September 2010 River Ranch Diary

At the moment of this writing, I am in southwestern Oklahoma visiting my family and taking care of some minimal business here in the town where I grew up, graduated from High School, and departed for other, not necessarily greener, pastures. Coming back here is always a long road, mostly because I no longer consider this place as home.

Home is where I feel most comfortable, not in the sense of sitting in a beloved, overstuffed chair or sleeping in a cushy bed, but rather in the sense of being at ease in my environment. Environment refers not only to the immediate physical surroundings of where I live in the northern plains but also to the intellectual camaraderie of my friends, to their social and political ideals, and to the emotional sense I feel when I meet the new day that presents itself to me and which, like it or not, I must meet.

I attained my majority in the southern plains in the vast prairie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains. I have lived the largest part of my life in the northern plains, and I have felt the tightening grip that the northern plains have exerted on my life. But it was in the southern plains that I first met the American Bison and elk, and where I learned to ride a horse.

Every time I return to this area, I make a point of visiting the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge where I hiked and camped as I was growing up. Not very much has changed in the Refuge since then, except the regulations regarding camping and swimming. I understand those changes because the area gets so much use from visitors that without regulations it would likely be damaged beyond recovery.

The Wichita Mountain Range consists of about a sixty mile outcropping of red granite that pushed up through the surrounding layers of limestone, sandstone, slate and shale, much like the Black Hills of South Dakota, except the Wichitas are much, much older and are, therefore, more rounded and worn, more exfoliated, then the jagged peaks of the Black Hills.

The Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache fought here to retain their heritage just as did the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes in the northern plains. The subsequent history concerning the establishment of reservations for the tribes is also similar north and south, as was the resistance by the tribes against those reservations and the loss of their heritage.

And just as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were the last to “come in” so, too, were Quanah Parker and Geronimo the last war chiefs to realize that the fight was lost and conceding was the only, however meager, road to survival. Geronimo is buried with many family and tribal members in the Apache Cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Quanah Parker and members of his family are interred in the Old Post Cemetery at Fort Sill. Both grave sites are reverenced by tribal descendants who grace the surrounding trees with mementos and traditional prayer bundles. I visit the grave sites occasionally and try to imagine what it must have been like with the buffalo gone, the heritage overwhelmed, the home, as it had been known, no longer comfortable, no longer an environment in which to be at ease.