Story
Welcome to the Great American Desert. Thirty thousand square miles of ‘not much to look at’ for as far as the eye can see.
Mostly settled now, what little part’s got water under it. Or oil.
The Spanish explorer Francisco Coronado came through here, back in the mid-fifteen hundreds. Called this place the Palisaded Plains - el Llano Estacado. Named it when he saw the high cliffs of the Mescalero Escarpment on the western edge of this dry, thirsty land.
Course nobody around here’ll tell you that. Hell, even the United States Geological Survey calls this place the same thing we do: the Llano Estacado - Spanish for “The Staked Plains.” Some folks’ Spanish is just a little better than others’.
The stories are different but the legend’s always the same: Francisco Coronado’s Pawnee indian guide led the expedition out here to die. Would have worked, too, except Coronado finally got wise to the trick and had him locked up.
Accused him of dealing with the devil to commit high treason, and sentenced him to death. Coronado’s men strapped him to a chair and screwed a blade through a hole in the back of it, tighter and tighter into his neck until they’d broken it in two.
They say that with no one left to guide him, Coronado had to drive stakes into the ground so he could find his way back home across the endless plains.
It’s not a bad story.
Truth is, Coronado’s men didn’t drive wooden stakes into the ground to get back to their homeland.
They drove wooden stakes in the ground to send the devil back to his.