Miles of history: 'Heaven’s Harsh Tableland' takes an in-depth look at the Llano Estacado

What, you may ask, is so terribly interesting about a high, flat, dry, stark plain covering 48,000 square miles.

In the hands of historian Paul H. Carlson, there is a great deal of compelling information about the Llano Estacado in the Southern Plains.

The Llano extends from the Pecos River Valley and the towns of Clovis, Portales and Hobbs in eastern New Mexico well into western Texas, encompassing range lands, cotton fields, the oil-rich Permian Basin and the cities of Amarillo and Lubbock.

Miles of history: 'Heaven’s Harsh Tableland' takes an in-depth look at the Llano Estacado

Carlson is the author of the book “Heaven’s Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado.”

What makes the book so rich and engrossing is Carlson’s down-to-earth (pun intended) writing touch. “I’m an old-style historian. I write a lot of narrative history, and it’s sometimes frowned upon by academic historians,” Carlson said in a phone interview from his home in Lubbock, Texas.

The book comes alive through the vividness of his descriptions of the land, the people who have lived and died on it, the animals that have grazed on it and its changing environment.

Carlson’s book takes the reader back before humans showed up.

He writes in a chapter summary that, geologically, the Llano Estacado began forming between 10 million and five million or more years ago. It grew from outwash materials — pebbles, gravel, silt and dirt — of the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico.

At least two critical phenomena grew from the creation of the Llano Estacado, Carlson notes. One was the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground reservoir of water extending from eastern New Mexico and West Texas to South Dakota. The other is the Caprock, a layer of sandy limestone and caliche near the Llano’s surface.

Rivers, valleys and draws cut through the Llano’s surface, making the landmass less monotonous.

Back in the late Pleistocene epoch, 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, Carlson writes, the Llano wasn’t so dry. Tall grasses predominated, plants spread and some trees were visible.

In that epoch some Ice Age animals — woolly mammoths, dire wolves and horses no larger than llamas disappeared, but others species, including coyotes, deer, elk and rabbits survived.

The first humans, part of hunting and gathering societies, arrived on the Llano about 12,000 years ago, Carlson writes that most authorities suggest.

Of these early arrivals, were those in the Clovis tradition. Evidence of Clovis culture was found in an archaeological site first discovered in 1929 near Portales and Clovis.

On the Llano, the Clovis hunters sought Ice Age megafauna, ate geese, ducks and turkeys and gathered plants, seeds, fruits and nuts.

With the Ice Age ending, megafauna grew extinct except for bison. With the Llano’s climate patterns grew warmer, shorter grasses took over. That benefited a smaller modern species of bison that thrived on the Llano and elsewhere in North America, Carlson writes.

Carlson notes severe changes in climate over many centuries and their influences on the different people who moved into or out of the Llano.

For example, about 2,000 years ago, the Archaic period yielded to the Ceramic time, “named for its people’s adoption of pottery and characterized by long episodes of drought.” Another development of the Ceramic period was the widespread use of the bow and arrow.

After 1400, groups of Athabaskan-speaking people, dominated by proto-Apaches, raided villages on the Llano and elsewhere on the Southern Plains, he writes.

Another major change was the arrival of Europeans. In 1541, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was among the first conquistadors who trekked on the Llano, encountering people he called Querechos, probably an early Lipan Apache group, Carlson writes. They were mobile bison hunters and used dogs “with travois to carry loads of meat, bones, horns, hoofs, hair and hides to live.”

Coronado also met a different group he called Teyas. They spoke a variant of an ancient Uto-Aztecan language associated with Salinas Pueblo in New Mexico.

The Lipans dominated the Llano for almost 200 years. Then, in about 1718, Comanches traveled east from northern New Mexico to the southern Plains and the Llano. They reigned for about a century, with the Llano as the geographic center of their Comanchería.

Carlson’s historic survey moves forward all the way to the year 2020.

Given the wealth of characters and stories in this book, Carlson includes helpful summaries at the end of each chapter. He also incorporates sidebars that highlight people and places on the Llano worth knowing about.

In one chapter, there’s a sidebar on Georgia O’Keeffe. Before Abiquiú, before New York City, O’Keeffe taught school and painted in Amarillo and served as an art instructor at West Texas State Normal College.

Another chapter’s sidebar is about Stanley Marsh, whom Carlson describes as one of the most lovable and eccentric characters of Amarillo and the upper Llano Estacado. Marsh may be best remembered for commissioning the public art exhibit along Interstate 40 of 10 half-buried Cadillacs.

Yet another sidebar is about the name Llano Estacado. Llano is Spanish for plain. Estacado, Carlson writes, has several possible meanings — staked, elevated and palisaded among them.