Grand Elders

Impressions

Grand Elders

Portraits of Time

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            The quest was to come up with pictures of the four horse trainers.

            The words were one thing, but without a visual impression only half the story was told. CJ had seen the article and thought it would go with something she was working on, and the need was to bring it to life. The order was standard.

            Make them 5” X 7” and 300 pixels!

            The calls went out. My dad had the one of Clarke, Uncle Roy, and their young Martin friend. Jerry had sent me the one of his dad when we did the Henry Woodrow story, but it had not been retained so a call was made again to their home place along the ditch just south of the mouth of Mogollon Creek. The one of Big Boy was more uncertain. In order, Rena was called who said Tommy Drummond would have it. It turned out that Delie had it and he sent the print in the mail.

            We caught Ramon at the sale barn in Deming. He brought Paloma and the horse was made part of the image.

            And, then, there they were, the four horsemen.

            Impressions

            Those of us who know what it was like to experience a quiet house are becoming rarer by the year. The inference, of course, was time before television. There was radio, but when KSIL went off the air early in the evening the options were slim. The reception in southwest New Mexico were meager. Those were the years before transistor radios and the discovery of KOMA, Oklahoma City. Looking back, it was a marvelous era when we actually talked and listened.

            From early times, my preference was to be at Cliff or on the Mangus with my grandparents. In the former, the kitchen table was the center of the evening social world. In the latter, the porch out the kitchen door of the little board and batten house was where we sat in the summer and watched the day come to an end.

We talked and swatted flies.

We got to know our grand elders in ways that now seem foreign. Their presence and their communication were not influenced by anything or anybody. There were no critiques or interpretations of what they said. We got to know them on our own and their counsel and influences were often the most important parts of our early life.

There were other impressions, too.

On the Mangus, there was a picture on the wall of an Indian maiden dancing around a fire. Her dress was green. Her hair was raven. The background was dark just like it was after sundown and the fire was the center of her attention. The image could be considered mysterious or at least it was to the young eyes and mind of this memory. It became part of that home and embedded in memory.

At Cliff, the comparable impressions were more numerous. Sometime in the ‘30s a photographer visited the Gila Valley and created a number of wide-angle portrait type pictures that have become true family treasures. Three hang in my tack room above the cowhide covered chaise and the wood stove.

Two of them are branding scenes.

One of those is at the head of Sacaton Mesa above Rain Creek. There is no corral. Rather, the cattle were held up in what the Californios would describe as holding rodear. Outriders had to shape them while ropers drug calves to a fire. The names of the riders, posed for the picture, are written on the back. My great grandfather, the one who arrived from Texas in 1888 with cattle branded PIT on the left rib, and his two sons always hold my attention. There they were with little idea that someday this picture would capture such attention.

The second picture is another branding on the bench above the creek at the 916.

In this case, my great-great grandfather, the one that arrived from Texas in 1884 with cattle branded 916 on the left rib, and his grandsons hold center attention. The cattle are being held by riders against a fence. The crew is not posing. They are working. There is a dipping vat in the picture which had implications with cattle driven from Texas in the preceding years. There is a bay horse tied to a big alligator juniper that is carrying a saddle that I know well. It has a Cross Triangle carved in the swirl of fleurs.

If you concentrate, it wouldn’t be hard to hear the sounds of the branding. It wouldn’t be hard to smell the smells, either. It certainly wouldn’t be hard to feel the June sun on your face or hear the creek under the bench. The points on the mountains looming behind and above were crystal clear.

Its wide framed vista is timeless.

Portraits of Time

The third picture is taken at the top of the first rise as the road leaves the river above the Rice headquarters. It is all there in panorama the way it once was in the best of times.

The barn, the orchards, the granary, the house, the fields are combined to be the creation that started with nothing in the waning years of the 19^th Century. It is all there.

Given our choice of circumstances, there are more of us who would never have left that place and its backdrop. It taught us to love something we could never possess. It promised a way of life we glimpsed and embraced through our surroundings, in our grand elders, and in our imaginations.

That vista captured us and held our attention. It still does. It was a better time regardless how it was measured. The artist that took those pictures is unknown, but his work remains outstanding. The images stand alone in importance.

They represent … Home.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Asked where home is the reaction remains, “Cliff.”