Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, Liberal & Dodge City, Ks.

Mon & Tue - April 5th & 6th


This is an 1882 church at Puerto Luna, just south of Santa Rosa. It is supposed to be the oldest community in New Mexico. Legend says Billy the Kid had many friends here and visited frequently.


This is Blue Hole in Santa Rosa just off the main route, where the original Route 66 went before 1937. They do year-round scuba diving here. It is 81 feet deep and 61 degrees year round with an outflow of 3,000 gallons per minute.


The kids were having a blast diving in while we were there.

This is the longest mural with a scene of Route 66. It is one of 24 murals in Tucumcari. They have a dinosaur museum here that is supposed to be very good, but it was closed the day we were here.

We're off to see the wizard in Liberal, Kansas. On a side note the high school is the redskins and the middle school is the warriors. Also, we have noticed several schools, police stations and courthouses along the way with the Ten Commandments prominently displayed.

Here is Dorothy after the tornado with the witch's slippers sticking out underneath the house.

We're not in Kansas anymore Toto.

Miss Elizabeth (I think she was Auntie Ems aunt) took us on a tour thru the Land of Oz to the Emerald City. I skipped down the yellow brick road and sang the song and was told that almost everyone does. They can't help themselves.

They originally didn't think people would be able to farm past the 100th meridian because it was too dry. I bet they would be surprised to see all the dams on the Colorado River and all the channels diverting water for irrigation.

Wyatt Earp arrived in Dodge City in 1876 to establish law and order, one of several towns he is credited with taming. Bat Masterson was another famous lawman here. Dodge was known as The Buffalo Capital of the World for five years until the mass slaughter destroyed the huge herds and left the prairie littered with decaying carcasses. It was also known as Cowboy Capital, Queen of the Cowtowns and Wickedest Little City in America.

850,000 buffalo hides were shipped from Dodge City 1872 to 1874. Farmers gathered the bones and sold them for 6 to 8 dollars a ton. They were used in the manufacture of china and in fertilizer.

This church had it's altar painted on the wall rather than wooden carvings or statuary.

This is their Carnegie Library. I thought the architecture was interesting, very different than most of them that we have seen. There are 16 miles of brick streets in Dodge City and they are in excellent shape.

This is Boot Hill Museum where the very first Boot Hill was located. 32 cowboys were buried here with their boots on and later moved to a new cemetery.

Longhorn cattle took the place of the buffalo and seven million were marketed from Dodge City in the 1870s and 1880s.

Statue to honor the Cowboys.

The original downtown is gone, but they have built a replica of it where you can go to the saloon and order a sarsaparilla and watch a shoot out in the street.

Dodge City was founded in 1872 five miles from Fort Dodge because the commander at the fort would not allow alcohol within five miles. They settled their differences in shoot outs and lawlessness reigned for a while.

Fort Dodge is now Kansas Soldiers Home. A civilian who kept a store at a military fort was called a "sutler". He paid a fee for a monopoly to conduct all the buying and selling there to the soldiers and to travelers following the Santa Fe Trail. Two soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for actions at Fort Dodge. One of them, Corporal Kyle, was later killed in a gunfight at Hays City saloon by Hays City Marshal, Wild Bill Hickok.

This is Liberty Garden in the Dodge City Park. It is a memorial to the 911 tragedies. It includes pieces of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and has replicas of the Twin Towers.

We went thru four states in one day as we traveled across New Mexico, thru the corners of Texas and Oklahoma, and on to Kansas. As we traveled thru Dalhart, Texas we noticed that many of the business names started with XIT. We wondered what it meant, so John looked it up. It means Ten in Texas which is the name of the largest fenced ranch in the world. I guess they owned a lot of the businesses in town as well.

Next on our route is Abilene, where John says he has been waiting his whole life to go, because to quote the song, "Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I've ever seen. Women there don't treat you mean in Abilene, my Abilene."

We're traveling north and getting anxious to be home again for a while. Wish we could just click our heels. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. Oh yeah, I forgot for a minute. We are at home all the time, wherever we are.

Tarra

Roswell, New Mexico

Thur/Sun - April 1 - 4



Roswell, the home of the UFO and alien sightings. John has been so excited to get here, so he could finally meet the rest of my family, he says. I was a bit disappointed in the UFO Museum. There were a lot of newspaper articles and pictures and documents about sightings and cover-ups, which may be all true, but nothing really that you probably haven't seen on a TV special.





John Chisum, "Cattle King of the Pecos", was the largest cattle producer in the 1870s with a herd of 80,000. He was a good friend of John Tunstall and at first befriended Billy the Kid. He later selected Pat Garrett to rid the area of him.

This is the Chavez County Courthouse in Roswell. We walked inside just to look around and there were two security guards on duty and a security screener to walk thru. However, the real problem was the dress code. John had on swishees and they don't allow sweat pants. However, since it was Good Friday and there was no court in session, they allowed us to walk into the main foyer and have a look at the architecture of the dome from inside.

This is the Roswell Museum and Art Center, including the Robert H. Goddard Planetarium. He was the "Father of Modern Rocketry". They have an extensive collection of American West and Indian and military stuff back to the 1500s and lots of sculptures, paintings and photography of all types. This is a really good museum. Someone at our campground told us the Museum of Contemporary Art was also very good.

These are just a couple of houses on the historic walking tour. The second one is actually the Historical Center Museum. It is free and very much worth going thru.

We spotted this little fellow right on the sidewalk as we were doing the walking tour. He was about two inches long and almost an inch thick, but very much dead. He is the only one we have seen and I was very glad he was dead.

On Sunday we drove to Sumner near the Pecos River to see Billy's grave. They used to say that west of the Pecos, there was no law and order except Judge Roy Bean. Remember the movie with Paul Newman? Anyway, Billy was shot at a house only a couple 100 yards from the cemetery where a couple of his pals had been buried the year before, so he was buried with them. Some caring person decided he should have a head stone and made one. Unfortunately it was stolen and was missing for a number of years. When it was found and returned, there was a big ceremony when it was replaced and it was fenced in with chain link fence. However, it was stolen again, and after a few years found and returned again. This time they wanted to make sure no one could steal it again, so I guess Billy is destined to be locked up for eternity. There aren't very many graves in the cemetery and only one since the 1940s. It is a veteran buried there in 2004. He made a special request to be buried there with his parents. His grandfather was a pall bearer at Billy's funeral.

More tomorrow,

Tarra

Ruidoso, NM. & Smokey & Lincoln County

Tue - March 29th

I'm back. Finally got a new months worth of gigabytes, so John will let me blog again.

Ruidoso Downs home of the famous Quarter Horse Race Track.

Hubbard Museum of the American West, including Anne Stradling's collection of horse related items, is also in Ruidoso. It is an excellent museum.

Also here is Smokey Bear Historical Park where the original bear cub, Smokey, who was rescued from a forest fire by a fire fighter, is buried. John said to me, "Being from a small town in North Dakota, I suppose you never heard of Smokey Bear." I said, "I never heard of forests." He said, "That's okay. When we get to the small town tavern museums, you will like them."

I wonder if they give out free samples.

From here we headed to the town of Lincoln, which looks much as it did when the likes Billy the Kid roamed it's streets. Ten of it's 48 structures are now the Lincoln State Monument. All of the town and a 10 mile stretch of Hwy.380 are part of the Lincoln National Historic District.

This is the old Lincoln County Courthouse where Billy the Kid was returned to be hanged after his trial in Mesilla. Once again he escaped and killed two deputies in the process.

This is supposedly one of the bullet holes inside the courthouse during his escape. He was later found again by Sheriff Pat Garrett who shot him dead. When he had trouble collecting the $500 reward, the people were so outraged, they took up a collection and gave him almost $3,000.

These are some of the buildings in town and the grave markers of John Tungstall and Alex McSween, both killed during the Lincoln County War. Billy the Kid was part of their group, but managed to escape during the fire when McSween's house was torched and burned down.


The Lincoln County War was all about who was going to have control of the government contracts to provide beef for the fort and the reservation.

There are lots of interesting exhibits in the courthouse, the Tunstall store and the Montano store, which tells the Hispanic history. Many lawmen lost their lives in this county. When another deputy was shot in 1933, the people took up a collection and bought a machine gun for the sheriff's office, so they would never be outgunned again.

I have read that there are lots of lizards in the desert, but this was the only one we saw all winter.

The Mountain of the Gods Casino is also at Ruidoso. It is the most beautiful casino I have seen and it is in a gorgeous setting with lake, mountains, golf course, fishing, guided hunting trips, etc.

There is also skiing about 10 miles from Ruidoso at Ski Apache, 11,000'+.

Tarra

White Sands Missile Range & Dunes & Alamagordos

Mon - March 28th

Andres Mountains leaving Las Cruces.

There are several of these water towers in Las Cruces all painted with different western scenes. I thought they were neat.

This is the White Sands Missile Range. It used to be called the Proving Ground. It was established at the close of WWII to test emerging rocket technology. It has conducted more than 42,000 missile and rocket firings. It tests for the army, navy, air force and NASA and they continue to test the most advance technologies.

These pictures are of the outdoor missile park. There is also an indoor museum from prehistoric farming to hard rock mining to rocket science.

The military shares the range with an assortment of plants and animals. Scientists are currently conducting research on one of the world's largest herds of African oryx which range freely there. We were only allowed to take pictures facing west. No pictures of the testing range to the east in the desert were allowed.

Leaving the missile range we had to go thru a border check. This sign was at the check point, in case anyone is looking for a job.

This is at the White Sands National Monument in the Tularosa Basin. It is part of the Chihuahuan Desert, the highest and largest desert in North America, in three different states. Kids were having a blast just diving headfirst off the back side of the dunes. Some had rented the little plastic saucers, but they weren't working that great. I think they needed a little 3M silicone spray on the bottom.

"John, wait for me! Only a few more pictures, I promise."

"Yeah, right."

This is called a plant stand. The sand dunes can grow as much as 30 feet per year. The highest ones are about 60 feet. Several plants can grow as fast as the dunes and keep their tops above the sand to survive. Skunkbush sumac and hoary rosemary mint are two bushes that can grow like this and when the dune finally blows away it hangs onto enough soil to survive. The yucca can also grow this fast, but when the dune blows away, it collapses. This has probably grown from the bottom of the dune.

This shows the yuccas at ground level and the ones at the top that have grown to keep ahead of the dune. John said, "Lotta sand. I heard it was lush and green before George W. took over."



This is a Rio Grande Cottonwood, the only tree that grows here. It can also keep ahead of the dune, so you only see the top of the tree above the dune.

The sand is made from gypsum that blows down from the San Andres Mountains to the west. It forms crystals and then the wind and rain turn it into sand. It is a common mineral, but rare due to the fact that it is water soluble.

The roads and parking lots where they had graded off the drifts of sand looked just like hard-packed snow. I said it looked like it should be slippery, so of course John had to try to do a cookie, but it didn't work. Kids!

Museum of Space History at Alamogordos and International Space Hall of Fame. 28 countries furnished artifacts. We didn't go thru the museum, but there is plenty to see outside in the Air and Space Park and the Astronaut Memorial Garden dedicated to the seven who died on the Shuttle Challenger. I think we are getting kind of museumed out. You've seen one rocket, you've seen 'em all.





Alamogordos Founders Park near old downtown. It is very nice with lots of bronze sculptures and a huge painting all honoring the history of their town and it's founders.

Just kitty corner across the street, they have a memorial to veterans from the area with a nice little park and zoo just behind it.

Moving on tomorrow, but need to wait a few days for my new month's worth of gigabytes to kick in, so I can do some more blogs.

Tarra