Eagle Nest Canyon

Eagle Nest Canyon, which runs up from the Rio Grande along the eastern edge of Langtry, holds one of the most important archaeological sites in North America. It is called Bonfire Shelter, and it lies about a kilometre up from the river junction behind a rampart of limestone blocks that fell from the roof and wall of the overhang. That collapse is the reason the site exists. It turned the foot of the cliff into a trap with a floor, so animals driven off the rim above landed inside the shelter rather than out in the open canyon, where the floods that come down it would have carried the bone away within a season. The shelter is wide and shallow, some ninety metres across and only fifteen deep. What is deep is the fill: twelve metres of stacked deposit. Inside are three great bone beds, separated by metres of later material. The uppermost holds the remains of as many as eight hundred bison, almost all cows and yearlings, brought down in a single set of events, with dart points among them of types otherwise found in central Texas. Bonfire is usually called the earliest and most southerly bison jump in North America. The southerly half of that is not in question. The earliest half rests on a far deeper layer whose reading has been argued over for twenty years, one restudy calling it a butchering site rather than a kill, more recent work returning to the drive. Below all of it lie the bones of animals extinct since the ice age. The land is the Skiles family ranch, nothing of the shelter is visible from the highway, and it is reached only on guided tours out of Langtry.