Out of the blue and back

New Mexico Business Journal, Nov, 1996 by Christine Mather

Uncle Millard's story involved his brainy older sister who walked off with all the family laurels as an assistant cabinet head in F.D.R.'s administration, while he faded into the marginal ranching business out West, pushed into obscurity by a wicked case of dyslexia. He ranched in eastern New Mexico, married, had no children, outlived his wife and died at a very advanced age in a nursing home in Clayton. The ranch had been unused and unlived in for a least 50 years, Millard having never started back in ranching after the War. It may be that he had lost track of his own property, although the taxes were dutifully paid by the law firm, perhaps from his modest disability checks. In any case, it passed to me free and clear. I simply had to travel to the ranch and survey my new-found empire.

The ranch, romantically named Blue Yonder, was located in Henry County, that little left over bit of New Mexico tucked on the eastern edge of the state at the conjunction of the Ute and Tramperos Rivers, more west Texas than New Mexico. The history of the region was fairly obscure though a chance purchase of a copy of Langley's On the Eastern Edge of the West gave me a quick reference to the turbulent history of Henry County and my great uncle's possible role in its development. He must have been part of a small group of homesteaders, part of the Compton Act, a little-known freebie to establish new ranches and to celebrate, at last, the passage of New Mexico into statehood. It was here that the notorious Calaveras gang was brought under the law by Pat Garrett shortly before his adventures with Billy the Kid, and here also that the famed Goodnight-Loving Trail crossed.

The prehistory of the area gave me hope that we might have a chance of finding some interesting archeological material on the half-section of land. Being not terribly far from finds of Clovis tools and the encampment mentioned in Dalman's Lithic Classifications Among the Upper Confluence of the Ute River and Salt Marshes, I was hopeful that we might be able to at least gather a few arrowheads or tools as we walked off the perimeter of the long abandoned ranch.

The Spanish history of the region seemed more remote than even its role in prehistory. Other than the long abandoned town of San Damion, with its charming crumbling adobe church - and the very unlikely possibility that Coronado may have added this tucked away stretch of land to his meanderings - there was only the one cache of goodies at the Henry County Historical Society to show for all the years of Spanish life. The historical society seemed to have some pretty nifty stuff such as a bronze mortar, one very large T-shaped stirrup, the upper part of a sword and a few unrecognizable medals, probably religious rather than coinage. The stirrup was illustrated in my copy of La Familia y Tiempos Perdidos, Joseph Quirarte's classic volume on pioneering Hispanic families in Southern New Mexico. He is one of the few scholars that even bothers to touch on Spanish life in Eastern New Mexico.

I was shocked to find among Quirarte's extensive references note of a little pamphlet, published by the historical society, Roman Soldiers in Henry County. Seems that one of the local history buffs had decided that the mortar with its Latin inscription, was yet another one of those bits of evidence that the Romans had been wandering around the West and had dropped a drinking vessel out on the plains. Fortunately, Quirarte blasted this bizarre little theory away. Henry County has been among the areas declining in population for over 30 years now. There is little reason to hope that this trend has bottomed out yet.

This left me with the thorny decision of what to do with, and about, the Blue Yonder. Over 50 years of neglect, no nearby towns, no means of running or supporting a ranch (to say nothing of my lack of knowledge of how to do such a thing!) made me question if I should even accept this inheritance. When I spoke with James Fallon, he made me long to consider accepting the ranch. He described its beautiful remoteness and untouched grasslands, away from highways, telecommunications, beyond the touch of trashy contemporary culture - he encouraged me to become a 21st century pioneer. But then, my husband pointed out concrete facts like the necessity to establish home schooling for our teenage daughters (fat chance they'd go for that!) and other bruising realities of a cash economy. Fallon, like others, was just doing his best, hoping to seek out new families to settle in New Mexico's most forgotten and remote corner.

Finally, we had to let the Blue Yonder go. It had been idle for so long and its location was so far from our earthly realities that it seemed impossible for us to consider. Having been ungrazed for so many years, the land had a certain status and interest so we were fortunate to be able to deed the property to the Nature Conservancy. It will be added to a few other parcels of land to form a special preserve for rangeland habitat. As much as we would like to visit and to encourage others to see the special, delicate beauty of these enchanting lands, it shall remain off limits. We must all live without this opportunity, but secure in the knowledge the land will be held in trust for the future - untouched and unvisited.