The Ghost of the Llano Estacado
Buffalo hunters ended the reign of the bison herds on the southern Great Plains at the end of the 1870s. In need of a new profession, one of those hunters, a Texan by way of England named Frank Collinson, took up life as a cowboy in the shadow of the mysterious Llano Estacado.
While searching for stray cattle up on the Llano one day, he came across a former hunting friend. Sitting in the middle of that ocean of grass, listening to the wind, the old hunter told a story about a horse he had been trying to capture for two years. The rare, pure white mustang had deep black eyes and was “as fleet as the wind”. The buffalo had disappeared, but bands of wild horses still stalked the grasslands of the Staked Plains.
The story haunted Collinson and he later asked some friends and noted mustangers, Pedro and Soledad Trujillo, about the horse. They told him every mesteñero on the Plains knew about the stallion and called him the Ghost because he vanished when anyone got too close. Many had tried to catch him; all had failed.
Collinson and the brothers hatched a plan to go Ghost hunting on the Llano Estacado. In the spring of 1882, they met at Blackwater Draw to set it in motion. After locating the stallion and his band, Soledad stuck a long pike in the ground with a crimson banner on top to mark the location. This became the guidepost the mustangers used to “walk the horses down” with the goal of keeping the horses on the move until exhaustion made them too weak to escape.
The chase continued for three days as the hunting party traded off in relays covering dozens, then hundreds, of miles as the band looped back around to their home range. The mares dropped out, one by one, until only the Ghost himself remained. On the morning of the fourth day, the hunters spotted the stallion heading west out of the rising sun toward a landmark known as the Yellow Houses. When the stark white mustang reached the bluffs overlooking the eastern edge of the alkali lake at Casas Amarillas, he paused, then disappeared.
Close enough to hear the splash, Collinson reached the cliff edge in time to witness the last struggles of the stallion before he became engulfed in the mire. The Ghost had chosen death over capture.
The onetime buffalo hunter later reflected on the Ghost’s almost unnatural qualities: “He had been foaled on the best short grass that ever grew, in an invigorating climate. He had grown bigger and stronger than any other mustang I ever saw. We took after him at the time of year when range horses are at their weakest. After having been run for towards three hundred miles by successive relays of grain-fed horses, he could, at the time of his fatal jump into Yellow House Lake, have easily run away from any horse chasing him.”
The defiant mustang bands would soon follow the fate of the bison herds on the Plains. A haunting epitaph, The Last Run of the Ghost of the Llano Estacado symbolizes a vanished chapter of the Staked Plains.
