As they approached Apache Pass, the alkali was so deep on the ground it looked like snow. They could see Indian campfires all up in the hills.
—
As I follow the westering trail of Perry and Welmett, on Paisano Drive in El Paso, the Rio Grande on my left, obscured by the rusty hulking mass of the newfangled border fence, the Franklin Mountains loom up to my right, Mount Cristo Rey with its tall white cross at the summit points the way west. The great smokestacks of ASARCO, demolished over the last year, no longer stand as a landmark, a reminder that a place called Smeltertown used to exist.
Decorative concrete barriers (terra-cotta and teal blue, vague line work signifying the outline of distant mountains) flew by the car window, as camera towers maintained their eternal surveillance. I delayed my overland journey and exited the elevated highway and wandered through the strange landscape of a postindustrial borderland, winding in and among security barriers that are less successful than the highway itself in severing the connection between the old Spanish town of El Paso del Norte, now a killing ground for Mexican cartels, and the former village of Franklin, Texas, now known as El Paso. I passed the decommissioned barracks of old Fort Bliss. Just yards from the river, no longer historical landmarks, they have been converted into shabby apartments. In the old neighborhood of Chihuahuita, tiny stucco homes resembling adobe and painted in festive colors—sky blue, pink, yellow—nestle up right against the border fence along with the community center and a playground. Signs in Spanish for used clothing proliferate, in front of homes and on the sides of old warehouses.
Driving along a lonely road lined with garbage and empty water bottles and rusting chain-link fences, cut off from the rest of El Paso by an elevated highway, I glimpsed a sign for Oñate’s Crossing and pulled over. I got out and walked into a weedy windblown historic site, where four markers, erected at different times, fabricated from different materials, commemorate significant doings in this place: the crossing of Don Juan de Oñate in 1598; the existence of El Camino Real, which linked the kingdom of New Mexico with the kingdom of Mexico, two great dominions of New Spain, by way of Chihuahua. The life and death of Major Simeon Hart, a pioneering El Pasoan, flour merchant, and ardent Confederate, was memorialized by means of an almost unreadable pink marble slab. A banal chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire across the top separates the sad little park from the riverbank and a road used by Border Patrol vehicles. Surveillance cameras, high atop towers, keep watch. Pink gravel, clumps of dead grass, a few ancient dead mesquite trees, and a healthy stand of river cane competed for my eyes’ attention with small piles of rubbish. Later I read that Simeon Hart and his wife, Jesusita, lie buried in an unmarked grave somewhere nearby; the mausoleum their son built in the 1870s was demolished for the construction of the freeway overpass that looms above this historic place.
Site of the historic crossing of Don Juan de Oñate, 1598
I returned to my vehicle and drove out through the pass. The road took me into New Mexico. The old roads followed the water; the new roads just go. The old fields along the river, formerly filled with fruits and vegetables, melons and corn, have been converted into tract houses, a few irrigated fields of grain, the refinery where Rudy Garcia broke his back. Silica mines, for the paving of paradise, owned by Cemex. The Gila Mountains rose before me. A sign told me that God is on my side. I passed Camping World, catering to RVs, the new argonauts, and a defunct amusement park called Wet and Wild Water World. Official warning signs reminded me that DUST STORMS MAY EXIST. It seems the New Mexico Department of Transportation employs philosophers in its signage department. I passed historic old Mesilla, the old crossing of the Rio Grande, where a man once made a fortune selling water to emigrants at ten cents a drink, and continued on to Las Cruces. My plan was to stop at the old mining village of Santa Rita, now consumed by the enormity of the Chino copper mine. More RV parks, pecan orchards in the midst of a barren waste devoid of all grass, supporting little more than creosote.
In Deming, I saw a sign for Pancho Villa State Park, commemorating the Mexican revolutionary’s brief bloody sacking of Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, and I took a quick left turn.
Feeling betrayed by his former patron President Woodrow Wilson, Pancho Villa decided to kill some Americans, so he led fifteen hundred Mexican revolutionaries across the border and burned Columbus, taking nineteen lives. General John “Black Jack” Pershing countered with a punitive expedition. For two years Pershing chased Pancho Villa around northern Mexico. The expedition was a failure, and Pershing never even engaged Villa, but it was the United States’ first military use of aircraft. The First Aero Squadron flew 540 missions, covering twenty thousand miles. I spent a pleasant hour wandering around the museum and talking with the staff. The old airplanes were beautiful, constructed mostly of wood, smoothly polished and gleaming as they hung from the ceiling. The border country has long been a laboratory for military applications.
Dust devil, New Mexico
—
I resumed my former course, heading to the old mines at Santa Rita del Cobre, where James Kirker began his career as a scalper. Small ephemeral homesteads dot the landscape. The desert has been given over to the mobility of senior citizens; a vast parking lot devoted to the restless twilight years of the American middle class. I wondered what they do out there, with their RVs circled like covered wagons, baking day after day in the sun, no golf courses or swimming pools nearby. Perhaps they simply watch television or browse the Internet, adding their opinions to the comment sections of The Huffington Post and Breitbart News.
As I approached the dry meanders of the Mimbres River, the character of the landscape changed from a sandy wasteland to an arid short-grass prairie. A small resort huddled around some geothermal therapeutic springs. I pulled in to City of Rocks State Park and chatted with a volunteer about the rock formations, which poke up from the desert floor like mushrooms. The rocks are the eroded and exposed outcroppings of the Kneeling Nun Tuff, formed from volcanic ash deposited here thirty million years ago. They are cousins of the hoodoos along the Rio Grande. The volunteer told me she tried to volunteer at the Big Bend but the park did not have a space up at the Chisos headquarters that would accommodate her forty-foot trailer. The Mimbres people lived here for fifteen hundred years, before the Apaches came. I asked about pictographs. She smiled and replied that they do not really tell people about those unless they ask, hoping to avoid vandalism, it seems. They were petroglyphs, carved, not painted, and she gave me a handout and a map showing me where to find them. I found one and photographed it, high up on an outcropping, a dark figure with zigzaggy legs playing what looked like a flute.
I rejoined the endless stream of RVs on the highway and made my way to Hurley, a small town perched on the edge of the Chino copper mine, an enormous open pit owned by Freeport-McMoRan. Signs warned that I was entering a blowing-dust area, and then I could see why. A few years before, I flew over the mine with the artist J Henry Fair, who makes gorgeous abstract aerial photographs of environmental crimes. It was like flying over the Grand Canyon. Deep in the bottom of the terraced pit, gigantic earthmovers and dump trucks the size of three-story houses scooped up the copper-laden ore. They looked like toys inside the yawning depths of the mine. They lay the ore out in broad pads, called stockpiles, monstrous artificial mesas of pale pink rubble. Sulfuric acid dribbles through the ore, leaching out the copper, collecting in huge ponds that reflect psychedelic colors, especially from the air. It was dust blowing from these gigantic acid-laced pads that I was now driving through.
The old Santa Rita copper mine, where the War of Apache Scalps was treacherously inaugurated by John James Johnson’s hidden blunderbuss, was long ago consumed by Chino. I wondered if I would be able to somehow feel the ghost of James Santiago Kirker in a landscape that had itself been scalped. I guessed there would be some kind of museum in town and soon discovered that a festival was going on, with old restored cars, vintage hot rods, amplified music. It was a
celebration of Hurley pride. I parked and walked through the gray-haired crowd of civic-minded residents, wounded-warrior devotees, and mine workers enjoying a day off. The Democrats of Hurley were holding a voter-registration drive. A person with a microphone urged parents to get their children fingerprinted. “Why? Because they’re criminals? No, not necessarily. To keep them safe and secure if they happen to wind up missing. It’s a pretty good idea.” I had a hard time following the logic. I suppose fingerprints would help identify the bodies.
Chino Mine, Hurley, New Mexico
On Cortez Avenue, I found the Old Hurley Store and Art Gallery. I spoke with a woman named Karin about James Kirker. She showed me a couple of books about him, but they were not for sale. They were from her private library. She told me that a descendant of Kirker’s lived nearby, over in Bayard. Kirker was a “horrendous man,” she said. “Got to be just about anything that had black hair he’d scalp.” Her voice was deep and smoky. She showed me a sheet of raw copper she had picked up off the ground and a painting her husband had made, a detail of the rusty side of a ship in San Diego harbor. It was a good painting. They retired here to Hurley so that her husband could have his own art gallery. I walked outside. I could hear the sound of the machinery in the mine just out of sight.
I drove to Bayard, where the giant ore pads of Chino, hundreds of feet high, loomed over the town. In Silver City, I parked next to a Jaguar and ate lunch in a restaurant called the Curious Kumquat, then drove west through the bottomland along the Mimbres River. As I crested hills, I could see more copper mines in the distance, and then I suddenly came upon the Tyrone Mine, a crazy pink-terraced devastation. I had to pull over, had to soak in the enormity of what I was seeing. How nice, I thought: there was a scenic overlook and welcome center, but the chain-link fence was locked. I climbed over. A plaque explained that environmental protection is just a part of modern mining and that the monstrous stockpiles of mined rock before me, millions of tons of waste, were the result of a twenty-million-dollar reclamation project. “Seeding,” I read on the weathered and faded sign, “will occur in the future.” Not a single living thing grew on the site.
A few hours later, as I descended from the Continental Divide (6,355 feet), I could see dozens of dust tornadoes passing across the plain.
In 1858, the emigrants crossing this stretch of modern New Mexico, part of the Gadsden Purchase that finally established the western portion of the border with Mexico in 1853, faced a series of relatively straightforward marches from watering to watering, thirty or thirty-five miles between springs: Cooke’s Spring, the Mimbres River, Stevens Creek. The danger was not so much the desert here as it was the Apaches. Whether or not attacks came was simply a matter of luck and timing. Sometimes soldiers saved the day; most of the time they did not. Mail and stagecoach stations came under regular assault, stock was stolen, emigrants were harassed. In later years forts were established. Ruth Shackelford, in her diary, describes horses being stolen by Indians in the night, deserted and abandoned ranches. Cooking with weeds and dried grass at Soldiers Farewell, Cow Springs, Barney’s Station. Each day seemed to bring another grave.
In Bowie, Arizona, I drove through a huge pistachio plantation to follow a winding road to Apache Pass. The road threads its way between the Dos Cabezas and the Chiricahua Mountains. Spits of rain splattered on my windshield and clouds hung low over the mountains, but as I ascended the pass, trying to imagine what the road would have been like in 1858, the year Butterfield established a mail station near Apache Spring, the sun broke through. Perry and Welmett probably came this way. Not much daylight remained when I parked and hiked down the trail toward the ruins of the Butterfield station. The Chiricahua Apaches, led by Cochise, were mostly friendly in those years, and they remained so until the Bascom Affair of 1861, when an inexperienced U.S. Army lieutenant named George Bascom led a punitive expedition into Apache Pass, believing wrongly that Cochise and his warriors had attacked the ranch of John Ward, stealing livestock and kidnapping a child. A series of violent exchanges resulted in both sides killing hostages, and the Apaches captured a wagon train, tying several people upside down on wagon wheels and building fires under their heads, boiling their brains until their skulls popped. The ensuing war lasted until 1872.
Apache Pass reminded me of Juno and the country along the Devils River, though here I was in the presence of mountains, not canyons. I walked along a narrow trail, through gullies and clumps of mesquite. I have rarely felt so isolated and alone. Not a sound of industrial civilization could be heard: no jets overhead, no rumbling eighteen-wheelers along the highway. Cedar dotted the grassy slopes above me, and live oaks clustered along the dry creek bed. A pair of scruffy-looking mule deer, does, stepped out of the brush and eyed me without fear. Red and black crossbred cattle lounged nearby, chewing their cud, as I walked up to the ruins of the Butterfield station. Remnants of low stone walls, about a foot high or less, traced the outlines of two or three buildings. Sunbeams poured through a break in the clouds, as if some choir of angels were about to burst out singing.
Many travelers described the beauty of these mountains and the divide between them. Descending on the other side of the pass, often along hanging roads, I was grateful I was not at the mercy of a team of exhausted horses or mules.
When Ruth Shackelford came through here with her family, she described seeing Indian campfires in the hills all around them. It was not an easy passage, and there were many graves of soldiers and emigrants, victims of Bascom’s folly. Phocion Way describes Apache Pass in 1858 as “deep” and “wild looking”: “The mountains rise on either side from six hundred to a thousand feet above our heads, and in many places it presented a perpendicular wall of rock for a great height, with only just space enough for one wagon to pass between. Near the end of this pass is the Apache Spring. This is a bad place for the Indians.” Way and his companions also saw Indian fires on the mountains all around them, but they were not molested. It reminded him of Bonaparte crossing the Alps.
Butterfield station, Apache Pass, Arizona
Many of the great cattle trains were brought through Guadalupe Pass, farther to the south, near the present border with Mexico. But for an emigrant train in 1858, Apache Pass would have been the most direct route: from there to Dragoon Springs, the San Pedro River, and up toward the village of Tucson, by way of the ancient missions of San José de Tumacácori and San Xavier del Bac.
My own route took me down from Apache Pass along a well-graded road, all-weather caliche, through a beautiful basin with short grass the color of straw stretching out in a level plain toward the horizon, where more mountains rose, classic basin and range topography. The road was lined with a barbed-wire fence, five strands, supported often by irregular stumps of wood. Bored Hereford cattle watched me as I photographed the landscape and drove on. A sign told me to SLOW DOWN, SAVE A COW. In the little town of Willcox, Arizona, there was the Cowboy Hall of Fame, and an attraction called the Cochise Stronghold, and a couple of vineyards. The Desert Inn had burned to the ground, and in the middle of a field I saw a boot the size of a car next to a fiberglass teepee.
I made my way back up to the interstate, the sun setting, throwing a magical light over the Chiricahua Mountains; it was a Georgia O’Keeffe painting come to life—eroded mountain faces, mottled with shadows, dun brown to dark gray chiaroscuro, blue-purple accents, shifting in the distance, one mountain blending into another, range upon range upon range as I passed through infinite basins, linked basins, through staggered parallel ranges, flying in my air-conditioned rocket ship over thousands of feet of sediment, the leavings of shallow seas.
Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona
I passed what looked to be a copper mine, some kind of strange leachate seeping down the piles of slag of the mountaintop removal mine, a miniature Chino. Through Texas Canyon and into the Dragoon Mountains, surrounded by jumbled pink granite boulders in strange fractured shapes. The stage passed through here in 1858, and not far away Cochise made
his last stand. Down into the San Pedro basin, I drove through Benson, an ugly town nestled in what appears to be volcanic tuff, much like Terlingua, and crossed the San Pedro River. South of here Philip St. George Cooke and his Mormon Battalion fought the Battle of the Bulls.
The whole country around me was dotted with little homesteads, shack-like houses off in the distance, maybe a trailer house, some kind of RV parked under a corrugated ramada; retirees or hippies going off the grid, moving out into the desert to get away from it all. It’s a dog-patch subdivided wasteland of desert mystics and witches and meth cookers. Or perhaps it’s really just a nice, nontraditional community and I have no idea what I am talking about, which is most likely. As I approached Tucson, the country became rougher, with multiple draws, gullies, dry streams. Somehow the mail and emigrant road passed through here. Now we have a different kind of migrant, and I guess they are not welcome in this state.
In the 1850s, Tucson was a little village, largely Mexican and Indian, a small walled fort for the garrison. South of there, the more significant landmark was the mission of San Xavier. It was founded in 1692 by a remarkable Jesuit priest named Father Eusebio Kino, who walked all over Arizona, converting Indians to Christianity and blazing trails to California before his order was expelled from New Spain. The mission is extraordinary, especially the interior, a baroque extravagance of statuary, wall paintings, icons, shrines, and relics. I sat in a pew and stared, trying to make sense of the riot of color and figuration. Devout pilgrims filed in and touched the life-sized head of Saint Francis stretched out in a white robe. They all reached down and lifted his head three times, then knelt and prayed, touching his forehead. San Xavier was in ruins by the 1850s, open to the birds and small furry mammals. Travelers from los Estados Unidos passed through, sometimes riding their horses into the sanctuary and wondering that such a building could exist in that wilderness.
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