Cowboys and Indians

First, Cowboys. West of San Antonio, everyone except us tourists from ‘somewhere north of Dallas’ wears a ten-gallon hat.
As for Indians, the local Apaches and Comanches often disagreed with the 19th century Anglo settlers who had the habit of picking the choicest land in the region and calling it home. To protect these settlers, as well as stagecoach travel across Texas, the U.S. Army built a line of cavalry posts here in the 1850s. During this time, an experiment with camels as work animals instead of horses in this arid land failed, but mainly for political reasons. The forts—and the camels (a wild herd is still said to roam the hills east of Marfa)—were abandoned in 1861 with the onset of the Civil War.
We walked the ruins of Fort Lancaster today, along the Pecos River, the only visitors in this desolate and very quiet place. -DJN