Discovering buffalo wallers near Eldorado

The first time I noticed the buffalo wallows, I was just a kid, bouncing along in the passenger seat of Uncle Frank’s old pickup as we made the hundred-mile trek from our ranch near Juno to Producer’s Livestock Sales in San Angelo. It was the 1960s, and those trips were a ritual, hauling cattle, sheep, and goats to market. The landscape near Eldorado rolled by in a blur of mesquite and prickly pear, but something always caught my eye: these odd, shallow dips in the farmers’ fields along the way. They weren’t like the natural gullies or washes you’d expect. They were too round, too deliberate, like giant saucers pressed into the earth. Some held water long after a rain, shimmering under the hot sun, while others sat dry, their packed dirt glinting smooth and bare. They didn’t fit the rugged, rocky terrain of Schleicher County, and that inconsistency sort of nagged at me.

I must’ve been about ten when I finally asked about them. We were driving past a field just outside Eldorado, the horizon flat and hazy, when I pointed out one of those depressions. “Uncle Frank,” I said, “what are those holes out there? They look like they were put there.” Uncle Frank, who’d been chewing on a wet, frayed toothpick and squinting at the road, chuckled. “Those are buffalo wallers, son,” he said, his drawl thick as molasses. “Back when the big herds came through, the buffalo’d roll around in the dirt to make those. Kicked up mud to keep off the bugs and the heat. Made a mess of the ground, but it worked for ‘em.” I stared out the window, trying to picture it… thousands of those shaggy beasts, snorting and rolling, carving out those dents in the earth. It was hard to imagine in a place now ruled by barbed wire, plowed fields, paved roads, and grazing cattle.

Uncle Frank went on, telling me how the buffalo used to roam this far south, down to the Concho River valley and beyond, back in the late 1800s. “Millions of ‘em,” he said, “movin’ in herds so big they’d darken the plains.” He talked about how they’d wallow to cool off, to shake off ticks and flies, or just to mark their spot like a dog scratching its back. The mud would cake on their hides, shielding them from the sun’s fire and the biting insects that plagued the Southern Plains. I tried to picture those wallows fresh, churned up by a thundering herd, not the quiet, weathered pits I saw now, half-reclaimed by grass or pooling with rainwater.

As the years went on, I kept noticing those wallows on our drives. They were everywhere once you knew what to look for—some just thirty or forty feet across, while others stretched a hundred or more, shallow enough to walk through without twisting an ankle but deep enough to hold water for weeks. I learned later that the biggest ones, maybe two hundred feet wide, were from herds piling into the same spot over years, their hooves and bodies grinding the soil to a hard, smooth finish. In the northern plains, they were probably larger, Uncle Frank reckoned, since the bison down here were likely stragglers or seasonal visitors, not the massive herds of the Panhandle said to be four or five million head each. The Concho River, not far off, would’ve drawn them in for water, and the clay-heavy soils around Schleicher County held those wallows’ shapes like a memory etched in the earth.

I got curious about the history behind them. Uncle Frank told how he and Dad listened to the stories their dad, Pawpaw Fish, told about the great slaughter in the 1870s, when hide hunters with their high-powered rifles tore through the Southern Plains. By 1878, the bison were all but gone, wiped out to feed the demand for hides and to starve out the Comanche and Apache, who depended on them. I later learned about Charles Goodnight, who saved a few calves up in the Panhandle, starting a herd that’s now at Caprock Canyons, some 250 miles north of us. But down here in the Eldorado, Sonora, and Juno area, no bison roam anymore. The wallows are all that’s left, silent scars from a time when the plains pulsed with life.

Sometimes, on those long drives, I’d imagine the wallows as they were: freshly churned, dust clouds rising as a bull rolled his half-ton bulk in the dirt, snorting and kicking. I pictured the Comanche and Apache Indians tracking those herds, maybe right where Eldorado’s gas station or feed store sits now, using the wallows as signs of where to hunt. The settlers who came later probably cursed them, their wagon wheels catching in the dips. Now, most of the wallows I saw as a kid have been plowed over or faded under the weight of time and ranching. But every so often, on some untouched stretch of rangeland, I’ll spot one… a shallow, stubborn dent, maybe 40 or 50 feet across, holding rainwater or sprouting stubborn weeds. It’s like the land’s still whispering about the buffalo that used to call it home.

From time to time, I still drive out the familiar roads to the Concho River, and I still find many of the wallows still intact. The landscape’s changed… more fences, more pump jacks. But I still find a few faint depressions in pastures of the divide country, their edges softened but unmistakable. I haven’t been to Caprock Canyons yet, but I hear the bison there still make wallows, just like their ancestors did here. I still see them from time to time, watch the dust fly, and feel that connection to the past. For now, though, I carry those Eldorado wallows in my mind. A childhood curiosity turned into a grown man’s respect for a world we’ll never see again.