Gone to Rock and Ruin: Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument

By Beryl Cain Hughes

Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument thirty-five miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a federal entity in 2015, but until now, there has not been a single comprehensive book written about the site.

Beryl Cain Hughes, who has long been fascinated by the site, celebrates the history and natural beauty of what had been the one and only national monument in Texas for several decades in this collection of essays.

She answers questions such as the following:

Who were the people who lived near the quarries?

Why was the flint more valuable than gold?

What did these people eat, wear, and do?

What were their most significant accomplishments?

The author also celebrates the accomplishments of Floyd V. Studer, who was the first person to recognize the importance of a hill pockmarked with the pits that people dug in their search for good flint. He would spend his life dedicated to the site and its preservation.

Explore the history of some of the earliest people to venture into the Western hemisphere who dug flint, set up trade exchanges, established villages, and fought to survive with Gone to Rock and Ruin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480862869

Beryl Cain Hughes

Beryl Cain Hughes has lived in the Texas Panhandle for more than thirty years and is well acquainted with Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. She has degrees in history and anthropology, and a master of arts in library science. She has presented a number of papers on various aspects of the Flint Quarries, parts of which are included in this book, to professional societies.

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Copyright © 2018 Beryl Cain Hughes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Interior Art Credit: William Burrell

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6287-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6288-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6286-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945555

Archway Publishing rev. date: 06/08/2018

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Canadian Breaks

Trek To The Flint Source

Worthless Agate

The Flint Source

Flint And Language

The Kiss of the Aurora

Music And Dance

Daily Necessities: Food And Clothing

Division Of Labor

Petroglyphs

Man The Dirt-Eater

Ruins

Studer Family Background

Mother Culture

Alibates Ruins 28, 28 A, 29, 30.

Kiva

Agriculture

Abandonment

Studer And The P-PHM

Canadian River Municipal Water Authority

National Monument Status

Also by Beryl Cain Hughes (writing as Beryl Cain Roper)

Trementina: New Mexico’s Most Interesting Ghost Town

Trementina Revisited

In the Light of Past Experience: Papers In Honor of Jack T. Hughes

DEDICATION

To Jack T. Hughes

He introduced me to a Texas before cowboys, Cadillacs and oil wells.

EPIGRAPH

It’s not mainly our capacity to dig out facts, but rather the educated intuition and practical experience to arrange them in meaningful patterns that is most important.

Harlan Cleveland.

These essays are proof of the author’s innate curiosity and her drive to satisfy that curiosity. Whether it’s the origin of the name of the people, or how Texas’ first national monument came to be, she has dug into the past to answer her own questions and, in the process, has given the reader insights into the history of Alibates in this beautifully illustrated book. Here and there are hints of her humor like salt on the meatier facts and propositions of her research. Once there was no book about Alibates national monument; now there is.

Mary Ruthe Carter

INTRODUCTION

When I first became aware of Alibates, I went uptown to pick up a nice book about it—one with lots of pictures. They celebrated their 50th anniversary as a Federal entity in 2015. Naturally it would be the subject of several books. Surprise! There is no book about Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. A clerk in one bookstore peered earnestly into his computer screen and asked whether I was sure that Alibates was the author I was looking for.

Supposing that the person who sees the lack is the one to fill it, I began to visit the Park. I took a few pictures, spent a lot of time perusing National Park Service photos, and reading books about the peopling of the Americas. I was surprised to learn that for fifty years, Alibates Flint Quarries had been the one and only National Monument in Texas, and most people, just a few miles away, had never heard of it!

Full disclosure: I am not an archaeologist, and this is not a scientific treatise. I am simply a researcher and writer who is intrigued by puzzles. This is a collection of essays on various aspects of the Alibates Flint Quarries and the people who lived there. Where did they come from and why settle in the Canadian Breaks? What did they eat and wear? Did they have language, music, dance?

All the essays are more or less on the same subject—the people of Alibates. Each stands alone, and the whole thing may seem somewhat disjointed, jumping from one item to the next. No effort has been made to provide connecting bridges.

Of course, there is no discovery without a discoverer. In this case, that person would be Floyd V. Studer. He was not the first to find the hill pockmarked with the pits that people dug in their search for good flint. He was the one who devoted his life to it and to its preservation. So there will be Studer biographical material, as well as mention of some of those who assisted in the work, throughout.

Now the Alibates Flint Quarries is carefully guarded. You can drive to the Visitor’s Center, but if you want to visit the quarries, you must join a tour guided by a ranger. Each Saturday in October, there will be a tour of the ruins. For further information look at the website, https://www.nps.gov/alfl/index.htm Click Find your State, then Texas.

I need to clarify something about the folk I call the Alibates people. There has never been a group called quote Alibates people in the sense of Germans or Tahitians. But think of it this way: you may be tall or short, devout or an atheist, you may say Si! Si!, Ja!Ja!, or your speech may have a touch of the Auld Saud. But if you make your home in Texas, you’re a Texan. It is in that sense that I speak of the Alibates people. They are the people who lived at the Alibates Flint quarries, dug the flint, and set up the trade exchanges, no matter where they came from, how long they stayed, or who their ancestors were.

Of one thing we can be certain: they were among the earliest people to venture into the Western hemisphere. They were truly American Pioneers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank all the members of the Panhandle Archeology Society, the Southwest Federation of Archeology Societies, and that special Friday lunch group, the Curmudgeons.

The Archivists of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum have furnished me with all kinds of printed materials and photos, including the Congressional Record.

Photographs were furnished by Alvin Lynn and James Coverdale, and original drawings by William Burrell.

Robert Wishoff shared his thesis with me. His Nearest Neighbor Analysis was new to me and helped me to clarify and solidify my thinking on the clan system of governance.

And a special hats-off to Rolla Shaller, whose knowledge of Panhandle archaeology and his willingness to share his personal knowledge of the Studer family has proven invaluable.

PROLOGUE

This is the story of one of those rare moments when an ordinary day, a weekend for rest and relaxation, turned into something beyond dreaming. A young man was roaming the hills and valleys of the Texas Panhandle, a place once dubbed an uninhabitable desert. Upon being shown an old cemetery, he realized that he was looking at the evidence of one of North America’s oldest and most advanced civilizations. It stretched along the Canadian River from Oklahoma to New Mexico, but the center, the raison d’etre, was the place where Alibates Creek flowed into the Canadian River.

Floyd V. Studer was 32 years old in 1925. As he began to understand the importance of his find, he knew it had to be kept secret for a while. As someone said, We have to save it from the public so we can save it for the public. Studer went so far as to concoct phony maps and put up signs warning people to Keep Off. He had a career, a family, social and civic obligations, but Alibates became the passion of his life. He was determined to get it recognized as a National Monument.

This was a battle that would involve the Bureau of Reclamation, the United States Congress, and eventually the President himself. But he won. Floyd Studer, the self-educated insurance salesman from Amarillo --some little town out on the Plains that nobody back East had ever heard of—won. After 40 years of effort, his 13,000-year-old mining and trading center at last became Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument in 1965. His goal finally accomplished, he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1966.

From Amarillo, drive north on Highway 136 to Cas