Tahoka Lake -- a place for education and research

Tahoka Lake -- a place for education and research

--Burr Williams

Coach Don Hilger of Tahoka is a go-getter. (And a heck of a bus driver, too!) Recently he manhandled a Yellowhound down some mighty rough gravel roads, ferrying thirty Tahoka Middle School students to Tahoka Lake. When the kids tumbled out of the bus, the temperature was in the middle 20s, but the wind was not blowing, thanks to his lucky star! Coach Hilger had arranged for his students to meet with professional archaeologists and participate in real scientific research.

Dr. Eileen Johnson met the students at Mrs.Clyde May’s ranch house. Dr. Johnson is Curator of Anthropology, the Horn Professor of Museum Science at the Museum of Texas Tech University, and the Executive Director of the Lubbock Lake Landmark, the world-renowned archaeological facility just to the northwest of Texas Tech. For the day’s adventure, she assigned Dr. Stance Hurst, the Lubbock Lake Landmark regional research program Field Manager, Dr. Beau Schriever, the Museum Photographer and Documentation Specialist, Sophie Butler, Research Technician, and John Moretti, Research Aide to demonstrate basic field anthropology to the students.

Humans have used Tahoka Lake for thousands of years. As one of the larger and deeper salinas (salt lakes) on the Llano Estacado, it has three permanent springs along with other wet-weather seeps that once attracted the hordes of wildlife that early Native Americans relied upon for sustenance. Despite years of “arrowhead hunting,” the steady wind and water erosion continually exposes more artifacts. The goal for the day; discover artifacts and then use High-tech GPS equipment to accurately map their location.

Dr. Johnson had selected a rocky ridge for the survey. The crest of the ridge was riddled with small rock shelters large enough for people to use. On the north end of the ridge, a dense copse of junipers (cedars in West Texas parlance), mixed with scrubby hackberry and littleleaf sumac. The 60-degree slopes were covered with little bluestem, white tridens, blue grama, and sideoats grama. The ranch has been superbly managed for many years by the May family – such “ice cream grasses” grew everywhere.

Tahoka Lake

Before the students dispersed into two groups, Dr. Johnson, gave a short speech about the archaeological importance of the lake and described the long-range plans for continuing surveys over the coming years. Once at the site, Dr. Hurst and the rest of the archaeological team took half of the students to the research site. I took the other half on an ecological survey, focusing on the plants with ethnobotanical uses (useful to humans for food, material, and medicine) and interpreting how the Native Americans would have used the landscape. After two hours of work, the group ate lunch, and the groups of students switched. Mrs. May’s grandson Kelson aided the process. Stevi Huffaker, a math teacher at the Tahoka Middle School, served as a second student group leader .

Coach Hilger went with the first group to go with me. Students photographed the plants I spoke about, as well as taking many pages of notes. The groups will combine their research and create a field guide to the lake that will later be printed and presented to Mrs. May. Mrs. May is creating a non-profit organization to preserve the ranch and its resources and promote education and research at the site. Dr. Johnson, Dr. Dave Haukos of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Dr. Warren Conway of Stephen F. Austin State University, Tahoka lawyer H. Calloway Huffaker, and I serve as advisors to Mrs. May.

The temperature quickly became bearable, especially when we could find a big shrub to get out of a steady cool breeze that never got worse than ten miles an hour out of the southeast, right over the lake. The lake was almost full, thanks to plentiful fall rains. Thousands of sandhill cranes use the salina for a nighttime roost, and the big birds kept coming and going from the lake, their glorious trumpeting calls a constant presence.

In one of the draws near the site, hackberries covered with tiny reddish berries attracted dozens of mountain bluebirds (shockingly turquoise) and even more big red-breasted robins. In the early afternoon, the birds all gathered at one of the seeps near the edge of the lake. The seep was a hundred yards from a wonderful hackberry savannah with old trees with sizable girth dotting a waist-deep alkali sacaton meadow. Dr. Hurst agreed that in the future some exploratory trenches should be dug in the hackberry savannah. The location was perfect for a sizable Indian camp. It was down out of the drying west winds of summer and the cold north winds of winter, close to water, and had plentiful shade.

The rock shelters on the ridge nearby have long-since been picked clean by arrowhead hunters. Many of the “caves” were just the right size for burials in the Comanche way. It is hoped that if anyone with knowledge of any artifacts found there will come forth! Dr. Johnson, in her introductory speech, told about how in the past arrowhead hunters have unfortunately removed significant material that modern archaeologists would have found invaluable for further understanding the Indian’s adaptations to the tough environment of the Llano Estacado. She lauded the work of some amateur archaeologists, including the Midland Archaeological Society, for being “even more professional than some professional archaeologists.”

In 2000 and 2001 Dr. Johnson headed up a summer field camp at Tahoka Lake, studying the artifacts left by Hispanic sheepherders (pastores) that had constructed rock pens now not far from Mrs. May’s house. The work resulted in a display for the Lubbock Landmark and included photographs by Mrs. May’s late son. Jesus Perea used the lake in the 1870s as a headquarters for up to a dozen herds of sheep (30,000 total). Later C.C. Slaughter used the lake as a site for a line camp for his open range cattle kingdom, and his foreman for the ranch (Jack Alley) later bought it. Mrs. May’s husband’s family bought the ranch in the early 1920s.

The Sibley Nature Center salutes the efforts of Coach Don Hilger to make local history come alive for his students. Rick Day of the Andrews Middle School does the same for his students, too. We hope that other Llano Estacado school districts will be inspired by their work, and follow their lead. Leave no child inside!