From the viewpoint of that hawk soaring there in the updraft they spread—south to north—farther even than the hawk’s long vision can perceive. More than two thousand square miles. Glittering mesas jeweled with decorations set in the brightest hues of blood red, blue, milky white, verdant herb and mesquite green, or golden yellow.

The range of blues is widest, azurite, ultramarine, turquoise, beryl, all the variety that clay and sky can make, and sparkling in the sun glint, glittering with selenite diamonds set in rough earth.

The Blaine Escarpment begins to rise even beyond our north border. In its bounty it gives us the Great Salt Plains, the Nescatunga and the Cimarron, Alabaster Caverns, Cedar Canyon with the natural bridge, Chimney Rock and its fantastic arena, the Glass Mountains, the Gyp Hills, Roman Nose Park, Red Rock Canyon, The Tonkawa Hills.

Wild, semi-arid country, often apparently deserted—but only apparently. The hawk wheeling there high, now diving, is sighting down the arrow of its beak at a field mouse, which sees the fast running ground shadow of the hawk and terminates its hurried mouse-nibble in a leap for safety.

The mouse was nibbling a remnant of calf hide left among bone litter, the leftovers of a coyote pack’s moonlight feast of some nights past. Where the coyotes have left few tracks the cattle have left many.

Narrow, winding cattle trails, single-filing across the solitary, mute banks of arroyos, trails which tangle and unsnarl themselves in loose and easy wandering toward every horizon. It is an open country of few fences. Only time hinders you from removing yourself to another place on any horizon.

Only time hinders you but you must learn patience, for the distances are long. Haste breeds frustration. Go with patience, with easy stride if afoot, with the wind your companion. He also accompanies the horseman who rides easy, this companion who never speaks, for he can only sing. This he does without surcease, a booming bass in deep arroyos, sometimes howling in the canyons and draws, plucking his own accompaniment on every barbwire fence and net of high wires. This virtuoso wind companion can sing the highest falsetto on the peaks and crests.

He can chill you in winter until your bones are a percussive chatter for his rhythmic wail. His heat can dry you in summer to parched yearning, to such thirst that impels you to pluck the long straw of reed grass and use it to suck up thirst quenching water from a cow track.

Whereupon he may taunt you, dancing and swirling in dust-devil retreat across the Cimarron sand and its cool blue pools of salty water. The companionate wind, gentle, saucy, wild, a free devil forever departing, never returning, and always present.

The true natives of this country of extremes . . . the quite breeze . . . silence . . . shimmering squirming heat waves . . . incredible color . . . a bitter chilled blast of whipping flesh cutting sleet . . . snow . . . cold as hard and intractable as iron, gripping the same earth refined by midsummer’s furnace heat . . . gentle, cool rain . . . a caress in spring . . . autumn’s sleepy lull . . .

It is apt to drive you to insanity—the insanity of wanting to live your whole life there. Its solitude’s are good for a type of casual, easy living, possible only to a paradoxical people who can instantly change to cope with change; change which may be sudden, and even violent.

Who named the Glass Mountains? Nobody knows. The name first appeared on a map issued by the federal land office in 1873. Two years later a map from this same source called them the Gloss Mountains, precipitating a conflict, which continues to this day. And it inspired a probable legend.

The 1873 map resulted from a survey led by an engineer named T.H. Barrett. Historiographer James Cloud is of the opinion that the draftsman who copied the 1873 map misread the "a" and thought it was an "o". There is a persistent legend that a member of that first exploring party was British, or Bostonian.

This Britisher (or Bostonian) awakening early one morning in the survey camp east of the mesas, saw the sun glinting on the selenite. He exclaimed in his long eastern patois, "Why, they look just like glaws!"

Thence, the party’s cartographer simply wrote down what he thought he had heard. It was a passing error. Glass was the right word for their name, and so it remains. Other errors have passed through the vicinity. A pair of them were outlaws, pariahs named Dick Yeager, alias Zip Wyatt, and Ike Black.

Zip and Ike had a cave hideout west of Orienta. They stole horses, hijacked travelers and freighters, lived off their plunder, and made general nuisances of themselves.

The tale of their killing and capture from the viewpoint of W. D. Fossett, special agent of the Rock Island Railroad who participated in the chase, differs in details from other accounts, as do all eye-witness narratives.

Railroad detective Fossett was in Kingfisher when he heard of the pursuit. A large number of volunteers urged him to form a posse, and he wired Rock Island headquarters for permission to join the manhunt.

Permission received, the number of his volunteers suddenly dwindled to two, a gent named Bill Banks and Fossett’s own son, age sixteen. Yonder in the Glass Mountains, a group of eight men had already surrounded Yeager and Black.

In the gunfire Ike Black had been instantly killed by a shot through the head. Dick Yeager had been wounded, shot in the breast. Yeager, a tough man, retrieved the Winchester the bullet had knocked from his hands. Firing it with accuracy, he drove the eight men to cover and won his freedom.

Wounded, and afoot, he then forced a farm boy to carry him in a cart deep into the gyp hills. Here he abandoned the boy, stole the horse, soon exchanged it for another taken at gunpoint from a homesteader, and fled to hide in the hills.

Railroad agent Fossett, with his son and Bill Banks trailed Yeager into Greaver Canyon then on toward the ranch of famed Indian Scout Amos Chapman. Moving fast, unable to obtain rest or food, Yeager in desperation finally took captive a homesteader named John Daily.

With Daily as hostage Yeager stopped at the John Pierce claim long enough to eat the only food in the house, some bread and milk. Stealing a fresh horse from the neighboring Blakely pasture Yeager then left Daily and fled alone.

The railroad detective and his two cohorts missed Yeager at the Chapman ranch and again at the Pierce homestead and were still trailing him. Daily, instead of returning to his own home, was riding for help. Darkness came on. The paths of Yeager and Daily crossed in the dark. Daily, approaching a pasture pond, saw the dark silhouette of another rider. Daily recognized Yeager, kept his distance, and changed his voice to ask for directions. Yeager failed to recognize his recent captive.

At the nearby Miles homestead Daily found a meeting of the Anti-Horse Thief Association in session. Here was help. Marshall pioneer Billy Fox was among them. Detective Fossett, his son, and Bill Banks joined forces with this Anti-Horse Thief posse soon after daybreak.

Yet another posse, led by Garfield County Sheriff Thralls joined in the chase. The Gyp Hills were swarming with manhunters. Yeager headed for the home of his sweetheart, on Skeleton Creek. They ran him to the ground there during the morning.

The exhausted outlaw had crawled into a cornfield alongside Skeleton Creek to rest, and had fallen asleep. The manhunters awakened him with gunfire. Two of the bullets hit Yeager. He was a hard man to kill. Mortally wounded, they carried him to Sheridan community church.

It was Sunday morning. Services were just over. The manhunters came reasonably close to a gunfight among themselves over whether Yeager should be jailed in Kingfisher, Logan, or Garfield County. The argument cooled as soon as it was decided how any reward money would be split.

Yeager was taken to Hennessey then to Enid, where he finally died, but only after languishing throughout the month of August and seven days into September, in the Garfield County jail.

The Indian-Pioneer papers contain tales of other hunts in the Glass Mountains, these not for men but for wild game. One of the most unusual tales concerns Amos Chapman, mountain man, frontiersman, Indian Scout, who married a Cheyenne girl and was adopted into that tribe.

Deer and wild turkey abounded in the Glass Mountain mesas. New York City’s Mayor Hewitt had come to hunt them. When Amos Chapman came upon Hewitt’s camp, the camp was deserted. The entire party was out hunting.

Amos figured any New York politician was bound to have come supplied with plenty whiskey. Amos hunted around the camp until he found the whiskey, and stole it all.

The mayor’s camp was near Sheridan’s Roost, southwest in Major County, established by General Phil Sheridan as a semi-permanent camp during the Indian skirmishes of 1870. A quarter century earlier, in 1843, Captain Nathan Boone, son of Daniel, wrote colorful descriptions in his journal of this vivid country, its red earth, blue clay, white gypsum, bitter water, and the geologic shapes along the Cimarron, which he spelled "Semarone."

These mesas of the Blaine Escarpment contain three types of gypsum; satin spar, massive, and selenite. Formed 200 million years ago during the Permian Age, an inland sea with its shores in the Arbuckle and Wichita Mountains deposited the massive gypsum strata, which forms the caprock of each technicolor mesa. The selenite is shining and crumbly as isinglass. Satin spar is thicker, sometimes crystalline, sometimes stained to various tones of red.

Over the centuries the Permian seas became dry. The marine water evaporated and wind and river began its eroding work. Each lone peak is still gradually changing its shape. The "Red Beds," slopes, and arroyos tinted by iron particles turned to rust, are rich grazing land.

Herds of both beef and dairy cattle graze here. Ranchers in Major County totaled their herds at 89,000 last year: 61,000 beef cattle and 28,000 dairy cattle, pasturing now on cured winter grasses and grazing vast fields of winter wheat which will grow through early spring, ripen in summer, and produce a harvest of more than one-and-a-half million bushels; 1,868,400 bushels last year.

Beneath the wheat and the grassland pastures lie oil and gas. Major County is one of the Mid-Continent Field’s most active drilling areas. The gray-green caprocks of these mesas, varicolored and mullioned like medieval castle windows, look daily on new drilling rigs, which will become producing wells. Feeder pipelines wander off across the solitudes like the cattle trails.

Great stand of cedar timber once grew here. Our pioneer grandfathers, who were too often plunderers and not conservators, cut this cedar for fence posts, firewood, and sod house roofs, and not only for their own use. They hauled it out and sold it. A pioneer settler recalls seeing a mile long column of wagons laden with cedar logs emerging from the Gyp Hills. Though it was against the law to cut the timber from these then Indian lands, timber raiders have never been attentive of the law. Their profits exceeded the small rare fines they paid for the timber they cut and sold.

So we lament the errors of the past, and consider the beauty that remains. In our new and strongly born ecological conscience, perhaps we can preserve their incredible technicolor beauty for our grandchildren. It is worth preserving.