High in the San Mateo Mountains of the Cibola National Forest in New Mexico is Apache Kid Peak, and one mile northwest as the crow flies, at Cyclone Saddle, is the Apache Kid gravesite. The hiker who comes across the marked site in such a remote area may wonder who the Kid was, and perhaps will ask himself why, so far from the usual tourist attractions, such an elaborate memorial has been assembled. In the story of the Apache Kid, much of it fact and part of it legend, rests one of the Southwest’s many intriguing sagas.

The Kid was born in the 1860s, possibly a White Mountain Apache, and his family settled at Globe, Arizona Territory, in 1868. His name, Haskay-bay-nay-natyl (“the tall man destined to come to a mysterious end”), was too much for the citizens of Globe, who called him “Kid.” The Kid learned English, worked at odd jobs in town, and was soon befriended by the famous scout, Al Sieber. In 1881, the Kid enlisted in the Indian Scouts, probably at Hackberry, Arizona Territory, and showed such aptitude for the job he was made sergeant, eventually rising to the rank of first sergeant within two years.

The Geronimo Campaign of 1885-1886 found Kid in Mexico early in 1885 with Sieber, and when the Chief of Scouts was recalled in the fall, Kid rode with him back to San Carlos. He re-enlisted with Lt. Crawford’s call for one hundred scouts for Mexican duty, and went south in late 1885. In the Mexican town of Huasabas, on the Bavispe River, Kid nearly lost his life as the result of a drunken riot in which he had been a participant. Rather than see Kid shot by a Mexican firing squad, the Alcalde fined him twenty dollars, and the Army sent him back to San Carlos.

It was during Kid’s eighth enlistment in the scouts, which began April 11, 1887, that he found himself in a situation that would lead to a court-martial, imprisonment, a civil trial, a new sentence, escape, and life as a fugitive. The course of the disastrous events unfolded, as did so many among the Apaches, with the brewing of tiswin, a beverage made of fermented fruit or corn. Brewing tiswin was illegal on the reservation, but with the agent, Captain Pierce, and Al Sieber both gone on business, the time seemed auspicious for a tiswin soiree. Kid had been left in charge of both the scouts and the jail, but before he and the scouts could get to the camp where the tiswin was flowing freely, two men were dead.

One of the dead was Kid’s father, Togo-de-Chuz, and the other was the man who had killed him, Gon-Zizzie. Kid’s friends had killed Gon-Zizzie, but the blood-price did not satisfy Kid; he and his scouts went to Gon-Zizzie’s brother’s place, and there Kid killed the brother, Rip. Kid and his scouts then returned to his father’s camp, where they joined the others in drinking tizwin. The drunk lasted several days, and finally, perhaps filled with remorse and certainly hung-over, the scouts made their way back to San Carlos to face both Sieber and Captain Pierce.

Kid and his scouts arrived at San Carlos on June 1, 1887, and found that neither Sieber nor Pierce was in a mood to deal generously with them. A crowd of Indians, some armed, had gathered to witness the punishment, and when Captain Pierce ordered the scouts to disarm themselves, Kid was the first to comply. The scouts’ firearms were laid on a table near Sieber’s tent, and Pierce ordered Kid and the others to the guardhouse to be locked up until further action could be decided upon. They were about to comply when a shot was fired from the crowd, and soon the firing became widespread.

In the melee that followed, the disarmed Kid fled, Sieber’s tent was shredded by bullets, and a massive .45-70 bullet smashed Sieber’s left ankle, crippling him for life. It has never been determined who fired the shot that struck Sieber, but it is known that neither Kid nor the four scouts ordered to the guardhouse with him did the shooting. They ran for cover, managed to secure horses, and with perhaps a dozen other Apaches fled for wilderness. The Army reacted swiftly, and soon two troops of the Fourth Cavalry were following the fugitives up the banks of the San Carlos River.

Telegrams were sent from San Carlos to San Francisco, Headquarters Division of the Pacific, and to Washington, D.C., as the Territories braced for another Apache outbreak. Territorial newspapers in Arizona and New Mexico were quick to pick up the story, and the Army began to feel the heat of irate editorials. For two weeks the errant Apaches led the cavalry a good chase, until, aided by Indian scouts, Kid and his band was located high in the Rincon Mountains. The troopers surprised the Indians and captured their mounts, saddles, and equipment. Kid and his followers escaped into the rocky canyons and ravines, but faced the prospect of survival without horses while pressure from the Army increased daily.

After some negotiation, Kid got a message to General Miles stating that if the Army would recall the cavalry he and his band would surrender. Miles called off further pursuit, and on June 22, eight of Kid’s band gave themselves up. Kid and seven others surrendered on June 25. Miles decided to try Kid and four others by a general court-martial, despite the fact that they did not, in all probability, understand the charges pending against them.

The trial was concluded, and to no one’s surprise the men were found guilty of mutiny and desertion, and each was sentenced to death by firing squad. General Miles, upset with the verdict, ordered the court to reconsider its sentence. The court reconvened on August 3 and the convicted men were resentenced to life in prison. Miles, still not satisfied, reduced the sentence to ten years. The sentence began with the men in the San Carlos guardhouse until such time as the Army decided where to send them. The Army decided, on January 23, 1888, to send the prisoners to Alcatraz Island, California, rather than Fort Leavenworth Military Prison. Taken to Alcatraz under heavy guard, the five began what was to be a brief incarceration.

In reviewing the trial, the Judge Advocate General’s office had become convinced that prejudice existed among the officers on the court-martial, thus precluding a fair trial. On October 13, 1888, Secretary of War William C. Endicott authorized the remission of the remainder of the sentences of the five prisoners, and by November they were back at San Carlos. Meanwhile, the Indian Rights Association, concerned that the incarceration of Apaches as federal inmates in state prisons was the result of federal usurpation of territorial jurisdiction, had sued on behalf of two incarcerated Apaches. The court agreed to the release not only of the two named in the suit, but to the release of all the Apaches held as federal prisoners in Illinois and Ohio. Eleven murderers were to be returned to San Carlos as free men, and the outrage in the Southwest was immeasurable.

By the middle of October 1889, Sheriff Glenn Reynolds of Gila County had arrest warrants for most of the freed Apaches, and among them was Apache Kid. The trial of Kid and three others for assault to commit murder in the wounding of Al Sieber was set for October 25, 1889. The four were found guilty, and on October 30, each was sentenced to seven years in the Territorial Prison at Yuma. On November 1, along with five other prisoners, they began what was to have been a stagecoach journey to incarceration in a prison notorious for its brutal living conditions, a prison aptly called “Hell-Hole.”

The journey was to have been a two-day trip by stage from Globe to Casa Grande and from there by rail to Yuma. Sheriff Reynolds chose a deputy, W. A. “Hunkeydory” Holmes, as guard, and Gene Middleton, the stagecoach owner, as driver. All three were armed. Except for Kid and Hos-cal-te, considered to be the most dangerous and shackled at both wrists and ankles, the Apaches were shackled by twos, leaving each man with a free hand. A Mexican horse thief, Jesus Avott, was unshackled.

On the second day, after a night at Riverside, the coach had to make a steep ascent at Kelvin Grade, and all prisoners but Kid and Hos-cal-te were put out to walk. As the coach made the grade and disappeared from view, the prisoners over-powered Reynolds and Holmes. Holmes died of fright, and Reynolds was killed with Holmes’ rifle. Middleton was also shot and horribly wounded with Holmes’ rifle, but survived. The prisoners unlocked their shackles with keys taken from the dead bodies of Holmes and Reynolds and disappeared into a developing snowstorm. Jesus Avott cut a horse loose and rode into nearby Florence with the grim news.

By a strange course of events, Apache Kid was no longer an admired and honored scout, but a fugitive with a price of five thousand dollars on his head. It was widely believed that Kid used the San Simon Valley in Arizona and Skeleton Canyon in New Mexico as his avenue for travel to and from Old Mexico. Into the 1920s and 1930s, rumors circulated along the border that Kid had been seen, men had talked to him, he was alive on a ranch in Sonora, and on and on. Who knows? As our Mexican neighbors say, “Solo Dios sabe, Señor, solo Dios!”

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Space of all kinds surround Roswell. Wide open spaces, Robert H. Goddard’s space experiments, and the crash of a UFO. Has the beginning of space exploration here been overshadowed with all the hype of the UFO crash in 1947? Probably. At the Houston Space Center and Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center, Robert Hutchings Goddard is known as the Father of Space Exploration.

But it was here in Roswell in the 1930s that Dr. Goddard brought his experiments to life. They were the forerunner of the Apollo Spacecraft crew setting foot on the moon in 1969. What humans had dreamed of and had written of in fiction was now a fact. Earth had been left behind and the heavens were being explored.

Why was Roswell chosen? Because of its terrain, altitude, and climate, plus a small population of only 11,000. The name of the field where he made his test flights was known as Eden Valley. Many years later in reminiscence, Mrs. Goddard said it was truly an Eden. “Townspeople came to call, invited us to social occasions and overlooked our Eastern accents, accepting us as their own.” Those are some of the same reasons many people move to Roswell 65 years later.

While Dr. Goddard’s experiments were on hold during the Great Depression, something significant occurred that would ultimately serve as a Memorial to him. The Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) built the Roswell Museum Federal Art Center, one of 67 such centers in the United States.

The background of his life offers insight into his contribution to the space program. His schooling was haphazard due to poor health, so he resorted to self-education by studying scientific and mathematical texts. When he entered high school he was two years older than his classmates.

He gave the commencement address at graduation, ending with, “It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” It was perhaps prophetic of his life.

Inspired by Sir Isaac Newton’s theory that to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction, he felt this principle was the key to sending up rockets.

He continued his schooling and his experiments, after one of which he became known by the derisive name “Moon Man.” This made him very hesitant to give publicity to his experiments.

One person who knew him well said, “For years he carried on his work virtually alone. He experienced frustrations of many kinds: financial difficulties, problems of health as well as the resistance of a new mechanical device to taming and development.

“What he tackled almost single handedly has since taken billions of dollars and thousands of engineers to do now. Yet he designed and built rockets that contained all the essential devices of those found in huge space rockets of today.”

Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh was interested in rocketry and was influential in obtaining financing for Dr. Goddard. He had confided to Lindbergh that if he were given $25,000 a year for four years he could accomplish in 48 months something that otherwise might take a lifetime. Colonel Lindbergh was successful in securing grants from the Guggenheim Foundation. In late 1934, the Lindberghs made a surprise visit to the Mescalero Ranch to see the Goddards, setting the whole town of Roswell abuzz.

The Navy wanted him to work on a liquid fuel, jet-assist rocket and wanted also the option to move him to Annapolis. In 1942 the Navy exercised its option, and the Goddards left Roswell for Maryland in July to work on a project at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station. Thirty-five more patents were issued while he was at Annapolis.

In April of 1943, Dr. Goddard contracted a cold and by the end of June his voice was extremely husky. By 1944, his crew could barely understand him. He continued his visits to the throat specialist, and his wife raised the question of cancer of the throat of which his father had died. It proved to be the cause of his huskiness and a laryngectomy was performed in July of 1945. On August 10, 1945, he died quietly and was buried in the family plot in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Shortly after his death, Mrs. Goddard sold the Mescalero Ranch in Roswell and began transcribing his notes to establish the importance of his work. It took her and two assistants nine months to complete the typescript.

The idea of the Goddard Rocket and Space Museum came into being at a dinner honoring Mrs. Goddard. During discussions following the meal she generously offered to make the fabulous collection of Goddard memorabilia available to the Roswell Museum. Her one requirement was that this vital historical collection be properly housed and displayed.

She felt the collection should be exhibited at the Museum because, “The friendly warmth of this typical western community and the vast open spaces around it afforded an ideal atmosphere for the creative efforts of my husband. He spent ten happy and fruitful years in Roswell, bringing to reality the dreams that are still so much a part of today’s efforts in space.”

The Goddard missile and rocket collection were formally offered to this non-profit, city-owned Museum on May 6, 1958. On this date the City Council authorized the enlargement of the Museum to provide the requested housing and display space.

Since Dr. Goddard had been a Rotarian, Roswell Rotarians decided to undertake the reconstruction of his shop at a cost of $15,000. The fundraising was a successful community-wide effort.

NASA presented the Museum with a scaled replica of his first successful liquid-fueled rocket. Other companies subsequently assisted in obtaining his tools and original equipment.

In conjunction with the Workshop reconstruction, the Robert H. Goddard Planetarium was constructed at the west end of the Museum and Art Center. It is the largest Planetarium in New Mexico, seating 120 people.

During the 91st Congress in 1970, a concurrent resolution recognized the Goddard Rocket and Space Museum in the Roswell Museum and Art Center as a fitting tribute to Dr. Robert H. Goddard, space pioneer, 1882-1949.

And it is here visitors and residents can walk through the replica of his workshop and marvel at what Robert Goddard used to create his rocketry.

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In his grip on the imagination, psyche and national character, the mountain man rivals the cowboy as the archetypal American Hero. In the Southwest the mountain man reached his zenith, and held his lifestyle longest, in the region’s last great wilderness – the Gila country of southwest New Mexico. Here within the mountains and canyons of the Gila, San Francisco and Mimbres Rivers, the mountain man era lasted well into the 20th century.

The fur trade brought the first mountain men west. From St. Louis, trappers seeking beaver went northwest up the Missouri and Platte Rivers, or, south and west on the Santa Fe trail to Taos. By the mid 1820’s, Taos was trapper’s headquarters. In the fall of 1825 a group of trappers outfitted in Taos, determined to explore a new range of mountains, beyond the desert to the south and west. Among them was a twenty-one year old of romantic notions named James Ohio Pattie (1804 – ?).

Pattie was from Kentucky and he was not, in retrospect, a great mountain man. He was only marginally successful as a trapper, nearly starved to death in the wilderness several times, and was once so foolish as to drop his gun in fright in the face of an angry grizzly bear. Yet he was with the first group of mountain men to explore the Gila drainage and is forever etched in mountain man history because he left a book detailing his adventures: The Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie.

Pattie’s Narrative remains a fascinating document for the modern reader. Though not always accurate as to dates and chronology, Pattie gives the reader a vivid picture of pristine Southwest New Mexico in the 1820’s: the lush, riparian bosque near Socorro, where he encountered his first grizzly; the climb over the Black Range at Emory Pass and descent to Santa Rita del Cobre near present day Silver City; the descent of Sapillo Creek to the Gila River where the trappers took 30 beaver the first night; the Gila Hot Springs, now a small resort community, where Pattie soaked himself in the steamy waters and, he claims, cooked a fish! Later, downriver, he describes the river entering such a narrow canyon that they had to detour their horses and mules far to the south. The detour was arduous and they survived only by butchering one of their horses for food. The modern reader recognizes the rugged Gila Middle Box Canyon; based on Pattie’s description, it’s changed but little.

That first winter, Pattie’s party trapped several hundred beaver, only to lose most of the pelts (and at least one of the trappers) to the Apaches. The next winter they had acquired nearly $20,000 worth of Gila beaver, only to have all the furs confiscated in Santa Fe by the Spanish governor. Here Pattie commented in his diary: “The whole fruit of our long, toilsome and dangerous expedition was lost, and all my golden hopes of prosperity and comfort vanished like a dream.”

By 1830 Pattie was back in the Midwest, penniless, his health broken, but with a headful of experiences and the remnants of a diary that his vivid imagination sometimes over-leapt. Fortunately for posterity, he promptly turned that diary into a narrative, imperfect but invaluable. Alas, James Ohio Pattie, Gila mountain man, was never to profit from his book. He disappears from history about 1833, probably the victim of a cholera epidemic.

The most historically significant of the Gila mountain men was a contemporary of Pattie’s named James Kirker (1793 – 1853). Kirker arrived at the Gila trapper’s headquarters, the Santa Rita copper mines, in 1826, and he stayed for a decade at least, trapping the Gila streams and acting as a guard, scout and manager of the mines. By his own account he was “highly successful” as a trapper. According to William C. McGaw, author of the Kirker biography, Savage Scene, Kirker was once gone off in the wilderness, hunting and trapping, for 18 months! As late as 1837, when beaver were of little economic consequence due to their scarcity, Kirker emerged from the Gila Wilderness with over 1,000 beaver pelts, only to lose the entirety to an Indian raid.

But Kirker would be of minor historical interest had his career ended with beaver trapping. Instead, following the Apache uprising in 1837, Kirker turned to a more lucrative pursuit: scalp hunting. Hiring out to the Mexican government at $200 per scalp, Kirker led vigilantes of 50 to 100 men, many of them Shawnee and Delaware Indians, on punitive expeditions against the Apaches. The scourge lasted a half dozen years and ranged over the wilderness, from Taos to Santa Rita to Chihuahua City. The toll of Apache dead eventually exceeded 500; the scalps hung in gruesome display in the Ciudad Chihuahua square. One of Kirker’s recruits, James Hobbs, wrote: “We would fight certain tribes . . . for the fun of the thing, and for common humanity, even if we were not rewarded for every scalp.”

Kirker’s life truly was a “savage scene,” yet he survived it all – the wilderness trapping, the Indian wars, the Mexican American War (1846) where he served as a scout – to die of natural causes in 1853. Further, he left a multitude of descendants, a number of whom still carry the Kirker name and work in the Santa Rita mines.

For a period following the decline in the beaver trade the mountain man as a type faded from the Southwest. He reemerged in the latter part of the 19th century in the form of a number of remarkable wilderness adventurers who hunted predatory animals. The first of these was a literate, one-armed Englishman named Montague Stevens (1859 – 1953).

Early in the 1880’s, Stevens established ranches over a broad range in what is now Catron County, roughly between Datil and Reserve. Ranching on the frontier would have been adventure enough for most, but not for Stevens. He turned to the pursuit of mountain lion, black bear, and, finally, the magnificent grizzly bear, then making its last stand in the Southwest in a losing war with the livestock industry.

Stevens’ grizzly bear hunting was unique. He hunted them horseback with hounds, wilderness pursuits that at times went on for 30 miles! Stevens reported that the largest of these grizzlies weighed 800 pounds. And he did it all – lest we forget – with one arm!

Stevens’ own volume on his adventures, Meet Mr. Grizzly, is of more than historical interest. His observations on the natural history of the grizzly bear are of value today. His methods for training hounds and horses, achieving obedience through kindness, presaged by many decades the training “discoveries” one reads about in modern dog and horse volumes. Finally, almost alone among the early hunters, he understood the difference between control and extermination. As the grizzly grew scarce, Stevens quit hunting them and, in his words: “I became a zealous convert to their preservation, to prevent so noble an animal becoming extinct.” Stevens died in Albuquerque at the age of 93.

A native of St. Louis, James “Bear” Moore (circa 1850 – 1924) arrived in southwest New Mexico about 1880. In 1892 in the San Mateo range southwest of Socorro he fought a grizzly bear in a death struggle, armed only with a knife. The bear died; James Moore survived, barely, but was left permanently disfigured. As he later told it to forest ranger Jack Stockbridge: “My face was left all twisted out to one side and I never shaved after that. I can’t talk very plain either. There’s terrible scars on my forehead and arms, and you can see my heart beat where that bear clawed my chest open . . . ever since, they’ve always called me Bear Moore.”

Always reclusive, Bear Moore drifted ever deeper into the Mogollon Range, killing his own meat, selling a few hides, and occasionally bringing in a few ounces of gold dust that he would trade for salt or ammunition – more a survivalist than an entrepreneur. Meanwhile he carried on a vendetta against bears. He built massive, log, bear traps, some of which may still be found in the Gila Wilderness. Stockbridge once witnessed the cruelty: “I heard the durndest racket . . . and rode down and there was Bear Moore with a bowie knife tied onto a stout stick, poking between the logs of a trap at the bear . . . and he kept on that way until he killed the bear.”

In January of 1924 Bear Moore, aged and emaciated, was caught in a snowstorm and died of exposure in his primitive camp in the Gila Wilderness. He was buried there at Little Turkey Park, near the head of Sycamore Canyon, on the west side of Brushy Mountain.

No review of New Mexico mountain men can avoid the mixture of fact and legend that surrounds the unusual Ben Lilly (1856 – 1936). Born in Alabama, Lilly arrived in New Mexico in 1911 and for the next two decades was probably the most skilled hunter who ever followed a hound. He worked alternately for ranchers or the federal government, essentially a bounty hunter in pursuit of bear and mountain lion. Some of his peculiarities are part of New Mexico’s lore. He would not work or hunt on Sunday, and if his hounds treed a lion on the Lord’s day he would refuse to kill it (though back there in the wilderness only the Lord could have known) till the Lord’s day had passed. He would roll up in a hide in a snowstorm rather than accept a warm bed inside a cabin or house. He was tougher than a boot. Indeed, his mountainous excursions could wear out a pair of hunting boots in a matter of months. And remarkably, the older Lilly got, the more his incredible fitness served him as a hunter.

Whatever the legends might say, it is a fact that Lilly was already 55 years old when he arrived in New Mexico. He was just coming into his prime. Jack Hooker, still living in Silver City, recalled in a recent interview that he hunted with Lilly in the 1920’s. Hooker was then in his twenties; Lilly was past sixty. “When the race started,” Hooker said, “and the hounds went over the hill, Lilly walked me down. After that I rode a horse when I hunted with Ben Lilly.”

The results of Lilly’s hunting talents were awesome, and alarming to a modern conservation ethic. In 1925 Lilly’s best hound, Crook, died along Sapillo Creek. Lilly buried him there and left a momento, written in pencil on the lid of a shoebox. Later, Jack Hooker dug it up. It reads: “Here lies Crook, a bear and lion dog that helped kill 210 bear and 426 lion since 1914, owned by B. V. Lilly . . .” J. Frank Dobie, Lilly’s biographer (The Ben Lilly Legend) wrote: “To watch his dogs work was a lively pleasure to Mr. Lilly. . . he detailed their trailing techniques and accomplishments with a kind of solemn glee – a pride transcending any egoism – and the plain dignity that belongs only to elemental life.”

Of course age in time captured Ben Lilly, too. He died feeble, “in his second childhood” as Dobie wrote, at the county poor farm near Pleasanton in December 1936.

Finally, Nat Straw (1857-1941) was a likeable guy and natural raconteur. Jack Stockbridge wrote: “Everybody liked Nat Straw . . . he was always welcome . . . he would tell you all kinds of stories and have his fun as he went along.” A native of Minnesota, Straw came to the Southwest as a young man and lived for a time with the Navajos where, according to Dobie, “he mastered their language, their lore, and at least one of their women.” By the 1880’s he was off in the mountains, alone with the lure of the Mogollon Range. Like Lilly, Straw was often afoot in the wilderness, moving his camp with burros, but he was a trapper more than a hunter. He trapped a jaguar in the Black Range in 1902, one of the few ever taken in the state. He was also a prospector and sporadically sought the (probably mythical) riches of the Lost Adams Diggings. Late in life he could comment, “I know ten thousand places where the Lost Adams Diggings ain’t.” He concluded, “The Adams Diggings is a shadowy naught that lies in the valley of fanciful thought.”

No book has been written on the life of Nat Straw but biographical sketches of his life, and that of Bear Moore, may be found in Wilderness of the Gila by Elizabeth McFarland.

Nat Straw was active in the Gila Wilderness until near his death in 1941. There hasn’t been a real mountain man in the Gila Forest since. Just as well, some would say, considering all the killing they did. Perhaps. But these were the men who broke trail, who went in and stayed for months at a time – no map, no trail guide, no camp stove, water filter, tent or air mattress. No helicopter to bail them out if they made a mistake. The wilderness life we can only dream of, they knew and lived. They were a product of their times, and of the singular wilderness that formed them – the Gila country. And what J. Frank Dobie said of Ben Lilly favors any one of these Gila mountain men: “He came from a solitary race.”

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Technorati Tags: food,sex,prostitution,madam,Millie,Mildred Cusey,southwest,Silver City,Deming,Grant County,Luna County,person,people

 

“All the faults of humanity are more pardonable than the means to conceal them.” — Rochefoucauld, French philanthropist (1747 – 1827)

 

The history of humanity is a long and complex one. When stripped of all the manifold facts and figures, it really comes down to two key fundamentals: food and sex. Food sustains the living, while sex insures the continuity of that living.

Mildred Cusey spent most of her life engaged in the professional aspects of both basics. She was early caterer for the former and later entrepreneur of the latter.

Mildred was born February 28, 1906, in Kentucky. She was orphaned at age twelve, her parents reportedly victims of the 1918 flu epidemic.

When her older sister (by four years) contracted tuberculosis, the girls headed west to Deming, New Mexico. There the sister was admitted to the Holy Cross Sanatorium, located on the western edge or the Camp Cody site. Millie, although underage, was hired as a Harvey Girl, allegedly by a woman who attended the same Catholic Church. When the Harvey House transferred her to Needles, the hot climate prompted her to quit.

In Silver City, Mildred was working in a brothel when the town marshall ordered her from the house because she was underage. Millie later said, “I told him I would come back, buy the whole block and run it to suit myself.” And she did just that!

Early work as a waitress led to the more lucrative profession as a “lady of the night.” Mildred was not destined nor desirous to remain one of the girls; her aspirations were to have her own house and be its madam.

In the early 1930s, Millie made good the prophecy she pronounced to the Marshall. She purchased three houses in the 500 block of Hudson Street in Silver City: 500, 506 and 514. The most famous was the McComas home at 514. In 1883, Judge McComas, with his wife and young son (age six), were traveling to the Lordsburg area from Silver City when they were attacked by a band of Apaches. Both parents were brutally murdered and the boy was taken captive. It was a much-publicized tragedy at the time.

Mildred returned to Deming in the late 1930s to purchase the bordello on the north side of town. It was located in the 500 block of San Carlos. Thelma Austin, the former owner, stayed on to run the house. As Millie was wont to do, she would purchase a going business, leave someone in charge, then venture forth to seek another opportunity.

The Deming house was reportedly haunted. The new owner decided to spend some time there to appraise the situation. She concluded the nearby trains were causing the house to vibrate, thus causing small items to fall.

The brothel was referred to, among other things, as the “pest house.” This label appears to have been attached some years before when Deming underwent a smallpox epidemic. The infectious disease first appeared in December 1916. Dr. P. M. Steed began a program of free vaccination, voluntary to most but forcefully to the reticent. With the hospital full, Steed and the law evicted the madam and her girls from the bawdy house. The building was fumigated and set up as a temporary hospital. About 250 people contracted smallpox and 50 died. When the epidemic was over, the house was returned to the madam and she was compensated for its use.

In an interview, with the late Dr. George O’Sullivan in 1990, the conversation drifted back to his early days of practice in Deming. He was familiar with the “pest house,” as he referred to it. The doctor was the house physician from 1939 to 1941. His duties were to examine the girls every ten days per state law. He remarked, “That was an education.”

O’Sullivan continued, “Someone should write a book about those (houses), because they were very important in the social and political life of the territory and the state.”

Asked if his being house physician was a political appointment, Dr. O’Sullivan laughed and replied, “Oh no. It was very informal. The girls had something to do with it. They voted or something.

“The woman who owned it was Mrs. Cusey from Silver City. No one here knew much about her. Most everyone thought Thelma Austin owned the house. Mrs. Cusey told me she owned it and Thelma was her housekeeper, not in the sense that she went around with a broom keeping house. She ran the house.”

Regarding Mildred, the doctor continued, “She came down to Deming every night and checked the receipts. She was very active in business, in charities, and put lots of kids through college. She was a remarkable woman.”

In regard to the regular examinations he gave the girls, O’Sullivan said, “There was very little disease. In fact, I never saw a case.”

He described the “pest house” as a big old square building. Millie sold the house to some African-Americans in the late 1940s. They staffed the establishment with African-American girls and did very well for awhile, but eventually they ran out of girls.

Mildred’s early love life is rather obscure. She is said to have been courted by a sheriff of Lincoln County. His name was Brady and he was a descendant of the sheriff that Billy the Kid was charged with killing in 1878. It was serious enough that Brady presented Millie with a new Buick. In later life, she favored Chryslers and owned a number of them. Early on, she was briefly married to a Bernay and a Clark.

Her most lasting marital commitment was to Wendel Cusey, a rancher and contractor. They tied the knot about 1950 and remained husband and wife until Wendel died in 1991. Mildred said, “I never lied to him about what I did and I guess that is how come we got along so good.”

Millie was protective of the girls who worked for her. She would not tolerate drugs or drinking. Her little cats, as she called them, were required to take regular examinations as a precaution against venereal disease. The girls never handled the money, a measure to prevent them from being beaten and robbed. Mildred collected board and a percentage of the earnings from the girls.

One new girl, named Birdie, came to work in new high heel shoes. Newcomers were usually assigned the most distant rooms from the reception area. That night Birdie made house history by turning 91 tricks.

The following morning Millie asked her, “Aren’t you tired?”

“No,” replied Birdie, “But my feet hurt!”

Mildred was an entrepreneur by nature. When still in her late twenties, she was running six houses: three in Silver City, one in Deming, one in Lordsburg, one in Laramie, Wyoming. At various times, her holdings included: a ranch, parking lot, taxi stand, bars, restaurants and various minor houses. The core of her domain, however, remained in the 500 block of Silver’s Hudson Street.

It was her usual practice to lease her houses or employ a landlady. An incident in 1951 prompted authorities to insist that Millie personally manage her houses or be closed down. After a business deal went sour, a man named Bowker went gunning for Mildred. Failing to find her at 514 Hudson, he ended up wounding a house client with his Smith and Wesson and taking one of the girls as hostage in his car. Unfortunately for Marie, she was abducted in her working attire: au naturel – and this was January.

Bowker was quickly captured and the girl returned to the warmth of indoors. In March, he pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to three years. The kidnapping charge was dropped.

In 1968, Police Chief Tommy Ryan closed down Millie’s houses in Silver City. The city council held an open hearing. Charges and countercharges were exchanged. Cusey claimed that Ryan had been paid $4,000 cash and granted in-house privileges over the years.

One attorney described Mildred’s house as “Silver City’s most famous and most cherished institution.”

The hearing proved inconclusive, but Mildred Cusey was indicted by the grand jury. She took the case to the state supreme court, where she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a fine. Millie’s houses were torn down and replaced by the new post office.

Mildred held a tag sale in August 1978. Thousands of items from her famous bordellos had been stored in a Bayard warehouse. There were probably more visitors there to see the famed madam as there were buyers of memorabilia. Millie opened one old dresser drawer and discovered a set of false teeth, upper plate. She said, “Some man left in a hurry, wouldn’t you say?”

Mildred was a charitable woman. Former Silver City Mayor Ernie Brown said, “Mildred was always giving to the needy. She was the most sincere and giving person I ever met.”

The legendary madam lived life in the fast lane, and expressed no regrets about anything she did. She said, “You either do things for love or money. I sure didn’t do what I did for love.” In regard to prostitution, Millie was in favor of its being legalized and thought this move was inevitable. “It is an honest life, without hypocrisy or pretense.”

Mildred Cusey left this earthly existence on November 8, 1993, a legendary figure with a legion of friends. A fitting epitaph might be words of her own choosing, “I’ve had a ball.”

Appreciation is erpressed to Susan Berry of the Silver City Museum for material furnished, and to Peggy Wright of Pinos Altos for pictures and material pertinent to the Deming operation.

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While a correspondent for the Albuquerque Journal, I spent an afternoon in the Grant County Jail interviewing a modern day mountain man. This isn’t writing; it was just a matter of getting the man to talk and then arranging the notes so it all made some sense. After the piece came out there was some comment by law enforcement that I’d made the guy out to be better than he was. For example, I found out later that the man had kept a diary in which there were allusions to kidnapping some young and unsuspecting nubile and keeping her there in the wilderness so he could “raise her up right.” Also, the man did not, to put it mildly, keep a clean camp. But I never thought he was a hero. To a journalist, such a character is neither good nor bad, only interesting. And what was primarily interesting about this man was the fact that in 1983 he had gone off into what remains a pretty awesome wilderness, and he had stayed for a year.

The Gila National Forest of Southwest New Mexico encompasses more than three million acres in a contiguous block of largely untrammeled terrain, an area larger than some Eastern states. Near the center of this last great wilderness in the Southwest, in a cave a few miles downstream from where Sapillo Creek meets the main branch of the Gila River in northern Grant County, Martin Price made his new home in June of 1983. He brought with him a subsistence lifestyle and the myth of the mountain man.

“The Gila is the Yellowstone of the Southwest,” Price said. “I loved it. It was my home, but it brought me to this cage.”

This day, Martin Price, 31, was a resident of the Grant County Jail. Nearly a year after he moved into that cave at Panther Canyon, he was arrested by officers on horseback and charged with twenty-three counts of cattle rustling, burglary, littering and poaching of wild game.

In November 1984, he pleaded guilty to one count of each charge and received a two year deferred sentence, a condition which included a nine-month jail term. He served most of that nine-month term while awaiting sentencing and was eligible for release on probation in January 1985.

“I’ve got a ranch job lined up in Arizona,” Price said. “It’ll be legit’ and I can still live in the hills. I hope to live a lot like I always did, only I won’t be killing cows anymore.”

Long before his stay in the Gila Wilderness, Price chose to live in the woods, always picking mountainous terrain in the West.

“I lived for seven years, mostly, in the wilds. I lived for months at a time in the Chiricahua Mountains, in the Santa Catalina Mountains and the Mazatzal Wilderness, all in Arizona. Also, in central Nevada and in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. In the Sawtooth Mountains I had a dog, a German shepherd pup, for company . . . until he was killed by a bear.

“It didn’t matter where I was, I was always out in the desert or in the hills. That’s what I liked. And when I got some schooling, I began to read Indian stories and all about mountain men. When I was four or five, my dad was at the silver mine in Puerto Libertad in Sonora. It was there that I first became friends with lizards. People laugh, but I can communicate with lizards; they’re my friends. That’s how I got the name `Gila Monster’.'”

Price was born with an affinity for the outdoors, but had no more of the skills needed to live there than any other middle-class person. He acquired some of those skills in the military – three years as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne.

“I had a very difficult time in the military. I liked the soldiering, I liked guns and learned about weapons. I didn’t like the discipline.”

What Price learned about guns in the military he would put to use in later years in the wilderness.

“When I first went to the woods I survived mostly by hunting. In the Gila I hunted squirrels – tassel-eared squirrels, rock squirrels and Arizona grays. Turkey and deer – I’m learning how to work hides. Not many rabbits in that part of the Gila, but plenty of fish. I caught suckers, catfish and trout. I speared them and I made fish traps. I caught bullfrogs.”

Price said he was learning how to use homemade traps and a bow, but he did most of his hunting with guns. At his Gila camp he had a .22 rifle, a .270 rifle and .41 Magnum revolver, all with open sights.

“I didn’t want a scope,” Price said. “I wanted to get close.”

One of the creatures Price got close to in the wilderness and levelled on with his iron gunsight was a domestic animal.

“Yes,” he admited, “I also hunted cows.”

And, in that, Price’s life in the wilderness came up against the law. Price did not equivocate.

“I couldn’t live out there without breaking the law. For one thing, it’s against the law nowadays to live in the wilderness. You can only stay so long and you’re supposed to get out.”

And hunting today, as Price found out, is not what it was when the mountain men roamed the Gila. The game is there, but it’s protected by a bureaucracy and rules to match any found in urban life. You can kill a deer, but only at a certain time and in a certain way and you’re supposed to have a license. The squirrel season is a month long. The bullfrog season is shorter than that. And it is not legal to spear gamefish.

“It’s against the law to live off the land anymore,” Price lamented.

One would expect a tirade here, a protest of the U.S. Forest Service, the New Mexico Game & Fish Department, et al. But it doesn’t come.

“Basically, I think those guys are doing a damn good job,” Price said. “The Gila Wilderness is special. I’m glad they could save some of it. Those guys like the wilderness, too.”

In Silver City, after Price was arrested, many people belittled his living off the land, because he had poached game and rustled cattle. Price said, “I went six months at one point without seeing another person. That’s something. I am a student of son-hak, the art of being a hermit. I worked in the wilderness to develop my mental powers to be a hermit. In time, it felt natural to live alone. Of course, I wasn’t alone, really. I can communicate with animals. I was not alone at all. And I didn’t kill animals in the area where I lived. I only killed what I actually needed. I suffered remorse at times after wounding and having to kill with my bare hands. I was an animal, too. But then, we are all animals.”

Price did not think he has any more natural ability for living outdoors than any other person, merely more of a liking for it. He did believe he developed outdoor skills during seven years in the wilds.

“Your senses develop in the wilderness. I concentrated on a different sense each day – hearing, sight, smell. I’d trail an animal and smell his track. Every human being has that ability to develop these senses . . . we have been dulled by modern society.”

Price talked at length about his campsite. “I have always been a backpacker, never used horses or burros. I packed in four loads on my back. My cave was about a mile up Panther Canyon from the (Gila) river, up above the canyon, where I could see all around. But I was totally concealed from the river. I had a couple of sleeping bags and Army blankets. I packed in tea and sugar and salt . . . some food. But, soon, I had nothing but what I could get myself. My camp was in the zone of pine and piñon and oak and manzanita. I learned to make use of six kinds of plants. I had started a garden when they caught me. That garden was a rock garden . . . I had to clear it. I had three bald eagles near camp. They stayed up by where the Sapillo comes in. But one would fly up and down the river every day, right by camp. And in the cave I slept by the fire and I could lay on my back and see the fire and the stars.

“It was cold that winter, though it was really a mild winter for the Gila. But it was very cold. At first, I was all bundled up. But there I was on a January morning standing at the mouth of my cave in a T-shirt and bare feet.

“I’d cross the river in winter and I’d just take my clothes off and cross in my bare feet. When they came to arrest me, all the officers had jackets on, and I was barefoot already that spring. Their mouths dropped open when they saw how I was dressed in the cold.

“There was a good snow one night, but I just brushed it out of the cave in the morning. That snow was less than the one in Idaho, in the Sawtooth Mountains in June. I was snowed in for two days there. I ran out of wood, and had no fire. I ate elk meat raw, and that warmed me up.

“I felt healthy in the wilderness. I was healthy. I was never sick in the Gila. I’ve been sick several times in here.”

What about Ben Lilly, last of the mountain men, who lived for long periods of time in the Gila, alone with his hounds as a government hunter, killing bear and lion for bounty?

“I’ve heard about him. I’d like to read his book, The Ben Lilly Legend. But Ben Lilly wouldn’t be allowed to live like that today, any more than me.”

And what of society, that cut short your life in the Gila and put you in a cage?

“True individuals are a rare species today. There’s no room for an individual anymore. Not just in the wilderness, but anywhere. Our society won’t allow it.”

Price said he was a religious man. As he described his beliefs, I was reminded of the 19th century New England transcendentalists whom, with the exception of Henry David Thoreau, Price had not read.

“I’ve read Thoreau, but I’m not that educated. I don’t read or write that good. But I believe in the Great Spirit, what most people call God. I see God in the trees, plants, rocks. It’s all connected. Trees, rocks, water – it’s all connected and perfect the way it is, the way it operates. I learned all that in the wilderness.

“But I’ve learned some things in here, too. When I was brought to the cage, people were talking like I was dangerous and didn’t like people. I like being alone, but I don’t dislike people. And in here, I’m starting to re-establish human relationships. I’ve made some good friends in here. And I’m getting to know my parents again. When I first came to this cage I had culture shock. Getting used to people was the hard part. But I don’t think I’d want to go back to being so alone anymore.”

Price seemed to have a particular fondness for the television set.

“I’m missing my afternoon’s TV with this interview. After a year without any TV, I’ve spent a lot of time with it in here. I’ve learned from TV, too. I watch the performers and the people in the news and the politicians and I see who has succeeded. It’s the people who are positive about life. It’s the doers. I learned that was true in the wilderness, and now I see it here, on television.

“I think we are destined by fate. But I believe you can alter your destiny. You go to the wilderness and you don’t know if you can do it. You face a crisis everyday and you get scared. You find out that you can do it, and you become more positive about life. You learn to stay calm. I learned to be self-reliant – I like to be self-reliant – and that makes me believe in myself. I believe in myself.”

Martin Price did not talk only about his time in the Gila and in the Grant County Jail. Some questions took him back to other places where he’d lived in the woods, when he wasn’t always by himself.

“I had that dog in the Sawtooth Mountains. That was company, for a while. And for a while in the woods, this guy camped with me. He didn’t last.

“I lived with a girl, too, and she didn’t last. I burned up three times the wood when she was there. She married fire. She was afraid to leave the fire. Some women like the idea of living in the wilderness, but they change when they get there. They don’t like the reality.

“And then, I lived with Susan and her four kids. Those were the best days, with Susan and those kids. Then she left the wilderness. When she was gone I didn’t want to be with nobody anymore. I felt hurt and hostility. That’s when I came to the Gila to live alone. I’ve gotten over most of the hurt and hostility now, living in the Gila and being in here, too.

“And since she left, I’ve been celibate. I’ve been celibate for two and a-half years. I will end that soon, as soon as I get out of here. But that was the best – when I lived in the wilderness with Susan and those kids. You come into camp at night and a woman and kids are there, and they have the fire ready and you’ve got a deer slung over your shoulder. That was it.

“And a lot of people have told me that they would like to live like I did, if they could. They can’t. I can’t. Not anymore. I’ve learned my lesson. I was born one hundred years too late.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After his release from the Grant County jail, Martin Price went back to Arizona but he didn’t take that ranch job. He kept disappearing into the wilderness, then, following another capture, he would spend time in jail. About ten years after his time spent in the Gila, he disappeared into the mountains for the last time near Prescott, Arizona. Soon, area ranchers began losing cattle, and there was evidence of deer poaching in the region. Sheriff’s deputies went into the mountains to get him. This time the mountain man had no intention of giving up. Martin Price died in those mountains in a shoot-out with the law.

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In the days of the Old West, New Mexico was home, at one time or another, to many of the more colorful desperadoes. The Clantons, William Bonney, Jesse Evans, William “Curley Bill” Brocius, Clay Allison, Doroteo “El Tigre” Sains, Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, John “King of the Rustlers” Kinney, Jim Miller, and Johnny Ringo are a relatively small sample. Because of its remoteness and proximity to the Mexican border, Southern New Mexico attracted a large number of outlaws: violent men who lived from the labor of others, who were quick to kill, and for whom the conventions of settled society meant little. A man who fit the mold of New Mexican outlaw, and has been largely ignored by historians and folklorists, was José Chavez y Chavez.

Born in 1851 in Ceboleta, New Mexico, little is known of his childhood. José discovered that honest labor is often difficult, and he gradually drifted from petty theft to cattle rustling. By the time of the Lincoln County War (1878-79), José was in the company of William Bonney (Billy the Kid) and his following of thieves and rustlers. During the Lincoln County War, José sided with the Tunstall-McSween faction against “The House” as the Dolan faction was popularly known. The formation by McSween of “The Regulators,” a personal army under a thin cloak of legality, made up of between forty and fifty hardcases paid four dollars a day by Tunstall, turned the sniping of the two Lincoln County factions into open warfare. Among the Regulators were José, Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Jim French, John Middleton, and Fred Waite. Special Constable Dick Brewer led them.

The murder of John Tunstall on February 28, 1878, by members of the Dolan faction led, on April 1, to the assassination of Sheriff Brady in Lincoln by Bonney and several others. In later years, Chavez y Chavez claimed the killing of Brady to have been his own work. More deaths followed, and a climax of sorts was reached with the “Big Killing” of July 19. McSween, his wife, and their dozen or so allies had barricaded themselves in McSween’s home (among whom were Tom O’Folliard, Francisco Zamora, Eugenio Salazar, Vincente Romero, and Ignazio Gonzalez). The house was set afire, and in the chaos that followed McSween and five of his allies died. José and four others, among them Billy the Kid, fled the burning structure, all save one making it safely to the shelter of the riverbanks behind the burning house. Harvey Morris died in a hail of gunfire before he had gone three steps into the yard.

In an attempt to stop the chaos, Governor Lew Wallace established in March 1879, a militia of fifty men called the Lincoln County Mounted Rifles (or as their detractors called them, the “Governor’s Heelflies”). Chavez y Chavez enlisted as a private. The purpose of the militia was to curtail rustling and its accompanying violence, and to bring to justice men for whom warrants had been issued. The group was disbanded the following July, having done little to bring stability to the turbulent area.

In the meantime, José had testified at the Dudley Court of Inquiry along with Billy the Kid, in a vain attempt to secure some accountability for the Army’s role in the Big Killing. In May 1880, a prisoner in the Lincoln County jail, “One-Eyed Joe” Murphy, was assassinated, and it was widely held that Chavez y Chavez was responsible. After his friend Billy the Kid was killed by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881, José began to drift, always on the fringe of the law, doing what was necessary to survive. He moved north, and turned up at Las Vegas, New Mexico, where his reputation with a gun reputedly led to a contest with Bob Ford, assassin of Jesse James. José’s skill won a shooting match convincingly, the story goes, and when subsequently challenged to a duel, the humiliated Ford fled.

The story, apocryphal or not, may have led to a job as a lawman, because José became one of three policeman in Old Town, Las Vegas. Unwilling to escape his past, he joined Vincente Silvas’ gang, La Sociedad de Bandidos (Society of Bandits), and Las Gorras Blancas (White Caps), the terrorist arm of El Partido del Pueblo Unido (People’s Party). The White Caps, a Klan-like organization, sought through fence-cutting, arson, and physical assault, to drive settlers from lands that had once been common pasture. The Society of Bandits was a Mafia-like collection of some of the meanest, cruelest men ever assembled in New Mexico. Chavez y Chavez felt right at home.

On October 22, 1892, José and two other Old Town police officers, Eugenio Alarid and Julian Trujillo, lynched one Patricio Maes at the behest of Vincente Silva. In February 1893, Silva, fearing his brother-in-law, Gabriel Sandoval, was privy to the truth about Maes and was about to inform, murdered Gabriel with the assistance of Chavez y Chavez, Alarid, and Trujillo. Silva became concerned over his wife’s constant questions about her brother’s disappearance and decided she had to be killed. He ordered his trusty trio to dig a grave for his wife’s body, and while they dug they decided that Silva was out of control. When Silva appeared with his wife’s body, the trio murdered him and buried the two together.

The following year, a man arrested for the Maes murder implicated José, Eugenio, and Trujillo in the murder of Sandoval. In April 1894, Eugenio and Trujillo were arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Chavez y Chavez, with a $500 price on his head, fled and was arrested May 26, 1894, at Socorro. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death, but was given a new trial by the territorial supreme court. Found guilty again, he was sentenced to be hanged October 29, 1897. He was granted a stay of execution, and on November 20, Governor Otero, over prolonged and vociferous objections from the citizens of Las Vegas, commuted the death sentence to life in prison.

On November 23, 1897, Chavez y Chavez entered the Territorial Penitentiary as inmate #1089, there to remain until January 11, 1909, when, at the age of 57, Governor George Curry pardoned him. The pardon was the result of assistance José had rendered to guards during a riot. He returned to Las Vegas and spent his remaining years among his friends. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, his passing was a peaceful one. A feared pistolero, killer of more men than Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett combined, José died in bed holding the hand of Liberato Baca, who was possibly the only man to face José in a gunfight and live to tell about it. The hombre muy malo was 72.

There is a curious footnote to José’s story. He has been linked by a number of writers to the February 1, 1896 murder of Col. Albert J. Fountain and his son, despite the fact that he was behind bars at the time the murders took place. In his autobiography, George Curry asserted that José was implicated in the murders, and that assertion has been accepted uncritically until recently. The deaths of Albert and Henry Fountain cannot be counted among José’s many killings.

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Although Juan de Onate is credited with bringing the first cattle into New Mexico from old Mexico, it was John Chisum and men of his ilk who made the cattle industry an economic force in the 1860s.

Chisum was a Texas bachelor in his early thirties. However, there were rumors, later proved to be true, that he had a love affair and two daughters by a mulatto slave girl. He had purchased her for $1400 from some emigrants bound for California. Jensie was an excellent housekeeper and cook, only fifteen and beautiful. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Chisum freed all his slaves, including her. He then put her and the girls in a home in Bonham, Texas and left funds for their needs.

He blazed the historic Chisum Trail from the little town of Paris, Texas, where his cattle herd was first begun, across the desert of Texas then north to the Pecos Valley in southeastern New Mexico. Tales have varied about how many cattle were in the drive in 1867 when he took them to Fort Sumner. Some say 600, some say 900. Author Georgia B. Redfield in an article in The Cattleman about 1942, describes the trip:

“Although it was early spring, it was as hot as any mid-summer day of the year 1867 when nine hundred head of gaunt beef cattle staggered over an unbroken trail, on the last lap of a three-day waterless drive…’They won’t ever make it to Sumner,’ said one of the cowboys…’We’ll make it,’ replied the dauntless Chisum with a grim tightening of the tired lines of his mouth and jaw, which in every crisis of his life characterized his refusal to accept defeat.”

The campground and cattle rest established near the Rio Hondo and Rio Pecos, now the site of Roswell, provided much needed water.

Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving were also cattlemen driving cattle to Fort Sumner. When Loving succumbed to a wound from a bow and arrow in 1868, Chisum and Goodnight formed a partnership. In the next five years Chisum earned enough capital to move permanently to New Mexico.

He purchased South Spring Ranch, with its 40 acres, the South Spring and a large adobe house, three miles south of Roswell. He tore down the old adobe and built an adobe/frame house with four rooms on each side of an open hallway. Underneath the open hall there was an acequia. There were verandas on both the front and back of the house so he could sit in the shade at any hour of the day. He built a separate room at the back of the house for his cowpunchers to hold their dances so “they don’t beat up my Axminster carpets with their boots.”

Described as a man born to the land and handsome, he was average height but strong and with a sunburned and weatherbeaten complexion. His hair was thick and brown, his eyes a blue gray, and he wore a mustache. He was known to be fair in his dealings with others, one who paid his debts and wasn’t involved in any violence.

The first brand he used on his cattle was “the long rail,” a straight horizontal line across the whole side of a cow. However, it was easily changed to other brands so he used a large “u” on the shoulder of the cows. But his “jingle bob” brand was the most famous in the west. It was a slit on the cow’s ear with one part of it standing upright and two-thirds of it bobbing. The Cattle King was said to have remarked, “Them derned ears won’t jingle but they sure will bob.”

He grazed 80,000 head of cattle on a one-hundred mile stretch of public domain. As homesteaders began to arrive in Roswell to start small cattle operations using the public domain for grazing, these cattle became mixed in with the Chisum herds. This caused extra work at round-up time as well as opened the door for cattle rustling. Chisum was possessive of his turf, and there were hostilities.

This conflict was one of the elements contributing to the Lincoln County Wars. John Chisum preferred to make his contacts directly for the purchase of beef for Fort Stanton rather than go through Lawrence G. Murphy, beef subcontractor for a Santa Fe government contractor. Murphy had virtually held a monopoly until 1877 when Chisum backed new residents Alexander A. McSween and John Tunstall. The three of them opened the county’s first official bank.

McSween’s business partner Tunstall was killed in a brutal ambush by a sheriff’s posse. That was followed shortly by the killing of two of the men accused of killing Tunstall. A state of near anarchy now existed in the huge county of Lincoln. The battles continued until 1881. Chisum was never directly involved in them although he gave sanctuary and material support at his South Springs Ranch.

Shortly thereafter Chisum came down with small pox. His men put him in a tent in the camp south of the Pecos, assigning men to nurse him day and night. A black cowboy, Frank Chisum, his friend, and almost considered a son, rode to Fort Stanton to bring him medical help. Frank stayed with Chisum until he was well, then came down with the disease himself but also survived.

In 1883 a tumor began to grow on Chisum’s neck, causing him pain. He tried to remain optimistic but knew his father and grandfather had died from cancer. Finally in 1884 he decided to go to Kansas City for treatment but took only a driver with him. On July 24 surgeons removed the tumor. When he was told the operation was a success he started for home. In Las Vegas, New Mexico, he fell ill and was advised to go to Eureka Springs, Arkansas to a health spa for further care. He lived in a hotel there for several months. However, the tumor returned even larger. His brother James came to stay with him in December and on December 22, 1884 Chisum died. He was buried on Christmas Day at the family plot in Paris, Texas.

Thus ends the career of one of the great men of the West. One hundred and fifteen years following his death, on December 15, 1999, the Chisum Trail was again in the limelight with the Last Great Cattle Drive of the Millennium moving as many as 500 head of cattle from Roswell to Lincoln.

And the legend lives on through a statue of him on horseback in Roswell’s Pioneer Plaza.

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Victorio’s Mimbres Apaches were concentrated family units which had once populated the Mimbres and Gila Rivers, and Mogollon Mountains. Through attrition from contact with encroaching Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers, their numbers dwindled, and in 1870 the Mimbres Apaches were given a small reservation, Ojo Caliente or Warm Springs, northwest of present Truth or Consequences.

Victorio, born sometime in the 1820s conflicts, grew up in an era of escalating conflicts between Apaches, Mexicans, and American settlers. That he did not declare war on the whites until 1879 is proof of his leadership and integrity. Victorio’s efforts as leader of his people were conciliatory until the end. He co-operated with U.S. agents and the military, but he did not associate with them.

Thrapp says, in Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches, “Even in the disputes and differences around Ojo Caliente, Victorio made it a practice to remain beyond reach until the way was safe. He might remain aloof on a mountaintop until he was very sure. Never was Victorio a lounger around the agency or military posts. He remained apart, ever vigilant, wary, even when nominally at peace. He could not be surprised . . . No white man knew him well, although many made contact with him frequently.”

Much of what we know about Victorio is from Thrapp’s studies of military records. Officers who fought in Victorio’s War averred that he “displayed great military genius.” Major Andrew Jackson McGonnigle (an obscure soldier to be sure, but one who fought in the Civil War, and subsequently with both Sioux and Apache) “considered Victorio the greatest Indian general who ever appeared on the American continent.”

Victorio was an able general, and was also greatly loved by his own people. Early in 1880 he was wounded in the leg during a fight which took place on the east side of the Black Range, not far from Ojo Caliente. The party of scouts, led by H.K. Parker, cut down the Apaches in a deadly crossfire. Parker called to the women to come out of the Apache camp, so as not to be hurt. The women replied that they would stay with Victorio because if he died, “they would eat him, so that no white man should see his body.”

Thrapp says, “Surely he held great devotion from his followers.”

Victorio’s life is one to be pondered from the point of view of the culture which he personified. His decision to go to war came after many years of astute leadership in the face of white encroachment and racism. It came after the news that their Warm Springs Reservation would be taken from them. Some say what finally goaded him to war was a warrant for his arrest sworn out in Grant County, New Mexico. That warrant would have been issued in Silver City.

His declaration of war would destroy what was left of the Mimbres Apaches. The war lasted one year, threw the Southwest into chaos and alarm, and ended on a rocky hillside in Mexico in the fall of 1880. Victorio, caught by Mexican militia, out of ammunition, died in battle. A Tarahumara Indian claimed to have fired the killing bullet. Victorio’s people, who survived in captivity in Mexico, claimed Victorio took his own life, with a knife in the gut.

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On May 17, 1885, Mangus (son of Mangus Colorado), Chihuahua, Nachite, old Nana, the shaman Geronimo, and their followers fled the San Carlos reservation in Arizona in an attempt to regain the freedom they had known before the reservation system was instituted by the United States government. The restrictions of reservation life were difficult for these semi-nomads, and they longed for the openness of the land the Spaniards had called Apacheria. Although the Chiracahuas could not have foreseen it, this was to be their last attempt to recapture the old ways that many of their cousins had already forsaken.

The “renegades,” or “hostiles,” as they were called, consisted of thirty-five men, eight boys, and one hundred and one women and children. They would occupy the attention of five thousand troops, five hundred Indian auxiliaries, and an unknown number of civilians. In an area roughly the size of Illinois and comprising some of the roughest desert and mountain terrain in North America, they maintained themselves for sixteen months. In that time they killed seventy-five citizens of the United States, twelve White Mountain Apaches, two commissioned officers and eight soldiers of the regular Army, and an unknown number of Mexicans. The Apaches lost six men, two boys, two women and one child.

Following the breakout, some of the Apaches moved toward the mountains to the east, striking settlers and miners as they found them. General Crook arrived at Fort Bayard, New Mexico to establish a command post, and by the first of June the hostile bands had struck near Alma, Silver City, Camp Vincent, and Grafton, killing eighteen civilians. Believing that the Indians would move south through the slot between the Chiracahua Mountains and the Peloncillos and move through the San Simon Valley to Skeleton Canyon or through the San Bernadino Valley to Guadalupe Canyon, Crook ordered troops to guard all water holes between the railroad and the Mexican border.

In Skeleton Canyon, called Canon Bonita by the Mexicans, Chihuahua’s band surprised eight troopers of Troop D, Fourth Cavalry, killed three men, burned the wagons and supplies, and drove off forty horses and mules. The Apache tornado moved south. They hid in the canyons and fought only when it pleased them. When they camped and were in fear of attack, they chose a place where surprise was impossible and where there was an easy line of escape. Skeleton Canyon was but one of many ideal canyons on the way to Mexico. By the middle of June, the fugitives had slipped past the Army’s patrols and were in the Sierra Madre of Sonora, Mexico.

Crook sent two columns into Mexico, one in June and the other in July. The former was commanded by Capt. Emmet Crawford, the latter by Capt. Wirt Davis. Crawford’s command consisted of one troop of cavalry (normally forty men) and ninety-two Apache scouts; Davis’ command consisted of one troop of cavalry and one hundred Apache scouts. Through the summer and into the fall the columns pursued the Apaches, undergoing terrible hardships. Geronimo led them into Chihuahua, turned north, and crossed the border into the United States. By the end of September, hostile raiding parties were again crossing the line at Guadalupe Canyon and moving north, raiding, killing, and stealing horses. Arizona and New Mexico were once again in turmoil.

In November, a band of nine hostiles led by a younger brother of Chihuahua named Josanie (some called him Ulzana), crossed the border and rode for the Florida Mountains, killing as they moved northward. They moved into the mountains near Hillsboro and continued their depredations, killing civilians and Indians alike, and stealing horses virtually at will. By the end of December, Josanie and his band had killed thirty-eight people, stolen over two hundred horses and mules, and escaped back into Mexico with the loss of but one man.

Crook, under increased criticism from Washington, launched a second expedition into Mexico, again led by Crawford and Wirt Davis. On January 9, 1886, Crawford located the Chiricahuas, and the next morning his scouts attacked, taking the hostiles’ herd and camp equipment. The Chiracahuas, badly demoralized, agreed to negotiations for surrender. In a tragically confused incident, Mexican troops arrived, and mistaking the Apache scouts for hostiles, opened fire and mortally wounded Capt. Crawford. After the departure of the Mexicans, Lt. Maus conferred with the hostiles, who agreed to meet with General Crook and discuss surrender. Geronimo named as the meeting place the Canyon de los Embudos (Canyon of the Funnels), about twenty miles south of the American border and near the Sonora/Chihuahua border.

The conference was held March 25-27, 1886, and Crook told Geronimo that unless he surrendered he would be hunted down and killed, even if it took fifty years. On March 27, Geronimo agreed to surrender on the condition that he and his followers would be returned to the reservation after two years’ exile. Crook agreed, believing that he had secured the most favorable terms possible. President Cleveland and General Sheridan were infuriated, and informed Crook that the conditions were unconditional surrender, only sparing the Indians’ lives in the bargain. The dispute between Crook’s position and the position taken by Cleveland and Sheridan became moot, however, because on March 29, Geronimo, Nachite, and thirty-nine others bolted the encampment and fled for Mexico.

In a series of telegrams from Ft. Bowie to Washington, D.C., Crook defended his actions, his officers and men, and his Apache scouts against Sheridan’s direct and implied criticisms. Finally, on April 1, he sent a telegram to Sheridan asking to be relieved of command of the Department of Arizona. Sheridan, who had never really been convinced of Crook’s unorthodox approach to fighting Apaches, accepted Crook’s request and, effective April 28, 1886, appointed Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles to take command of the Department.

Miles stationed infantry to guard passes and waterholes, established heliostat signal points on mountain peaks, and dismissed the Apache scouts. A unit was organized of one company of infantry and thirty-five cavalymen under Lt. H. W. Lawton, Fourth Cavalry, and Leonard Wood, an assistant surgeon. Twenty Indian scouts under Tom Horn, and a pack train of one hundred mules and thirty packers completed the command. In less than a week in the mountains, the horses were rendered useless and the cavalry became infantry. From April, when they entered Mexico, until August, the expedition marched and scouted but accomplished little.

In mid-July, General Miles, operating on a rumor that the hostiles were near Fronteras, Sonora, and talking surrender, dispatched Lt. Charles Gatewood from Fort Bowie with orders to seek out Geronimo. Gatewood crossed into Mexico from Cloverdale, New Mexico, and made contact with Lawton and Wood by early August. They proceeded north, and by August 23 Gatewood and Lawton’s scouts were on the hostiles’ trail and closing.

The following day Gatewood met the hostiles on the bank of the Bavispe River. They were told to surrender and that they would be sent to Florida with their families to await the pleasure of the President of the United States regarding their final fate. Discussion continued all that day, and Geronimo was visibly shaken when informed that all his friends and relatives had already been taken to Florida. The following day, heeding Gatewood’s advice, Geronimo said he would go to the border and surrender to General Miles.

The group came through Guadalupe Canyon to the San Bernadino Valley and moved north to a glade where Skeleton Canyon met its south fork, arriving there at the end of August. General Miles did not arrive at the surrender site until September 3, where he repeated to Geronimo, Nachite, and the others the terms of surrender given by Lt. Gatewood. The terms accepted, Miles returned to Fort Bowie the next day with Geronimo, Nachite, and several others. There had been nineteen men and twenty-eight women and children. Six of the Apaches, three men and three women, refused to accept the surrender and fled back to Mexico, where death at the hands of the Mexican border guards awaited them.

On the morning of September 8, 1886, General Miles sent the Apaches east on a train under heavy guard. Thus they began their years of captivity as prisoners in a strange land, and with their departure the Indian Wars of the Southwest came to an end.

* * * * *

On Route 80 south of Rodeo, New Mexico, near Apache, Arizona, stands a marker commemorating Geronimo’s surrender. A short distance south of the marker is a road which leads east and then south/southeast to the actual surrender site. This is four wheel drive vehicle country, and heavy rains can render the road virtually impassible in spots. Once at the site, the canyon road leads east and ends about two miles inside New Mexico. From there, travel is by foot following either the canyon floor (the creek bed) or a higher narrow trail. For one who wishes to understand the elusiveness of the Apaches and the difficulties in the Army’s attempts to capture them, a day spent hiking Skeleton Canyon will be an invaluable lesson.

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Oldtimer Bob Sundown is a dropout in the true sense of the word. For 40 years he has voyaged about 20 miles a day along the West’s gritty highway shoulders in a donkey-drawn sheep wagon he and some kids built from discarded materials. “Thousands of friends,” a few live-in chickens and his knowledge of edible plants form his sometimes tenuous security net. Although he intentionally draws no pension nor social security, he claims he’s the richest man on Earth because he knows how to “use his mind.”

The seventy-something, slow-and-steady traveler espouses hard-won creeds borne of stark life experience. It’s apparent this slight, one-eyed, leathery-faced man in dusty clothes has conquered concepts cerebral seekers grapple with perpetually. As his story unfolds, he untangles fear, worry, surrender, attention to the moment, freedom and peace of mind sagaciously in the rough, unfeigned tongue of cowboy slang.

Sundown bears his Nez Perce Sioux mother’s name. He drove his Caucasian father off at age ten with a pitchfork after the man “whupped” his mother and sisters one too many times.

He left home at age eleven to begin a lifetime of labor that continues to this day, although a heart attack last year curtailed his fence building and “cowboying” activities. He still teaches survival skills to children, announces for children’s rodeos and ranch-sits for friends – mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. He says when he gets too old to work, he will lay down and die.

He eats plants, jackrabbits, chickens and eggs. His burros, he says, “always have hay.” Sometimes, if he has money left over after his burros are fed, he treks to town and treats himself to some store-bought food. “I’m not afraid to go hungry,” he says. “It never killed me yet.”

The former Marine, prospector, sheepherder and owner of two ranches used to travel the highways incessantly in trucks loaded with show horses and cattle. But four decades ago, after his wife was killed in an automobile accident, he decided the fast lane was not his friend. He relinquished his worldly goods and properties to his children.

He motions to the range beyond the highway. “I wanted to prove that a person can survive if they know what to do. Do you know there are 190 different plants you can eat around here? Pretty soon people better learn to be self sufficient.”

He expresses concern for an exploited world and its victimized children, blaming corruption in government, the church, the media and other institutions. But the corruption, he says, is just the end result of the root problem: the unbridled human ego.

Humans will be free when they learn to surrender their fear-based need to control, says the cowboy, intimating that the mind can expand to a clear perspective when aired in nature’s open spaces.

“Lots of people are afraid to do the way I do; they say they can’t. I say, How do you know? Have you ever tried?’”

But the nudge is designed to click light bulbs rather than change lifestyles. Acknowledging his way would be inappropriate for most, he believes humans from all walks of life face tough roads, and the key to peace is in learning to handle the fear that accompanies struggle.

“People are worrying about, ‘what am I going to do tomorrow?’ Let a person who has real heavy duty fears of life just go someplace away from every place else and just give up on everything and relax and start to think – use their mind. Then they figure, ‘Hey! By golly! I made it through today!’ They realize, ‘Hey, I could have done this but I was afraid.’ Then they figure again, ‘What was I afraid of?’”

“Everybody can be free; it doesn’t matter what kind of element they’re in. They just sometimes get too afraid to turn loose. If they just take another step – it’s like a newborn learning to walk – they’re afraid but then they take it and everything’s all right.”

“I don’t give a hoot where you’re at or who you are. If you can use this brain and these eyes and legs, you can always make a buck or two. In 40 years, I’ve never worried about tomorrow because tomorrow is always a new adventure.”

Despite losing an eye and getting his legs pummeled with machine gun lead in the Korean war, Sundown has persevered. “They told me I’d never walk again. That’s just a big bunch of stupid words,” he says, nodding downward. “I don’t even wear braces anymore.”

An avid reader and gatherer of information, he lived through his recent heart attack without medical assistance by preparing beforehand for the unexpected. “I used my mind, what was give to me. The mind is the most powerful thing on Earth, if people learn how to use it.”

Sundown was heading west toward Flagstaff, Ariz. to teach a survival workshop and announce for a children’s rodeo. Then it was on to Wyoming and Idaho, where he says he’s going to die because “that there’s near where I was born.” Is he afraid to reach the end of the road? “Fear of death is one of the dumbest ideas they put into people’s minds.”

When will he arrive in Idaho? “Whenever I get there, kiddo.”

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