DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just the voice carryin' the story down the road. Now, somewhere beneath the waters of Lake Champion in Mitchell County lies a place that used to be something else entirely — something older than any town, older than any trail, older maybe than memory itself. They called it Seven Wells.
And if you were standing there before the lake covered it over, you'd see why. Seven spring basins, each one shaped so perfectly round and so perfectly deep that you'd swear somebody had dug them by hand. But no human hands made those.
Underground water carved them out, the same underground water that fed Champion Creek itself, and those basins just sat there looking for all the world like wells a giant might have sunk into the earth. So Seven Wells it was, and Seven Wells it stayed. Now here's where the story starts to get big — and I mean big in the way only deep time can make a thing feel big.
Buffalo tracks. Cut right into the soft sandstone along the creek banks, pressed so deep you could run your hand across them and feel the weight of a whole world that doesn't exist anymore. Great herds of bison found this place and came back to it, again and again, wearing their trails into stone like a signature.
And they weren't the only ones who knew the value of a good water source in dry West Texas country. For hundreds of years, Indians camped here too, at the spot where north and south Champion Creeks converged. At least four trails crisscrossed that convergence point — four trails meeting at those seven basins like spokes finding a hub.
Then came the 1880s, and along with them came settlers, the kind who looked at springs and sandstone and ancient crossroads and said, well, this seems like a fine place to put down roots. A small settlement took shape right there at the site of the wells in Mitchell County, and somebody gave it the name Artesia. A little town, early in the county's life, rising up at a spot that bison and Indians and uncounted travelers had already been calling important for centuries.
And now? Now it's quiet down there under Lake Champion. The springs, the sandstone, the deep round basins that fooled your eye into seeing something man-made — all of it covered over.
Seven Wells is a story the water is keeping now.
What the marker says
This area, now covered by Lake Champion, was once the site of springs that originated from underground water which also supplied Champion Creek. They were called "wells" because the Seven Spring Basins closely resembled man-made wells. Buffalo tracks cut deep into the creek banks of soft sandstone indicated this was a watering place for great herds of bison. At least four trails crisscrossed the area where north and south Champion Creeks converged. For hundreds of years Indians also camped here, and in the 1880s a small, early Mitchell County settlement named "Artesia" grew up at the site of the wells. (1968)