Gone to the Horizons
Sounds
National Anthem like none other
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
It was just
after sundown on the last day of deer season, 1961 or 1962. My dad and I were
coming off a steep slope in the exact location where Bill Evans Dam exists
today. We had just reached the bottom of the Mangus when it screamed, or,
rather, wailed.
Never had I
heard the scream of a cat like that before, and never …again. We never saw it,
but assumed it was a lion and not a bobcat.
Men and raw nature
My maternal
grandfather and his brother, Carl and Blue Rice, killed the last grizzly bear
in New Mexico
in the spring of 1931. The bear was killed just off the Rain Creek Divide in
the Mogollons near the Grant County-Catron County line. That country had been
Shelley and Rice family range since the mid 1880’s. The Shelleys believed the
bear had killed 28 head of their cattle since the previous fall
Lawrence
Shelley jumped the bear on Lookout Ridge. The bear had come onto the trail on
top of a shower that had just fallen.
Pushed, the bear turned off the
ridge into the rocks and brush. Lawrence
immediately trotted home to the 916 headquarters for dogs and to alert
neighbors including the Rice brothers. The hunt was on.
The brothers and their hounds
struck the tracks and the race commenced. They trailed the bear to where they
couldn’t ride, dismounted, and followed the sound of the dogs on foot.
Soon the dogs were barking ground treed
and a horrible brawl was in progress. As the brothers approached the howling,
growling, and brush breaking battle of life and death, they emerged on a rock
and looked down at the now bloodied dogs and the bear. Immediately, the bear
saw them, and, “like a man climbing through willows”, the bear swiped the dogs
aside and started to them never taking his eyes off their skylined image.
When they killed the bear coming up
onto the very rock from which they waged their battle, they had only one loaded
cartridge left between them.
Dust, smoke, and the sounds of that
battle died away … gone forever to the horizons. What would it be like to
witness and to hear those sounds?
More Sounds …
I often hear men working cattle. Most
of the time, I am struck by the absence of what I remember as a kid. I think I only
rarely hear the duplicated sounds of old time cowboys.
A distinct memory lingers when I
think about a day about 1960 when my dad and I were coming down Clark Canyon.
Way off down the canyon we could hear a lone cowboy. He was coming off a point
with a bunch of cattle. My dad immediately told me it was Tom McCauley. How did
he know that?
First of all, we could assume it
was Tom because we were on his place. The cowboy was alone which also signified
it was likely to be Tom, but there was more. Having been around Tom all his
life, my dad would have known the sound of that old cowman implicitly. With a
big voice, Tom would be starting cattle and moving them with his voice alone as
he worked horseback.
Similarly, there are stories of the
Shelleys working the Gila River bottom from
Hell’s Canyon downstream to the mouth of Turkey Creek with a single man.
Terrell Shelley recounts stories of how easy it was for a single man horseback
to work miles of that river bottom by himself … and his voice.
I swear I think I could pick out of
a recording the sound of my paternal grandfather, Albert Wilmeth, working
cattle. A resonant high pitched yip was his trademark call. He never whistled
like my maternal grandfather. He couldn’t. My memory of his sound was an
unlikely utterance coming from his physical presence. It wasn’t so very loud in
his presence, but it would carry long distances.
I’d give anything for a recording
of that sound. I’d love to hear what, at one time, was taken for granted and
commonplace.
Origins
Those historic sounds came from
spontaneous, long ago events. Most of the cowboys in that era were one or two
generations removed from Texas
from which most of their families migrated. That made them one to three
generations away from the Civil War and the big cattle drives. Few of the Gila River settlers would have been old enough to be in
the Civil war, but their kinfolk and their contemporaries would have been.
My great grandfather, Lee Rice,
would have certainly ridden with cowboys of Civil War experience when he rode
“up the (Goodnight-Loving) Trail” three times with Charles Goodnight himself.
On that trail, with its horrendous 45 mile dry walk to the Pecos
and Horse Head Crossing from the common route with the Butterfield Trail, he
would have heard the original historic yell.
That was the Rebel Yell. It likely
formed the basis of generations of cattle calls that came from Texas replete with Texas customs and
culture.
I would love to hear that original sound,
too. If you read Jackson’s
biography there is mention of the use of what became known as a trademark
Stonewall strategy as early as the first Battle of Manassas. In his orders in
the assault on the Henry Hill house where he earned his nickname, he instructed
his men to “yell like furies”. There is every indication that result became the
Rebel Yell.
It was used as Jackson’s strategy in the Shenandoah
Valley battles. It was part of the psychological war he had to
employ to even the disparity of men and material. It was extremely effective.
At Chancellorsville, Union troops
led by General Joe Hooker were shocked into retreat by the eerie wail of the
Rebel Yell as Confederate troops unexpectedly came charging out of the wilderness
in fading dusk. It was to be Jackson’s
last charge, but it was indelibly etched in the southern psyche.
For years, the veterans of the
southern cause would gather for reunions. At some point, they would, in unison,
join together with their brotherhood and their yell. As time went on, there
were fewer and fewer voices. Finally, there were none.
Gone to the horizons was their original
sound, but a version of it lived on in future generation cow camps from Texas to all parts of
the West.
Fading …
Unabashedly, distant sounds in my
mind remain dear. They are various, but they are dominated by times of youthful
exuberance. The sound of basketballs bouncing on hardwood floors, the guttural
and popping sounds for five seconds after a football was hiked, the soft
recognition of a cow pairing with a calf, the appreciation of a tired horse
waiting for you to fork some hay, the thump of a rifle somewhere off to the
north on the forest on the first day of deer season, rocks rolling and the tell
tale sound of a departing mule deer, a bull coming to water, the sound of a
mourning dove at sundown, the real jing of bobs against tempered rowels, a John
Deere A accelerating, a pruning crew in an apple orchard, all of my grandkids
together laughing, a windmill pumping, and Mozart in the softness of a
California morning rain all come to mind in succession. They are mine, and …
they are not offered for debate.
Several years ago, Kathy and I were
standing with our friends, Joe and Diane Delk, just off stage of from where the
Delk Family Band was about to perform. It was there that a totally Grant County
suggestion was made. Joe took the idea
and transformed it into a singular sound of uniqueness and importance.
He played the national anthem on
his lone fiddle.
For a brief moment there was a bit
of background noise, but it subsided. There was a pause, and, then, a gathering
of human voices was heard. Softly with unity, those gathered sang as a
respectful backdrop to that lone fiddle. Before the song ended there was not a
dry eye in the hall. Never had we witnessed such spontaneous emotion. Never
have we witnessed such reverence extended to our national anthem.
I saw Joe the other night. He
talked about the most recent rendition of what is becoming a sensational
patriotic offering. He played the anthem with a friend making it a twin fiddle
experience. He tried to describe his emotions during the event. He couldn’t
conclude the account.
I know, though. I heard and
witnessed the original and it didn’t just drift off to the horizons to be
forgotten. This sound needs to be heard and experienced!
It is that important, and this
suggestion is also offered … without recourse of debate.
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “Yes, sir … this is Super Bowl significant.
There is nothing like it.”
THE WESTERNER sez:
Here's Joe Delk playing the national anthem at Southern NM Fairgrounds and an image which illustrates how I feel about the whole darn thing.
In his first 16 years drilling for oil, Robert O. Anderson came up dry 200 times. But having done his homework on the Empire-Abo field in New Mexico, he had an educated hunch that eventually his investment would pay off. In 1957 it did, big time. Anderson's find uncorked a quarter-billion-barrel reserve, one of the biggest in North America. He built on that to create the nation's sixth-largest oil company, ARCO. Anderson (1917-2007) was born in Chicago, where his banker father built a reputation for successfully lending to wildcatters, the independent oil explorers who were colorful figures in a risky business. When Anderson spent a summer in Texas laying an oil pipeline, he knew it was the industry he wanted to be in. "I liked the opportunities for initiative, experiment, independence and an outdoor life," he said in Kenneth Harris' book "The Wildcatter." "We were too young to be conscious of money in the depths of the Depression." Graduating from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics in 1939, Anderson read intensively about geology while working as a management trainee at an oil company in Chicago. He began looking for a small refinery that wasn't reaching its potential. He found one in December 1941, convincing his father to put up $150,000 — worth $2.3 million today — to buy a half-share in Malco Refining in New Mexico. As the new vice president, he experimented with equipment and processes and within six months had taken production from 1,500 barrels a day to 4,000...Meanwhile, he spent much of his time where his heart was — on his ranches. By the late 1960s their size across New Mexico and Texas totaled over 1 million acres — three-quarters the size of Delaware. With 120,000 head of cattle and innumerable sheep, the ranches brought in $50 million in revenue a year. He made sure to dirty his hands with his cowboys for 12-hour days whenever he could, according to Paul Patterson in "Hardhat and Stetson."...more
