The Cooke's Range, New Mexico

Ocotillo on Massacre Peak in the southern part of the Cooke's Range. 

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Cooke’s Peak rises 2,400 feet above the remote trailhead where seven of us (and three dogs) gathered on a chilly January day for a long-anticipated hike to the top. The route climbs an alluvial fan and turns into OK Canyon where it winds through oak, sotol, and juniper before launching steeply upwards over two saddles to a short third-class summit scramble. We hoisted our daypacks and set off up the trail while the dogs ran around finding old bones and muddy puddles, covering at least twice the distance we did during an already long day.

Cooke's Peak (the pointy one) viewed from Mimbres Valley northwest of the range.

On the trail to Cooke's Peak with the Chihuahuan Desert far below.

The view east from near the summit of Cooke's Peak.

 

The peak dominates the northern end of the Cooke’s Range, one of many obscure “sky islands” rising from the desert basins of Southern New Mexico. Thanks to a perennial spring, it played a disproportionate role in U.S. and Mexican history and the U.S. doctrine of manifest destiny. Military, mail, and passenger routes between the East and California stopped at Cooke’s spring rather than bypassing the mountains because it offered the only reliable water between the Rio Grande and the Mimbres River. 

A lone ocotillo on Massacre Peak in the southern Cooke's Range with the Florida Mountains in the distant background. The easiest  east-west route is between the Floridas and the Cooke's Range, but there isn't any water.

 

Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke traveled the route in 1846-47 with a ragtag battalion of Mormon “soldiers” recruited in Iowa to bolster the U.S. military presence in the southwest, much of which was still owned by Mexico, and to diffuse tensions with the Mormons. They welcomed this because it gave them a chance to travel west funded by the military, escaping persecution in Iowa. After prolonged conflict and negotiation with Mexico, the Gadsen Treaty established the international border about where it is today, and the U.S. gained possession of Cooke's route.

Ellen near the summit of Massacre Peak just south of Cooke's Gap and west of the spring. A plaque commemorated the Cooke expedition as well as a group of boy scouts who visited the summit more recently, presumably to install the plaque.

 

Long before Europeans started arguing over ownership, the Mimbres chipped petroglyphs in the hills and canyons of the range. They are often fantastical, though some depict easily recognized rattlesnakes, sheep, bear prints, and yuccas. There are even the outlines of scarlet macaws on boulders in at least two sites. These tropical birds were traded (and maybe bred?) as far north as Chaco Canyon and its outliers and clearly had religious and cultural significance. Their feathers have been found attached to prayer sticks and ceremonial clothing. The Mimbres abandoned the area around 1150 AD, perhaps migrating south into Mexico. Bands of Apaches later established ephemeral camps in and around the Cooke's Range where they hunted and organized raids.

Petroglyphs in the Cooke's Range.

More petroglyphs including a possible macaw and Santa Claus roasting a dead rat over a fire??!!

Grinding holes in sandstone.

 

The Apaches were antagonized by the stream of Europeans threatening their sovereignty. Cooke’s Pass, just west of the spring and sandwiched between steep cliffs and hills for over a mile, was a perfect place to attack travelers, and the Apaches took full advantage. During one well-known attack in July of 1861, Mangas Coloradas and Cochise, two famous Apache leaders, ambushed seven members of the Freeman Thomas Mail Party as they entered the canyon, forcing them up a side canyon to the south where they built rudimentary rock shelters and fought the warriors until their inevitable deaths. According to an account by Jay Sharp, the stripped and mutilated bodies of Thomas and his companions were found two days later by passing freighters who described the scene:

 

“The ferocity of the battle, the freighters said, could be measured by the numerous shell casings littering the ground and the bullet marks covering the rocks and trees around the stone barricades.”  

 

Ellen hiking through Cooke's Pass in November and feeling somewhat less terrified than travelers 150 years earlier, despite the 8-mile shadeless round-trip. 

We spent a day trying to find the site of this attack, but aside from a few ambiguous rock shelters, any signs of the battle have been erased by 160 years of weather and scavenging. This and many other attacks led to the construction of Fort Cummings near the spring in 1863 and deployment of military personnel to protect the vital transportation route. Today, all that remains of the fort are a few decaying adobe walls and a barren cemetery. 

Decaying adobe walls at Ft. Cummings, once a busy military outpost positioned to protect travelers from Apache attacks.

 

Lonely graves at the Ft. Cummings cemetery. The military was tasked with collecting human remains that had been left scattered along the route through Cooke's Pass and relocating them to this cemetery. The bones and bodies contributed to the terror travelers felt as they passed through the canyon.

After the Indian Wars, the Cooke’s Range was occupied by miners, goat herders, and ranchers. Abandoned towns dot the foothills today, and old mines are everywhere. To the west, Flourite Ridge is riddled with adits where miners extracted its namesake mineral, used to make steel, especially during WWII. Also during WWII, in the basin to the east, pilots dropped bombs containing small amounts of explosive and a lot of flour to mark the spots where they exploded, helping them evaluate their aim.

A stone house probably used by miners near the north end of Fluorite Ridge.

On the northeast flanks of the range, the once prosperous mining town of Cooks Town (spelled without the “e”) is mostly gone save for remnants of a few buildings. The town was established in 1876 and mostly abandoned by the beginning of WWII but it once had as many as sixteen saloons (and no churches!). Donald Couchman (Couchman 1990), in his comprehensive Master’s thesis on the history of the region, tells a story of intrepid partiers from Cooks Town: 

“Many of the community social functions were conducted at the schoolhouse…People would come from as far away as Deming, Lake Valley, Las Cruces, Hatch, Hatchita, and the settlements along the Mimbres River. The revelers pushed the school furniture against the wall for room to dance and used the seats for beds for the children when they could no longer stay awake…Sometimes after dancing all night, the participants would climb the remaining distance to Cooke’s Peak and enjoy the dawning of a new day together.” 

We stopped for a snack below the summit headwall and then scrambled to the top where a little snow and rime from the previous night’s storm clung to rock and a few hardy desert plants. To the south, the craggy Florida (pronounced Flor-eed-ah)  and Tres Hermanas Mountains rose behind the town of Deming; to the west the Big Burro Mountains and Apache Peak guarded the New Mexico-Arizona border; sixty miles to the east, the Organ Mountains stood behind Las Cruces; and to the north lay Silver City and the vast Gila National Forest. A lot had happened in the country visible from the peak since humans found their way into the southwest. A little reluctantly, we started down, tired from the hike even without having danced all night.  

Ellen and our friend, Beth, at the summit of Cooke's Peak.

Carlos, Beth, and Ellen, starting the descent from the summit.

A last view to the east during the descent back to the trailhead.

Proposed Mimbres Peaks National Monument

 

Along with the Floridas, the Tres Hermanas, and the Goodsight Mountains, the Cooke’s Range is included in a proposed Mimbres Peaks National Monument, which would include just over 245,000 acres. Together, these sky islands account for remarkable biological diversity, numerous cultural sites, and unlimited opportunities for adventure. 

 

 

References

 

Barbour, Matthew J. 2014. Journey Through the Mining Camps of Cookes Peak in New Mexico Where Mineral Riches Once Thrived. Miningconnection.com.

 

Couchman, Donald Howard. 1990. Cooke’s Peak – Pasaron Por Aqui. A Focus on United States History in Southwestern New Mexico. Cultural Resources No. 7. Bureau of Land Management, Las Cruces, New Mexico.

 

Sharp, Jay. Cooke’s Canyon. Journey of Death. DesertUSA.com.

Visiting the Past: Kashgar China, 2006

 

Window curtain, Kashgar, China. 2006

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Ellen, Bei, and I visited Kashgar in 2006, near the end of a year teaching and traveling in China (see blog). Tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government were rising, but we were largely unaware, more tuned into tensions between Muslims and Americans during the Bush administration’s “war on terror” following 9/11. In a dusty desert town on the edge of the Taklamakan desert, a man lounging on a motorcycle asked me what I thought of Bush, pronouncing his name with a long-u, while drawing his finger across his throat. 

 

Kashgar sits on the western edge of China’s Xinjiang Province and was an important Silk Road hub linking China to Central Asia and Europe. The predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, native to Xinjiang, are one of 55 minority ethnic groups recognized by China. Historically, Xinjiang has been controlled by Mongols, Russians, Turkic people, and Uyghurs, as well as the Chinese, but the PRC is quick to suggest that China’s cumulative control lasted longer than that of others. 

 

In response to ethnic unrest in 2009 and partly under the cover of antiterrorism measures after 9/11, the PRC came down hard on Uyghurs, branding them separatists, terrorists, and religious extremists and enacting measures to “assimilate” them into Chinese culture. These included closures of mosques, reeducation, mass arrests, establishment of internment camps, and destruction of traditional Uyghur sections of cities including Kashgar. Like in Tibet, economic incentives have drawn Han Chinese to Xinjiang, diluting the Uyghur population and culture. 

In 2021, the U.S. State Department accused the PRC of crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang, adding to the growing tension between the U.S. and China. The Congressional Research Service published a useful summary of events leading to this determination, and detailed information is widely available online (e.g., here, and here), but in 2006 when we visited, much of this was in the future.

 

In Kashgar, we stayed at the Chini Bagh Hotel on what were the grounds of the British Consulate during the time of the Great Game when the British and Russian Empires vied for control of Central Asia and India. Bei was 5, and though keen enough to wander with her parents, eating lamb kabobs and visiting markets, I often left the hotel early to walk through the city with my camera. 

 

Most of us wish we could see with our own eyes what the world looked like before it was “modern,” a word applied to whatever age happens to be yours. Perhaps this nostalgia is more painful for photographers. Images of everyday life 25, 50, or 100 years ago evoke fantasies about the photos we might have made. Yet here we are, time rushing by, the envy of future photographers. Kashgar and the Uyghur culture was eroding in 2006 when we visited, but much remained that is now destroyed.

 

I recently ran across images by Carl Mydans (1907-2004), a documentary photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s along with Dorothea Lange and later for LIFE Magazine, covering WWII and spending two years as a Japanese prisoner after being captured while working in the Philippines. His experiences left him with a keen sense of history. Mydans once said, maybe a little dramatically:

 

“All of us live in history, whether we are aware of it or not, and die in drama. The sense of history and of drama comes to man not because of who he is or what he does, but flickeringly, as he is caught up in events, as his personality reacts, as he sees for a moment his place in the great flowing river of time and humanity. I cannot tell you where our history is leading us, or through what suffering, or into what era of war or peace. But wherever it is, I know men of good heart will be passing there.”

 

I recently reprocessed some of my images from Kashgar in 2006 realizing that I never included them in my China blog. There are a lot of images here, but they capture some of the diversity and liveliness, and some of what is now the history, of the city and the Uyghurs. I’m grateful to have been there.

Uyghur man, Kashgar.

Kashgar evening TV.

Street scene.

Young woman, old Kashgar.

Kids in the old part of Kashgar.

Young friends (or siblings?).

Woman and window.

Naan.

Door and padlock. 

Old friends.

Women at the market.

Carrying brooms to market.

Woman in old Kashgar, early morning.

Buying vegetables.

Three generations at the animal market.

The grandmother from the previous photo.

Sheep shearing at the animal market.

Pushing sheep.

Smoker.

I'm not sure what to say about this, except that if these guys had been rock climbers, their boldness would have been legendary.

Early morning woman with hot water.

Woman at market.

Instrument maker.

Restaurant.

Towels and window reflections.

 

Winter in Eastern Wyoming

Abandoned farmhouse and cows north of Manville, Wyoming. January 2016/

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In January, before classes and teaching started again, I drove from Laramie to Eastern Wyoming, spending the night in Lusk, where my friend, Doug Scambler, works for a couple of days every other week as a child psychologist, before circling back home via Guernsey the next morning. Doug generously shared his hotel room and the inside information that Lusk: population 1,567, has a pizza place, called The Pizza Place, with perhaps the best pizza in Wyoming, thanks to its pizza-savvy owners, transplants from Chicago.

I started the trip in early morning light, driving first through Sybille Canyon and then to Wheatland for less superlative food--a fast food burger--before heading north and then east to photograph the small towns of Shawnee, Lost Springs, and Manville along Highway 18. I arrived in Lusk with a little time to spare before meeting Doug for dinner.

Ten miles to the east, a dark cloud of smoke billowed up from the prairie, so I drove out to investigate. The smoke originated from a ranch, recently purchased by a rancher who, with his son, stopped to talk with me while I took some pictures (none great) of the evening light streaming through the smoke. His family had been in the area for generations, but he had purchased this place recently and was burning brush and old piles of junk that the previous owner had left behind he told me, shaking his head.

The conversation circled around to all of the abandoned farms in that part of Wyoming and the hardscrabble history of the place. He recommended a book called “TheChildren’s Blizzard,” about a sudden prairie storm in 1888 that killed hundreds of children trying to get home from school. I related my experience of seeing the impact of the flu of 1918 memorialized in rural cemeteries across Wyoming. He told me that during that flu, his grandmother had walked with his mother to a neighbor’s house to check on her, afraid to go in for fear of germs but shouting through to the open window to ask if she was alright. The neighbor replied that she was fine, but her child was dead. It’s hard to imagine that life could be so raw and desperate just 100 years ago, though I know that people today have their own struggles.

Chance encounters on road trips are often the most memorable and interesting, and I’m often surprised by how willing locals are to tell stories to strangers passing through. If I weren't such an introvert, I'd spend more time trying to seek out these encounters. Instead, I take pictures of places where there are very few people.

Old boxcars south of Bosler, Wyoming, with the Laramie Range in the background.

Piles of dirt along the Union Pacific Railroad.

Fallow field, Sybille Canyon.

Shawnee, Wyoming: Established in 1887 and now nearly abandoned.

Lost Springs!

The Lost Bar in Lost Springs.

Lost Springs, settled in the 1880s and named for a spring that nobody could find was originally a railroad town with 200 residents.  In the 2010 census, it's population was 4 (Wikipedia).

Classic architecture in Lusk, Wyoming.

Lusk is named for a cattleman named Frank Lusk, who established a ranch in the area in 1880 when Colorado got too crowded for him. He had contemplated moving farther east in Colorado towards the Nebraska line, but on an earlier trip had been impressed with the people living in Wyoming, so he decided to go there instead (Wikipedia). 

A shed in Lusk. A catastrophic flood damaged Lusk in June 2015, and perhaps is responsible for this end of the shed being bowed in.

Flood damage, Lusk.

Flood damage and bathtub rings, Lusk.

House and barns, Jay Em, Wyoming

Jay Em was originally a watering hole along the Texas Trail, and the town was established between 1912 and 1915 to support ranchers in the area. It's named after a ranch called the J Rolling M, owned by Jim Moore and established in the late 1800s (Wikipedia).

Garage, Jay Em.

Railyard, Guernsey, Wyoming.