Travels with Cooper (1): Silver City

 The Mimbres Indians once lived in what is Silver City, New Mexico, although they did not call themselves, "Mimbres", since that is a Spanish word meaning "willows", found there along the stream banks.   For around a thousand years, beginning about 200 A.D., they lived lived on those copper and silver-laced hills and marshes.

They made beautiful pottery, now also called "Mimbres", at about the time my ancestors were grunting and throwing stones at each other, somewhere in Europe.  About the time I was born, in the 1930s, their pottery was discovered by miners pecking and picking at everything to find silver, and the local tradition says that their pottery was used for target practice by the boys carrying firearms to protect themselves from each other.

For a time, the area was an Apache campsite.

The Spanish, lusting for silver and gold, did mining for copper in the area in the late 1500 and early 1600s.  After the American Civil War, settlers pushing west discovered silver, and Silver City was established in 1870, and the man who laid out the streets for his new mining find never saw the town he designed because he was killed in an Apache raid.
Mari and I decided last Fall that we wanted to take our new/used camper to Silver City, so this last week we convinced our new/used dog, Cooper, that he wanted to see Silver City, too, and off we went!

In our exploration of Silver City's main street, named after the man who designed the town he never saw, Mari found a fabric store, so Cooper and I went for a walkabout, and we discovered that Billy the Kid had been arrested for the first time in Silver City, and in honor of that grand fact, had built a replica of Billy's cabin.  That is what the guy at the door told me, and I believed him:  I did not want to get shot.

Billy lived simply when he was not shooting people and robbing banks and getting arrested.  Billy's pottery was not up to Mimbres' standards, so nobody shot it to pieces.  Eventually, somebody shot Billy instead, and that is what caused the good people of Silver City to remember the time when Billy, whose name was not Billy at the time, had been arrested for throwing rocks at a Chinese man, and for stealing butter from a rancher.  Too much is too much!  Throwing rocks, maybe; but not stealing butter.

Mari's Dad once asked me to read a passage from a Norwegian book he had found that said his Norwegian ancestors had been thrown out of Scotland, I think it was, for stealing tubs of butter and lard.

I would like to believe that somewhere in Scotland there is a simple log house furnished as the Scots would like to remember it, as a memorial to Mari's ancestors who stole tubs of butter and lard, but perhaps not.  They may have been camping in the longboat they came in.

We found an eating establishment on John Bullard's main street, which said that they had a semi-abandoned patio in back, overlooking the Big Ditch, where Cooper could roam free and could not cast a stain on their clientele.

Cooper, as it turns out, is a good traveler, but an escape artist.  He has not yet found a harness that he cannot duck out of, when that becomes necessary.  Like Billy the Kid, he is establishing his own trail of escapes from captivity.

He does not go far.

He just wants to notify us.