Amistad Dam, finished in 1969 by the United States and Mexico together, holds back the Rio Grande a dozen miles above Del Rio. The water it raised backed up the Rio Grande, the Pecos and the Devils rivers until the canyon floors of the Lower Pecos were under a reservoir. Archaeologists had been racing it for eleven years. The first survey went out in 1958 under the National Park Service and the Smithsonian, and two men recorded 188 sites on the Texas side in about ten weeks. Forty nine of them had paintings on the walls. The University of Texas took the work over through its Texas Archeological Salvage Project a couple of years later, and fieldwork carried on until the water arrived. Dozens of sites went under. For some of them the only surviving record is a set of watercolours made by Forrest Kirkland, a commercial artist who spent the years from 1937 until the war copying Lower Pecos rock art by hand, measuring and scaling each panel and matching the colours. Sites nobody photographed properly exist now as his paintings and nothing else. What survived did so by sitting high enough on the canyon walls to stay dry. Panther Cave, where a red mountain lion nine feet long leaps across the back of a shelter above the mouth of Seminole Canyon, is one of them, and it is reached today by boat, across the water that took everything below it.
Getting there
29.4499, -101.0563
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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