Preservation at the expense of History

Management of Values

Preservation at the expense of History

Darlene’s memory

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            New Mexico pioneer, Fred McCauley, was known to say, “I’d rather be a pig farmer in hell than have a farm at Redrock.”

            His contention was not lost among listeners. The narrow valley at Redrock is prone to flooding and years of effort can be wiped out in a single event. As kids, we all knew about the flood of 1941 even though many of us didn’t come along for a decade. The flood was both monstrous and devastating. Accounts of hearing it come were akin to the onrush of multiple trains with the breaking and crashing of trees.

            Although subsequent floods were larger, the 1941 Gila flood impacted more people on the basis of concentration of farming and the absence of protective structures. The interesting thing, though, is the assessment by the descendents of those people who endured the event. It wasn’t the raw exposure to nature that cut short the lives and expectations of those generations.

            It was government and the culprit was not local or state government. The foe was invariably … federal government policies.

            The prelude

            The call came out of the blue.

            “Where are you goin’?” Hank asked without identifying himself.

“All right, where are you and where did I miss you?” was my response knowing immediately who it was.

My childhood friend had seen me on a cross street in Deming as I made my way to the courthouse to visit with the county manager and to declare cattle numbers to the assessor’s office.

“Call me when you finish,” was his short order instruction in a conversation that lasted less than a minute.

I wound up at his kitchen table with his wife Nancy’s extended family eating ribs, beans, potatoes, and fresh tortillas. The meal was right out of ranch history as if it we had broke for lunch at a 1959 New Mexico branding complete with blue skies and bawling calves.

I had never met Nancy’s mother, Mrs. Blakey, but I knew who she was. I knew generally where she and her deceased husband, Bud, had ranched as I knew she was a sister of the second generation McCauley clan from White Signal.

 She informed me it was my grandfather, Albert Wilmeth, who met her family at the depot in Deming with a team of horses and a wagon to haul their possessions to Grant County in 1904. I questioned her about the likelihood of it being Grandpa Albert in 1904 since he would have only been 12 years old and a hundred miles from home by himself with a team and a wagon.

“It was your grandfather, Albert Wilmeth,” was her terse response.

We laughed and told stories of our family and with its extended outcross connections. Mrs. Blakey’s son, Ray, her daughter, Mary Ethel, Mary Ethel’s husband, Randy, and Ray’s daughter, “little” Nancy held court as Hank and I smiled and filed conditional interrogatories. It was a homecoming of sorts predicated on pioneering New Mexicans who are forever linked to the nebulous government term “history value”.

We are a true and original family of Grant County history.

When the Gila River McCauleys were discussed, Mrs. Blakey suggested she would claim unconditional ties to “Uncle Fred” and “Hap’s bunch” and then (one must assume) conditional ties thereafter. She then informed the gathering that Albert and Sabre Wilmeth’s only daughter, Mary Effie, had wed Hap and that Mary was my aunt.

Peace and tranquility were further assured.

Nearly all stops were pulled as we discussed successes and failures, killings and marriages, births and deaths, humor and darkness, family and enemies, and then and now. Central to it all that captivated the dreams that gave rise to seven generations was this big land. We are forever linked to its singular foundation.

If that isn’t the value of history … nothing is.

Preservation at the expense of History

There is a problem, though.

The entire premise of federal land agency management has been limited to the condition of current production or less. That is a devastating standard to stake lives and futures.

On a broader scale, there is not a business venture anywhere that has thrived when locked into the status quo with changing growth restraints. In New Mexico, that condition has been created by the endemic, utter fascination of the federal government’s zeal for land ownership and its resulting and crippling management tactics.

In state ownership, market place relationships exist and mutually beneficial relations have been created and perpetuated. That relationship is at arm’s length. On the whole, state government hasn’t stifled enterprise development nor has it thrust itself into dominion status. The relationship is not normally even discussed and land stewards would most likely fight for its continuation. Both parties benefit from mutual successes.

The federal relationship is completely different.

 Ranchers universally equate their relationship with the federal government on a scaled basis. That scale, measured from bad to good, does not reveal mutually beneficial outcomes. The measure plots oppression and our eventual destruction.

That is a terrible predicament.

This matter will emerge from every conversation within historic family meetings. It wasn’t the floods, or the massacres, or the deaths of infants that incur the most vigorous wrath. Those matters were issues of life and the need to simply overcome. They are placed in simple juxtaposition to the humor, the skill, or the respect assigned to those who have gone before us.

The tyranny of the federal land agencies is expansive. The lack of market conditions and any foundational mandate to honor private property rights has given rise to their self assigned mission to protect. That "protection" has created indecision, decadence, misuse of resources and environmental chaos. For many years they have disallowed the private capitalization of improvements, barred parallel enterprise development, and splintered customs and culture.

This has also contributed directly to the devastation of historic families.

The service and the reminder

Yesterday, we gathered to celebrate the life of Uncle Hap and Aunt Mary’s second child to survive infancy.

Darlene McCauley was born March 6, 1940 and she now rests on hallowed ground at the Mesa Cemetery at Cliff. She is the third of the Albert and Sabre Wilmeth grandchildren to mark the conclusion of full life. Her obituary describes in written form the events of her life that were discussed and shared in expanded words among family and friends following the internment.

Darlene brought us together.

She brought us home to that wonderful country that attracted our great and great-great grandparents over a century ago. A number of us drove south along the Gila River to the mouth of the Mangus to revisit where, arguably, Darlene spent the happiest days of her life as a child. We remembered many things both directly and through recollections of others.

We reached out and touched each other.

I know Darlene would agree that being part of this historic family is one of the few earthly things that have lasting significance. In our various endeavors, it remains.

In our journeys, our relationship with God has become ever more important, but there was an immoveable connection between Him and where he placed us. Perhaps we suffered a bit of misconception of equating Him with our surroundings, but, nonetheless, that relationship formed a bridge to Him that now stands paramount.

There are consequences.

We have an unabashed assessment that our stewardship and impact on our surroundings is important. We reject the notion that an absentee owner knows more than we do and must continually guide, moderate, and direct our actions in order to save these surroundings.

How dare them, or, it, as the matter pertains!

There are too many that now suspect that the value of history has been morphed from its original premise and has little to do with the blood, effort, and lives of our founding predecessors. We are absent from the process. Federal resource management plans are being formulated accelerating the constraints that have already crippled an entire, epic way of life. History is being transformed through administrative action from being a managed value to being a nebulous corruption of generational displacement. It now constitutes whatever a special interest wants and leaves in its wake contempt for its true meaning.

What we are learning, though, is that our earthly salvation rests solely within families, the locals who actually have a stake in the outcome of lives.

We must make the value of history come alive in our midst and in the actions of Congress. No longer can we rely on someone else to do it.

We are important, and we must assure future generations an opportunity to make these surroundings as fruitful and healthy as God promised and … intended.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “’Nearly all stops’ was conditional on avoiding discussion of a particular shooting!”