Silver City & Albuquerque

Here are some of Mother's memories of Silver City and Albuquerque, NM.
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After Boyd and family moved to Silver City Boyd got very interested in geology, and mining as Silver City was built as a mining community. The Santa Rita Copper Mine is to the southeast of Silver City and has been mined for several hundred years. Indians were mining there before the white man came. The site listed below has an excellent history for the area where the mine is.
http://www.southernnewmexico.com/Articles/Southwest/Grant/SantaRita-Thetownthatvani.html
Before long Boyd was prospecting for his own mine. He had a turquoise mine for a while in the Burro Mountains to the southwest of Silver City. He got quite a bit of good turquoise out of it and made many turquoise buttons for his wife and girls to use on their clothes. He polished lots of pieces of turquoise to be used on necklaces and in rings. I remember Mother, Catherine having what seemed like lots and lots of turquoise when I was a girl but don’t think it was as much as I thought it was when I got older. Mother did let me have one piece that I took to a Navajo silversmith when I was 17 and had made into a ring. I wore it constantly for years and years. It needs some repair work now so I can wear it again. Sarah, Janice and I divided the turquoise and all of the 1920’s though 1940’s costume jewelry that she and Gram left to us.
For several years Granddad, Boyd, was partners with a couple of other prospectors and they had different mines mostly in the Burro Mountains. They went to places called White Signal, Alma (now a ghost town and not named after my grandmother), Shakespeare, (also a ghost town), all of which are in the Burro Mountain area near Silver City, NM. The Burros are high desert, shrub growth with juniper and pinion trees very similar to what we have here where I live on the West Mesa area west of Rio Rancho, and Albuquerque, NM. There are lots of rolling hills that tend to drop off into dry arroyos that can run full of water when a rain storm comes. Those rains are apt to bring all kinds of rocks and ore down from higher up when they happen. Gold, silver, turquoise, copper, and a few other ores can be found there in small amounts. I don’t think there were any huge mining claims there just small ones that a person or family might seek out a living from if they worked at it real hard. This was during the Depression and with all his health problems Granddad couldn’t get much in the way of work to feed his family with so he tried mining. If he actually made any money with it I couldn’t say but it did seem to save his life. The doctors in Texas told him he had about six months to live but by going to New Mexico and living mostly outside in the desert seemed to help and he lived for another 16 years.
Mother was able to find the general area where the Elks Tooth Mine was that Granddad and a partner worked for a while in the 1930’s. This would have been when she and Daddy moved there in 1970. When Lee and I lived in Silver City from 1971 to 1973 we explored that area a lot. For a while Daddy, Robert Barnett, had a mining claim filed in that area probably in the 1980’s. At about the same time, Mother’s cousin, Rex Green filed a couple of mining claims there, too.
In the 30’s when Granddad was mining there he would live out there in a tent all week and work while Gram and their three daughters lived in Silver City. On Friday evening Gram and the girls would drive out and stay with him until Sunday morning when they would go back to Silver City for church. Gram and Granddad helped start the Church of Christ that they went to in Silver. I remember reading a book written by a woman who was the wife of one of the preachers hired by the church. She and her husband were from back east somewhere and she seemed to think they had moved to one of the most remote places on earth. Gram had bought one of her books after she wrote it. But it was quite funny in many places and I do think she learned to like Silver, at least a little bit.
Mother told me many stories about living in Silver City and about the mining camp at the Elks Tooth (There are two teeth on a bull elk that are almost pure ivory and are valuable as ivory is. Most hunters that hunt elk will pull the ivory teeth and keep them. A lot of them are made into jewelry.) At the Elks Tooth mine Granddad used a contraption he called the Groundhog to help with the mining. All prospectors and miners back then would make different things to help them get the gold ore out of the dirt. Most were screens and shaker boxes that rocked the dirt back and forth to let the gold fall through so the dirt and other rocks could be separated out and discarded. Granddad and his partner made the Groundhog out of running gears of an old car. They would put a couple of shovel fulls of small rocks and dirt into a box that would be shaken allowing the smaller gravel and hopefully gold fall through into smaller boxes or screens where it could be looked at to see if there was gold. They had rough, rubber mats under the screen to catch any gold that could be found.
He, also, did some gold mining using the traditional gold pan held in a stream of water that allowed the user to swirl the pan allowing the sand and dirt to be siphoned off as the gold would be heavier than the dirt. I have a gold pan that may have been Granddads or it might have been Daddy’s. Mother wasn’t clear on who it had belonged to.
At this camp and at others Granddad would have problems with the native wildlife coming in to help themselves to his food and other gear. At one camp he found he could put his can of milk that he used in his coffee in a fork of the tree that shaded the camp and it would stay cool as well as being handy when needed. Only the milk started to disappear faster than it should have. After several days of careful watching Granddad saw a small squirrel had discovered the can of milk and learned to tip the can just enough to get a drink of milk then when it let it go the can would return to the correct place in the tree.
Another time Granddad said there was a coyote started hanging around trying to steal scraps of food. They thought it was a female that had a litter of pups somewhere that she was feeding. For some reason she stole on of Granddad’s leather gloves and they would see her carrying it around. They never did figure out if she did it cause she liked him or as a toy for her pups or just because she could. They said it was very much like a tame dog would do.
And another time they had a mountain lion or cougar start hanging around their camp. They saw the big cat tracks lots of time and could see from the tracks that the cat was watching them from just out of sight many times. They were mining in an old mine shaft at that time and frequently there would be the tracks of the cougar in the tunnel when they would go back in the morning, and at other times they thought the cat was hanging around the entrance to the tunnel while they were in there. No, Granddad didn’t seem to be afraid of any of the wild animals that came around. Actually he was the kind of person who might have been a wildlife conservationist or naturist in this day and age. He liked and respected all of nature and her animals and learned as much as he could about nature teaching it to Alma and his daughters and anyone else that wanted to learn.
This was the depression era and they didn’t always have the best food so Granddad would kill rabbits for them to eat when he got a chance as well as a deer in the fall each deer season. Silver City has always been know as a good area for hunting mule deer, white tail deer, turkeys, and elk, as well as bear and cougar. One day he was talking to some friends when they spotted a jack rabbit sitting off a ways from them. One of the friends told Granddad he couldn’t hit the rabbit with a rock so of course Boyd had to take the dare. He selected his rock and threw it at the rabbit hitting it and killing. He had played baseball as a boy and I think he played on a baseball team some in Silver City and was good at throwing baseballs so it was no surprise he hit the rabbit. I am sure it made them a good supper that night. Mother said that they would boil the rabbit and then make a stew or fry it.
Mother said they had lots of friends who were living in the Burro Mountains and mining during this time. One of them was named Valle Tulloch (I am not sure of the spelling) and his wife. They dug into a hillside and built a room to live in. They added a front wall and a roof to keep the dirt from sifting down. They had a wood stove, a couch, and a table and chairs, and a bed in the room. They hung canvas from a wooden roof in the room to keep out rain. They had a large, furry, white cat to help keep down the mice, that would visit them each night after they went to bed during warm summer nights when the door was left open for cool air. Valle and his wife got in the habit of reaching down from the bed and petting the cat as it walked by in the dark. One night the moon was bright and he looked down after he had petted the cat a couple of times and realized he was petting a skunk. The skunk didn’t seem to mind and they wondered how many times he had petted it on other nights without even realizing it wasn’t the cat.
One day this same couple had gone to Silver City for supplies and when they came back their nice, snug home in the hillside hole was a wreak. Tracks showed that a mountain lion had come through the window. It had got into a large can of shortening, ripped open a bag of flour, and bit into several cans of food. Could it have been the lion that Granddad had seen around his camp? No one will ever know.
I’m not sure but this might have been the same couple that Mother told another story of. One day the wife had re-arranged the furniture in the house. By now they had a dresser with a large mirror on it like was common back then. That night they went to bed and during the night the husband woke up. There was a full moon shining through the window and when the husband sat up in bed he saw a naked man staring back at him. He grabbed the shotgun he kept beside of the bed and shot the stranger. Only then did he realize he had shot his reflection in the mirror. His wife just laughed and laughed at him.
It was somewhere in the Silver City area that some pictures were taken of Alma and her daughters swimming in an irrigation ditch on summer. The story was that there were huge old willow trees near the ditch and a windmill that pumped water into a big water barrel.
There was an Old Prospector that Granddad met that had 12 mules and a little dog that rode on a pack saddle on one of the mules. He had sold everything he and his wife had and taken to prospecting when she died except a set of expensive silver ware. He liked Granddad’s three daughters so much he gave each of them a spoon out of the set of silver ware. I am not sure who had the spoon that was Mothers. She said it had a date of 1912 on it.
Another old prospector that Granddad knew once flashed too much money and someone kidnapped him, stole his money and dropped him down a mine shaft. But he was found before he died of starvation and lived to tell the tale. I think she said it was the same man who told of having a daughter in San Francisco that disappeared when he lived there. He spent thousands of dollars to find her. She had got in the car with the wrong person. She was drugged and he found her just before she was shipped off to China to be sold on the black market.
A man that Mother knew at some time in Silver City gave Mother some silver kitchen ware that he had that he said he had bought for his wife when she was alive. He had used the huge silver pot as a coffee pot on his campfire for years and it has a dent in the side. I have it. There was a matching salt & pepper shaker, a sugar & creamer sets, a two handled drinking cup, another cup, jelly cup with handle. All are nice, old silver but none match which makes me wonder at the story he told about buying it for his wife. Could he have simply collected in his travels or maybe it was stolen. Who knows what those old prospectors might have done before they got the gold favor. Mother may have met this man after she married her first husband known as Slim.
In about 1941 the Green family moved from Silver City, NM to Albuquerque, NM where Granddad could get better care at the Veterans Hospital. In 1942 Mother married Slim when she was about 18. It seems that her mother, Alma, may have insisted that they get married as she thought it might be ‘necessary’. Also, I seem to remember that Slim may have had some medical training at some point and Alma thought he might be able to take care of Catherine better as Catherine had asthma since she was quite small. In fact the asthma got so bad sometimes that they didn’t think Catherine would live to be grown. At that time there was little known about asthma or how to take care of a person when they had an asthma attack. Bad luck has passed the asthma on to all three of Catherine’s daughters, and all four of her grandchildren have a touch of it, also.
Not long after she and Slim married they and a couple of friends, Milton Andrew and his wife, and brother made a trip into the then new Gila National Forest to see the Gila Cliff Dwellings that were to become quite a tourist attraction in the 1960’s to now. Now there is a paved road most of the way to the Dwellings but then there was barely a trail to them. The left with the tractor and wagon from Doc Campbell’s Store. The store is still open in Gila for outfitting and supplies for travelers and tourists. Plus they guide hunters into Gila Wilderness. There is a good article about the history of Doc Campbell’s Store and the Gila Hot Springs at these sites.
http://www.gilahotspringsranch.com/aboutus.htm
http://geoheat.oit.edu/bulletin/bull23-4/art6.pdf
Site with old black and white photos of Gila National Forest and Gila Cliff Dwellings.
http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/about/history/gila/index.htm

Most people that wanted to see the cliff dwellings went in on horseback at that time but their group decided to pull a wagon, or trailer with a Ford tractor. They rode in the wagon with all their food, bedding, and gear while one man drove the tractor. Kate told how there were ‘screaming points’ where the trail was so narrow and high up they thought for sure that they would fall off a cliff. They stopped at a place called Lyon’s Lodge for one night. They camped for several days in a meadow below the Cliff Dwellings and explored the area and Dwellings. Kate told of exploring the old Anasazi houses one day and then when she went back there was a mountain lion track over her track where she had crawled through one of the tiny doors. Even at that time most of the pots, arrow heads, and other things left by the original Indians that had lived there had been stolen by pot hunters and other people that had come to see the Cliff Dwellings. (When Kate and husband Bob moved to Silver City in 1970 they visited the Cliff Dwellings many times as did their daughters and friends.)
In the last years before the death of Doc Campbell, he and his wife, Ida, became good friends with my dad. Daddy made several trips into the Gila Wilderness with Doc, first as an elk hunter and later at the request of Doc’s family as a friend and someone to help look after Doc who was a good bit older than my dad. Doc insisted on going on the guided hunting trips offered by his family but his family was beginning to fear for his safely so asked my dad to go as a friend.
Mother told us the stories that Milton had told her about his first trips into the Gila area in about 1944. He told about the big herds of deer, lots of rattlesnakes, and how he had seen a mountain lion and her babies living in the cliff dwellings. Milton said on one of his first trips he saw a hole or cave in the rock cliff near the cliff dwellings which can still be seen today. Being the adventous kind of man he was with thoughts of lost gold treasures he attached a long rope to a tree or rock on the top of the cliff and had his friend let him down over the edge of the cliff. He said that the rope wasn’t quite long enough to allow him a good look in the cave and the rope started twisting and turning when he got to the end of it. He didn’t get a good look but he couldn’t see anything that looked very interesting. Maybe just some sticks that could have been either a rats nest or possibly the nest of a hawk or eagle. He had his friend pull him back up and planned to get a longer rope and go down again. As far as Mother knew he never did try to get back into the cave again. It certainly was a good story.
Milton told Mother about a man named Bear Moore. I don’t know if anyone ever knew his real first name. He was called Bear because he had been attacked by a bear and had a badly disfigured face from the attack. Because he didn’t want to scare people or have them make fun of him he lived in seclusion as a hermit on the West Fork of the Gila River a few miles west of the Cliff Dwellings. There were stories of Nat Shaw a bear and lion hunter, and Ben Lilly, another bear and lion hunter who graduated from the University of Mississippi and then became a mountain man and hunter with a big pack of hounds. In the early 1900’s there was a renegade Apache Indian that lived in the Gila Mountains with his wife and 2 or 3 children. They traveled all over the Gila area killing game, robbing camps and stealing horses. Mother didn’t know if they were ever arrested or not.
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While she and Slim were married they did a lot of traveling around New Mexico. She told of going to Acoma Pueblo and buying some small Acoma pots made by a young girl. She couldn’t afford to buy any of the bigger ones made by the well known potters. She told of finding an old cast iron skillet in the mud after a rainstorm in the Los Lunas, NM area. There was an old adobe house nearby that had a dirt floor. (Year later in late 1970’s and early 1980’s Lee and I would explore a big, old, wood frame house that had been abandoned that looked as if it might have been an old ranch or hunting lodge. I think a lodge as it was near the river where a lot of hunting was done. Nearby was an old, adobe one room house with a dirt floor, that I wondered if it could have been the same one Mother (Kate) found that time. I stopped at the ‘lodge’ with Mother one time when we were driving from Albuquerque to Silver City but she said she couldn’t be sure. The ‘lodge’ has since been torn down which is a shame as it could have been remolded when we saw it. From the back door you could look down on a pond near the Rio Grande River where there were usually hundreds of snow geese in the winter, as well as ducks, and Canadian geese.)
It was while she was living with Slim that Kate had a pet skunk. Someone found two baby skunks and knew how to safely remove the sent glands with a sharp pocketknife before the babies could throw the musk that comes from the glands. One skunk baby didn’t live very long but Kate had the other one for several years. There are a couple of pictures of it and a dog they had. She always talked about her pet skunk but said they really shouldn’t be kept as pets.
Catherine, also known as Kate, lived with Slim for a couple of years. She always said she was thankful they didn’t have any children. Slim was quite a bit older than she was and did a lot of drinking. He got a job in Portland, Oregon working on a dairy farm, which was something he had done a lot of, and he and Kate moved to the farm near Portland. Kate didn’t like it there. She said it seemed like it rained all the time. It must have been a really bad year for rain. (Ironically her youngest daughter, Janice, and family would move there to live in 1999. They like it there.) She said the moved back to Silver City, NM where Slim’s drinking got worse and she divorced him and moved to Albuquerque, NM where her parents had moved to. She said there were good times with Slim as well as bad. He played guitar at dances frequently and she enjoyed going to them, dancing and singing the old western songs.
Boyd and Alma moved to Albuquerque sometime in the 1940’s to be near the VA hospital there. Kate moved back in with them and her sisters when she divorced Slim.
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It was here that Boyd bought a home in what is now called the North Valley of Albuquerque on Don Louis Rd. I have not been able to find a Don Louis Rd. in the North Valley. There is one in the South Valley now but it is not the correct road.


While here he became a self-taught taxidermist. Alma and Kate helped him with the work. He also did a lot of handyman work for anyone that would hire him and learned to do flagstone work which is considered quite and art. He laid flagstone in the patio in their backyard and several people in Albuquerque hired him to do flagstone work at their homes. It is possible some of that flagstone work is still in some of the old homes.

Kate learned to do fur work sewing fur into fur coats, stoles, and muffs for the rich people of Albuquerque. She, also, did leather coats, gloves, and vests. When I was a child I that it was really fun to look thought the pieces of fur and leather that my mom had left over from she did this kind of work. She kept the pieces in two large heavy, cardboard barrels with metal lids. Sarah and I have some of the left over fur and leather now. We have made a few things out of some of it. I can’t object to using the leather from cattle that have been butchered for food. As for killing any kind of wild animal for its fur I am completely against it. Too many of our wildlife had become almost extent do to hunting and killing simply for a fur coat. Especially leopard, cheetah, zebra, American bison, bobcat, bear, mink, marten, beaver, and other fur bearing animal. And the use of animal parts for souvenirs in other countries is just total ignorance, stupidity, and worse, greed. Guess it is best not to get me started on this subject.

I think mom may have worked in several different clothing shops in Albuquerque, one being a fur shop. For a while she worked for a shop called Pioneer Wear in Old Town Albuquerque. The store was still there in 1967 to 1969 when we lived in Albuquerque then.
Mother, Kate,

Over the next few years all three sisters met and married. Elnora met and married Alfred Botts, whose family was from Texas, also. Alfred had come out from California on a visit and renewed acquaintances with the Greens asking Elnora to marry him. On returning to California he had sent Elnora a bus ticket so she could come and visit him in California which she did and agreed to marry him and move there. After they married they moved to El Cajon, CA near San Diego, where they lived from then on. They had four children Jerry, Bruce, Lynda, and Shirley. Elnora still lives there.
Wanda moved to the Los Angeles, CA area to go to a school and when the money for school ran out after the first year she found a job in the L.A. area. She met and married Dale Dickson and they lived in Torrance, CA where Wanda still lives. She and Dale had three children Denise, Dana, and Diana.

Before Wanda moved to California she met a man in the Air Force stationed at nearby Kirtland Air Force Base. I think his name was Smitty or at least that is what he was called. Smitty had some friends and they started going to the Green home when they could to visit with the three sisters. One of the men was Robert Barnett. He and Kate started dating and on August 31, 1950 they were married in a small ceremony in the Green backyard. In early November of that fall Mother, Daddy, and my mom’s parents, Body and Alma went on a deer hunting trip. It was at that time that Mother became suspicious that she might be pregrent.

A few months later in November of 1950 my granddad when to the bus station in Albuquerque, I don’t remember why he went there, but he died while there. I never got to know him as I was born the following August 3, 1951.