Skip to main content

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.














Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more