Page 58 - Early Naturalists of the Black Range

was scarcely a day when bear-meat was not served up at some of the messes. The grizzly and brown are the largest, some having been killed which weighed from seven to eight hundred pounds. These are dangerous animals to approach, unless there are several persons in the party well armed; and even then, it is well to have a place of retreat in case of emergency. I have known a grizzly bear to receive twelve rifle or pistol balls before he fell; though in one instance a huge animal was brought down by a single shot from a well-directed rifle, which passing through his entire length, killed him instantly. Turkeys abound in this region of a very large size. Quails too are found here; but they prefer the plains and valleys. While we remained, our men employed in herding the mules and cattle near the Mimbres, often brought us the fine trout of that stream....” (p. 236)
These descriptions are reasonably apt. When members of the Lewis and Clark expedition first encountered Grizzly Bears they were in terror. Their musket shots did not seem to phase them.
There are no longer Grizzly Bears in the Black Range; humans wiped them out. There are, however, Black Bears which can weigh up to 400 pounds. (Males average 250 and females average 170.) Black Bears come in a variety of colors; black, brown, and cinnamon.
The black-tailed deer he refers to is the Mule Deer, Odocoileus hemionus. Two subspecies are found here, the nominate form, O. h. hemionus, and the Desert Mule Deer, O. h. eremicus. The synonym (Cervus lewisii) which Bartlett refers to is the one given by Peale in 1848. There have been several others.
In a letter dated July 1, 1851, to Secretary of the Interior Stuart, Bartlett described the start of his trip south to Sonora. “The whole region south of the range of mountains which runs about twelve miles south of the Copper Mines is barren desert waste, without a single tree or bush with but three or four springs of water and destitute of grass, saving the parched and dry musquit, some three or four inches high.”*
By 1849 the territory between the Rio Grande and San Diego was fairly well known, due to the large number of travelers who were using Cooke’s Wagon Road. But that does not mean that travel was easy.
When Bartlett and party arrived at the Copper Mines, James Meyers, who was the Quartermaster, found that the housing at the mines was so “dilapidated that it seems to me to be a greater labor and expense to repair than build houses.”**
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* Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 32nd Congress, 1st Session, Senate Executive Document 119 (1852), pp. 413-14.
** Letter from James Meyer to Bartlett, dated April 21, 1851.
The photograph of a Black (Cinnamon) Bear, above, was taken along South Percha Creek, east slope of the Black Range, May 26, 2020. The photograph of Pronghorn, below, was taken in the Nutt Grasslands (SE edge of the Black Range), May 17, 2017.
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