OUR SANCO PEOPLE

Sanco, the name will always be associated with the Yellow Wolf Valley, historically, geographically and in whatever present the future turns into.  The headwaters of Yellow County.  Its mouth is at the Colorado River, about two miles above Lake Spence.

Comanche lookouts from the top of Horse Mountain, Durham Peak or Meadow Mountain saw the dust arising far down the Colorado Valley as the future came riding in.  From the tops of these mountains one can see another future riding in.  We who have see this come on may do our best to shape the future, but we can not fight it any more than Comanche Chief Yellow Wolf could, though he tried.  The wigwams were passing.  They did not come back.  The past will never come back as it was.

When Ulmer Bird rambled through the live oaks, hackberry, chittim and mesquites on both sides of Yellow Wolf Creek, it seemed to him that there was a grapevine in every tree.  So the first white men who had come that way named it Grape Creek, and so it was on the first surveys.  Some time after the Civil War the name was changed to Yellow Wolf when that Indian''s name had been associated with the creek and the valley.  In the early 1880s the name of the creek on the surveys was Yellow Wolf.

Large Indian camps from pre-historic times line the banks of Yellow Wolf Creek.  Where the plow or other modern activity has not disturbed them there are small mounds of stones that show to have been burned by fire, usually a limestone turned somewhat blue and made brittle and crystallized by heat.  These little piles of rock are usually about three feet across and the chunks of stone may be about the size of a man''s two hands clasped together.  The Indians for many centuries used the stones for stoves, and the water from Yellow Wolf, Mess Box, Rough, and other creeks.

300 years ago the Apaches were dominant here.  The Comanches walked down out of the Rocky Mountains into the Arkansas River Valley some time before 1700.  They were members of the Shoshonean family, of the Penateka band (honey-eaters).

By 1825 the Apaches and Comanches were fighting horseback, when the Comanches defeated the Apaches south of Red River.  The artist, George Catlin, declared that the Comanches were not equaled by any other Indians on the continent in horsemanship, and that they could be compared to the mounted hordes of Ghengis Khan.

General Ranald McKenzie, in command of Fort Concho, was given the green light to drive the Comanches out of Texas.  The fateful battle in the Palo Duro Canyon, 27 September 1874, destroyed their horses and wigwams and ended their power in Texas.

The Indians named their tribes in words that in their own tongue means "Our People."  When the Apaches came down from the north their tribal name was N''de, meaning "Our People."  The Comanche name for "Our People" is Nimma.  The Zuni and other tribes called them Apache, "Our Enemy."  Comanche means enemy, "anyone who wants to fight me all the time."  So these adopted the name themselves and became enemies with a vengeance.  But their name had originally been "Our People."

Over 130 years ago, some of another tribe were moving into these upper river valleys - OUR PEOPLE.  The Comanches had been gone 26 years when Ulmer Bird was born in a two-room house under the old burnt live oak tree at Sanco in 1900.  You might say the smoke signals had given way to the newspaper.  So let us look at what they left to us.

NOMADS

They built no houses.  Never

Piled they stone on stone.  Those

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