| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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I would call breaking dependence on Earth mankind's number one long-term priority. But we can't do that if we keep simpering over the first few casualties and deciding space isn't worth the effort because people can get killed. If it isn't cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sedentary lifestyle, or handguns--any of which kill Americans in horrendous numbers--then it is too dangerous to fool with. Just on one Saturday night how many more Americans die from these causes than have died in the entire history of the space program? And the Saturday night deaths went for nothing.
Vietnam was really, really bad. But considering the number of really bad things in this world , it has gotten attention out of proportion. So has the Challenger accident. Let's move on.
Our next stop near the Enchanted Circle was the town of Cimarron. This was one of the wooly towns of the wild and wooly west. The town saw the likes of Kit Carson, Jesse James, Bat Masterson, Clay Allison, Buffalo Bill Cody, Davy Crockett, Evelyn Leeper, and Blackjack Ketchum. The big attraction in Cimarron is the St. James Hotel. It started as a bar built in 1873 and was made into a hotel in 1880. Twenty-six men died in gunfights at the St. James. Perhaps the best known gunfight was on November 1, 1875, between Robert A. Clay Allison and Francisco 'Pancho' Griego.
Clay Allison was born in 1840 in Waynesboro, Tennessee, where his family had a farm. In spite of a club foot, he was something of a scrapper. When the Civil War broke out he could have been deferred because of his foot, but chose to defend Tennessee. After the war three Allison brothers, one sister, and her husband all moved to Texas. Clay signed on as a cowhand and went on several cattle drives.
In 1870 when local cattlemen Coleman and Lacey moved to New Mexico, Clay drove their cattle in exchange for three hundred head he could keep. He started a lucrative ranch in Colfax County, New Mexico, near Cimarron.
Clay found he had a taste for and a talent for leading vigilantes. He had a successful outing on October 7, 1870, leading a mob to nearby Elizabethtown, where they broke into the jail and lynched an alleged murderer. Allison decapitated the body and took the head back to Cimarron, where he placed the head on a pole and used it for decoration.
On January 4, 1874, gunfighter Chuck Colbert challenged Allison to a horse race. The result was called a tie and the two men went to dinner together at a restaurant. After dinner they had coffee. Colbert started to serve Allison coffee but Allison noticed Colbert picked up the pot with one hand and his pistol with the other. Allison wanted to be served neither hot coffee nor hot lead. Colbert's shot missed; Allison's did not.
On October 30, 1875, Allison led another lynch mob to lynch suspected murderer Cruz Vega. Vega claimed another man was the killer, but was lynched and shot in the back. Allison took the lynch rope, tied it to his saddle horn, and dragged the body over rocks and bushes.
Cruz had a friend in town who was a dangerous pistolero. This was Pancho Griego. On May 30 the same year Griego had been dealing three-card monte with three enlisted men of the Sixth U.S. Cavalry. They accused Griego of cheating. He threw the money on the floor. They knew what was coming next and ran for the door. Griego had his pistol out and had killed two and injured the third before they could get out the door. Out of bullets, Griego leaped on the third man and finished the job with his Bowie knife. He was a dangerous man to cross.
And Allison's treatment of Cruz was crossing Griego. The lynching was on Saturday, October 30. Griego decided Allison would die. On Monday, November 1, Griego saw Allison in the street and invited him for a drink and a talk at the St. James Saloon. There was a clear tension between the men. After talking at the bar they decided for more privacy they would repair to an empty corner of the saloon. Nobody knows what happened, but Allison suddenly had a gun in his hand. There were three shots and the lights went out. When they came back on, Allison was gone and Griego lay dead on the floor.
There is more to the story. The locals started deciding that Clay Allison was not the kind of citizen that Cimarron needed. The CIMARRON NEWS AND PRESS wrote a scathing editorial against him, so before it hit the streets he and some friends broke into the newspaper office, smashed the press with sledge hammers, smashed up the furniture, and threw the whole mess into the Colorado River. Next morning he took the printed copies of the newspaper and sold them himself for twenty-five cents a piece. When he passed by the newspaper office, the woman who owned the paper and whom Allison had never met was standing there. 'Look what you did. You should be ashamed of yourself.' 'I don't fight with women,' Allison said, pulling $200 out of his pocket. 'Go buy yourself a new press.'
Allison tried to steal a herd of Army mules but things went wrong. While he was escaping he accidentally shot himself in his club foot and needed a cane for the rest of his life.
On December 21, 1876, Clay and his brother John were drunk in a saloon. A local deputy tried to get them to give up their firearms. Ignored, he fired a shotgun. He injured John but Clay killed him. Clay spent time in jail for this one.
One of the stories of Allison was that once a dentist he went to was working on the wrong tooth. Clay left and went to another dentist. Then he returned to the first dentist and used the dentist's own pliers to extract one of the dentist's front teeth. He would have done the other but people came to hear what the screaming was.
On July 7, 1887, Clay very anti-climatically fell off a wagon and fractured his skull. An hour later he was dead.
Headed back to Taos you pass through the Red River Valley. I sort of doubt it is the same one as the song. I sort of associated that with Texas, but I could be wrong.
Also you go over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. This was at one time the second tallest bridge in the U.S. highway system. As you walk the bridge you cross a gorge 685 feet deep. It makes you feel a little nervous as you walk it. Even worse, it sways in the wind. When heavy trucks go over, the whole bridge just sort of shakes under you. Makes you a bit nervous.
We finished the Enchanted Circle and returned to Taos. Our last stop in Taos was the Kit Carson Home and Museum. Christopher 'Kit' Carson seems to have lucked out in the history books. He is known as an Indian fighter, yet he is also remembered positively by Indians today. He executed orders fighting Apaches and marching Navajos to Bosque Redondo where they were victimized by raids of other tribes and where there was not enough land usable for crops. However, he fought Indians only after the bitterest of protests to his commanders. At his first opportunity he resigned and instead worked for Indian rights in Washington and elsewhere.
The Carson house was found much abandoned the first decade of this century and it was restored. Where possible it has been stocked with actual artifacts of Carson's life. Carson could neither read nor write, but he did dictate his memoirs to a friend who wrote them down. He then sent them to a publisher where they were edited by a Mr. Peters. Rather than editing them down, they were edited up to five times their original length. Carson had his memoirs as published read to him and responded, 'Mr. Peters laid it on a leetle thick.'
The museum shows many of the firearms of Carson's time and shows what was involved in just loading them. There are examples of military uniforms of the period. Other artifacts include a New York HERALD from April 15, 1865, announcing the assassination of Lincoln. Another case had a metal bathtub of the period. The last three rooms were a typical bedroom, kitchen, and living room. There is actually just about nothing in the Carson house that old Kit would recognize, but as he was a hard-drinking mountain man, that situation may also have occurred during his life.
On the way to Santa Fe, we stopped at the Santuario de Chimayo. This is a Catholic shrine where there are supposedly cures that take place and there are crutches and asthma inhalers and the like left abandoned there. Illusionist The Amazing Randi investigated the cures. What happens to the people who leave crutches there? 'The answer is that they simply fall down.' I have had a cough this week. I visited the shrine. I still have a cough.
We continued to Santa Fe, got a room, had a mediocre Mexican dinner at Tortilla Flats, and returned to the room. And that pretty much was our Tuesday.
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Breakfast at the local JB's.
Our first destination of the day is Bandelier National Monument.
On the way we listened to the radio. When we travel in the United States we listen a lot to National Public radio. Wherever the NPR affiliate is, it usually has the music we most want to hear. Also, I like their 'Morning Edition' and 'All Things Considered' news programs each day. We have had miserable luck with them this trip. Either by design or coincidence every public station in Arizona and New Mexico seems to be having their fund drives at the same time. They are all asking for money. It makes them a real pain to listen to and that has been most of the trip.
I have to admit by this point in the trip I am just a bit pueblo-ed out. Only so many times can you climb a hill to see a bunch of adobe bricks laid out in a rectangle. The sort of thing that was at, say, Pueblo Grande in Phoenix is worth going to only if you are going to less than three archaeological sites in all. So it was with a certain measure of reluctance I set out in Frijoles Canyon.
I don't know how or why a canyon came to be named for beans. Like a lot of scenery around these parts, the canyon is just beautiful. It is a nice forested walk at the bottom with pine trees all around. Squirrels are plentiful (as they used to say) with a sort of black color and tall tufted ears. (Speaking of animals, a while back I noticed a spectacular bird flying. It was bright white, dark black, and had touches of blue. Spectacular bird it seemed to me. It turns out on asking that it is a rather common and little-respected bird. It's a magpie. I think it's considered something of a pest to people grown too used to its beauty to care. Alfred Dreyfus admired the beautiful and graceful birds that glided through the skies over Devil's Island. Years later he found out what kind of birds they were ... seagulls. I can tell you that West Coast seagulls are beautiful. In New Jersey the seagulls are nice but just don't have the long beautiful wings that the California gulls have. Maybe Dreyfus was seeing the California breed of gulls.)
Anyway, on either side of the canyon are cliffs with an odd look as if the cliff has rotted or eroded under the surface, leaving the surface mostly intact except for holes. Actually the cliffs are really rock spewed out by a volcano about one million B.C. There were gas bubbles in the rock that made the rock weak except for on the surface where it cooled first. The weak inner rock eroded under the surface and you got large caves behind a Swiss-cheese-like surface.
There was a large kiva but what impressed me the most at the kiva was that there was a tarantula minding her own business walking around it. It wasn't big like Mexican Tarantulas. This little spider, standing still, would have just fit into a circle two inches in diameter. We stood back at about two feet and watched her with binoculars. (Our binoculars will focus on fairly near objects and with eight-power, we were getting a view like we were six inches away.) She must have been aware we were following her, but she just went about her business. |
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