Old West | R. Doug Wicker — Author

Tag Archives: Old West

June 24, 2013 · 5:35 am

The Salt Flats of the San Elizario Salt Wars

We did some touring this past weekend with our second-eldest grandchild. On Saturday we drove to Carlsbad Caverns through the infamous salt flats of the San Elizario Salt Wars and passed by the highest point in Texas at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. As always, you get to see the adventure from the comfort of your air conditioned home:

Hard to believe, but in the Old West salt was a commodity worth starting a war. Salt was badly needed in the Chihuahua Desert for everything from preserving meats, to mining silver (using the patio process), to keeping both man and animal alike alive by replenishing the salts lost to sweat in the 100°+ (38° Celsius) temperatures of summer. Live stock simply could not exist in these extreme conditions without it.

At the base of the Guadalupe Mountains some 100 miles east of San Elizario, Texas, lie the vast salt flat pans near what is now the town of Salt Flat, Texas. Starting in the 1870s a war broke out for control of this valuable resource — a war that would become nationally famous as the San Elizario Salt War. This uprising saw the only instance in history in which a band of twenty Texas Rangers actually surrendered to a mob.

The object of this fascinating bit of Old West history still lies upon the ground along U.S. Route 180 / U.S. Route 62 between El Paso and Carlsbad. Taking a look at the pictures, it’s hard to conceive that a commodity carried cheaply in any grocery store was once worth human lives:

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Tagged as Old West, photography, R. Doug Wicker, Salt Flat, San Elizario Salt Wars, travel

May 29, 2013 · 5:35 am

High Chaparral and Rifleman Country

The drive through southeastern Arizona and along the U.S. border with Mexico in southern New Mexico brings with it numerous reminders of the Wild, Wild West. That’s especially true if you grew up watching Westerns on television. Depart Bisbee, Arizona, southeast bound on Arizona 80 to Douglas, Arizona. From Douglas, continue northward on Arizona 80 (formerly U.S. Route 80) into New Mexico, where the highway becomes New Mexico 80. Shortly after passing into New Mexico you will find yourself at the intersection for New Mexico State Road 9, which will ultimately lead you to El Paso.

What, you may ask, is so special about this route? The answer is simple: For the most part is parallels the old El Paso and Southwestern Railroad line (also known briefly as the Arizona and South Eastern Railroad), and in some stretches of New Mexico 9 the road is actually built atop the old railroad grade.

Not only will you see signs of the long-abandoned rail system, you’ll also find alongside what appears to be many of the Old West telegraph poles that accompanied the line — beautifully preserved in the hot, dry climate of the Chihuahuan Desert. Many poles not only retain their glass insulators, but some even have remnants of telegraph wire hanging from them.

Now for a bit of television history:

Southeastern Arizona is High Chaparral country. The mythical cattle ranch of Big John Cannon was supposedly not far from here — about midway between Tucson and Tombstone — but the series also dealt with Cochise , Gernomino, and their Chiricahua Apache tribe. That would appear to place the High Chaparral Ranch much closer to the Dragoon Mountains than to either Tombstone of Tuscon.

If you watched The Rifleman (by far the best of the old, thirty-minute, black-and-white Westerns of the late ’50s to early ’60s), then you might place the fictional North Fork, New Mexico somewhere near Santa Fe in the north of that state. That’s unless you’re paying attention to other references made during the series — references frequently made to southern New Mexico towns such as Las Cruces, Silver City, and Lordsburg. that would place North Fork much closer to the U.S.-Mexican Border in the extreme southern half of the state.

So, what does High Chaparral and Rifleman country look like? It looks a bit like this (click on an image to bring up an album of larger versions):