First impressions are often far off!
Clovis grew very slowly on me.
I visited only once, in about 1961, for football.
71-3—was the approximate score I remember.
Clovis Cougars loved football like we never would.
They knew the game and actually cared.
They prayed before the kickoff
and kept pointing up after multiple touchdowns!
Before I felt its historic and geological aura,
Clovis seemed like a dim bulb place.
Boring, homogenous, Texas-like folks
who had sleeker cars with fins.
How did Clovis emerge to be so important overall?
Its bounce far exceeds Lubbock or Albuquerque.
Luck of Blackwater Draw—a felicitous find!
Clovis man and Clovis points trump all the others—
The real dawning of Americans on Earth.
Prolific hunters who somehow killed
all the mammoths and gomphotheres.
Archeologically-credible among many bogus discoveries:
the Clovis Comet, Sandia Man and the Roswell UFO.
Messianic Frank Hibben proselytized for earlier Americans
but without bones, couldn’t convince.
Meanwhile, Clovis stuck in the textbooks.
Profound megamesa landscape with striking markers—
Llano Estacado, yucca faxoniana.
Evolved from prairie paradise to friction-free thistle/tumble flatlands.
On an Indiana-sized, clay-topped Ogalalla table.
Prairie chicken, pronghorn and bison Elysium,
Became national park of Comancheria,
1750-1850 terrorist nation centered on Clovis--
a center of wild violence and vicious, mean war.
Smallpox and buffalo extinction
broke Comanche hearts and culture,
and killed Black Horse, last fighting chief.
Our “high” moments were Adobe Walls 1874
and the Buffalo Hunter’s war, 1877.
US military operations to allow the
“safe, civilized slaughter of bison
without messy terrorist raids”.
An outlet for post-Civil war frustration?
It built mountains of bison skulls,
perfect for macho-photo boasting.
When the bison were all dead the hunters
became Texas/Colorado cowboys and took hungry cattle on the
Goodnight-Loving Trail, sang those texas river songs
and made up one-armed Billy Wilson legends.
Cows munched the blue grama to smooth barrens
that barely slow the wind and tumbleweeds.
More ATSF tracks were laid along the Belen Cutoff.
Clovis town was founded 1906, named for Franko kings.
It now anchors the mighty Southern Transcon.
Overgrazing the Llano created the dust bowl/
Dirty thirties, Woody and Karen Hesse
Norm Petty, Buddy & Crickets, Bob Wills:
That’ll be the day, Peggy sue,
Take me back to Tulsa, San Antonio Rose,
Jole Blon and Pistol-packing mama.
Clovis may seem like the town in the Last Picture Show
“a town with no reason to exist
and people with no reason to live there”
a festering red-state skin patch,
where Texasisms leak into tolerant and diverse NM—
a judgmental membrane: the diffused ones wear stomper studs,
pump the aquifer dry, and run special ops.
but unlike Roswell’s hollow alien mantra
Clovis’ past is stellar and full of vital stuff.
Residents feel their past even if they don’t articulate it.
