Sul Ross State University - Brand Yearbook (Alpine, TX)

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A Pueblo Indian Pottery Maker San Ildefonso, New Mexico Page 9

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As a race they have withered from the land. Their arrows are broken and their springs are dried up; their cabins are in the dust. Their council fires have long since gone out on the shore, and their war cry is fast dying out in the untrodden West. Slowly and sadly they climb the mountains and read their doom in the setting sun. They are shrinking before the mighty tide which is pressing them away; they must soon hear the roar of the last wave that will settle over them forever. Ages hence, the inquisitive white man, as he stands by some growing city, will ponder on the structure of their dis¬ turbed remains and wonder to what manner of person they belonged. They will live only in the songs and chronicles of their exterminators. Let these be true to their rude virtues as men and pay tribute to their unhappy fate as a people. HIS prophecy of Sam Houston’s, uttered more than a half century ago, iL has been fulfilled. Everywhere the Indians have disappeared from their old haunts to live in pueblos the prosaic life of the pottery maker, the basket weaver, and the laborer—an ironic contrast to the shifting and picturesque life of their ancestors. They are gone from the Big Bend Region, the Jumanos, the Mescalero Apaches, the Comanches, who lived for centuries in our canyons and our caves. The written records of their early days are meagre and scattered refere nces, in Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his long wanderings in the Big Bend Region, to the Jumanos, whom he encountered near Presidio forty-three years after the discovery of America; scattered bits in the records of the Conquista- dores, Espejo and Mendoza, and later in the journals of the Padres who lived and worked among the Indians. With the coming of the American pioneer to the Big Bend in the middle of the nineteenth century, began the long and bitter warfare which ended in the redman’s expulsion from the region. History and legend have preserved for us only the records of Indian cruelty, only the names of a few of the great chiefs;—Bajo el Sol, Espejo, and Alsate. But the Indian has left his own record in the paintings on his cavern walls, in the implements of his warfare and of his crude domestic life. And the de¬ scendants of his old enemies in the Big Bend, in the spirit of the great pioneer, Sam Houston, have sought to preserve these records, to see that at least he may live “in the songs and chronicles of his exterminators .’’ It is in that spirit that we have turned to the Indian for our motif in this book. The design on the cover is copied from a tanned leather shield loaned to the museum by Mr. C. R. Williams of Fort Davis, whose grandfather killed the original owner, an Indian brave, in battle. The rug in the scenic section is an exact copy of a chief’s blanket. The other color drawings in this volume, with the exception of the Thunder Bird, are copies of Mr. 0. L. Sims’ exact reproduc¬ tions of Indian pictographs and petroglyphs found on the cliffs along the Rio Grande and at Myer Springs, Fort Davis, Paint Rock, and Lobo, Texas. The references to relics and to the evidence of Indian habitation in the various can¬ yons are based on the field notes of Mr. Y. J. Smith, who has done extensive research in Indian culture. Page S

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