Chances are, many readers have been to Carlsbad Caverns numerous times. Below is is an excerpt from reporter Alvin Rucker’s column “Across the Trail of Billy the Kid” in the July 6, 1929 issue of the McCurtain Gazette published in Idabel, Oklahoma:
Tourists from Oklahoma who plan to drive over the Oklahoma City – Carlsbad Cavern route this vacation season should arrange travel schedule so as to reach Lubbock, Texas, at the end of the first day’s drive, and Carlsbad the second night. It is necessary to be at the cavern entrance at 10 o’clock a.m. in order to get through, for at that hour the “donters” start. The cavern is operated by the federal government. One daily trip is made through the cavern, about five hours being required. All go in a big mob, and for every 20 visitors there is one “donter.” It is the “donters’” business to go along and tell you to quit whatever you happen to be doing. It’s “don’t walk so fast;” “don’t walk so slow;” “don’t go in there;” “don’t touch the rocks;” “don’t carry away any of the formations.” When I got out of that cavern I was as obedient as a private in the Army. It is necessary for the guides continually to admonish the visitors in order to prevent accidents and to preserve the cavern in its pristine condition for succeeding generations. Much of the original beauty of Mammoth cave, Kentucky, been lost through wantonness on the part of visitors, and the government is wisely trying to preserve Carlsbad cavern. A portable typewriter ean not give even a hint of the awe-inspiring grandeur of the interior of Carlsbad cavern, and the best that I can do is to send you some pictures, but even photography is pitifully inadequate. The cavern is electrically lighted and trails are absolutely fool-proof. The great dining room where hot dinners are cooked and served is 650 feet under ground. It was the farthest I had ever been from heaven. The head guide pointed out a formation which, he said, had required 60,000,000 years to complete, after the cave was formed. A man from New York demanded a recount, but got no second. Sixty million years may a long time when compared with man’s allotment of three score and ten years on earth, but after all, 60,000,000 years is not even a sun-up in eternity. If Billy the Kid had known of that cave they wouldn’t have had him yet.
Literature issued in connection with the cavern states that the ascent is so gradual and slow that even the aged need not fear becoming fatigued in making the trip. I noticed, however, that a white-haired old gentleman from Maryland who was making the trip the day I was in the cavern panted like a prize fighter in the last round he got half way through, and he gave up. Next day I saw him in Roswell and he was all right. He said that he wouldn’t have become tired but for the fact that he had asthma and heart trouble. He sorry that he was not able to go clear through the cavern. I told him that in a few more years they would be running ambulances through the cavern for invalids and that he could make the trip then. That cheered him up.
Those who want to turn back before the journey is completed are permitted to do so with an escort at dining room, and the others go on. I stayed until the finish, but I had rather change four flat tires in a downpour of rain or beneath the burning sun of the Carrizozo desert than climb that last flight of 200 steps, after tramping for hours in the cavern. In coming out it is the last 1,000 miles that seems the hardest on old folks. Five hours is a long time to be out of God’s sunlight, during daylight hours. It seems like eternity. When I got out, I hurried to Carlsbad, 30 miles distant, and bought all the newspapers I could find, in order to see what had happened on earth while I was underground – it seemed so long. The dining room is operated as a private concession. The meals are cooked down there and there is a telephone in the dining room. The meals cost 75 cents and are worth the money. The cavern is probably the nearest bone-dry spot between the Rio Grande and the Canadian border.
Carlsbad cavern is winter resort for to the millions of Oklahoma bats that make the caves of Major county their homes during the summer. Bats are great tourists, according to batologists, who say they are exceeded in prodigious flights only by wild geese and flivver owners.
It is needless for Oklahomans to hasten to Juarez after visiting Carlsbad cavern, for they will be making and selling it in Juarez long after the vacation season is over. In Carlsbad, Juarez-bound tourists, pending the completion of the scenic cutoff, are directed to drive south to Pecos and then west to El Paso and Juarez, but if you take my advice you will do as Carlsbad citizens themselves do when they start to El Paso and Juarez – drive north to Roswell and then west over the highway scenic route. Stay in New Mexico as long as possible, not only because of the places of historical and topographical interest, but because of the wonderful highways. In New Mexico you pay 25 cents a gallon for gasoline, but the extra price goes on the highways, the tourist obtains more miles per gallon, and if time is an element he can drive 100 miles an hour, if his car will go that fast.
Southern New Mexico is a tourist’s paradise. The serpent-like Rio Pecos, the noisy Ruidoso, the Bonito, the Hondo and Tularosa flow through it; the Capitans, the Guadalupe, Sacramento and the Sierra Blanca rise above it; white desert sands glisten in it and over all is the sunny mantle and atmosphere of Mexico and Spain.
From Carlsbad drive 15 miles north on Highway No. 2 and stop at a lone filling station on the right side of the road. It is run by Frank Head of Konowa, Okla. Get Head to introduce you to John McKenzie, a cattle herder on the surrounding plains. McKenzie will be glad to take you up the road a few miles and show you the site of a forgotten adobe town and its abandoned cemetery – old Seven Rivers. Long before there was a railroad in New Mexico Seven Rivers was a boisterous cow town, and the hang-out for the Seven Rivers Warriors and L G. Murphy’s cowboys. Stage and freighters made old Seven Rivers a stopping place during the 15 years following the Civil war. Nothing remains now except the ruins of old adobe buildings, thousands of pieces of whiskey bottles, poker chips and revolver shells. John Dowe transported lumber on burros to old Seven Rivers and erected a frame saloon building. Among the adobe saloon buildings and other adobe houses the frame structure was so outstanding the knights and knaves of the plains literally shot it to pieces. McKenzie can tell you that there not a space that could be covered by the hand that was not perforated by revolver and rifle bullets. Have him take you to the old Seven Rivers cemetery, nearby, and you will see that the whooping, whiskey drinking, revolver shooting cowboys did not spare even the few tombstones when they were looking for targets.
The Pecos valley was to the cattle covered plains, what the Nile valley is to Egypt – the most fertile and desired section, and hundreds of thousands of longhorns once grazed in the valley. The herds were owned by kings who paid no tribute; they were guarded by men who acknowledged no master and who knew no home except the saddle. Drive on north to Roswell, 60 miles, but when five miles south of Roswell turn to the right in a grove of cottonwood trees that leads to several brick houses. That is the the old South Spring ranch headquarters where old John Chisum, cattle king of the Pecos valley, once lived in medieval splendor. On burro backs he brought trees from distant states and set out a great grove, nearly all of which is now gone. He built a great adobe castle with 20 rooms the remains of which can still be seen in the jungle of underbrush to the right. The great spring which gave name to the place has been so depleted by the drilling of irrigation wells that only a remnant remains. Following the Lincoln county war the ranch passed into the hands of the Hagerman family, pioneer railroad builders in New Mexico, and has since remained.
At Roswell, drive a few miles east to the Pecos river bridge and you will be in the area that comprised Pat Garrett’s ranch at the time he was sheriff of old Lincoln county and killed Billy the Kid. From Roswell drive 40 miles west on highway No. 366 across a mountain desert to the Hondo Trading Co.’s store, but instead of turning to the left, keep straight on 10 miles into the historic town of Lincoln, once the county seat of an area 200 miles square – old Lincoln county. Stop over night at the Boniot Inn. While you are listening to the phonograph playing the saga of Billy the Kid, look directly across the street at the old McSween-Tunstall store around which the cattlemen’s war raged. Adjacent on the west stood McSween’s great adobe of 15 rooms which the Murphy faction stormed and burned during a battle with McSween defenders led by Billy the Kid, 50 years ago. The heavy wooden shutters on the windows are still metal-lined to resist bullets, just as they were then. The McSween home and store were converted into forts during the five-day battle between the rival factions of cattlemen and their cowboys. Three of the men were either from or returned to Oklahoma at the end of the war. Some of the relatives of the three are very prominent in Oklahoma today. Employ Luna to walk with you from the east end of the mile-long old road that still serves as a street, and point out the old buildings and the rock fort that played such important parts of the Lincoln county war. The old Ellis house on the north side of the road, at the east end ot the street, is where Governor Lew Wallace, of Ben Hur fame, wrote the letter and kept the clandestine appointment with Billy the Kid and induced him to surrender. Have Luna point out to you the door jam in the Montana house where Billy the Kid carved his name. The letters are still there, after a lapse of a half century. Have Luna point out the mountain top, three quarters of a mile from the McSween store, from which Billy the Kid shot an enemy during the famous battle, the body rolling clear down the mountain side, where it is buried in an old cemetery, filled with the the bodies of men who died with their boots on. The two-story adobe building on the south side, at the west end of the street, was the old Murphy store, in the upper east of which Billy the Kid, while waiting to hanged, killed one of his guards, and then from of the east window of the room killed the other and escaped. The building is now the Lincoln public school building. Luna, your guide, witnessed the killing of one of the guards. Four miles west of Lincoln there still lives an aged Mexican, Ygnio Salazar, who was one of the fifteen defenders of the McSween home and store when the two buildings were stormed, one burned and the other looted, by the Murphy faction.
Drive back to the Hondo Trading Co.’s store and follow the south prong of Highway 366 through the beautiful Ruidoso and Tularosa canyons. On the left side of the road a few miles after passing Bonnell’s ranch you will see an old gentleman selling cider. He is George Coe. He owns 360 acres of irrigated land and has a lease on several thousand acres of adjacent mountain land on which he grazes cattle. Notice that the first finger of his right hand is gone and the hand shattered. He was a participant in the Lincoln county war and was shot by Buckshot Roberts at Blazer’s Mill, which you will pass as you drive down the road. At Blazer’s mill talk with the storekeeper, J. H. McNatt. He used to be a cowhand around Ryan and other southern Oklahoma towns. He knows everybody in Oklahoma – whom they married and whom they killed. Just before reaching the Mescalero Indian reservation there is a spring on the south side of the road. Stop and drink out of it. Fifty years ago, Fred Waite, Jim French, John Middleton of Oklahoma and Henry Brown, with a dozen members of a posse, headed by Billy the Kid, stopped there to drink, with a fatal result. At Tularosa turn south to Alamogordo and there be certain to fill the gasoline tank. Instead of following highway No. 366 as the bus does, follow state highway No. 3 across the Alamogordo desert, sixty-two miles between filling stations or other signs of habitation. The road is fine and mountains on the distant desert rim soon come into view. When you reach the White sands, park the ear and climb to the top of the seemingly endless dunes that stretch a hundred miles away. You are not apt to get lost unless you become snow-blinded, as you can follow your tracks back to the car. Stop all night at Las Cruces, an American city populated by Mexicans, and next morning drive out to Pat Garrett’s grave, and then five miles south of Mesilla Park, a collection of filling stations. At Mesilla Park turn west on a good dirt road and go another five miles to Old Mesilla, a dreamy Mexican adobe town with ruins that resemble pueblos.That building the big elephant painted on the side is the old court house in which Billy the Kid was tried and sentenced to be hanged for killing Sheriff Brady at Lincoln, during the cattlemen’s war. It was later the Elephant Saloon and is now a Mexican pool room. After you tire of old Mesilla, return to the highway and drive forty-five miles south through El Paso and to the American end of the International Bridge.
Old Lea County, N.M. 