Memoirs of Kelly, NM and the Mines
The Beginning and The Early Days (From the Lion's Jaw):
After my father returned from the Civil War he was appointed as Marshal in the troubled area of Missouri, Southeastern Kansas and Indian Territory. He married and had four children. After his first wife died he moved to the frontier, then New Mexico, in the 1870's. General Lew Wallace, governor of the territory, put him in charge of peacemaking in the surging, lawless Western Socorro County. When I asked him about these difficult assignments in country where Colt and Winchester had ruled, he said he did not carry a gun because he knew that he could not out-shoot the gun-slingers of the day and was thus safer under the prevalent ethics of not shooting an unarmed man. Apparently he made out all right. I remember once when he jailed thirty Indians who had gotten high on White Man's whiskey. He put them in an adobe lock-up with a silly little window. Feeding thirty hungry Indians was more than the little town of Kelly could handle, but by a strange quirk of fate their horses were left in an adjoining corral and they had all vanished by morning. Although my father was not expert with a Colt 45, his cousin, Wild Bill Hickock, was a crack shot and became famous as Marshal of Dodge City.
My mother, Manta J. Givens, was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on the Wabash River October 24, 1858. Her family migrated to Kansas and homesteaded in Eastern Kansas near the Neosho River. Mother taught school in southeastern Kansas about the same time that my father was a Marshal in that area, following his return from the Civil War.
These were difficult times for peace-loving people. It was still frontier country. Added to the hardships of pioneering were the still inflamed passions of the Great War and the presence of hordes of lawless men in neighboring, but not neighborly, Missouri and Indian Territory. To add to the ferment came the cattle drivers from Texas to the newly established railheads at Abilene and at Dodge City. As a small boy visiting my grandparents in Kansas, I noted a shotgun over the mantel that bore the initials AHS burned into the stock. I was told that they stood for "Anti Horse-thief Society" of which my gentle, peace-loving grandfather was a member. It was a kind of vigilante movement, which had its day of usefulness until law and order were established in the area.
My mother and father were married in Socorro, New Mexico, on 23 January 1883. He was still a lawman, but only part-time now, for he was mining in the booming camp of Kelly in the Magdalenas. They built a log cabin in Mill Canyon under the shadow of the 10,000-foot peak of Old Baldy. Friends, including Dr. Mitchell, who officiated at my birth (8 September 1885) and the Bichairds, who also built cabins down the canyon near what is now the Mule Shoe Ranch, so we had a little settlement.
One thing that attracted folks to Mill Canyon was an ample supply of wood to stoke the charcoal pits that my father built to furnish reducing fuel to a crude smelter at South Camp some six miles distant. Father owned a couple of silver mines, and when silver was in demand, he mined silver. When it was not in demand he served as a peace officer, butcher or whatever helped pay the bills. A man of principle, he refused to apply for a disability pension from his Civil War service, because he said that fighting for his country had been his privilege and duty. Mother had been a Kansas school teacher, and insisted her little boy wear a kilt – until I embarrassed her by proving to the miners that I was not a little girl.
Wild turkey, deer and other game were abundant; also bears and mountain lions. My mother said she could hear the lions scream frequently at night as they prowled about. One day this civilized school marm looked out to check on me playing on the mountain trail and saw a mountain lion trotting along the path towards me. She dashed out with a broom, her only handy weapon, and shooed the lion off. Then she scooped me up in her arms and carried me inside. Delivered like Daniel from the lion’s jaw.
About the house - it was a real cabin about 24 square feet with round logs. Windows were glazed with oil paper, no picture windows those. The logs were chinked with smaller timber and mud, and there were cracks where the mud had fallen away. In winter storms the snow used to drift through cracks to the bed my brother and I occupied -- fortunately, not enough to make snowballs. Our parents’ bed occupied the corner back of us. In another corner a cast iron stove provided heat and cooking surfaces. The oven often served for thawing dynamite that had crystallized in the cold, to an unstable, dangerous state.
One night a skunk strolled in through the open door to investigate. My father threw a bootjack at it and the animal departed, leaving a good trail behind. We would have moved, but there was no place to go. You can get used to many things, but skunk odor is hard to ignore.
Compensations were the smell of wood fires; the sight of storms drifting up the valley below us with great sheets of water driving against the rugged slopes across the canyon and the abundant wild flowers that appeared miraculously in the spring.
I learned years later, that when I was about three years old, a war party of Apaches had come to our area, The men-folk put provisions in one of the mines and maintained an alert. They also went on patrol and those who were not on patrol slept in their clothes to be ready to protect us if the Indians came to Kelly. The Indians had killed some Mexicans and burned their wagons a few miles away but around the bend of the mountains out of sight of Magdalena Mountain, which they considered sacred.
On the side of the mountain was a huge image of a beautiful woman’s face, composed of a huge bare slide of reddish rock for the cheek bordered by bushes and cliffs to give a Grecian profile. Tradition said it had appeared when an Indian girl pursued by a too ardent lover had jumped off a cliff to her death. They would not kill people in the sight of that image. It is still there. The Mexicans were superstitious too and bared their heads when they passed by on the road to Magdalena.
When the little smelter shut down, that source of income disappeared. We moved into Kelly, the center of the mining activity and much closer to mines in which my father had an interest. I was 4, and my brother Allen was 2. These mines were higher, at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. My father continued to work these claims, commuting daily by horseback.
I enjoyed going up to the mine where my father and the men were working. Sometimes one would take me inside. I liked the cool darkness and smell of the ore, except after they had been blasting. One day I found a stick of dynamite outside and I sat on the dump pinching off little bits and hitting them with a hammer against a car wheel. A healthy "pop" resulted. My father came out and horrified, saw me at my deadly play. He grabbed me and gave me a good tanning, and after that I left the dynamite to those who knew better how to use it.
Memoirs of a Miner, Magdalena, NM
Sally Parsons forwarded us the memoirs of her father who was born in 1885 in Kelly, NM and lived there until going to prep school in Socorro. Thank you Sally for sharing this history. Her words of her father are in the sections below:
Part I: The Beginning and The Early Days (From the Lion's Jaw)
Part II: Lessons from Mule Drivers and The Uncertainties of Mining.
Part III: School Days.