THE WAY THE WEST REALLY IS By: Carl Adams
In March of 1979 I was able to promote a job for the month of April as ranch manager and occasional flight instructor on a ranch in the southwest corner of New Mexico.
I decided to drive from my home in north east Texas rather than fly for a number of reasons, not the least of which was possible inclement weather.
The first thing I did was make a list of everything we would need to take from home. This took about three days. The next two days were used to trim the list when I discovered it would take a freight train rather than a van to haul everything on the list. The next thing I did was lose the list and start over again. When the second list started to take the general shape of the first one, I threw it away and started loading the van. I then mapped a route to ElPaso and removed a few items from the van then replaced them with more essential items. Within two or three days of this, everything we owned had been in and out of the van at least once and some items were beginning to look frayed around the edges from having been drug in and out of the van so much.
We finally left home about 2.00 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon and drove to Ft. Worth. There we visited with relatives and rested for four hours then started west on 1-20 for ElPaso.We rolled into ElPaso about noon the next day,totally exhausted. The next planned stop was at the Plum out of Luck ranch about forty-five miles west of El Paso and eight miles north of the U.S. Mexican border.
The foreman of the Plum out of Luck ranch and his wife were school mates of my wife and they were gracious enough to have offered to feed and board us for two or three days, until we could rest and make arrangements to meet the owner of the ranch where I was to work for the next month.
In ElPaso we ate, fueled the van, checked the tires, including two spares, filled the water jug and coffee thermos and called George Pendleton in Silver City, New Mexico to see when he could meet us at the ranch. He was pretty busy and could not tell me then, but asked me to call him back on wednesday around 5:OOP.M.
Interstate 10 goes north from ElPaso 37 miles to Los Cruses, then west 52 miles to Demming. New Mexico highway 11 goes south 34 miles to Columbus. The map did not show a shorter route from ElPaso to Columbus but I have always been sort of adventurous, and have never been accused of being overly patient, so I took out of ElPaso headed west don a small rough street roughly parallel to the U.S. border. About a mile after I crossed the Rio Grande river the street became a small rough sand road.
About thirty minutes and ten miles later, I had my first flat tire of the trip. I didn't have to pull over to the side of the road to change it. When we stopped we were already pulled over to both sides of the road. It wasn't nearly as wide as 1-10 and I-20 where I had spent the last eighteen hours. In fact it was only as wide as the tires on a single wheeled pickup. While I changed that tire my wife took some pictures and poured me a cup of coffee. As I walked around the van, I looked at the view and in all directions, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but sand dunes, sparsely covered with mesquite and grease wood with an occasional creosote bush or octullo cactus. If you looked close there was a road of sorts. A more accurate description would be a pair of ruts in the sand left by a four wheel drive pickup.
Forty five minutes or an hour later we were crossing the southern foothills of the Portillo Mountains, following an abandoned rail road track when I had the second flat tire of the trip. I got out and walked back to the left rear tire and was looking at it hoping I was seeing things when I realized it was not only flat but totally destroyed. I then remembered that when I replaced that tire I would not have a spare tire left. While I changed that tire I mumbled some two and three part words, and I may have mentioned the ancestry of the people who had sold it to me two months and ten thousand miles earlier.
My wife is a very staunch church going citizen, and while I was changing the tire and verbally abusing she walked around the van and heard me. Boy, did I ever get scolded? Among other things, she said she didn't think it was necessary to talk like that to change a tire. I don't believe that woman has ever put on her first tire in the middle of the desert, at least 25 miles from the nearest house or telephone. Needless to say, the traffic rush had not started in this part of the desert that day.
After I had stowed the jack and the remains of the tire, I drug out the map for a quick reconnaissance. We were a little more than half way from ElPaso to the Plum out of Luck Ranch, or what we call the point of no return in the aviation community, so we continued west.
Six or seven weeks earlier we had flown out to the P.L.O. ranch to visit so I knew just about where the main ranch house was. I am half american Indian, and we Indians seem to have a built in sense of direction and distance, so I was able to tell when we were directly south of ranch headquarters. I don't understand this sense of direction and distance, I just use it.
When I felt we were directly south of the headquarters I began to watch for a possible route to the north and sure enough, in a little while we came to a set of four wheel drive pick up tracks heading due north so I followed them.
The ruts were several days old and it was evident that it had rained at least once since they had been made, but so what? We were six or eight miles south of where I wanted to be so I followed them. In about two miles we came to a shallow depression about 100 yards wide and several miles long lying across our route. The tracks continued across the depression as best as I could tell. The depression was full of water. I went back to the abandoned rail road track and headed west again. I also remembered one of the Mexican cowboys having told me while I was at the P.O.L. earlier about a place called El Laguna De Los Indios (Indian Basin). It started five miles south of the P.O.L. headquarters and ran ten or twelve miles to the east. I had almost decided my sixth sense had failed me when I figured that if I had counted the distance I had bounced up and down plus the horizonal distance from ElPaso I would be almost to Columbus N.M.
Five miles farther we came to what looked like a well traveled road, for this part of the country heading off to the north. It had two sets of four wheel drive tracks and the last one had been pulling a trailer.
We turned up this road and within two miles we were stuck in a small mud hole. I told my wife to wait there and I would walk to the headquarters to get someone to come back with a four wheel pick up and pull the van out of the mud. While she was removing her high heeled shoes and replacing them with boots, she casually mentioned that I was bothered with one or both of two problems. Either I had suffered brain damage as a child or insanity ran in the family, if I thought she was going to wait out in the desert by herself for no telling how long, while I walked to where I thought the headquarters might be to get help
Before leaving the van, we drank all the water we could, then started walking. About an hour and five miles later we came to a fence near a dirt stock tank that I recognized. I told my wife that we only lacked about three miles being to the head-quarters and she said something about "believing it when she saw it." This was about 4:00 p.m. Monday and we had been awake since 8:00 a.m. Sunday. She was probably getting pretty well exhausted by this time and I know that I was. When we finally got to the house there was no one at home but the door was not locke. We went right in and made ourselves
at home and immediately drank all of the iced tea in the refrigerator.
Around 5:30, Bill and Mary (the ranch foreman and his wife) came in. He had been stuck four or five miles north of the house and/ she had to go pull home out of the mud. After we had eaten, he and I got in one of the four-wheel drive pick-ups and went and pulled the van out of the mud. It was really surprising how much shorter the distance from the house to the van was when riding as compared to walking.
1979 was really a wet year in southern New Mexico. The average annual rainfall is 2 1/2 inches and it rained 3 1/2 inches in three weeks in November 1978. In March it had rained another two inches.
Back at the ranch house that night, Bill asked me to take four or five cowboys and bring all the calves from the house trap to the corral the next morning. The house trap is a small pasture adjacent to the house where Bill had put a bunch of calves. He had to get all of the paper work ready and wait for the brand inspector so he couldn't go with us to round up the calves. We had also fixed the flat on my van(the only spare repairable) and replaced an axle in one of the pick-ups. By the time we had finished it was now 10:30 p.m. and I was so tired I could have laid down on a barbed wire fence and covered up with a set of chain harnesses and slept real well. It as almost daylight before Mary started beating on our bedroom door the next morning but I was more tired when I got up than most people are when they go to bed. By the time we had eaten breakfast and got ready to go to work, the cowboys had caught, fed and saddled enough horses to round up the herd and bring to the corral. The only thing Bill had told me was to bring all of the calves from the house trap and he had not told the cowboys anything. This presented somewhat of a problem since none of the cowboys could speak English and my Spanish really leaves something to be desired. I tried telling them in English to bring all of the calves to the corral, while punctuating with lots of arm waving, pointing and other such gestures, They all sat on their horses with a blank look on their faces. I then tried pointing at the pasture and at the corral. This didn't get the point across either, but one of the men turned to another and said something that sounded like "el sequndo as loco, possibly". What that means in English is something like The foreman must have lost what little intelligence he had, if any." This finished getting me awake as well as arousing my temper. I felt some of the men could understand some English and knew what I was trying to get them to do, but they were having some fun at my expense, I then said"Trigue los vacas, total." I think this means "bring all the cow." So we started down the fence west from the house. It was 5 1/2 miles to the northwest corner and 4 1/2 miles from the north side to the south side. If this is a small trap, I would like to own a big one.
About the time we reached the west side of the trap we started to jump some of the calves. I have seen deer that were not as wild as this bunch of calves. Normally, when you start driving cattle they bunch up, with one occasionally running out of the herd and trying to circle back behind, but not this bunch. They were all singles or in groups of not more than two or three, they would all run in different directions. We were still in the flats. This is fairly level ground with sand dunes and mesquite so the calves could usually run a little way and be out of sight of us.
I dispensed the cowboys along the west fence at about a half to three-quarters mile intervals and we all started east at the same time. About a half mile from the east fence all of the men stopped and I continued down the south fence almost to the south-east corner. I then turned to the north and as I came even with each of the cowboys he came with me and we drove them to the house and into a corral.
After we took a coffee break, and talked for fifteen minutes, we started running the calves out of the big lot into the lane. As they were driven down the lane they were counted and separated sa to sex.This took a pretty good while since one couldn't get in the lot with them on foot because they all had war on their minds. We had to put two cowboys , on horses, in the big lot and have them separate out one or two at a time and drive them into the lane. We then tried to stop the heifers at the first small lot without letting the bulls in, then drive the bulls into the next small lot.
Meanwhile, the state brand inspector was sitting on the fence trying to see each brand as the calves came by him and trying to keep count of the number of calves that went into each lot. These men really do a remarkable job and they usually do it under some very adverse conditions.
After lunch we ran the bull calves across the scales in groups of ten, weighed them, and put them in what Bill called “The Shipping Pen". This pen is the same size as my farm in east Texas. We then weighed the heifers and put them back in one of the other large pens in the corral.
The trucks had not arrived to pick up the calves so Bill and I got in a pickup and rode around the southern part of the ranch for the rest of the afternoon, checking and repairing windmills. I think we checked fourteen and had to repair three of them.
After we had eaten that night and were sitting around talking, Bill told my wife about the ranch where we were going to be working for the next month. He said the house wasn't too bad. The front part was still standing up straight and they had not killed a rattlesnake in the house in more than a month. He also said that if we had a four wheel drive pickup, and if it didn't rain any more we could probably drive all the way to the house and not have to walk the last four or five miles. My wife asked him about T.V. reception down there and he said there was none, but there was a telephone and sometimes a good radio would work.
The next day I drove the sixteen miles to Columbus to the telephone and called Mr. Pendleton and made arrangements to meet him the following day in front of what he called the Cloverdale store.
The map shows Cloverdale to be about 150 miles from Columbus and since I didn't want to be late for work the first day, we left the P.O.L. ranch at 8:00 A.M. the next morning. We stopped in Columbus and fueled the van and checked the oil and tires then headed west on state highway 9. This was a straight , well paved road for the first twenty miles. I rode along thinking how lucky we were to have a good road for a change. We then came to the end of the pavement and the straight part of the road. The next forty five miles were rough but not nearly as bad as some of the trails we had driven over in the last three days.
From Hachita to Animas the road was paved and the scenery improved considerably. There were some irrigated alfalfa fields that were unusually green in the valleys and the tops of some of the mountains were still snowcapped. In this forty five mile stretch we crossed the Continental Divide three times.
In Animas we stopped for a short break and to do some shopping. After my wife saw the prices she decided there was nothing she really needed.
We took state highway 338 on the home stretch. It was paved for the first twenty miles then more of the rough, crooked roads to which I was slowly becoming accustomed. While I was still on the paved road I noticed a pretty good sized creek on my left. It was running north and was completely clear. After seeing this stream I knew what people meant by clear mountain water. About 200 yards beyond the end of the pavement the stream ran across the road. No bridge or culvert, just gravel and the road went right across the stream. The water was so clear I could see everything on the bottom and the water didn't look over three or four inches deep so in we went. Looking in these clear mountain streams sure can be deceptive. I think it was ten or twelve inches deep.
I couldn't see very good because the water splashed all the way over the top of the van when I hit it. The stream was only about twenty feet wide so we were able to make it all the way across but the brakes got wet and for a while we didn't have very good brakes.
About ten miles farther I came to the first highway sigh I had seen since leaving Animas. This sign indicated Cloverdale to be straight ahead and Douglas Arizona to be to the right. I knew then I :was still on the right road. It also helped that this was the only road branching off since leaving Animas. By this time we were beginning to come to some cattle guards across the highway and on some of them there were signs indicating that we were now entering private land.
My wife, being the worrying type, began to be concerned about the road getting worse, ~We had crossed the stream twice more), about driving on private property, about being lost, and a whole wrath of other petty problems.
More to please her than anything else, I stopped at the next only} ranch house we came to and went to the door, I asked the lady there where and how far Cloverdale was. She said something that I understood to mean that she didn't understand English so I asked in Spanish. She told me several things, none of which I understood. I thanked her and went back to the van and told my wife that Cloverdale was just a little way down the road and that it was all right to drive on the highway and that the road was in pretty good shape all the way. After another ten or fifteen miles we come to a fork in the road with a sign showing Cloverdale to the right and sure enough about five miles up this road we came to it. There was a store that had been closed in the early nineteen thirties which was now used to store hay, and a community mailbox. About a half mile south there was a cemetery. There was also a road going north and a sign showing that it met the Douglas road twelve miles away. We arrived at Clovedale at 11;00 a.m. so we had an hour to kill. We looked around for a little while then decided to go on up the road toward the ranch. About a mile west of Cloverdale we come to what we here in Texas would call a road park. It had picnic tables and a trash incinerator and a piece of concrete that looked like a tennis court with no net. Most of it was also shaded by some elm and oak trees. It didn't appear to have been used in the last several year. Immediately beyond the park, there was a fork in the road with a sign indicating the Pendleton Ranch was to the right. We turned right and in about fifty yards the road turned left again, and once again crossed the same steam we had been following for the last thirty or forty miles. About a quarter mile further we crossed it again just above a waterfall with a pretty good sized hole of water at the bottom of the waterfall. We stopped there for a while and took some pictures and ate the snack which Mary had fixed for us at the P.O.L. Ranch. There was also a small yellow building near the waterfall which I later found was a temporary forest ranger station. We turned around and went back to downtown Cloverdale and waited for Mr.Pendleton. Just before noon a couple of people drove up and asked if I was Mr.Pendleton and I told them I was not but he was expected there at any time. They had come down to buy some young hereford bulls. Mr.Pendleton arrived right away and we all went back to the corral and windmill southeast of the store building. Mr. Pendleton and the other man and lady looked at some your bulls and I talked with the cowboy who had been waiting at the corral. He was the crew for the P.N.Ranch. His name was Anufo and he spoke very little English. Like all of the people raised in that part of the country, he had all the patience in the world, so we were able to communicate to some extent but most of the time it was pretty slow. When Mr. Pendleton had finished talking to the people about the bulls, Anufo loaded his horse in the trailer and got in the pick-up and drove back up the road we had taken earlier that went by the park. Mr. Pendleton told me to follow Anufo on up to the ranch headquarters. I could tell on the way to the house my wife was pretty concerned about the condition of the house but she need not have worried. It was just as Bill had described. There was no TV in the house and Mr. Pendleton said they had already tried everything to get reception and could not. The front part of the house was still standing but the rest was just as good. It had central heat (butane) with carpets in all of the rooms (Three bedrooms) and was really nice. Not only had they not killed a snake in it in the last three or four months, I don't think they ever had. The house was in the mouth of a small box canyon with mountains on the south, west and north side and in front of the house the stream ran out of a much bigger canyon that started out in front of the house and ran north into the main part of the Pelencillo Mountains. We spent the rest of the day unpacking and looking around the house. The box canyon where the house was contained about ten acres and had the house, shop, bunkhouse, equipment shed and a set of corrals. The following morning Anufo and I loaded two horses in a trailer and went back to the store pasture and gathered about thirty bull calves. We then put weights on some of the horns. The weights are used to shape the horns if needed. We also vaccinated and sprayed the calves. On Sunday afternoon my wife and I drove up to the north part of the mountain range. To do this we had to go to the Cloverdale store and take the Douglas road about eight miles north, then it turned west and ran through Geronimo Canyon. This canyon cut through the Pelencillo Mountains from east to west and was two to three thousand feet lower than the peaks on each side. It opened into San Semone Valley on the west end about two or three miles south of Skeleton Canyon. This is really some rugged, beautiful country. I could see why the Calvary could never capture Geronimo and his band of Apaches in these mountains.
I spent most of the next week servicing and repairing the equipment and even did some electrical and pluming repairs to the house and bunk house.
The following Saturday we drove through the Coronado Forest and up to San Semone Arizona. From there we went over to Wilcox to see Mr. and Mrs. Nino Cochise who had adopted me earlier. In Wilcox we found that they had Moved to Tombstone so we drove over there and visited with them for a while. After leaving Tombstone we drove to Douglas and bought some groceries then went back to the ranch.
Monday and Tuesday Anufo and I built and repaired fence. On Wednesday I took a young horse that we were breaking to ride and rode south west of the ranch house to a place called Indian Springs. It had been a campsite of Geronimo in his heyday and was on the local smugglers trail from Mexico into the U.S. that was supposed to have been heavily used by smugglers about the same time Geronimo was giving the Calvary gray hair.
I was riding south on the east side of a canyon thinking I could probably find some artifacts or maybe, some buried gold if I was lucky. I knew gold was one of the favorite commodities of the north bound smugglers. About a mile south of the spring I saw a small cave in the west wall of the canyon. It was almost impossible to see from where I was and totally invisible from anywhere else. Right away I decided to ride down and explore the cave.
The shortest route was to go back north to the spring at the head of the canyon where there was a trail of sorts down into the canyon. I made a mental note of the location of the cave and went back to the spring and down into the canyon and on down to the cave. While making this trip was the richest I have ever been. I could just see gold bars and silver coins with all kinds of jewels lying in the cave waiting for me to come on down and gather them. By the time I got back down below the cave I had already spent a young fortune in my mind.
The cave was at least forty feet above the floor of the canyon, straight up a rock cliff. There was a small rock protrusion on the south side of the cave mouth and just above it, so I tried to rope it, but my lasso lacked four or five feet reaching it. Not being one to give up easily, I tied the young stallion to some bushes right below the cave and stood up in the saddle and threw my loop at the rock protrusion. Right away, it was easy to see that the rope would reach the rock. It was also evident that the horse didn't think this was all necessary and that he wasn't going to stand still for it. Every time I threw my rope the horse jumped one way or another and more times than not I had to jump off the horse to keep from falling.
After numerous tries I finally snagged the rock and climbed up the rope to the cave. About the time I got my head and shoulders above the floor of the cave a female mountain lion jumped over me and hit the ground about fifty feet beyond the horse and disappeared. I almost fell and the horse did his best to have a one horse stampede. I am glad I had tied him with a heavy rope. Needles to say, the only gold in the cave was the coloring on the lioness.
Thursday morning Mr. Pendleton flew down about 7:00 A.M. and he and I flew over to Los Crusis and met Bill Wade from the P.O.L. ranch. We got into the pickup with Bill and rode down to Anthony where we picked up a young horse Mr. Pendleton had bought the week before. Bill took us back to the airport and he took the horse back to the P.O.L. Ranch. We flew on over to ElPaso and made arrangements to have some minor repairs made on the airplane. Mr. Pendleton and I spent a couple of hours going back to the ranch because I was giving him some flight instructions in his new airplane.
The next morning my wife and I took a pickup and trailer over to the P.O.L. ranch near Columbus and spent the night there. The next day we brought the horse Bill had picked up back to our place.
Sometime that week Anufo had left on a two week vacation to go over near Douglas, Arizona to his home, so it was necessary for me to stay around the ranch most of the time. Every two days I had to packsaddle some feed back into the mountain pasture to some registered two year old Hereford bulls and every ten days I had to carry them some salt and mineral blocks.
On April the 20 t it snowed about two inches so I could see that the packsaddle operation was nor over with, even that far up into the Spring of the year.
Mr. Pendleton came down the following Wednesday and late that afternoon my wife and I drove up to Silver City. When we arrived Mrs. Pendleton said that Mr. Pendleton had called from Animas and that he had landed due to mechanical problems with the airplane. Mrs. Pendleton and I went out to the airport in Silver City so I could take the other airplane to pick up Mr. Pendleton but we couldn't find the key. I drove back down to Animas, Picked up Mr. Pendleton and he and I went back to the airport there, and found the trouble to be that the switch had stuck in the START position when he started the engine in Cloverdale and the starter had run all the way to Animas. The starter was bar-B-quid and the battery was dead so we drove back to Silver City. The next morning we took the other plane and went back to Animas and brought the first plane home. We didn't have any trouble finding the key since he had it in his pocket.
Around noon we left Silver City and went back by the P.O.L. ranch and visited with Bill and Mary Lou then headed for home. The trip home was uneventful but very tiring.
