Plains Folk: Draws and coulees
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
Last week I received an e-mail from Victoria Sherry, who used to work at the Kansas Humanities Council. She has, as apparently many Kansans at an earlier time did, moved to Wyoming, where she now is the program coordinator for the Wyoming Humanities Council. Sherry is a Kansas native with a strong interest in landscape and history (she once hiked and camped across Kansas), and this is part of what she had to say:
"I'm in Wyoming at the moment, but the Great Plains are still on my mind. This is just sort of the western end. I've discovered that this state is full of people who came from Kansas and Nebraska. If you look at the so-called 'old' families, you find that many came out of Kansas in the late 1800s and into the 1920s. Kansas seems to be a supplier of Wyoming settlers in the same way that Iowa was a supplier of Kansas settlers."
I think she's right — I know several Wyomingites with Kansas roots. But Sherry had another purpose for writing, a linguistic one: "In light of all this, something I have found fascinating here is the use of the term 'draw' to refer to a shallow valley. I had never heard this term used outside of Kansas before."
She went on to comment on terms used in other Plains states for similar landscape features. In Nebraska and the Dakotas, Sherry said, she often heard coulee, in New Mexico it was arroyo, while the terms wash and gulch were ones she had run across in Colorado. She wasn't sure about Oklahoma.
Sherry could have added Montana to the coulee camp, as in Medicine Tail Coulee where Custer (although not his men) met his just desserts. As to arroyo, there's a line in a Santa Fe Trail folksong about a girl riding into an arroyo, "down by the Arkansas sand," which could have been in southwest Kansas, or else southeast Colorado.
I'm not aware of any coulees or washes in Kansas, but I do know of some gulches and lots of gullies.
A check of various dictionaries and thesauruses showed that coulee, wash, gulch, and arroyo often were cited as synonyms for one another, but not draw.
Sherry's conclusion was that draw must be an "extremely regional" and narrow usage. She also noted she had never seen the term draw used as part of a formal place name in Kansas. "It was just a term I heard my dad and a few Flint Hills farmers use." As in "we hunted up the draw and flushed some birds."
In Wyoming, Sherry wrote, "I've seen 'draw' actually appear on road signs, e.g., 'Davis Draw.' Granted, there aren't a lot of towns here, so they have to come up with something else to mark the turnoffs. It does seem that the term is common enough to be recognized by the highway department."
Like Sherry, I do not recall ever seeing the term "draw" on a road sign or in a map of Kansas, but the term is certainly in widespread use here. I've heard and used it all my life: "You can cross this draw if you drive on up a little way," or "That cow you wondered about had her calf in the draw over on the west side of the pasture."
Unlike Sherry, however, I have heard the term used in Oklahoma and also in Texas. The late Ernest Johnson, an old rodeo cowboy and cowboy poet from Vici, Okla., wrote a fine set of verses about a kid becoming a man on Pencil Crick Draw.
Like Sherry, I'm interested in learning more about draws and the different terms used in the Plains for this common land form, and I'll be happy to pass along to her any information, comments, or observations anyone might have.
