The Bears of Moro

Book excerpt: In the author’s first book, From Moro to Bluff Creek—Part 1, published in 2014, the author shares an assemblage of unique Moro stories, all garnered while living at Moro, Texas, all the while observing how one decision or lack of decision seemed to have set a new experience into motion. In the author’s second book, Toyah Medicine Woman of Bluff Creek—Part 2, published in 2017, the author returns to Moro again—this time through the life of a Toyah Native American medicine woman who also lived at Moro, albeit some eight hundred years prior to the author, in prehistory. In his current book, The Bears of Moro—Part 3, the author focuses again on Moro while exploring the recent and prehistoric past while sharing more of the author’s unpublished experiences and bringing more depth to the story of the Toyah Native Americans, which brings us to the subject of bears. You the reader will learn that in the time of the Toyah, one thousand years ago, Moro had a thriving population of grizzly bears; and the Toyahs came to Moro to take these bears, in a rite of passage for aspiring want-to-be warriors. This book introduces new Moro stories, not previously published, yet experienced by the author and stories taken from small ledger books handwritten in the late 1800s about the Civil War by a neighborhood veteran of the Civil War, John Joseph Vernon. Vernon’s ledger books tell stories in his unique vernacular of his growing up in the 1850s and 1860s experiencing the horrors of a civil war and facing an even worse reconstruction. The author simply transcribes the stories from Vernon’s handwritten notes, making small grammatical changes only when absolutely necessary, yet keeping the writing style of Vernon intact and to the period. The Comanche Native Americans also lived in Moro, simultaneously with the arrival of the author’s great-grandparents in 1879. The author, having read dozens of books regarding the Comanche Native Americans, became fascinated with Comanche life on the Southern Plains. He read stories of captured Comanche slaves such as Cynthia Ann Parker who became so enamored with her Comanche life such that when returned to her original white family, she still pined away to return to her Comanche family, refusing to eat and dying a slow, painful death. The author also learned that Comanche males only have one career path—take care of the horses as a youth, become a skillful raider capturing more horses as a young adult, and finally return to the Comanche homelife on the Comanche horse ranches as an older adult, somewhat used up following Comanche life as a raider. The author takes his knowledge of Comanche lore and pens his original story connected to historical places and events—presenting how life may have been for a Comanche family living at Moro and adjusting to the arrival of the European settlers in the 1850s. Spending even more time in an archaeological excavation of an actual Toyah encampment at Moro, the author’s findings reveal further insights into the Toyah culture and how their lives were often justified while engaging the ferocious bears at Moro. Taken together, these findings generate more information on many issues regarding the Toyahs while at Moro; yet at the same time, these findings also pose unanswered questions that perhaps could be explored with less direct means or psychic channeling. Consequently, the author obtains the services of four psychic mediums to assist in his evaluation. These psychic channelings reveal more unique information regarding these Toyahs and their lives at Moro. So come take this journey with the author, a thousand years in the making, and witness how various lives were impacted, shaped, and molded, all within this unique community of Moro. This journey and these events are all based upon the archaeological records, psychic readings, historical records, and events that occurred to the author while living at Moro.