Page 41 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Pete started working for a homesteading couple named Bill and Noel Barrett. (Noel had a sister who homesteaded also. Her name was Mildred Robinson and she later married Ed Dickens of Horse Springs or Green’s Gap.) Pete always came to the dances, and Noel said he never took a bath unless there was a dance. When he took his clothes off, according to her, they would stand alone. While he was bathing, she took his clothes and instead of putting them in the wash pot, she put them in the fire underneath it.
At the dances he would bow low before the lady when asking for a dance and he held a folded handkerchief in his right hand so he wouldn’t soil his partner’s dress. His waltzing consisted of hopping from one foot to the other.
He was so bowlegged the cowboys said he couldn’t stop a pig in an alley!
Pete was often at the store (Mr. Warren said he used a pound of chewing tobacco a week) where he told many tall tales, with Mr. Warren egging him on. One evening the subject of a recent rabies scare was being discussed. Pete said he wasn’t afraid of no old rabid skunk. “Why, once I was workin’ out on the range an’ in the night a skunk grabbed aholt of my ear.” Dramatic pause.
“What’d you do, Pete?” asked Mr. Warren.
“Why, I jest retched down an’ got my old six shooter and blowed ‘im loose!”
In another story he told about a cattle- rustling war that was going on when he was a young boy and wrangler on the GOS
Ranch near Silver City. While wrangling horses one morning, he came upon a group of rustlers in the process of changing brands on some cattle. They started shooting at him because he could identify them. The case came to trial and he was on stand as a witness. The lawyer asked, “Can you identify the men who were shooting at you?” “No sir.” “Didn’t you get a look at them?” “No, sir.” “Why not?” “Man, I was leanin’ forrad!”
When my supplies of groceries began to get low, I drove in to Magdalena (72 miles away) to replenish my stock and to have a few treats. I would stay at a motel (called Tourist Court in those days) for several days, take in a movie if one was available, go on an ice-cream-soda binge, and buy my supplies for the next three months. It was on one of these treks that I met Eleanor Williams, the remarkable artist (former trick rider) from Quemado. At the time I met her, she was showing a movie film in a vacant building in Magdalena.
I could buy canned and dried foods for indefinite storage, but there was always a dearth of fresh supplies — vegetables and meat. My greatest problem would have been with meat if it hadn’t been for my neighbors. The families who lived out there — both native and homesteaders — kept fresh meat the year round, and each one of them shared with me.
Meat was kept fresh by hanging it at night by a rope over a limb of a tall pine tree, letting it hang down far enough that it couldn’t be reached from above by bobcats or mountain lions. In the morning it would be wrapped in a tarpaulin and placed