Coyote Lake

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker at Coyote Lake has to say — and friend, this one's got layers. Out on the flat, windswept reach of Bailey County, there sits a lake. Not a pretty, postcard lake with canoes and weekend fishermen.

No. Coyote Lake is a salt lake — brackish water, the kind that makes you pucker — and yet, over the centuries, just about everybody who passed through this corner of the Texas Panhandle stopped and was grateful for it anyway. That right there tells you something about how thirsty this country can make you.

The lake is no small puddle, either. Its shoreline runs over six and a half miles, and its bed covers eight hundred and twenty-nine acres, making it one of the largest saline lakes in the whole region. Plenty of room for the stories that soaked into its banks.

In the early days, the Comanches were the masters of this land — and masters is exactly the right word. They ran the Staked Plains on their own terms. Artifacts found near the lake shore today show that Coyote Lake was a favorite Comanche camp site, which makes a certain kind of sense.

Water, even salty water, is power in dry country. That chapter of the story began to close after the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, after which the Comanches no longer hindered settlement of the Staked Plains. The land opened up.

And the people who rushed in next were not homesteaders with rocking chairs and seed catalogs. They were buffalo hunters. Even while the Indians were still a menace, those hunters were already swarming into the Panhandle, and they camped at Coyote Lake too.

They came for the southern herd — a herd that once numbered in the millions, those huge shaggy beasts covering the plains horizon to horizon. And the hunters worked at it with such relentless purpose that by 1877, they had killed so many that the southern herd nearly became extinct. Nearly.

That word has to carry a lot of weight. Millions of animals, and within just a few years — gone, or close enough to gone that the difference hardly mattered. Then the cattle came.

From 1885 to about 1910, Coyote Lake served as a watering spot for the XIT Ranch. Now, if you've heard of the XIT, you already know the number — but say it out loud anyway and let it settle: three million, fifty thousand acres. Three million, fifty thousand.

The XIT blanketed the western Panhandle, and Coyote Lake sat right there in the middle of its world, doing what it had always done — offering water to whatever living thing was thirsty enough to take it, salt and all. And then in 1898, the Pecos and Northern Texas Railroad built through Bovina, thirty miles north of the lake. Now cattle were moving — thousands of them, up from southern ranches, headed for the railroad at Bovina and on to northern markets.

And on that trail, Coyote Lake watered every one of them that passed. Comanche camps. Buffalo hunters.

Three million acres of cattle country. A railroad push north. One lake.

Six and a half miles of shoreline. Brackish water that nobody would have chosen if they'd had better options — but out here, on hot, dry days, it was exactly enough. That's the whole story of Coyote Lake, and honestly, that's the whole story of this part of Texas.

What the marker says

One of numerous natural salt lakes in the Texas Panhandle; its waters, although brackish, have been welcome enough at various times to Indians, buffalo hunters, and thirsty cattle on hot, dry days. The lake, having a shoreline of over six and a half miles and a bed area of 829 acres, is one of the largest of the many saline lakes in the region. In early days, the Comanches were masters of this area, but after the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, they no longer hindered settlement of the Staked Plains. Today, artifacts found near the lake shore show that this was once a favorite Comanche camp site. Even while the Indians were still a menace, buffalo hunters swarmed into the Panhandle, and they, too, often camped on Coyote Lake. Until 1877, they killed so many of the huge, shaggy beasts that the southern herd, once numbering millions, nearly became extinct. From 1885 to about 1910, Coyote Lake served as a watering spot for cattle on the huge (3,050,000 acres) XIT Ranch, which blanketed the western Panhandle. In 1898 when the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad built through Bovina (30 miles north), the lake watered thousands of cattle en route from southern ranches to the railroad, and from there to northern markets. (1968)