NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/travel/17119

Text File | 1993-01-03 | 48.5 KB | 1,070 lines

Newsgroups: rec.travel
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!cbnewsk!cbnewsj!leeper
From: [e-mail] (mark.r.leeper)
Subject: Arizona and New Mexico (part 1 of 4)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 16:02:44 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Lines: 1060








                             Southwest U.S.
                     A travelogue by Mark R. Leeper
                     Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper


Index of days:
October 10, 1992: Albuquerque, Socorro
October 11, 1992: VLA, White Sands National Monument
October 12, 1992: International Space Hall of Fame, Roswell Museum and
                  Art Center, Carlsbad Caverns
October 13, 1992: Carlsbad Caverns, El Paso
October 14, 1992: Fort Bowie, Chiricahua National Monument
October 15, 1992: Tombstone, Bisbee, Queen Copper Mine
October 16, 1992: Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Saguaro National
                  Monument
October 17, 1992: Casa Grande National Monument, Phoenix, Heard Museum
October 18, 1992: Champlin Fighter Museum, Arizona Museum of Science and
                  Technology, Pueblo Grande
October 19, 1992: Prescott Bead Museum, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon
October 20, 1992: Oak Creek Canyon, Sedona, Tuzigoot, Montezuma Castle &
                  Well
October 21, 1992: Little Colorado River Gorge, Grand Canyon, Wupatki
October 22, 1992: Navajo National Monument, Monument Valley
October 23, 1992: Lowell Observatory, Sunset Crater, Wupatki National
                  Monument, Walnut Canyon National Monument
October 24, 1992: Winslow Meteor Crater, Petrified Forest, Hubbell
                  Trading Post
October 25, 1992: Zuni Pueblo, El Morro, Mal Pais Lava Beds
October 26, 1992: Acoma Pueblo, Petroglyph National Monument, Taos
October 27, 1992: Enchanted Circle, Cimarron, Rio Grande Gorge, Kit
                  Carson Museum
October 28, 1992: Bandelier National Monument, Los Alamos
October 29, 1992: Santa Fe, Turquoise Trail
October 30, 1992: New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque
October 31, 1992: Albuquerque Museum, National Atomic Museum
November 1, 1992: return


     October 10, 1992:  Well, here I am starting another trip log.  I
just barely finished the last one about nine days ago.  That was better
than two weeks after I finished a six-day trip.  Of course, I wrote
something like 20,000 words.  That's something like a 3300-word essay
about each day.  Well, my brother and my father are photographers.  I am
just not into photography that much.  Taking a lot of pictures on a trip
is a distraction.  So I decided to write trip logs instead.  That gave
me something to do in the evenings on trips (which were usually empty)
rather than during the days (which are usually full).  Of course, as the
years have gone by, I have started writing more and more.














Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 2



     I did not sleep very well last night.  In fact, I have been awake
since 3 AM.  I spent the time cleaning up the mess I had made packing.
At about 7:35 AM our friends picked us up and took us to the airport
(thanks, Jo and Dale!).  The gate is something like 77 degrees
Fahrenheit by my thermometer.  People are fanning themselves with
tickets or fans.

     Our first leg of the trip was uneventful.  The breakfast was tiny:
a small pastry and a few cubes of cantaloupe.  I tried to sleep a
little, but the kid behind me was at war with the back of my seat.  In
front of me there were two rows of children from the family everybody
else on the block fears.  Reminiscent of the current Teentalk Barbie
saying "Math class is hard," one of the kids had a T-shirt that says "I
like school ... NOT."  The last word is in eight-inch pink letters.

     We have a short layover in our flight in the St. Louis airport.
The nickname of St. Louis is the "Gateway to the West."  That is more or
less how we intend to use it.  Actually, it looks pretty Eastern to me.
There was one guy that looked a little Western in a straw hat.  Someone
else had fancy boots.  Then Evelyn is wearing a string tie, but in her
case it is pure affectation.  She is a dude.

     I am trying to get in a Western mood by reading Pronzini and
Greenberg's BEST OF THE WEST, an anthology of short stories that were
made into Western films.  For years I'd looked for John Cunningham's
"Tin Star," which was the basis of HIGH NOON.  The other big find was
Dorothy Johnson's "Man Who Shot Liberty Valence."  I read both stories
several years ago when we got the book, but it seemed a good choice for
this trip.

     Waiting in the airport we talked to a black woman and her husband
who were retired and now every two weeks fly someplace in the United
States.  Sounds pretty good to me.  She also flew abroad but says she
wouldn't go back to Paris and wouldn't go back to Rome.  I asked her if
she'd been to Asia.  "No desire to go there."  Actually, she says she
does not like the fourteen-hour flights any more, so will be traveling
only domestically.  But as she puts it, "The Brinks doesn't follow the
hearse" ... so you better spend it while you're alive.  We sat next to
her for the best part of an hour and probably wouldn't have talked to
her if she hadn't taken the first step.  That would have been a pity,
since she was likable and affable.  Somehow I think we East-Coasters
have a hard time talking to strangers.  Oh, she also didn't like
Albuquerque.

     Another short leg by plane and we could see Albuquerque.  I spent
the time reading the many guidebooks, reading some film reviews I
brought off the Net, reading "The Tin Star."  It was fairly different
from HIGH NOON.  There was much less of the abandonment theme.  The main
character was more like Lon Chaney in the film--an old widower with
crippled hands.  His name was Doade.












Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 3



     My first impression of Albuquerque from the air was sort of like an
oasis in the middle of an immense flat valley.  The valley looked brown
and desolate, stretching to hills at a great distance.

     When things get ugly enough sometimes they come around the other
end and are beautiful.  There is something beautiful about a totally
ugly dog.  The land in the Great Southwest is like that.  It is parched
and withered and wind-blown.  It is a land that has been so punished by
the relentless sun and the rarity of water, it has come around to being
lovely again.  Go figure.

     Well, we landed in Albuquerque and went to the Hertz counter to
pick up our car.  Now we had asked in advance to have a cassette player
in the car.  We've brought Tony Hillerman novels on cassette and Western
film music (among other things).  Evelyn asked if our car would have a
cassette player.  Not at the price we were paying.  We will have to get
a larger car at $5 more a day.  At $23 days, that's $115.  No way.  If
need be we will stop at an electronics store and get a battery-powered
job and a bunch of batteries.  That will cost a lot less and when the
trip is over we'd still have the battery-powered job and perhaps some of
the batteries.

     Evelyn saw a sign that said, "If you are going to the El Paso/Las
Cruces area, ask us for special information."  Evelyn asked for the
special information.  The woman did not seem happy.  The special
information must be very special indeed if they are unhappy to give it
out.  The special information is that Hertz rents mostly Fords.  El Paso
is a border town.  Lots of cars get stolen.  Mostly Fords.  The local
car thieves specialize in Fords.  Apparently they heard someplace that
at Ford Quality is Job 1.  Or perhaps Ford just has cheesy security
systems.  Anyway, since we were going to El Paso, they had to give us a
different car.  It turned out to be a Mazda.  Nice car.  It has a
cassette player and ten miles on the odometer.  Thanks, Ford Motor
Company.

     So we hit the road.  Our first city was to be Socorro.  (We are
saving Albuquerque for the end since there is currently a hot air
balloon festival.  No way could we get a room.)

     So we hit the road and promptly fell in love with the area.  From
the road it is just beautiful.  We are nearly a mile above sea level and
that makes the air clear.  You see flat terrain and mountains in the
distance.  The near mountains are brown; the distant ones are a pastel
blue.  More distant mountains have faded to a sky blue.  You see
brightly colored weeds at the side of the road--some almost orange or
rust in color.  Other wildflowers are lavender.  The roads are wide and
straight, and speed limits are 65 miles per hour.

     In 1598 Spaniards from Mexico came north to settle.  They had to
cross an expanse of ninety miles of waterless desert.  The Indians of
southern New Mexico were astounded to see the white men come from the











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 4



desert.  They gave the men food and drink.  The Spanish named the area
Socorro--meaning "help."  It wasn't long before it was the Soanish
running the area they called Nuevo Mexico.  Pueblo Indians were
converted to Catholicism.  Their religious leaders were often hanged.
Their holy places were destroyed.  They were told their religion was
devil worship.  When the Pueblo Indians had enough, they decided to
revolt.  Each Pueblo tribe was given a string with knots.  Each tribe
untied a knot a day.  When there were no more knots to untie it was the
day to attack the Spanish.  The Spanish were thrown out.  That was in
1680 and known as the Pueblo Revolt.  For 135 years southern New Mexico
remained under Pueblo Indian control.  It was "re-settled" in 1815 by
the United States.

     Okay, gang.  Who can identify the following jungle?
          Elfego was wise,
          And Elfego was strong,
          Elfego Baca, who made right from wrong.
          And the legend was told,
          Like el gato the cat,
          Nine lives had Elfego Baca.
Give up?  Walt Disney's television program used to be free-form--
whatever he wanted to put on he would.  He tried shows (that might have
been essentially television pilots) with heroes like Texas John
Slaughter (Tom Tryon), Francis Marion--The Swamp Fox (Leslie Nielson),
and Dr. Syn (Patrick McGoohan).  The one that really did spawn a series
was Zorro, Guy Williams I think.  At least Williams played in the
series.  I don't remember seeing the pilot but a Walt Disney preview
show referred to it, saying it would be a series.  Nearly forgotten is
Elfego Baca (Robert Loggia).

     Elfego was plenty real enough and is something of a hero in Socorro
County.  I haven't found the full legend, but he supposedly single-
handedly held off eighty Texas cowboys.  Other people paint him in less
than glowing terms.

     We got to Socorro and checked into our motel, then rushed out to
take a walking tour of Socorro.  It is mentioned in some of the books.
The tour is only of low-grade interest.  From the square you can get a
free brochure that describes where to go, also you can get a description
in a local newspaperette that is given out free at motels and
restaurants.

     The problem is that the buildings range from lukewarm to cool
interest value.  There are about three or four left over from Wooly West
days.  Many are early 20th Century buildings representing things like
the only two-story buildings in town.  We did hit the Dana Bookstore,
owned by a Gladys Dana, a sweet woman to whom we talked for quite a
while.  We showed her a reference to her bookstore in a travel guide she
had not known about.  She said we'd made her day.  We also bought a
*very* comprehensive travel guide of New Mexico from her, by Chilton et
al.  Pricey, but very complete.  It may be the best travel guide I have











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 5



ever seen for any place.  The Mexican (they call it Spanish here)
restaurant we wanted was closed.  She reluctantly told us about El
Sombrero.  I am not sure why she was reluctant.  She said the food was
good, however.

     We stopped at a grocery to pick up snacks for the car.  (A Mazda
gets hungry.) Vending machines are fairly cheap at the grocery: thirty-
five cents for cans of Coke and Pepsi, twenty-five cents for the store's
own brand.

     That done, we went to El Sombrero for dinner and liked it.  The
night was clear and there was a big full moon.  We couldn't have ordered
things better.  Back at the room it was reading and writing with THE
PRINCESS BRIDE on HBO in the background.

     October 11, 1992:  We were up early and checked out of the hotel by
6:30 AM.  Breakfast at a little cafe.  I had Huevos Rancheros; Evelyn
tried the biscuits and gravy, which she knew I was fond of and wanted to
try.  First stop today was at the VLA (Very Large Array), currently the
most powerful radio telescope in the world.  It is actually twenty-seven
identical dish antennas and a Y-shaped railtrack system to allow moving
them around.  Moving them together or spreading them out has the effect
of zooming in or getting a wide-angle view.  Each of the disk assemblies
weighs 235 tons with the dish alone weighing 100 tons and being some 82
feet in diameter.  Early in the film 2010 they give you a close-up look
at one of the telescopes.  The telescope is so powerful they claim it is
fail-safe.  Aim it anywhere and you will learn a fair amount that was
previously unknown.  The tour is about ninety minutes and is self-
guided.  It starts with a show of computer graphics from NASA about
Voyager's visit to Neptune.  Almost no words but pleasant to watch.  The
VLA was used for telemetry in conjunction with the mission.  Then there
is a much more informative slide show for twenty-five minutes or so.
Then there are more exhibits inside and a walking tour that takes you
within twenty feet of one of the big telescopes.  The last thing you see
is a transporter.  It is a big tractor device that can go ten miles per
hour empty, five carrying a radio telescope.

     After the VLA it was back out on the roads.  Because we are high up
(about 7000 feet at the VLA), it is tough to guess distances.  The air
is less dense and that makes it much clearer.  You can look at a point
on the road and guess it to be fairly close, then drive to it and find
out it was two miles.  But the roads are a real pleasure to drive.  They
are scenic and have few cars.  At one point I tried to convince Evelyn
that Thailand would be a good place to retire.  Slow pace, interesting
culture, beautiful scenery, low prices, good food, mostly spicy.  I
think she was bothered by the fact it is so distant.  But to some extent
all those things are true of the Southwest.  And Evelyn seems much more
amenable to opening the discussion about this territory.  We both like
it a lot.

     Our next stop was at the Three Rivers Petroglyphs.  This just goes











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 6



to show you that even defacing nature can get an air of respectability
with time.  Some rather short hills at three rivers give a commanding
view of the whole surrounding valley.  That was just how the Mogollon
Indians used the hills.  Well, looking at an empty valley for hours on
end waiting for something to happen--and it never does--is a boring
occupation, and not surprisingly these sentinels got bored and into
mischief.  They started scratching figures into the stones.  Abstract
designs, lizards, sheep, human figures: all were grist.  The vandalizing
became a sort of art form between 1000 and 1350 A.D., not unlike
grafitti is in Manhattan.

     These glyphs were later rediscovered and turned into a sort of park
where, with little management or supervision, you can explore the hills.
That lack of supervision is, of course, a problem.  Some neo-Mogollons
have been scratching their own patterns.  Most of them are easy to
recognize.  The originals have much better style and use lines a third
of an inch wide.  Just scratching with a stone gives much narrower
lines.

     From there it was back on the road to Alamogordo.  The road passes
lava rock and yucca plants (they look like the green of a pineapple but
the leaves are bigger and straighter).  In 1897 a local rancher, Charles
Eddy, had a group of Eastern investors come out on a camping expedition.
They rode in coaches but ate from chuckwagons and slept on the ground.
But the point was to show them cattle, timber, and gold.  Within weeks
they had financed him to build the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad.
He purchased the Alamo Ranch and made it a junction for the railroad.
"Alamo" means cottonwood.  He renamed the area Big Cottonwood--
Alamogordo.

     It was a big change for the area, but the area later ushered in a
big change to the world.  It was July 16, 1945, when the Manhattan
Project took a remote section of the Alamogordo desert and set off the
first nuclear bomb.

     From the beginning of World War II the local Holloman Air Force
Base was testing experimental weapons and in particular missiles--not an
activity popular with the local farmers.  But it was a sacrifice they
made for the war.  In 1948, over the protests of Alamogordo, Las Cruces,
and El Paso, the proving grounds were expanded.  The name became the
White Sands Proving Grounds.

     Speaking of white sands, after checking into a motel, we headed out
for White Sands National Monument.

     Back in the Pre-Cambrian to Mezozoic Ages continental plates
collided hereabouts.  It was a slow but violent collision.  The edges
crumpled, forcing huge sections upward.  Where gaps formed in the
structure, magma bled into the gaps and hardened.  But some gaps did not
fill with magma, leaving huge hollow spaces supporting incredibly huge
masses of stone.  So the pressures forced the land up all throughout











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 7



this area but could not uniformly support it.  A section cracked away
and fell, causing a natural basin.  Rains dissolved minerals,
particularly gypsum, and washed them into the basin.  Hot, dry winds
then evaporated the water and left gypsum deposits in the basin.  The
dry winds broke up the residue.  What was left was a big bowl of gypsum
dust.  It was not a hospitable environment for plants.  Some, like the
yucca, did survive.  Some get blown out of the gypsum and die.  Some
have the gypsum blown out from under them and are left like towers
standing on tall roots.

     White Sands National Monument is nothing but a 224-square-mile
sandbox with white sand.  People love to come and watch the dunes, climb
sand hills, picnic, etc.  Evelyn thought the area looks totally alien.
I think the hills of white only look like snow.  The white sand is
surprisingly cool to the touch in the hot sun and we took advantage by
climbing dunes barefoot.  It was not the most fascinating of attractions
to me, but it was worth seeing.  We left long enough to have dinner,
then returned to see the sunset and the full moon rising (within about
five minutes of each other).  I was somewhat reluctant to leave the car
and miss the first of the Presidential debates.  However, after
returning to our room, C-SPAN was rebroadcasting the debate and I could
see what I had missed hearing.  Evelyn conked out early but I caught up
on my log.

     October 12, 1992:  This is the day wrongly celebrated as the 500th
Anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World.  Wrong!  That will
be in nine days.  Columbus landed on October 12, 1492, in the Julian
calendar which put too many leap years into the calendar.  In the late
1500's (many places) they switched to the Gregorian calendar.  That
meant dropping eleven days.  So isn't the anniversary eleven days later?
No.  Two of the eleven days were for extra leap year days after 1492, I
guess.  The proper date is October 21.

     Not seeing much that looked better, we had breakfast at Denny's.
Then we headed to the Space Hall of Fame.  It turned out to be on Route
2001--how cute!  We got there at 8 AM, an hour before it opened.  They
have a garden outside to walk around with missiles of various sizes.
They have a Nike Ajax.  I am not great with my missiles, but I was able
to tell Evelyn it was either a Nike Ajax or a Nike Hercules.  I do get
the two confused, but I knew it was one.  Somehow the Nike Ajax is
shorter than you expect when you see it close up.  They had a fat
missile called a Little Joe.  I'd never heard of it before.  Apparently
it was just used in doing space program tests.  They have a Mercury
capsule shell you can sit inside to get a feel for the scale.  They had
the actual rocket sled that Stapp rode in 1954 and was for a short time
the fastest man alive without ever leaving the ground.  He also was so
beat up by what were effectively winds of over 200 miles per hour that
his eyes were blackened and his face badly bruised by the whole affair.
There is also the grave of the first guy America ever sent into space,
at least the first guy who walked on two legs.  This, of course, was
Ham, the chimpanzee.  More on Ham later.  (Actually, we did not see the











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 8



grave right away.  It was the last thing we saw when we left.)  After
walking through the garden we wrote in our logs until the museum opened.

     The museum is four stories.  We went up to the top.  There were
models of many spacecraft, American and Soviet.  A woman, apparently a
cleaning woman, saw us there and started telling us about the space
program, starting with Ham since there was a rather poor model of Ham in
the bindings.  Apparently the woman had several members of her family
involved with the space program and had a lot of stories to tell,
starting with chimps Ham and Enos, the first two American astronauts.
Ham loved humans; Enos hated them.  Ham was very cooperative; Enos
really had to be forced to cooperate.  Ham came back friendly and happy;
Enos hated humans all the more for the torture they'd put him through.
Ham was just overjoyed to see familiar humans again.  Apparently Ham
rebelled only once.  After his flight they wanted to let reporters
photograph Ham in his capsule so they tried to strap him in again.  No
way!  I imagine Ham thinking, "What?!  Are you out of your minds?  I let
you strap me in there once before.  It was the dumbest thing I ever did
in my life.  I went through a long time of pain and horror and
confusion.  No way are you going to do something like that to me again."
Ham won.

     Well, the museum has lots of exhibits like spacecraft models,
documentary photos, models of the lunar lander and the moon buggy,
mockups of satellites, artists' and engineers' conceptions of space
stations going back to Chesley Bonestall, taped sounds of blast-offs,
information about the 50th anniversary of the A-4 (Aggregate-4, also
known as Vergettungswaffe-2 or just V-2).

     After that we headed out for Lincoln, best known for the Lincoln
County War.  There have been a lot of small wars in New Mexico.  They
were things like range wars.  But the best known local war was about
competition between two stores on one street in Lincoln.  Each store was
owned by pairs of ranchers who were would-be cattle barons.  One pair
were the ranchers L. G. Murphy and J. J. Dolan.  The other pair were
newcomers to Lincoln, Alexander McSween and John Turnstall.  Murphy and
Dolan had hired some ne'er-do-wells to rustle cattle from McSween and
Turnstall to help convince them to move out and abandon their store.
One of these punks was a sixteen-year-old born in New York City, but who
lived several places since his father died and his mother remarried.
This was Billy Bonney.

     One day in 1875 Billy ran into John Turnstall, the man he was
trying to drive out of the country.  Turnstall was a cultured Englishman
and ironically the two men found they liked each other.  Bonney
immediately switched sides and became devoted to the only man who'd ever
liked and respected him.

     Then Murphy--who had an in with local law enforcement--sent a
supposed "posse" made up of his remaining punks to arrest Turnstall,
claiming he'd rustled cattle.  Turnstall objected, but to avoid











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                            Page 9



bloodshed yielded his gun to the posse.  The punks then shot down
Turnstall in cold blood.  Bonney, who now went by the nickname Billy the
Kid, swore to kill his former friends who'd made up the posse and also
the sheriff who'd authorized their actions.  Billy organized several men
loyal to the dead Turnstall and to McSween into his own posse-gang which
he designated "regulators."  He was the youngest, but also the angriest
and the meanest, so they followed him.

     In a sequence of ambushes and gunfights, Billy and his regulators
made good his threat, saving the sheriff and a deputy to kill last.

     The new sheriff, Dad Peppins, a former deputy, trapped Billy and
his fourteen regulators in McSween's mansion with McSween.  For three
(or five) days the house was peppered with gunfire by a combination of a
huge posse and the local cavalry who showed up with a cannon trained on
the house.  The commander of the cavalry ordered a cease fire and
threatened to blow up the mansion if Billy, McSween, and the regulators
did not surrender.  To help Billy decide, Peppins set fire to the house.
McSween surrendered and was shot down in cold blood.  Billy killed his
killer and--against amazing odds--escaped.

     President Hayes had had enough and replaced the governor of New
Mexico with Civil War general Lew Wallace (author of BEN HUR).  Billy
agreed to let himself be arrested and then to turn state's evidence on
anyone who'd killed in the war so far.  But Billy lost faith in Wallace
and escaped again.

     Again a posse caught up with Billy.  After a siege, Billy gave up
and asked to talk with the posse's leader.  Instead, he shot the leader
and the rest of the posse retreated.

     Wallace appointed an old friend of Billy's, Pat Garrett, sheriff of
Lincoln County.  Garrett was able to corner Billy and his current gang.
Starving them out, he got Billy to surrender.  Billy was tried and found
guilty in Mesilla, New Mexico.  Garrett sent his top two guns,
J. W. Bell and Bob Ollinger, to take Billy back to Lincoln and to guard
him there.  Billy was placed in leg irons and shackles.  It clearly was
the end for Billy.  Bell treated Billy decently; Ollinger was a sadist
who used to ride for Murphy and Dolan.  Ollinger would torment Billy on
the way back to Lincoln, hoping Billy would give Ollinger an excuse to
kill Billy.  He would torture Billy, poking him with a loaded shotgun.
Bell did what he could to stop Ollinger from tormenting Billy.

     One day in Lincoln Ollinger left Bell to guard Billy and went out
to get a drink.  Billy was shackled and Bell was enough to hold Billy.
From the hotel across the street Ollinger heard a gunshot from the
courthouse and decided to investigate.  As he approached the courthouse,
he heard a pleasant, "Oh, hi, Bob!"  He looked up to see Billy training
a shotgun on him.  The manacled Billy had managed to get a gun and Kill
Bell.












Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 10



     With exaggerated slowness, Billy cocked the shotgun.  The sadist
Ollinger waited for the inevitable.  Eventually it came and most of
Ollinger was blown halfway into the street.

     Billy had a handyman find an axe and cut apart the leg irons.
Billy grabbed a horse and headed out of town, shouting, "Adios,
compadres!" to the witnesses.  Garrett had been made to look foolish.
Now he wanted Billy dead in the worst way.  Acting on a tip that Billy
would be at the Maxwell Ranch, he brought a huge posse.  Garrett himself
waited in Billy's darkened bedroom.  Bily entered and died.  Garrett
claimed self-defense, but many doubted it.  But Billy the Kid was
finally dead.  He was age 21.

     For years Billy has been a controversial figure.  Just about every
killing seems to have been either self-defense or in some sense someone
who was "asking for it."  Most of his killings were avenging a murder in
a time when legal justice was at best uncertain.  But there is also the
suspicion that anyone who finds good reason to kill an estimated
twenty-one people is in some way looking for good reasons.

     Many of the scenes of Billy's story are either on the road into
Lincoln or in Lincoln itself.  You pass a road marker that tells you
near here was Blazer's Mill, where Billy and three of the regulators
trapped Buckshot Roberts in a latrine.  Roberts was a Murphy enforcer.
From his "stronghold" he killed one regulator and wounded two others,
but Billy got him in the end.  Further on you see the spot where John
Turnstall was murdered, setting off Billy's violent revenge.

     Lincoln itself is just one street and you can still see Turnstall's
store that started the hatred.  Next to it is a field where McSween's
mansion was (a rather narrow mansion it must have been) which Murphy's
law officials and the United States Cavalry with cannon could not
capture Billy, though they did kill Turnstall's partner McSween.  About
a five-minute walk down the road is the Murphy store which--and this I'd
never heard before--was also the courthouse where Billy killed Bell and
Ollinger.  It seems the store was turned into a courthouse.  We were
here on a Monday so the courthouse was the only building open.  It has
been turned into a museum.  Where Billy shot J. W. Bell there is a hole
in the wall with a plastic flashmark around it to call attention to it.
Perhaps what is most interesting is to see photographs of what the
principals really looked like.  It is generally well-known what Billy
looked like from one photo that shows up in most of the sources, but I'd
never gotten much of an impression of either Murphy or Turnstall.  (An
interesting commentary on this is we dropped into a book and souvenir
store for Evelyn to see if there were postcards.  A boy about seven
asked who somebody was in a picture on one of the books.  "That's Billy
the Kid," an older brother said.  "No, it isn't.  I've seen Billy the
Kid on TV."  Actually I kind of wonder what version he saw.)

     Bidding a fond farewell to Lincoln, we headed for Roswell.  New
Mexico has an interesting system for encouraging tourism.  They have a











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 11



whole series of messages explaining the importance of each of the major
tourist attractions.  They are broadcast on short range AM radio near
each attraction.  You see a road sign telling you to tune to 530 AM on
your radio.  When you do, Ricardo Montalban is telling you all about the
local attraction.  Here he was explaining about the Lincoln County War.
It is a very clever idea.

     Next we went into Roswell to see the art museum.  Actually this is
the catch-all museum.  There is a section on art and another on Robert
Godard, including a reconstruction of his workshop.  Another section has
Spanish and Italian armor and swords.  Then there are two sections, one
on the history, clothing, and weapons of the Indians from the Roswell
area, and a similar room on the uniforms and weapons of the cavalry.
The latter room is also decorated with bear skins and other hunting
trophies.  Now this can have all sorts of interpretations from the most
politically correct ("See, the Anglos had no respect for anything alive
but their own kind") to the settlers' actual vision of themselves ("We
European-Americans have always been great sportsmen who could enjoy the
abstract meaning of killing, understanding death, skinning your kill,
and bathing in the blood.  But notice that we kept no Injun skins as
trophies, at least not the ones we show in public.  After all, what are
we--barbarians?").

     You see a lot of open territory between places here.  There are
lots of trailer parks, trailers being the new version of the great (and
not-so-great) wagons of the West.  They used to pull up around the
chuckwagon and a fire.  These days they all have chuckwagon sections but
they still pull up around other utilities and form trailer camps.  When
Indians were no longer a threat, God invented tornados.

     Speaking of Indians, there was a discussion on NPR about why it was
that the Indians were so badly defeated by the Europeans and they came
up with an unlikely answer ... pets.  Europeans lived very closely with
their animals; Indians had domesticated animals but did not really have
in their culture the close contact that Europeans did.  Sound nutty?
Not really.  Only about 10% of the loss of the Indians was due to
fighting between the cultures.  Gunpowder and technology very often
proved no match for the excellent warriors and tacticians that the
Indians were.  90% of the Indians who died, died by disease, as most
people are or should be aware.  Of that 90%, a small percentage died
because of germ warfare, the Europeans' policy of giving to the Indians
the effects of the European smallpox victims.  85% or so of the Indians
died because of unintentional contagion.  But it was the Europeans who
were in the alien land with alien people.  They seem to have just not
picked up very much disease.  (Experts are unsure about syphilis.  The
first European outbreak was in 1494 and that is the *only* evidence that
it was a New World disease.  But the Europeans were making a lot of new
contacts at that time and it may well have come from some place like the
Middle East.)  So why did so much more disease go in the other
direction?  Smallpox is a cattle disease that survives in humans.
Measles is a pig disease but it also attacks humans.  Indians did not











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 12



live in close proximity (like within a few feet) of a lot of animals.
Europeans lived around more diseases and to some extent had immunity to
them.  They certainly carried more.  The vast majority of the death of
the great Indian nations was accidental and probably was done by people
who didn't know they were doing it.  And by this theory it was just by
how much contact they had with their own animals that made the
difference.

     I should say more about the art.  There was a whole room full of
pictures done by someone who does all his art by putting little dots of
paint on five-foot square canvasses.  Any color television does exactly
the same thing, only better.  When his style works, this is probably
pointillism; when it doesn't, it is disappointillism.  They claim to
have a Georgia O'Keeffe collection.  I guess you can call it a
collection, but being that it consists of only one painting, whether
that is the right word or not is open to some question.  I guess if you
have collected one painting, that makes it a collection.  Her piece is
called "Ram's Skull and Leaves."  I think it is a really good name for
the work of art.  It really suits the painting, which is a picture of a
ram's skull and two leaves.  That is always a nice surprise in a
painting to find out the title and the subject matter are the same
thing.  But, no, if O'Keeffe says that's what the painting is, there
isn't any baiting and switching about it.  That's just exactly what she
delivers.  Now in the documentary about her she said she had been using
skulls in her paintings for a long time before she realized that skulls
might be symbols of mortality.  She just liked the shape, color, and
texture.  She apparently thought they just fell off the ram skull tree.
Of course, psychology tells us that there are people who like skulls for
their color, shape, and texture, but who'd not pick up that these are
really parts of once-living things.  There was a whole family like that
in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.  The fact that O'Keeffe could channel the
same impulses in socially constructive ways should be an example for
sociopaths everywhere.

     There is a nice mural by William Goodman.  It is a colorful fantasy
that is like Hieronymous Bosch without all the unpleasantness.  Well,
that was about it for Roswell, a nice town, and after seeing the local
museum it doesn't surprise me at all that there is a best-selling book
claiming there was a UFO crash in Roswell.  I am surprised it was only
one crash.

     Returning to our car, I was surprised to see somebody had smeared
his handprints on the backup lights.  At the time it struck me as odd.
Well, I later figured out who'd done it.  I did.  I put my hands on the
taillights getting into the trunk.  My hands were clean at the time, but
not clean enough.  Road dust in New Mexico is like the dust police use
to make fingerprints visible.

     But we could not tarry long.  We had to get to Carlsbad for a bat
exodus.  There are many millions of bats in Carlsbad Caverns.  For many
nobody is sure where they exit.  But at dusk about half million bats fly











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 13



out of the main entrance to feed.  Up until this point there were
swallows flying in and out of the cave.  They come to nest in the cave
and fly out less systematically in the morning.  Of course, when the
swallows want to return, they have to fight the tide of outcoming bats.
They don't--they just fly around and swear at the bats in bird language.

     People gather around the cave entrance in a sort of amphitheater
waiting for the smoky-looking serpentine trail that is a cloud of a half
million bats looking for insects to eat.  The swarms are much better in
the summer.  Right now, a large proportion of the bats have migrated
down to Mexico for the winter.  Even now, the bats came out in swarms of
5000 a minute.  The rangers can never be sure exactly when the bats will
come out.  They have a rough idea it will be about a half hour before
sundown.  But even then the bats can come out a half hour early or late.
It must start with some bat's stomach growling and she--they are mostly
females--flies out and that starts the exodus.  As they come out of the
cave, they are flying in counter-clockwise circles.  Bats and
mathematicians instinctively prefer counter-clockwise.  Close up it is
hard to tell the bats from small birds swarming in circles.  Further
away they look like a huge swarm of bees cork-screwing into the sky.
Then they disperse.  Of course, this variability of exit time means the
park ranger has to have a variable length speech.  It is a talk of at
least thirty minutes about bats that s/he is prepared to stop at any
moment if the bats start coming out.  After about fifteen minutes the
amphitheater starts to empty.  Only about a tenth of the audience stays
through the whole exodus.

     When the bats had flown, we checked into our motel and asked where
to get good barbecue.  Our first surprise was when they recommended the
Dairy Queen down the road.  Our second surprise was when we tried their
barbecue.  I think we were surprised someone recommended it.  Nat
actually bad, but somewhat lackluster.

     We finished the day writing.

     October 13, 1992:  We woke up early and went out.  We had breakfast
at a local restaurant, then headed out for Carlsbad Caverns.  There is a
lot more to the National Park than the Caverns themselves.  You drive
about seven miles through parklands with high yellow cliffs on either
side.  We stopped several places on the way in to look at rock
formations.  At one turnoff you follow a short path to an outcropping of
stone that the signs suggest would have made a home for two families.  I
told Evelyn it was a nice cheap summer home and what kept it cheap was
low overhead.

     Well, eventually we got to Carlsbad itself and parked.  Carlsbad is
a National Park, which I thought meant no admission was charged.  Not
so.  Admission to the caverns is $5.  If you want a guide to go with you
at your own pace and explain everything, that's fifty cents more.













Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 14



     The guide is a device I have seen elsewhere.  It is a fifteen-inch
wand that hangs around your neck that is a radio receiver, a small
speaker, and a rechargeable power supply.  When the wand just hangs, it
is turned off; pick the earpiece up to your ear when you are in a
designated area and a voice tells you about that section.  Now all it
would take, probably, is for someone to bring a Walkman and scan for the
same frequency that the electronic guide uses and you could save the
fifty cents.  Actually, I thought the tour guide did a particularly good
job of explaining everything.  There must have been on the order of
sixty messages or so, and they were very well explained.  When the tour
was over, I asked Evelyn if she had any rechargeable batteries on her so
we could tip the guide.

     The main chamber is about as deep as an eighty-story building is
high.  You have the choice of walking down and sightseeing on the way or
of taking the elevator down.  If you follow the signs for the Red Tour
they take you to the elevator; if you follow the Blue Tour, it goes into
the mouth of the cave and down the entire path.  Most places that the
Park Service tells you are gentle hikes are a bit more than that and can
be exhausting.  Here the warnings you get overstate how exhausting and
possibly dangerous the Blue Tour is.  One older gentlemen did complain
about how tough the tour was, but for most of the rest of us it wasn't
bad.

     The previous night when the bats came out, people claimed there was
a bat smell.  I couldn't tell at the time, but walking the Blue Tour you
definitely smell it.  You are not in the same chamber with the bats, of
course.  That would be disgusting and possibly dangerous.  You just
descend and descend surrounded by all the various structures of
speleothems (a stalactite or a stalagmite is a speleothem).  You see
curtains and soda straws, as well as grotesque shapes of the free-
standing speleothems.

     If I remember rightly how this was all created, you had a giant
underwater reef.  The mixture of sea water and fresh dissolved big holes
in the rock, then upward pressure from colliding continental plates
forced the holes above the water table so the holes drained.  Then
rainwater came through the roof with calcified limestone deposits and
leaked through the ceiling, leaving deposits of the limestone which
built up, creating the weird shapes over time, much like dripping hot
wax will form odd shapes.

     So when in the 1959 film JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH had
explorers going ever downward through caverns, they really could not
have gotten down even so far as the water table.  About a quarter of the
way into the trip I reminded Evelyn to be looking for settings from that
film.  In fact, before asking a ranger where the film was shot I had
already picked out three of the four sites in the cave he told us about.
There was one point where the Lindenbrook expedition was camped below
the Saknussem expedition and heard them above.  There was a green pool
that was used in the movie.  (I think for a while they thought it was











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 15



the grave of Alec McEwan.)  The Red Tour has a section of oddly shaped
formations that Alec McEwan fell through.  Between the halves of the
Blue Tour (at the beginning of the Red Tour), there is a big chamber
with a snack bar and souvenir shop.  Sort of a strange setting.

     I have been in caverns in Israel, Slovenia (formerly part of
Yugoslavia), China, and Ohio.  This is certainly the best set in the
world.  In Slovenia they said they were the second biggest cavern in the
world, second to Carlsbad, but that they were the biggest with
stalagmites and stalactites.  That was a lie, obviously, but I have to
say that Carlsbad has nothing to match the underground train ride
Slovenia has.

     Well, when we were done with Carlsbad, that was the big event of
the day.  We headed out to El Paso.  There is not much along this road
but the Butterfield Stage Piney Station.  This is a memorial to where
the stage used to stop.  It is just across the Texas border.  There were
some spectacular rock formations.  We also found the sky getting dark at
some point and expected we might get rain.  Actually it turned out to be
a dust storm.

     El Paso did not seem as inviting as New Mexico did, maybe because
it is a big city and in New Mexico we stuck to small towns.  El Paso
seemed a little run down.  We arrived at the motel just as the Vice-
Presidential debates were starting.  Neither of us were hungry yet so I
turned on the debates.  Evelyn stuck in earplugs and tried to write in
her log.  We went for dinner at the State Line Barbecue.  It was a lot
better than the Dairy Queen in Carlsbad.  Back in the room we wrote
until we fell asleep.

     October 14, 1992:  Each night our Motel 6s have gotten a little
less comfortable.  I woke up before 6 AM and I think we checked out
before 7.  Today the plan was to drive to Tombstone.  Breakfast was at
the first place we could find that seemed decent.  It was decent but the
service was very slow.  And they overcharged us and had to change the
check.  From there we hit Route I-10 west back to New Mexico and then
west into Arizona.  A lot of this was desert irrigated to make plots of
farmland.  There are always mountains in the distance.  Our last stop in
New Mexico was Steins, a ghost town right off the highway.  Evelyn
commented that the ramshackle town looked a lot like some parts of the
Dominican Republic.  Steins was a mining town at one point.  But fate
went against the town.  I am sure what we see cannot be all of the town
that was around before, but it isn't empty either.  Somebody has a bunch
of farm animals there including irritatingly boisterous roosters.  The
place seems to be more a dump than a ghost town.  There are old tires
and old rims (different places, of course).  There is an old stagecoach.
There is a modern vehicle that is clearly intended to run along train
tracks.  They have some rust with metal but no metal without rust.  The
whole town looked like what some bad science fiction movies said the
post-nuclear world would be like.  There were some nice goats in one of
the yards.  For $1.50 each the guy in the one open store would show you











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 16



around town.  Well, you could see most of the town looking through the
fence.  At least there was enough to know we didn't want to see it any
closer than we already had.

     Another few moments and we were in Arizona.  Ricardo Montalban gave
us a departing story about stagecoaches as the last thing we did in New
Mexico.  More farms or ranches.  More fields of chaparral.  It is clear
that here Nature had an over-developed sense of drama.  High mountains
with rock faces surrounded us.

     We pulled off the main highway to the Fort Bowie road.  This is a
dirt road past several grazing ranges and leads to a pull-off.  At the
pull-off there is a mile-and-a-half walk to Fort Bowie.

     What is Fort Bowie?  Well, the story starts in September 1857, when
the Postmaster General awarded an overland mail route to John
Butterfield.  Butterfield needed for his route a station that would have
water and the only place he could put it was in Apache Pass--land
belonging to the Chiricahua Apaches who were led by Cochise.  Cochise
tolerated this intrusion for two and a half years.  Then in 1861 some
Apaches--nobody is sure who--raided the ranch of local John Ward, stole
stock, and kidnapped a Mexican boy who lived on the ranch.  Ward thought
it was Cochise who led the raid.

     Second Lieutenant George Bascom set up a trap to capture Cochise.
He brought a contingent of soldiers into the pass.  Cochise and some
companions wanted to find out what Bascom was doing there and went to
talk to him in Bascom's own tent.  Bascom accused Cochise of the crime
and told him he was captured.  Cochise pulled out a knife and cut his
way out of an unguarded wall of the tent.  His companions did not get
away, however, and Bascom hanged them.

     Cochise led his Apaches against the Anglos for two weeks of raids.
The Anglos sent the cavalry in to secure the pass.  For the next twelve
years Cochise would lead a successful guerilla war against the Anglos.

     Brigadier General James Carlton captured the pass by force.  After
repeated attacks he built Fort Bowie to protect the pass.  The first
Fort Bowie was crude and uncomfortable.  It was later rebuilt and
expanded to accommodate more troops more comfortably.  After twelve
years of warfare an ex-Army scout named Tom Jeffords made peace with
Cochise.  (Anyone remember the film BROKEN ARROW with Jimmy Stewart as
Tom Jeffords winning over Cochise?  There was also a television show
about Jeffords also called BROKEN ARROW.)

     At last there was a lasting peace between the Anglos and the
Apaches.  That was 1872.  And peace lasted for about four years.
Cochise died in 1874.  Jeffords was replaced as agent in 1876.  Suddenly
there was a lot of dissatisfaction from the Apaches.  Afraid of losing
the pass, the government abolished the local reservation and moved all
the Apaches to another reservation.  Particularly unhappy about this









            Mark Leeper
            ...att!mtgzy!leeper
            [phone]