Southern New Mexico’s cowboy novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes surely rates as one of the most eccentric authors ever to inhabit the state. Seems everyone who knew him had a story or two about his quirky behavior.
Even now, I occasionally run into someone in Santa Fe who remembers Gene when he lived and wrote briefly in Tesuque, just north of town, during the 1930s. Inevitably, they’ll tell me of some odd thing he said or did.
Gene grew up working as a
horse wrangler on ranches in the Tularosa Basin and along the Jornada
del Muerto. His father briefly served as agent for the Mescalero
Apaches.
The country was still
part of the Wild West, and the young Rhodes did his part in making it
wooly. He was constantly in fistfights and shootouts. Late in life, he
would say that in his youth, he had witnessed 13 men killed.
The curious thing about
this feisty horse wrangler was that he loved to read. When not working,
he always had a book in his hand. Most often it was a paper-bound
classic ordered through the mail and paid for with coupons that came in
those days with each sack of Bull Durham tobacco.
When traveling, Rhodes
usually carried a gunny sack full of books tied to his saddle. Once he
rode 25 miles in a snowstorm reading Shakespeare and scarcely noticing
the cold. He would sit for hours in an old tin bathtub, with his nose
buried in a book...
Gene owned a hardscrabble
outfit in the San Andres Mountains, near the edge of the White Sands.
He had an ongoing feud with large rancher Watson Ritch, son of a former
territorial governor. Rhodes claimed that in time, he had eaten 181 of
Rich’s cattle.
On several occasions,
Rhodes tried to force Rich into a gunfight, but failed. Years after Gene
had left New Mexico, he learned that Watson Ritch intervened to bail
his widowed mother (the elder Mrs. Rhodes) out of a financial scrape.
Gene wrote his old foe a letter of apology and declared, “The hatchet is
buried!’
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| “The Four Rannyhands:” Harry Carey, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Fred Stone, and Charles M. Russell eating grub at Carey’s ranch, 1923 |
In 1906, Gene fled New
Mexico under mysterious circumstances and went to live for the next
quarter-century in his wife’s home town of Apalachin, N.Y. Several
different stories suggest the reason for his hasty departure.
One is that his habit of
rustling stock finally caught up with him, and he left the territory
just a step ahead of the sheriff. Another tale has it that he bent his
gun barrel over the head of a local tough named Kentucky Hargis, and
that incident prompted him to leave.
The most widely accepted
theory holds that his flight was prompted by a fight at Oro Grande, a
mining town on the road between Alamogordo and El Paso.
There, Rhodes got into a
fight with a large man in a crap game. They adjourned out back to finish
their argument and, being outsized, the smaller horse wrangler evened
the odds by breaking several beer bottles over his opponent’s head.
Thinking he had killed the fellow, so the story goes, Gene headed east
before he could be arrested.
During his long exile in
New York, he wrote and published eight novels and 30 short stories. He
always said that he dreamed night and day of his old life in New Mexico,
and that his writings about the glorious West provided him a measure of
comfort...
Gene Rhodes died in 1934 and is buried inside the boundaries of the White Sands Missile Range. One of his books, Pasó Por Aquí, is regarded as a classic of New Mexican literature.
Gene Rhodes died in 1934 and is buried inside the boundaries of the White Sands Missile Range. One of his books, Pasó Por Aquí, is regarded as a classic of New Mexican literature.
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