miles north of the river, and yet in my youth I never heard any of the stories I relate here. Though...