MacKinnon
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Sonnichsen labeled Rhodes “The Bard of the Tularosa,” and Rhodes’ life story intrigued me. Still, I never saw any need to read anything by Rhodes until I watched Four Faces West.
The movie starred Joel McCrea as a cowhand who robs a bank in New Mexico to help out his pa. Our outlaw/hero escapes, befriending an Eastern nurse (Frances Dee, McCrea’s real-life wife) on her way west, and a Hispanic gambler (Joseph Calleia). The banker (John Parrish) wants his money back and the robber punished, so the new marshal, Pat Garrett (Charles Bickford), goes after the outlaw. So does a posse.
What struck me about director Alfred E. Green’s movie was simple. This was a Western released in 1948 in which Mexicans are depicted with decency and integrity. This also was a Western released in 1948—a year that saw rather hard-edged Western films such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Red River, Yellow Sky, Coroner Creek, Blood on the Moon, and Station West, the latter with one of the most brutal fistfights you’ll see in any Western—in which nobody dies. Not only that, not one shot is fired and not one punch is thrown in Four Faces West.
That intrigued me so much, I tracked down a copy of Pasó Por Aqui.
The title comes from a carving—loosely translated as “passed this way” or “passed by here”—at Inscription Rock at El Morro National Monument between Gallup and Grants in western New Mexico. As early as the seventeenth Century, travelers carved their names in the sandstone promontory. Zuni Indians called the place A’ts’ina, meaning “place of writings on the rock.”
Four Faces West was mostly filmed in New Mexico, including around Gallup, El Morro, and White Sands National Monument in Alamogordo. Its national premiere was in Santa Fe.
The movie added the romance, stretched some things out, but, overall, remains fairly faithful to Rhodes’ story. In both novella and film, the fleeing cowboy comes across a diphtheria-stricken Hispanic family, forcing our hero to make a choice. And just like in the movie, no shots are fired, no one dies, and no fisticuffs occur in the novella.
Eugene “Gene” Manlove Rhodes was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska, in 1869 but moved with his parents to southern New Mexico in 1881, where he worked as a stonemason and helped build roads. By the time he was thirteen, he was cowboying—and became a good one: “a reckless bronc buster,” one person remembered, “a fanatic ball player and a fiend for poker and a fight.”
He was also an avid reader—Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a personal favorite. In an introduction to Rhodes’ The Proud Sheriff (Houghton Mifflin, 1935), published the year after Rhodes’ death, Henry Herbert Knibbs recounted an incident involving Rhodes, the cowboy/reader. Rhodes was riding a horse while reading a book, when the horse leaped, and both rider and mount fell down a ledge. When the colleagues finally reached them, they found both rider and horse banged up pretty good, but conscious.
“Hurt pretty bad?” one of the cowhands asked.
“No,” Rhodes replied, “but, dammit, I lost my place in the story.”
Grubstaked fifty dollars from his father in 1888, Rhodes entered the University of the Pacific, then located in San Jose,
California, but two years of higher education was all he could afford, and he returned to New Mexico, “broke,” Sonnichsen wrote, “and discouraged.” In 1899, he married a widow, with whom he had corresponded and who admired his poetry. She tried to make it in and around Tularosa, but needed to return to New York to care for her mother. Three years later, in 1905, Rhodes joined his wife in New York. He remained exiled from his beloved New Mexico for some twenty years, but in New York, when he decided to write, he wrote about what he knew best.
Good Men and True his first novel, was published in 1910. He wrote short stories, gaining notice for his works in the Saturday Evening Post, The Land of Sunshine, and Out West, the latter two edited by the renown Charles F. Lummis, and his novels.
In 1926, Rhodes and his wife returned to New Mexico, living in Santa Fe, Alamogordo, and at Albert Fall’s “Rock House” at the Three Rivers Ranch.
Rhodes published roughly a dozen novels, including West is West (1917), Stepsons of Light (1921), Copper Streak Trail (1924), and The Trusty Knaves (1933). His short stories and novellas totaled, depending on who’s counting, around forty or sixty, and he penned many articles and book reviews. He also wrote a number of poems.
He might have’ become known as the “Cowboy Chronicler,” but he wasn’t giving readers shoot-’em-ups. The Los Angeles Times called Rhodes “one of the few [Western writers] producing literature.” Bernard De Voto said that Rhodes’ stories reached “a level which it is intelligent to call art.”
In 1930, suffering from a “bad heart” and after a bout with bronchitis, Rhodes left New Mexico for California—better health care—where he died in 1934. Per his request, he was buried in New Mexico. His grave is located just inside the gate of the White Sands Missile Range, between Socorro and Carrizozo, where the epitaph on his tombstone, fittingly, reads: “Pasó por aquí.”
“He once said that his autobiography could be found in his books,” Doc Sonnichsen wrote, “and this is simple truth. It is also true that much of the history of his time and place can be found there likewise.”
I would have enjoyed meeting Gene Rhodes. When people asked where they could find him in Pacific Beach, California, Knibbs wrote, they would likely hear: “If he isn’t at home, you’ll find him at the baseball game.”
Anyway, I drew from Eugene Manlove Rhodes when I started this novel. As a salute, I sprinkled a few names of characters from Rhodes’ fiction for the population of Roswell.
I also remembered something Rhodes told Knibbs: “They say I write pretty good stories. But nobody ever says what a good rider I was.”
Nobody ever says what I good rider I am, either. Maybe for good reason.
The idea for the “broken ribs” plot element started percolating after a “horse wreck” near Ruidoso, New Mexico, in the summer of 2012.
Wally Roberts was living down in southern New Mexico at the time, where he catered rodeos and weddings and organized equine adventures through his company, Outlaws & Renegades, LLC. We had first met when Western Horseman magazine hired me as a photographer for an article to be written by Albuquerque journalist Ollie Reed Jr. about a hard, and long, “Billy the Kid’s Last Ride” trail ride that started in Lincoln and ended in Fort Sumner. A horse named Chuck, appropriately, chucked me off at a high lope during that assignment.
In 2012, Roberts invited me to come down to see what was involved in planning one of these “endurance” trail rides. It seemed like an intriguing idea for a magazine story, especially since the ride he was trying to make feasible would begin at the site of John Tunstall’s dugout on the Felix Cañon Ranch in southern New Mexico. Tunstall, of course, became famous after he was murdered—a key incident in the Lincoln County War that propelled a young gunman to fame under his nickname, Billy the Kid.
Roberts put me on Honey, a five-year-old mare that his daughter rode and which, he told me, “has never gotten any rider in trouble.”
For our “preride” Roberts, Felix Cañon Ranch foreman Chris Mauldin, and I trailered the horses to Tunstall’s murder site near Glencoe, unloaded them, and prepared to ride. As soon as I was in the saddle, Honey—who, remember, “has never gotten any rider in trouble”—started bucking.
Let the record show that I was not bucked off. Even Wally Roberts will testify to that. I stayed on for at least three jumps (all these years later, I’m thinking about making it four jumps). But when Honey decided to roll, I kicked out of the stirrups and dived in the opposite direction. My landing went, ribs-camera-rocks. Fearing that Honey might roll the other way, I got up, sort of, staggered a bit, and collapsed.
They caught Honey. I breathed. The filter on my camera lens was smashed, but the Canon still worked fine. Eventually, I sat up. Roberts checked my ribs. I didn’t feel that bad, having not been rolled over by an angry mare
.
Remembering the Code of the Cowboy, I climbed back into the saddle. We rode down to the marker at Tunstall’s murder site, snapped some photos, and Roberts left me with Mauldin. Roberts would trailer his horse down the road and meet up with us as we came down the trail.
Only, there was no trail. Mauldin was trying to find something paying customers could use. It did not take long until my right side began hurting. A lot. A short while later, I realized that I was in trouble. Just like Sam MacKinnon understands in this novel, I knew that if I climbed out of the saddle, I wouldn’t be able to get back on. There would be a pretty good chance that I’d have to sit there till Roberts or medical personnel came to fetch me—and Ruidoso, the nearest city with a hospital, was about twenty-five miles west down the main road, US Highway 70.
So when Mauldin dismounted to lead his horse down or up rock-strewn hillsides, or to duck underneath branches or limbs, I stayed in the saddle. I ducked—and, yeah, that hurt a lot—underneath branches. I twisted to keep from being knocked to the ground. Going uphill, I leaned forward; going downhill, I leaned back. Somehow, I didn’t lose my seat.
Come to think on it all these years later, I am a pretty good rider. At the least, I am, as Roberts said later that day, one tough SOB.
Anyway, roughly ninety minutes later, Wally Roberts rode up to Mauldin and me, we found a bit of a trail, and rode back to the trailer, where I dismounted. Roberts again checked my ribs, gave me a bottle of water to drink, and he decided that maybe we should stop at this country store down the road and buy some Advil or Tylenol. When we reached camp, I could even wash those down with cold beer.
On that drive to the store, Roberts and Mauldin cracked a joke at my expense. I laughed, and spit up some of the water I was drinking. Roberts joked: “Johnny, you’re not spitting up blood are you?”
When I checked—no blood—I noticed Roberts and Mauldin looking at one another.
That’s when Roberts suggested that maybe, just to be safe, they ought to take me back to Ruidoso, get me in the ER, make sure I was all right.
I said: “That’s a pretty good idea.”
The woman at the desk at the hospital asked for the time of the incident. I told her around 10:00 a.m. She gave me the incredulous look and said: “Why are you just getting here?” By then, it was around two in the afternoon.
I answered: “I had to finish the ride.”
The first nurse to examine me saw the imprint left by the camera. “Here’s the body … Here’s the lens.”
X-rays and further examination brought in the doctor, who said: “Two fractured ribs. Stay off horses for a while.”
When my wife learned what had happened, she suggested that I stay off horses permanently. I haven’t. But, so far, I haven’t been bucked off or injured in those past few years.
It turned out fine for everyone. Wally Roberts got a new addition to one of his cookbooks, also at my expense: “Honey-braised ribs.”
I used part of the busted-ribs adventure in my previous novel, Taos Lightning. But in Taos Lightning that fictional incident happens in Vermont.
Instead of New England, I wanted to set the entire story near Eugene Manlove Rhodes country (although I’ve placed this novel a little south and east of Engle, and a bit north and east of Alamogordo and Tularosa). Mostly, I wanted to stay faithful to Rhodes’ vision of the West, and possibly reintroduce a new generation of readers to “The Bard of the Tularosa.”
I’ve reread Pasó Por Aqui a number of times. Sure, the first two small chapters leave me scratching my head, and, especially to today’s readers, his dialogue can feel dated. But the story is beautiful. The land is as much of a character as Ross McEwen, the cowboy turned outlaw, and Rhodes writes with a love of people and place—both of which he knew quite well.
I’m glad Tuska sent me that copy of Four Faces West. I’m happy that I had the good sense to buy a used copy of Pasó Por Aqui and become more acquainted with Eugene Manlove Rhodes.
As I wrote in Pasatiempo: “He passed this way. I’m glad he did.”
Johnny D. Boggs
Santa Fe, New Mexico
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of two Western writers to have won seven Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford, in 2006, Doubtful Cañon, in 2008, and Hard Winter, in 2010, Legacy of a Lawman, West Texas Kill, both in 2012, Return to Red River, in 2017, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing”, in 2002) as well as the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel, Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm (2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (2002) is an historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (2002) and Ghost Legion (2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’ narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.” Boggs lives with his wife, Lisa, and son, Jack, in Santa Fe. His website is JohnnyDBoggs.com.