Drusilla Claridge has combined a fascination with history and an appetite for the outdoors since coming to New Mexico 23 years ago. She has participated in reenactments of the Rocky Mountain fur trade rendezvous, wearing authentic period Cheyenne clothing, and sleeping in a teepee. She has handled horses since she was a teenager, and has travelled horseback in the Gila Wilderness. She frequents New Mexico's hot springs, and has participated in a sweatlodge ceremony conducted by a Jicarilla Apache.
Dru worked on the Gila National Forest as a fire lookout in 1979, 1988, and 1989. The journal she kept was excerpted in a piece published by Stackpole Books. The book, Go Tell It On the Mountain, an anthology of lookout writing, includes the works of Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock, Jackie Johnson Maughan and others. In the summer of 1996 Claridge went back to tower work.
Dru worked on the historic districts of Silver City, New Mexico, reading nineteenth century newspapers, conducting oral history interviews, and photographing historic adobe buildings. Her work, writing technical documents on the history and architecture of Southwest New Mexico, allowed significant properties to be listed with the National and State Registries of Historic Places.
In the late 1980s, she lived in remote Quemado, New Mexico, and reported for the Catron County Courier. She also visited every lookout tower on the Gila National Forest, photographing them for the U.S Forest Service.
Her historical novel, Peacock Ore, is now available from 1st Books Library. The book depicts two cultures and their fight over the Mogollon mining district in the 1870's. On one side was the great Apache chief Victorio, with his sister Lozen, warrior and medicine woman; on the other was Sergeant James Cooney, with his Irish miners. The Silver City Daily Press pronounced it a "must read for Southwest history buffs." To order a copy, call 1-888-280-7715, or visit www.1stbooks.com .
In addition to writing, Dru also creates desert landscape pastels.
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The high valley in which the tiny town of Luna, New Mexico, sits is surpassingly beautiful. The San Francisco River courses by under enormous cottonwood trees, and the green valley stretches between piney mountains. Luna itself, rustic and basic, could hail from an era when cowpokes rode alongside their herds, ropes a-twirl, spurs flashing in the sunlight.
Actually, an even more radical time shift is required of the visitor who would take in everything Luna has to offer. With the re-opening of the Hough Ruin (pronounced HUFF), one must stretch one's imagination 700 years back in time, when another civilization peopled this lovely valley.
The Hough Site was first identified by Smithsonian archaeologist Walter Hough in 1907 when he mapped six sites in the Luna Valley. Fifty years later a team of archaeologists from the Museum of New Mexico excavated four rooms at the Hough site. These were backfilled and left intact until 1992, when a highway construction project brought the Hough Site back into the public eye. In 1995, while excavating ten rooms, archaeologists from the Museum of New Mexico discovered a great kiva.
That excavation project revealed a number of features which set the Hough site apart from other Mogollon ruins. It is large, L-shaped and multi-storied, with 20 to 35 rooms; and it has two kivas, including one great kiva. Kivas were used for religious purposes, and great kivas served not only the immediate community, but probably also neighboring pueblos.
The residents of economically depressed Catron County had hoped to protect the site and build a visitor center complete with handicap access. Zuni tribal officials, north of Luna, who claim the Mogollon people as ancestors, gave their approval of the project. The State Highway Department was cooperative, moving its expansion project twenty feet north so a shelter could be built over the excavated ruins.
The State Highway Department turned the site over to the U.S. Forest Service, to give the community time to raise funds for its preservation. The cost to build a permanent structure over the ten excavated rooms and the kiva, a visitor center with handicap access, and parking lots, was estimated at $300,000 in the '90s{$.EM$}the money was never raised.
With Highway 180 passing directly by its back door, the Hough Ruin is a perfect site for education and interpretation. The Luna Valley Ruins could link Casa Malpais National Historic Landmark in Springerville, Arizona, with Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument near Silver City, New Mexico, creating an archaeological scenic route. Of the three ruins, the Luna Valley Ruin would be the only one offering access to the handicapped. Development of the Luna Valley Ruins Interpretive Site would enhance recreational opportunities, promote site preservation, and encourage economic growth for Catron County.
Now all the Luna Valley Ruins need is money.