Blue Highways: Fort Stockton, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapTopping mesas, we see a golden light in the distance.  Is it a golden city of Cibola, such as we discussed a couple of posts past?  No, it's Fort Stockton, but if you've driven a long time it could just as easily pass as a golden place when you're hungry and tired.  To see where Fort Stockton, and its history of the West you've probably never heard of, is located click on the thumbnail of the map at right.

Book Quote

"From the top of another high mesa:  twelve miles west in the flat valley floor, the lights of Fort Stockton blinked white, blue, red, and yellow in the heat like a mirage.  How is it that desert towns look so fine and big at night?  It must be that little is hidden.  The glistering ahead could have been a golden city of Cibola.  But the reality of Fort Stockton was plywood and concrete block and the plastic signs of Holiday Inn and Mobil Oil.

"I found a Mexican cafe of adobe, with a whitewashed log ceiling, creekstone fireplace, and jukebox pumping out mariachi music.... At the next table sat three big, round men: an Indian wearing a silver headband, a Chicano in a droopy Pancho Villa mustache, and a Negro in faded overalls.  I thought what a litany of grievances that table could recite.  But the more I looked, the more I believed they were someone's vision of the West..."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Paisano Pete, the official mascot of Fort Stockton. Photo by spacemanspiff at virtualtourist.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Stockton, Texas

About two years ago, I made the 5-6 hour drive each Sunday evening from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Lubbock, Texas.  I was working in Lubbock at Texas Tech teaching political science, but my wife was living in Albuquerque.  It was part of my weekly ritual of driving home on Friday night, staying the weekend with her, and then driving back to be to work on Monday.  It was tiring, but also nice.  The drive was long but easy, with about a third of it on Interstate 40 and the rest through mostly uninhabited areas of New Mexico, and then sparsely inhabited areas of upper West Texas.

I especially liked driving at night after turning off the interstate toward Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  On nights before the moon had risen, or nights of no moon, it was almost completely dark save for the occasional car headlights coming at me.  When I reached an area where the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks paralleled the road, train headlamps shone for miles ahead of me and I would see them coming at me for at least 10 minutes before the train actually reached me.  And, like LHM says above, the lights of a town like Fort Sumner or Clovis would set the sky aglow for miles - a beacon toward which I would aim my vehicle, promising riches like a bathroom, road food like sodas, chips, candy or something else to keep me awake.  As the miles between me and these oases in the desert dwindled, I'd listen to music on my IPod, which sometimes would surprise and even scare me a little when the perfect song would pop up at the perfect time.  Once, I saw a freight train making an emergency stop on tracks paralleling the road between Fort Sumner and Clovis.  I though for a moment that I saw water pouring from the side of the train, and realized that I was actually seeing sparks from the locked up wheels of the train showering out from underneath the rail cars.  It was pretty amazing.

My trips through West Texas some many miles south of Lubbock, in the general area where LHM is traveling, was a lot like my trips through eastern New Mexico on my way to Lubbock.  Largely uninhabited and sparsely vegetated.  Few trees.  The main challenge driving such areas is to maintain ones attention as the miles of road blur together.  An event like topping a mesa and seeing the glittering lights of a city provides a little rush of excitement, a little bit of adrenaline, and is a welcome relief from the miles of loneliness and boredom that may have set in.  At least I had an IPod so I could maintain my attention through music.  At the time LHM wrote, IPods were still in a distant future - the desktop computer was only just being conceived as a possibility.

I have been through Fort Stockton twice.  The first time I blew through on the freeway with my wife after a camping trip at Big Bend.  The second occasion was a gonzo trip I made with a 70 something neighbor lady who needed to deliver a van to a non-profit organization in Guanajuato, Mexico that she helped direct from the U.S., and I jumped at the chance to make that trip.  On that trip, we drove through downtown Fort Stockton and I think we stopped for some lunch at a local restaurant.  I did not see a similar diverse group there - mostly Hispanic Americans - and I don't remember anything overly remarkable about the town in my brief time there.

However, I have become aware that Fort Stockton was largely garrisoned in the years after the Civil War to protect settlers from the Indians.  The garrison in Fort Stockton was, at its peak, 87 percent African-American.  These were the famed Buffalo Soldiers that Bob Marley immortalized in his reggae tune.  Known for their bravery and as fierce fighters, their stories have largely been lost in the annals of the history of the western U.S.  We don't think of the West as being more than the white cowboys, ranchers, and even lawless and dangerous citizens that gave the West its enduring popular legacy.  But in fact, many African-Americans went West to escape slavery, and to carve out new lives away from the overt racism of the South and the implicit racism of the North.

I wonder if the man LHM describes as "a Negro in faded overalls" was a descendant of one of the Buffalo Soldiers stationed at Fort Stockton, or descendant of slaves brought to Texas, or if his heritage was of a later arrival in Texas?  It's an interesting snapshot that LHM presents - the first inhabitants of Texas represented by the Indian, the men brought in to not only till the land for the masters but also to fight the Indians represented by the Negro, and the group supplanting both of them, as well as whites, as the biggest population of the Southwest in the Chicano.  They may recite a litany of grievances of the past, and perhaps they will address those grievances as the face of our country's future. 

That minority groups might recite those grievances loudly from a position of greater power drives a lot of the extreme political discourse and punitive policies toward immigrants and government redistribution of wealth in our country today.  I was reading an article by Kathaleen Roberts in the Albuquerque Journal on February 23, 2011 which profiles the Buffalo Soldiers and their pivotal role in securing New Mexico and helping it become stable enough for statehood.  The article makes the case that if New Mexico hadn't had these African-American soldiers in its territory, all trying to prove themselves in the wake of slavery, and who evidently often fought when white soldiers fled from overwhelming numbers (their ferocity earned them their nickname from the Cheyenne, who considered an angry buffalo the most fierce thing they could face), New Mexico might not be celebrating its centennial next year.  The article makes the argument that the West was a lot more colorful than we are led to believe by our understanding and depictions of history.  Perhaps we should remember the debt America owes to peoples of many different ethnic heritages in its creation and expansion, and not sanitize history in political attempts to uphold ideological biases to meet certain ends.

Musical Interlude

It's not a Texas music video, but it seems appropriate given my topic above - Bob Marley's tribute to the Buffalo Soldier.

If you want to know more about Fort Stockton or Buffalo Soldiers

City of Fort Stockton
Fort Stockton Historic Site
Fort Stockton Pioneer (newspaper)
TexasEscapes.com: Fort Stockton
Tour Texas:  Fort Stockton
Wikipedia:  Fort Stockton

Buffalo Soldiers National Museum
Wikipedia: Buffalo Soldiers
Youtube: History of Buffalo Soldiers

Next up: Balmorhea, Texas

Littourati News: Blue Highways Google Earth File Updated

I've finally updated the Blue Highways Google Earth .kml file.  It now has all the stops up through the latest post, West of the Pecos, Texas.  You can find the file in the Google Earth link at left, or you can simply go here.  I will be better about keeping this file up to date from now on.

Michael

Blue Highways: West of the Pecos, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe're driving along with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  The dusk is starting to get deeper.  There, against the paling light of the horizon, we see an almost perfect cone, rising like a temple out of the landscape.  We'll stop, climb it's height with LHM, and do some reflection.  See where I think this geographical feature that so caught LHM's attention is located by clicking on the map thumbnail at right.

Book quote

"West of the Pecos, a strangely truncated cone rose from the valley. In the oblique evening light, its silhouette looked like a Mayan temple, so perfect was its symmetry. I stopped again, started climbing, stirring a panic of lizards on the way up. From the top, the rubbled land below - veined with the highway and arroyos, topographical relief absorbed in the dusk - looked like a roadmap.

"....The night, taking up the shadows and details, wiped the face of the desert into a simple, uncluttered blackness until there were only three things: land, wind, stars. I was there too, but my presence I felt more than I saw. It was as if I had been reduced to mind, to an edge of consciousness. Men, ascetics, in all eras have gone into deserts to lose themselves - Jesus, Saint Anthony, Saint Basil, and numberless medicine men - maybe because such a losing happens almost as a matter of course here if you avail yourself. The Sioux once chanted, 'All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.'"

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Is this where William Least Heat-Moon climbed his "Mayan temple" in the desert west of the Pecos? Image from Google Earth's street view at 30.919661°, longitude -101.981235°West of the Pecos, Texas

One of the coolest things invented, I think, is the programming code that first started out as Keyhole, and is now Google Earth.  LHM didn't give exact directions about where he found things along the side of the road, and there are some landmarks - a stream, a tree - that are going to be absolutely impossible to find.  But with the help of Google Earth, and especially it's street view feature, I think I was able to find exactly this very spot that LHM writes about west of the Pecos River.  If anyone is traveling along what once was Texas 29, now U.S. 190, toward Fort Stockton after passing through Iraan, Texas and then over the Pecos, you'll find this particular landmark at  latitude 30.919661°, longitude -101.981235°.  The picture above was captured from Google Earth, and is what makes me think it's the right place, though of course there is no way of really knowing.  However, it appears to be the only place along that road that matches the description.

LHM seems to exhibit a lot of patterns on this trip.  He likes to stop at interesting places that are off the road.  He likes to climb to the top of things - he did so at the Caddo Mounds, and now here.  He also frequently evokes references to losing oneself.  He does a lengthy exploration of people voluntarily removing themselves from society at a trappist monastery in Georgia.  He refers to Jesus, saints and others in the quote above who have availed themselves of the desert to explore their deeper humanity and spirituality in a search for answers.

I think we can make our own deserts or we can find the physical desert, but the manifestation of the desert is different depending on which one we are in.  Since I've been living in a desert, the differences and the connections are more intermingled for me than they have been in the past.  Before, when I lived in other non-desert places, the actual desert was so far removed from my ordinary experience that seeing one or being in one was really a clash of sensibilities.  I wondered how anyone could possibly live there.

But often, regardless of where I was located, I was in a desert of my own making.  When I felt lonely, when if I withdrew from people because I was emotionally hurt or angry, or when I sought solace in meditation or prayer or some other type of reflective activity, I was inhabiting a desert of my own creation.  It is written that Jesus went into the desert and was tempted by Satan.  Every time I partook of activities in attempts to forestall something that I needed to do or take care of something that I should address, I was succumbing to those temptations and trapping myself in my desert.

The physical desert brings everything into stark relief.  In the desert you really are alone, and you feel very physically separated from other people.  You have withdrawn and it is difficult not to meditate or pray or reflect.  You are putting life aside for a moment to be there, because even though time doesn't really stop, it feels like it has.  The desert invites you to look at your life and put it in perspective.  The desert can tempt you with visions of what your life is and ought to be.  Medicine men go to the desert and some take narcotics like peyote in a ritual meant to draw the spirits and release those visions in stark detail, but the ordinary person need not go to such extremes to have similar desert revelations.

LHM says that he felt his presence and that he had been reduced to mind.  It is an amazing feeling to be at once so small and so big.  It puts us in our rightful place.  Yes, we are small in the cosmic sense, but yes, we are big because we can see, hear, experience so much and even our smallest actions can have large effects on our world.  Go to the desert to see, and you just may See.

Musical interlude

This is not a musician from Texas, but the topic made me think of this song anyhow.  Blind Willie McTell was a very influential blues artist in the 20s and 30s.  Searching the Desert for the Blues is a testament that no matter what our situation, we create our own deserts even in the midst of plenty.

If you want to know more about this area

I don't have anything for you.  It's a lonely stretch of land between Iraan and Fort Stockton.  It's all well, however.  Like LHM, you can take this space and time to do some reflection if you wish.

Next up: Fort Stockton, Texas

Blue Highways: Western Crockett County, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLet's pull off the side of the road for a minute in a remote and barren area of West Texas.  Turn off the engine and let the van cool.  The wind blows gently against the van, but we'll walk out and away and begin to see and really listen to what is around us.  We'll find life, nature, the universe and everything and we'll be fully aware of it as it begins to seep into our consciousness the longer we stay, watch and listen.  The road beckons, but for a moment, this is where we need to be.  Click on the map thumbnail to learn where it is.

Book Quote

"Driving through the miles of nothing, I decided to test the hypothesis and stopped somewhere in western Crockett County on the top of a broad mesa, just off Texas 29. At a distance, the land looked so rocky and dry, a religious man could believe that the First Hand never got around to the creation in here. Still, somebody had decided to string barbed wire around it.

"No plant grew higher than my head. For a while, I heard only miles of wind against the Ghost; but after the ringing in my ears stopped, I heard myself breathing, then a bird note, an answering call, another kind of birdsong, and another: mockingbird, mourning dove, an enigma. I heard the high zizz of flies the color of gray flannel and the deep buzz of a blue bumblebee."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Vista in Crockett County, Texas. Is this similar to what William Least Heat-Moon saw when he pulled off the road? Photo at behrensranchsales.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Western Crockett County, Texas

I suppose this post is an extension of the last post on quests, in a way.  I was struck by William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) quote above where he turns off the road in a remote part of Texas (Google Earth image is my guess of the location) just to see what was there.  It takes him a while to clear his head of the ringing in his ears from the motor of Ghost Dancing and the other road sounds while he drives.  Once that happens, he really begins to see and hear what's there.  What he begins to see and hear are the sounds of life all around him.  It reaffirms that even in the most remote places, the planet is alive and we simply have to open our senses to it to understand that life on the deepest of levels.

I had a similar experience myself, many miles south of Crockett County.  I may have briefly written about this before but I'll write about it again because it was a very important and spiritual moment for me.

My wife and I had made a trip to Big Bend National Park.  It became one of our favorite places to go because of it's variety and some special moments we had there.  On the western side of the Chisos Mountains, the road drops precipitously off a mesa down to a desert plain below.  From the top of the mesa, one can see nothing but the desert and little speckles of desert plants.  But as one looks, the eye is arrested by the site, almost directly in the center of the plain, a large cottonwood tree.  It is so large and out of place that one cannot gaze on it and wonder why it is there.

My wife and I took the Chimneys Trail to some rock formations and the direction was toward this tree.  I convinced her to see if we could reach the tree but after about a half hour of hiking across desert we realized that the distance was deceiving.  Reluctantly, I turned away.

Some months later, I was offered to go on a weekend camping trip with a colleague to Big Bend again.  He liked to hike, so I told him about the tree.  He was game to try.  We arrived near Big Bend one evening, and slept in the car by the side of the road, and in the morning made the drive to the Chimneys Trail.  We set off down the trail in the morning.  The desert was quiet, as if it were awaiting the sun with trepidation, and all the animals were in their holes to sit out the heat of the day.  When we reached the Chimneys, we set off across desert.

My quest was to reach the big tree, because it was there.  And in fact, the quest became almost like the hopeless quests one reads about in literature.  After about an hour of hiking we reached a shallow arroyo and went across.  Then after 15 minutes, another arroyo, a little deeper.  This pattern continued.  The next arroyo was deeper still, and harder to find a way out of.

Five arroyos we crossed, with the last being the deepest.  It was like a small canyon.  Every time we would crest an arroyo, the tree stood beckoning in the distance, a shimmering green beacon.  The last arroyo was very near the tree, and it almost took us a half hour to find a way up the other side and out.  When we reached the top, there was the tree.

But again, obstacles.  The tree was surrounded by the thorniest, impenetrable desert brush I have ever encountered.  We looked and looked around this thorny hedge but could not find a way through.  I was about to dejectedly give up when on a whim, I went to the edge of the arroyo.  The tree was right at the edge of the dropoff, and there, perilously close to the drop, was a small trail that went through a little tunnel in the brush and to the base of the tree!  We made it!

We sat under the tree.  The shade was nice and it was cool under the tree in the mid-day heat.  We looked out over the arroyo which stretched away on each side of us.  We were a little hyped up from our exertions but slowly, as my companion's eyes started to droop and he began to nap, and I became more attuned to our surroundings, I started to experience, and I mean really experience, the small ecosystem sustained by that tree all around me.  While walking through the desert, all I could hear was wind.  But under that tree, I realized I could hear not only wind rustling the cottonwood's leaves above me, but also the occasional drip of water condensing off the leaves.  I could hear insects of all kinds buzzing nearby.  It was quiet, punctuated only by my companion's occasional snore.  The tree literally buzzed, there in the emptiness and heat of the desert, with palpable life.  Because of it, I don't think I ever felt more alive.

A small piece of bark lay on the ground next to the trunk.  I took it and put it in my pocket.  I still have it to this day.  We stayed about an hour, and then refreshed, and with new life, we set back on our trek to the car.  I have no idea how far we hiked that day, but I know that for one hour, it was one of the few times in my life I was not distracted by anything and was fully engaged in my environment.  In a way, I had undertaken a quest, reached my goal, and found enlightenment from whatever you may call it.  God?  Nature?  The universe?  Whatever it was, I was reminded that there are things that are more beautiful and more powerful than me.

I'd like to think that, on top of a broad mesa in western Crockett County, that LHM experienced something similar.  Just after the quote above, he takes an inventory of the life that he can identify in what is supposed to be "barren" land.  He finds a lot of life around him.  He remarks that even though some might call it a land that God forgot, that someone still put barbed wire around it.  Barrenness is only an illusion, in my experience.  We can find importance and meaning, and even the trace of those who have gone before, pretty much wherever we go.

Musical Interlude

Here is an extended set of Lubbock music legends The Flatlanders.  The song I really wanted in this Texas musical interlude was If You Were a Bluebird, but I couldn't find a decent video of it being performed - either the song was cut off at the beginning or the sound was bad.  So, If You Were a Bluebird is at the end of this video.  Despite its length, it's worth watching Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore tell a story and you get two songs for the price of one - which is this case is free!  So what's not to like

If you want to know more about Western Crockett County

Crockett County
Texas State Historical Association: Crockett County
Wikipedia: Crockett County

Next up:  West of the Pecos, Texas

Blue Highways: Eldorado, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapOur quest continues.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is on a quest for answers, understanding, and to be in touch with his country.  I am on a quest to map his trip, and in a life sense, to be happy and fulfilled.  You, Littourati, each have your own quest you are following.  To see where we are on our current quest, click on the map thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"Straight as a chief's countenance, the road lay ahead, curves so long and gradual as to be imperceptible except on the map. For nearly a hundred miles due west of Eldorado, not a single town. It was the Texas some people see as barren waste when they cross it, the part they later describe at the motel bar as 'nothing.' They say, 'There's nothing out there.'"

 Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

"Welcome to Eldorado" sign in Eldorado, Texas. Photo by Billy Hathorn and hosted at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host site..

Eldorado, Texas

What's in a name?  If you live in a town called Eldorado, or El Dorado, then a lot.  It reflects the Spanish roots of a country, the United States, that outside its Southwest area largely focuses it's historical past on English colonization.  The term El Dorado is used as a place name for many towns in the United States and stands for the hopes and dreams of the other settlers of this country, the Spanish and mestizo explorers and conquerors that combed the Southwest looking for their own version of the American dream.

El Dorado was the legend that fueled the exploration of the Spanish across South and North America.  It was said that somewhere in the interior of both continents, cities could be found that harbored fantastic riches.  In these cities were gold, and minerals and gemstones, that exceeded the wildest dreams.  In South America, while the Spanish tended to pursue El Dorado, in North America they sought the Seven Cities of Cibola, first reported by shipwrecked explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca and the Moorish Estevanico (Esteban).  In the Southwest, the Seven Cities were thought to be the Zuni pueblos, where mica windows in the adobe buildings reflected the setting sun's light such that the cities seemed to gleam radiantly from afar.

In some reflections I have been reading, the authors have challenged me to reflect on my life's "quest."  To me, a quest is a desire to find something and claim it as one's own.  We quest for many things.  To the Spaniards tramping around the Southwest in hostile environment and territory, the quest was to find fabulous riches.  Finding those riches would not only make the Spaniards happy (they thought), able to live the life of their dreams, and receive the fame and importance due them but also justify Spain's investment in the New World.  Later, American explorers of the Louisiana territories and the Southwest, and their business and political backers, reworked this idea of the quest into American "Manifest Destiny," which justified American settlement under the idea that it was God's will that the United States should spread from "sea to shining sea."  While it undoubtedly laid the seeds for the economic powerhouse that the United States has become, a country that has literally been an El Dorado for many of its citizens, it also allowed for those same political and economic leaders to justify the subjugation and persecution of the country's Native peoples. 

Nowadays, we often speak of questing in a personal sense - a quest for more enlightenment or personal growth, or to be more in touch with our religious beliefs.  We quest for happiness, for an end to loneliness, for love.  In the process of our quest, we may come close or even find what we seek, or we may forever circle it, not quite reaching the goal we have set.  We might, as a result of our quest, become fuller human beings.  We might also become so consumed by the goal that we lose sight of ourselves, and intentionally or unintentionally cause hurt.

To me, there seems to be two sides to the idea of the quest - a light and a dark side.  These sides are encapsulated in names like Eldorado, Texas.  On the good side, these towns symbolize the very qualities that made the United States the country it is.  People on a quest for land, homes and livelihood found isolated valleys and fertile plains and created lives that might have seemed for many of them the slice of heaven they hoped and longed for.  They built something out of nothing, and in the land and their hard work found the gold they sought.  On the not so good side, the influx of settlers pushed out those who had lived on and hunted those lands for many centuries and pushed them to the margins - a reality that many Native Americans are still trying to escape.  To them, El Dorado means not a golden place, but an ideal that brought greedy and rapacious foreigners to their homes.  I find it interesting that many Native American tribes, when the Spanish came to their villages and pueblos, got rid of them by telling them that fantastic and wealthy cities existed many miles away to the north.  Many Spanish expeditions were led on wild goose chases - even as they explored as far north as Kansas, they were really interested in finding these wealthy cities and not really exploring the country.

There is another example of the not-so-good side of such quests.  In 2008, Eldorado, Texas became a center of controversy and unwanted attention because of a recently-arrived group of people who seek their own version of El Dorado.  A large Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints compound called Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch was built near the town. Their polygamist practices and allegations of sexual abuse led Texas authorities to raid the compound, busing away a number of children.  Many of the women were found to be or to have been underage brides and to have had children before becoming legal adults.  Some members of the compound were convicted of various sexual crimes, but today most of the children are back with their parents at the compound, whose leaders have said they will renounce underage marriage practices.

Many towns and cities in the United States, recalling both the bad and good sides of such quests, are named in the spirit of that which is just over the horizon.  How many?  Here's a roll call of towns and cities called, in one form or another, El Dorado.

El Dorado, Arkansas
El Dorado, California
El Dorado Hills, California
Eldorado Springs, Colorado
Eldorado, Georgia
Eldorado, Illinois
Eldorado, Iowa
El Dorado, Kansas
Eldorado, Maryland
Eldorado, Mississippi
El Dorado Springs, Missouri
Eldorado, Nebraska
Eldorado at Santa Fe, New Mexico
Eldorado, Ohio
Eldorado, Oklahoma
Eldorado, Oregon
Eldorado, Texas
Eldorado, Wisconsin

I don't make any claims that this is an exhaustive list.  I found these towns in two ways - typing "El Dorado" or "Eldorado" into Google Maps for every state.  I also looked at a list of settlements of the United States.  Some of these towns are larger, many of them are unincorporated communities.  This list does not list the myriads of businesses around the country that are given the name El Dorado.  However, 18 towns or cities in various states, most of which are in the Southwest or West but not all of them, with a variant of the name El Dorado is pretty impressive.

As for myself, I am realizing that my personal quest is to be productive, to better myself, to assist my community in any way I can, to love and be loved, to find happiness in my friends and loved ones, and to live a happy life.  Given my past history, which has involved some hard realities, my quest has been quite challenging.  In that way, I am no different from the settlers that created Eldorado, Texas or any of the other El Dorado's in the United States.  I am really no different than anybody else.  I am no different from LHM, who is on his own quest for personal healing through travel in Ghost Dancing around his country and interaction with the people he meets on the way.  Whether I find my city of gold beyond the horizon is a combination of my own desire and fortitude, and the whim of fortune.

Musical Interlude

For your Texas music interlude, a video of Joe Ely singing Tom Russell's song Gallo Del Cielo.  It's the story of a man on a quest, with his golden rooster that will get him there.  As some quests go, he takes it too far, and loses everything.  It's a wonderful song by a West Texas master singer-songwriter.

If you want to know more about Eldorado

Eldorado Success (newspaper)
TexasEscapes.com: Eldorado
Texas State Historical Association: Eldorado
Wikipedia: Eldorado

Next up:  Western Crockett County