Llano Estacado, Karl May, Comancheria, and Weimar Germany

I'm heading to West Texas (Panhandle) and Eastern New Mexico next month. I need to spend some time on the llano estacado, for the novel I'm writing. Need to get a sense of the air, the ground, the light. The novel is set mostly in Weimar-era Germany, where and when my father, HHB,  grew up. He was an Anglo-Irish guy transplanted (deported, actually) to Frankfurt in 1919, age 9, who came of age in that complicated crazy period of German history 1919-33, and taught himself the language of Goethe by reading and re-reading Karl May's Winnetou novels, which are set on the llano estacado. Hence HHB's lifelong fascination with the Wild West, passed on to me. Sounds like a novel, right? So any insider information on the that huge, dry country much appreciated. Right now I'm reading Pekka Hamalainen's wonderful Comanche Empire and learning how the llano estaduco--and 1000's of sq. miles of shortgrass plains east of the Rio Grande Valley and Spanish New Mexico--was dominated from the mid-18th to mid-19th century by the Comanche, a powerful empire of their own once they got horses and iron and good guns.
One of best books about that part of the West (after the mid-19th) is Hampton Sides' Blood & Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson.