Remembering Arenas Valley, New Mexico — We played with the ghosts of Geronimo and Billy the Kid

When I was six years old, my family moved from the tiny village of Savona in New York State’s Southern Tier to the even smaller hamlet of Arenas Valley in Southwestern New Mexico. It consisted of a few-score houses clustered around a tiny post office, five miles east of Silver City and two miles west of Fort Bayard.

My grandfather, Robert L. Ingraham, and me on a hunting expedition. I’m armed with my Daisy BB gun. ~ Ingraham Family photo

At age six, I was ready to let go of Mom’s apron strings and start exploring my new world. I soon met Ernest Harper, whose mom was postmaster, and became part of his circle, which included his brothers, Ira and James, and Danny Sanders, and sometimes Scotty Calloway, and other boys whose names I no longer recall. We did not include my sister, Helen, who was four years older than me, and a girl. Special treats included hunting trips (for rabbits) with my Grandfather Ingraham.

Our “hobby farm”

We lived in a small, white house that my grandparents had bought for their retirement (their home was in the company-owned town of Hurley, about seven miles to the south-southeast, where my grandfather worked in the Kennecott copper smelter). It was on a lot about half an acre in size which had once been — we were told — the location of a small dairy. One outbuilding, which we called the “bunkhouse,” had been used at some point to house livestock, perhaps three or four milk cows and perhaps even a cowboy or two.

Our home in Arenas Valley came with the “bunkhouse,” a water tank, a corral, and a 60-foot-deep well. ~ Ingraham Family photo

Today, our place would be called a hobby farm: We had chickens (including two pets, a Rhode Island Red hen, Lucy, and a Leghorn rooster named George), bantam chickens (Chinese Silkies and a Black Cochin who died of a brain tumor), rabbits, horses, white rats, and once a stray donkey.

George, our pet Leghorn rooster and his mate, Lucy, a Rhode Island Red hen, with the rest of George’s harem. ~ Ingraham Family photo

Smutsie on guard. ~ Ingraham Family photo

We had various dogs; the house came with a very pregnant bitch who had 13 puppies a few days after we moved in, and cats whose life spans were all too brief: they seemed obsessed with crossing the road in front of our house just when cars or trucks were approaching.

At times I briefly held captive local bullsnakes and horned lizards (which we innocently called “horny toads”). My family adopted a baby jackrabbit and raised him to plump, undomesticated adulthood before releasing him into the prairie in back of our house. He probably provided dinner for a hungry coyote that same day.

Artifacts and wilderness

A Mimbres Culture pottery shard that I found, almost in my back yard, in Arenas Valley, New Mexico. It is at least 800 years old. ~ Bob Ingraham collection

When my family moved to New Mexico, I was excited to think that I would be living among Indians. I didn’t realize that while I wouldn’t encounter any living Indians, our house in Arenas Valley was a close neighbour of an ancient aboriginal village comprised of pit houses that had been the homes of people of the prehistoric Mimbres Culture.

The Mimbres Culture, a prehistoric branch of the broader Mogollon tradition, flourished in the American Southwest from approximately 200 to 1150 c.e. Not more than 50 steps from our back door in Arenas Valley were the remains of Mimbres Culture pit houses that had apparently been looted by people using bulldozers to dig up commercially valuable artifacts, but they didn’t get all of those artifacts.

Just beyond the fence on the north side of our property, I often found shards of Mimbres pottery painted in intricate geometric designs. Once, after a thunderstorm, I found a white stone arrowhead. The arrowhead went missing long ago, but I still have one of the pottery shards. I would have many more if I had understood their historical significance.

Behind our house, spanning the horizon from northwest to east, were the mountains and ridges and canyons of the Gila National Forest, which includes the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area, established in 1928. It would have been possible — but foolhardy — for me to walk out the back door of our house and north into a wilderness which extended more than 160km (100 miles) into the Gila National Forest and the Gila Wilderness Area. But my friends and I spent long days exploring into the foothills and flood plain south of the Pinos Altos Mountains, never encountering another soul.

As far as I know, only one family, with the surname Elias, lived well north of the “built-up” area of Arenas Valley in the foothills of the Pinos Altos Range. They had two school-age kids, a boy and a girl, but I never got to know them, or anything about them. They, like the uniformly Anglo residents of Arenas Valley, were probably victims of New Mexico’s apartheid-like culture that separated Anglos and “Mexicans”. We thought of the Elias family as “Mexican,” although the surname Elias has been common in Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, French, Welsh, German, and Jewish cultures.

The view to the north-northwest from our home in Arenas Valley. ~ Bob Ingraham photo

Arenas Valley offered not only hiking, but a lot of other unscheduled recreation for my rowdy friends and me. When we weren’t in school, we spent much of our time trying to murder sparrows with our BB guns, impaling beetles on cactus spines, blasting tomato cans and ant hills with “cherry bomb” and M-80 firecrackers, and brandishing potentially lethal yucca-stalk spears tipped with six-inch spikes hammered flat and filed to near-razor sharpness. We made “rockets” by wrapping the heads of wooden matches in aluminum foil and heating them to ignition with other matches. Once we took apart two or three 30-30 rifle cartridges, packed the powder from them into one cartridge case, hammered the bullet back into the case, and then heated the case with matches until the powder detonated impressively — and dangerously! All of us had bows and arrows and often had contests to see who could shoot an arrow highest into the sky, straight above. Dangerously straight above!

In the summer, during our three-month school holiday, we camped out a lot, usually in the Harpers’ back lot. I well remember the camaraderie we enjoyed around roaring campfires under that incredibly dark, starry New Mexico sky. We slept in sleeping bags in U.S. Army surplus pup tents; my mom fashioned my sleeping bags from a couple of warm blankets fastened with giant horse-blanket safety pins. When we awoke, we would crawl into the chilly dawn to dress — unforgettably! — in cold, stiff Levis, warm ourselves at the fire that James Harper would build for us, and dig into breakfast, in this order: crisp bacon, then fresh eggs fried in bacon grease, then bread fried in bacon grease and slathered with strawberry jam. We washed everything down with water from U.S. Army surplus canteens.

Sometimes we were “walk-in” patrons of the Copper Drive-In theatre, a mile or so away from our village on Highway 180. We’d get there about dusk, and sit on blankets in the front row. The manager indulged us (we didn’t have to pay, but we’d buy treats at the snack bar). After the films we’d fumble our way “home” to our pup tents in the dark, lighting our way with flashlights, sometimes blundering into cactuses and once surprising a jackrabbit who burst out of his hideyhole and scared us more than we scared him.

Youthful dramatics

During the day, we often staged elaborate scenarios involving “Cowboys” and “Indians” or “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” — I’m sorry to say that “Indians” never took the role of Good Guys; it was the heyday of the Hollywood Western, and Indians rarely got the better of the Good Guys. And the on-screen “Indians” were always white actors.

My favourite sidearms in this play were a pair of toy cap guns: matched, full-scale, white-handled Colt .45s. Sometimes, one of us would take on the role of the desperado Billy the Kid, who had actually been a kid like us, 70 years before, in nearby Silver City. Or one of us might play the role of Sheriff Pat Garrett, who in July, 1881 tracked down and killed Billy the Kid.

Here I am, mounted on Helen’s first horse, patient, stubborn, elderly Chubby, in my obligatory cowboy boots and Stetson, armed with realistic, matching toy Colt six-guns, a Christmas present from my parents. That’s Helen, awkwardly standing by. Chubby was not too many slow steps from the glue factory. ~ Ingraham Family photo

We weren’t fussy about historical accuracy: “Billy” gunned down “Pat” at least as often as “Pat” ambushed “Billy.” And, of course, the imaginary bullets caused no pain, and our heroic “deaths” were immediately followed by miraculous “resurrections”.

Boyhood heroes

We were partial to two famous stars of the “Westerns,” Roy Rogers and the singing cowboy, Gene Autry, and devoured every new issue of their comic books, two covers of which are pictured at the right. I preferred being “Roy,” but I could assume the role of “Gene,” if I had to (in other words, if someone else “got dibs” first!)

Roy lost my allegiance for a time when another singing cowboy, Rex Allen, visited Silver City in person, probably to promote his 1951 film, Silver City Bonanza, which is set in Silver City, Arizona (despite the fact that there is no Silver City, Arizona!), and was filmed at two locations in California.

Cowboy movie star Rex Allen

I doubt that Rex could ever have beaten Roy, or Gene, or even Billy the Kid in a fast-draw contest, because he crossed his arms to draw, grabbing the pistol on his left hip with his right hand, and vice versa. I didn’t question it then, but it seems to me now that such a fancy move in a real gunfight would have guaranteed the gunfighter a short trip to Boot Hill. It is simply unergonomic! Anyway, I started wearing my own toy Colts backwards too, and became adept at my own “Rex Allen fast draw,” at least in my mind. Could I have outgunned Billy the Kid? You bet, pardner!

We weren’t always just playing games…

Our games weren’t always just games. By age 10 or so, I had my own .22 rifle, a Remington Model 12 pump-action rifle with an octagonal barrel. A box of 50 long-rifle cartridges cost...50 cents! With my parents’ permission, I often plinked tin cans in our back yard, or hunted for jackrabbits or cottontails, usually without success, thankfully.¹

My friends and I might have seemed typecast for William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but we did have some redeeming qualities: We often sought civilized pursuits in neighboring Fort Bayard. I discuss that interesting community in another web page, “Remembering Fort Bayard, New Mexico”.

Arenas Valley has long since fallen on hard times, and no longer seems to be the community it was in the 1950s. Weeds and rusty trucks and cars grow where once there were gardens and orchards and flowers. Fences sag, paint peels, and house trailers sprout like invasive weeds where once there were just yuccas, jackrabbits, and the occasional gopher.