Page 61 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Over The Hill But Not So Far Away
Chapter 14
Dusty School in about 1987.
In the fall of 1933, I went to teach at Dusty, just east of my Dad’s cabin over the Black Range in the valley at the foot of the San Mateo Mountains. I had board and room with Mary and Willie McCracken and their three children - Wilson (about 12), Buddy (10), and Dorothy (7). We lived right on the Magdalena-Dusty road, and about a mile north of the school house.
At that time there was Gobel’s store and filling station, the adobe school building, and a post office in the home of the postmistress, Mrs. Ramsey. Now the school house is the only thing left standing.
My pupils were John and Frank Tucker, John McCauley, the three McCracken children, two Welty children (a boy Herchel, and a girl Leah), and the grandson of Mrs. Ramsey - Ray Henderson. There probably were others, but if so I’ve forgotten their names.
Dusty was once named Cherryville until it was changed to the more appropriate title of Dusty. It lies in a broad shallow valley
between the San Mateo Mountains and the Black Range. In going there from Magdalena, you go west on U.S. Highway 60 for 22 miles to the present day VLA (Very Large Array), and turn south on the road to Beaverhead. Twenty-one miles south is a fork in the road, the right hand fork going to Beaverhead and beyond, the left going south to Dusty and on to Winston, Cuchillo and out to present I-25 just north of Truth or Consequences.
he Alamosa River traverses the entire valley from the Beaverhead fork to the Monticello Box Canyon (whose cliffs are of extreme height) where it turns toward the southeast and reaches Monticello, Placitas and eventually Elephant Butte Lake.
At the turn toward the box canyon, and back from the road, are the ruins of old Fort Ojo Caliente, named for a warm spring up a side canyon. The fort was headquarters in the 1870’s for a company of soldiers assigned to keep the peace. Victorio, Chief of the Warm Springs Apaches, had his headquarters near there and appeared regularly with his followers for their government rations of food and blankets.
Geronimo, a medicine man of the Apaches - not a chief as some people think - gave himself up at the final reckoning with the United States Government, but he was captured only once. That capture took place near Dusty, at this same fort whose