Page 10 - Spell of the Black Range

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SPELL OF THE BLACK RANGE
My grandfather must have had no more outstanding luck in Lake Valley than he had in Chloride. When I was a small girl he took me walking on the far side of the low hills just west of Lake Valley and pointed to the dugout where he had lived alone while in Lake Valley, a sort of shallow tunnel into the hillside, just tall enough for a man to stand up in. It was closed by a wooden door and frame when he lived there, but that was long since gone. It was not very long before his wandering feet and love of prospecting took him to the headwaters of North Percha Creek, or rather, a tributary of that creek, high in the Black Range, some thirty-odd miles north and west from Lake Valley. Here he made a strike which stirred his wildest dreams to life. He named his mine the Ingersoll, for Robert Ingersoll, whose works he often quoted. It is an extremely slow and difficult process for one man alone to dig much ore from a mountain, and soon Grandpa had a partner, and Austrian named Raubitzcheck. They built a sturdy one-room log cabin10 (editor: photo above, right) with a good fireplace and soon my grandmother returned from Ft. Wayne. Meanwhile, Grandpa and “Ruby” as they always called
him, dug into what they believed would be a fortune.
Grandma and Grandpa and Ruby shared the one room log cabin. Cooking was done in the fireplace with the aid of a good iron Dutch oven. The bunks, as was usual in miner’s cabins, were made of saplings and anchored to the wall, with supporting legs on the side away from the wall. Curtains
hung in front of the bunks to give a measure of privacy. I once heard my grandmother remark that Ruby was always very considerate and a perfect gentleman. I do not know just when or why Ruby left, but am under the impression some family matter called him back to the Old Country.
10.The photographs from the 1880’s - 1901, above and on the next page, are provided courtesy of The Mildred Elizabeth Fulghum Rea papers, 1880-1921. Ms 0054 New Mexico State University Library, Archives and Special Collections Department. In “Around Hillsboro” this cabin is misidentified as the saloon in Percha City. The cabin was built in the early 1880’s by Jay Barnes at the Ingersol Mine. Louise Sixbey Barnes is the woman at the left, Jay Barnes stands next to her, and Jay’s partner - Raubitschek stands at the right.
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