The Old Mackenzie Trail
See, stretching yonder o’er that low divide
Which parts the falling rain—the eastern slope
Sends down its waters to the southern sea
Through Double Mountain’s winding length of stream;
The western side spreads out into a plain,
Which sinks away o’er tawny, rolling leagues
At last into the rushing Rio Grande—
See, faintly showing on that distant ridge,
The deep-cut pathways through the shelving crest,
Sage-matted now and rimmed with chaparral,
The dim reminders of the olden times,
The life of stir, of blood, of Indian raid,
The hunt of buffalo and antelope;
The camp, the wagon train, the sea of steers;
The cowboy’s lonely vigil through the night;
The stampede and the wild ride through the storm;
The call of California’s golden flood;
The impulse of the Saxon’s “Westward Ho”
Which set our fathers’ faces from the east,
To spread resistless o’er the barren wastes,
To people all the regions ’neath the sun—
Those vikings of the old Mackenzie Trail.
It winds—this old forgotten cattle trail—
Through valleys still and silent even now,
Save when the yellow-breasted desert lark
Cries shrill and lonely from a dead mesquite,
In quivering notes set in a minor key;
The endless round of sunny days, of starry nights,
The desert’s blank immutability.
The coyote’s howl is heard at dark from some
Low-lying hill; companioned by the loafer wolf
They yelp in concert to the far off stars,
Or gnaw the bleachèd bones in savage rage
That lie unburied by the grass-grown paths.
The prairie dogs play sentinel by day
And backward slips the badger to his den;
The whir, the fatal strike of rattlesnake,
A staring buzzard floating in the blue,
And, now and then, the curlew’s eerie call—
Lost, always lost, and seeking evermore.
All else is mute and dormant; vacantly
The sun looks down, the days run idly on,
The breezes whirl the dust, which eddying falls
Smothering the records of the westward caravans,
Where silent heaps of wreck and nameless graves
Make milestones for the old Mackenzie Trail.
Across the Brazos, Colorado, through
Concho’s broad, fair valley, sweeping on
By Abilene it climbs upon the plains,
The Llano Estacado (beyond lie wastes
Of alkali and hunger gaunt and death)—
And here is lost in shifting rifts of sand.
Anon it lingers by a hidden spring
That bubbles joy into the wilderness;
Its pathway trenched that distant mountain side,
Now grown to gulches through torrential rain.
De Vaca gathered piñons by the way,
Long ere the furrows grew on yonder hill,
Cut by the creaking prairie-schooner wheels;
La Salle, the gentle Frenchman, crossed this course,
And went to death and to a nameless grave.
For ages and for ages through the past
Comanches and Apaches from the north
Came sweeping southward, searching for the sun,
And charged in mimic combat on the sea.
The scions of Montezuma’s low-browed race
Perhaps have seen that knotted, thorn-clad tree;
Or sucked the cactus apples growing there.
All these have passed, and passed the immigrants,
Who bore the westward fever in their brain,
The Norseman tang for roving in their veins;
Who loved the plains as sailors love the sea,
Braved danger, death, and found a resting place
While traveling on the old Mackenzie Trail.
Brave old Mackenzie long has laid him down
To rest beyond the trail that bears his name;
A granite mountain makes his monument;
The northers, moaning o’er the low divide,
Go gently past his long deserted camps.
No more his rangers guard the wild frontier,
No more he leads them in the border fight.
No more the mavericks, winding stream of horns
To Kansas bound; the dust, the cowboy songs
And cries, the pistol’s sharp report—the free,
Wild days in Texas by the Rio Grande.
And some men say when dusky night shuts down,
Dark, cloudy nights without a kindly star,
One sees dim horsemen skimming o’er the plain
Hard by Mackenzie’s trail; and keener ears
Have heard from deep within the bordering hills
The tramp of ghostly hoofs, faint cattle lows,
The rumble of a moving wagon train,
Sometimes far echoes of a frontier song;
Then sounds grow fainter, shadows troop away—
On westward, westward, as they in olden time
Went rangeing o’er the old Mackenzie Trail.