Page 14 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

except one and that was half baggage and half passenger car. The Magdalena tracks had a big Y so the train could turn around and head back to Socorro.
After arriving in Magdalena, I was still one hundred and twenty-five miles from my destination with no available public transportation of any kind. I spent Tuesday night in the small Aragon Hotel on Main Street. The wall in the lobby was decorated with a taxidermist’s delight — two mounted buck mule deer heads with antlers interlocked as they had died after a fierce battle and unsuccessful attempt at extrication.
The waitress in the hotel coffee shop told me she and her husband were homesteaders out Beaverhead way, and said she would watch for someone in town from the area. Thus I first met Peggy Gibson, destined to be one of my favorite people as long as I lived out there. She and her husband Dick had a homestead not far from the place where my dad subsequently filed on a claim, and I saw a great deal of them, especially after I moved over to my dad’s cabin after school was out. They had previously owned a café in Texas, but after the depression of 1929 started, they closed up and moved out to Beaverhead to homestead. When they were in need of cash during the building of their log cabin, one of them (or both) would go in to get a job as cook or waitress until they earned what they needed.
The following morning when I went down to breakfast, Peggy informed me that Lon Grogan, owner and operator of the Beaverhead Lodge and Post Office, as well as the Beaverhead sawmill, was in town after supplies in his truck. He said he would be glad to give me a lift, so shortly after
noon we started out. I knew I’d be going out of my way to go to the Lodge, but at least I’d have a place to stay while I waited for a ride to the Moore ranch, maybe until next mail day. As luck would have it, a couple of cowboys from the Ed Moore ranch were there with a wagon and team after a load of lumber. So I rode thirty miles on a wagon load of lumber, and after eating supper at Ed’s, trudged the last mile on foot to Dad Moore’s, having run the gamut in available modes of transportation – car, train, truck, wagon and foot.
Dry ice well near Bueyeros