Page 2 - Spell of the Black Range

The Black Range Rag - www.blackrange.org
SPELL OF THE BLACK RANGE
Spell of the Black Range
by Mildred Rea
The southern portion of the Rocky Mountains, lying west of the Rio Grande in southwestern New Mexico, with the southern tip less than one hundred miles from the Mexican border, is known as the Black Range. It is a rugged and beautiful country, still largely wilderness.
Maps of (forty or fifty) years ago show many little towns dotted over the foothills of the eastern slopes of this range — Chloride, Fairview, Grafton, Hermosa, Hillsboro, Kingston, Lake Valley — all ghost towns now. They lie within the boundaries of Sierra County, which was carved from three other counties in 1883 — Socorro, Grant, and Dona Ana. In the late 1870’s and early 1880’s silver mining was booming in the area, and a remarkably diversified stream of adventurous men, and a few women, flowed in to turn the sites of many “strikes” from small campsites, with
The header photograph on page one is by Bob Barnes of Hillsboro, taken near Kingston, New Mexico.
Above, the author and her parents in Chicago in 1897 (see first page). Her mother, Alice Barnes Fulghum lived in Chloride in the early 1880’s.
Right: The author’s grandparents (Jay and Louise Barnes) and her grandfather’s partner, Raubitzcheck at their cabin the area around North Percha Creek, on the east slopes of the Black Range, New Mexico, USA.
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