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Round Mountain Visions — The Spell of Tularosa and Mescalero
Last updated on Friday, July 18, 2003
The view from Round Mountain, facing west across White Sands to the San Andreas Mountains.
Photo by the Author.
On a warm January day I climbed Round Mountain to see what I could see. The cone shaped peak was 1000 feet above the 4500 foot high desert floor. My sea level legs and lungs strained into a climb that should have been easy. The path up was actually a shallow gully washed out by rain. Yucca challenged my progress with drawn bayonets. Here and there a cluster of juniper had to be sidestepped or crawled through. The altitude, more than the steepness, left me wheezing at the top, leaning against an immense granite boulder. The top is solid rock.
As Lord of the Mountain I slowly panned my realm. The sinuous dark ribbon of US 70 stretched seven miles southwest to the village of Tularosa. Beyond that the White Sands were spread like a rumpled sheet across the brown valley bed. The San Andreas Mountains rose up to block my view. Black Top Mountain, Gunsight Peak, Skillet Knob, all familiar forms. A hundred times I have watched the sun pass behind them, opalesce into dazzling glory then expire in its own red juices.
The San Andreas Mountains belong to the military. The whole range is off limits. And because the sign says "DO NOT ENTER" I am drawn like a moth to those forbidden places. How I would love to clamber up and down the hillsides, look for the abandoned homesteads of Joe Pete and Christopher Columbus Woods who killed the last bear in the mountains. Locate the haunts of Mellie Potter whose picture in a historical publication showed a girl of uncommon beauty. And the Prather place, where eighty-two year old John Prather literally stuck to his guns and refused to clear off his ranch, the only one to do so. Confronted by his willingness to die for his land, and embarrassed by public attention, all the king's horses and all the king's men tucked their tails between their legs and slunk back to the Pentagon. They took all but fifteen of John's four thousand acres for the missile site, but they left him alone and he died there.
I would top off an illicit hike in the San Andreas by visiting Rhodes Canyon, where the writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes lived and is buried. I own a print by Peter de la Fuente called "White Sands Hideaway" which shows a rundown ranch in the San Andreas Mountains. I have convinced myself that this was the Rhodes place. When I go there one day I will find that ranch, and it will look just like the one in the picture.
US 70 crawls northeast upwards into the Sacramento Mountains. The striated facade of these and the San Andreas Mountains are similar. They were once part of the same huge anticline, joined together by a paleozoic dome that was stretched beyond endurance by the Rio Grand Rift and eventually collapsed, falling several thousand feet to form the valley floor. The top is now the bottom.
The Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation is just a few miles up from my crow's nest on Round Mountain. That is why I really came to climb this peak. I am an Apache junkie. I have read every book, seen the movies, ate, slept and dreamed Apache. Not the modern ones. I don't know much about the modern Apache. The old ones.
On various pretexts, to buy gas or a candy bar, I stop in frequently at the Mescalero store before I venture into the mountains on US 70. It is, for me, an experience loaded with promise. These are not just ordinary people buying and selling groceries, tobacco, beer. They seem to be unaware of their own magic. Don't they know that this room is full of the blood of Geronimo, Victorio, Mangus Colorado, Cochise - all the great ones. My heart starts to palpitate just thinking about it.
Once when I was buying a coffee mug decorated with a picture of a Mountain Spirit Dancer a man approached and introduced himself as Bill Magoosh. "My God!" I thought, " he must be the grandson of Willie Magoosh who was chief of the Lipan Apache when they relocated here from Texas a hundred years ago." Struck dumb, I continued to make small talk, paid for the cup and left. A missed opportunity.
I knew my fascination for the Apache people was about to go over the edge when I stopped at a gift shop on the reservation one day and found myself lecturing an Apache woman about Victorio's sister, Lozen. She had claimed not to know the most valiant warrior woman in Apache history. Lozen sat in on war councils with the men, fought beside them, was a superb horse thief, and had mystical powers that enabled her to tell where an enemy was, and how far away. She was in that last sad desultory group of Apaches loaded on the train at Holbrook, Arizona and taken to Fort Marion as prisoners of war. It's a famous picture: Geronimo and Naiche are in front, sitting on a bank beside the train tracks. Their little rag-taggy group fans out behind them. Lozen is there too. It's just that no one knows which one she is.
Round Mountain
(cross on top).
Photo by the Author.
I know. I have decided that she is in the top row, third from the right. The defiant look on her face is partially covered by a lock of hair. Her head is held high. She looks strong and confident. If it is not her it should be. The lady in the picture captures the spirit of Lozen.
So I have come to Round Mountain because it is almost mid-point between two places which have cast a spell on me, Tularosa and Mescalero. It unites them in another way, also. On top of Round Mountain is a twenty foot cross guywired to the rocks. It was placed there in 1957 by a religious order known as Los Caballeros de la Santa Corona. The cross commemorates The Battle of Round Mountain. I am thinking about that fight between the Apache and the Tularosans as I lay down to rest on top of the mountain . . .
I have climbed the mountain to see what I can see. What I see is 1862. Hispanic settlers have wandered into the Tularosa basin. They come from the Mesilla Valley where the Rio Grand floodwaters destroyed their crops. Some just want to start life in a new place. The area around Tularosa beckons because the Rio Tularosa flows deep and cool year round. The soil is rich and needs only water to flourish.
Nothing welcomes them. The sun dessicates their nut-brown skin. It is too hot to work the fields. But they must. Scorpions poise beneath overturned rocks. Snakes grow angry in mesquite shadows. Vultures flap by on slow patient wings. Even the plants attack. Jumping cholla punctures unwary flesh.
Worse than all these hardships is the Apache. He is a relentless foe. Time after time bands of Indians raid the almost defenseless colony. Stock is driven off. Farmers are tortured and killed. Several times the settlers are forced off the land. Still they come back to try again, two determined cultures in a fight to the finish.
On March 11th of 1868 the Apache went on a particularly vicious rampage. They killed eleven men and two women. The people of Tularosa were thoroughly demoralized. Perhaps it was time to abandon the village once and for all.
It came to a head in April of 1868. At Fort Stanton, which is located southwest of the Capitan Mountains in Lincoln County, Sgt. Glass selected five troopers to escort a supply wagon through Apacheria to Fort Seldon in Texas. The soldiers were part of Company H, 3rd US cavalry. Several of the young men had no previous combat experience. They were tired of drills and routine and hoped for some action.
The wagon creaked slowly down through the mountains, stirring the dust which settled onto blue uniforms and blood bay horses. It was an unseasonably warm day that quickly exhausted the soldier's enthusiasm. They passed down through the Sacramentos, the most likely place for an attack. When they were five miles out of Tularosa, Sgt. Glass ordered the wagon to go on alone because the road ahead was considered safe. The six soldiers turned back towards Fort Stanton.
They rode two miles. Near the base of Round Mountain one of the soldiers thought he heard hoofbeats. They paused. Soon they all heard, and they knew what was coming. Instinctively they looked around for cover just as two hundred Apache warriors, led by the fierce war chiefs San Juan and Cadette, rounded the side of the mountain and swarmed towards them.
The partially intact wall of an abandoned adobe was close by. It was only about chest high. The soldiers took shelter there. With the little time they had before the Indians would charge they pulled their mounts down to the ground and hogtied them so they wouldn't be standing targets. Then the soldiers readied their weapons, post Civil War percussion Sharps carbines. These cartridge loading arms gave them an advantage. The Apaches had bows and arrows and an assortment of Springfield .58-caliber muzzle-loading muskets.
The Indians had a healthy respect for superior firepower. They also did not like to take foolish chances that might cost lives if there were other ways to conquer an enemy. San Juan and Cadette decided that they had lost the element of surprise; the soldiers were too well entrenched and could not be routed without risking casualties. They would lay siege to the soldiers and starve them out.
The Apaches stayed just out of range. A few warriors crept within bow range, fired their arrows high into the air and let them drop behind the wall. A couple of horses screamed, shots rang out, silence.
One of the soldiers volunteered to try to make it to Tularosa to get help. About 200 yards behind them the Rio Tularosa had carved a deep gully that ran down through the foothills, past Tularosa and disappeared into the desert sands. In freeze-stop motion he edged through the yucca and mesquite, dropped over the edge of the gully and raced towards town.
Several hours later the soldiers saw the Indians looking and pointing off to their left. A contingent of twenty-six armed Hispanic settlers was riding towards them at full gallop. Cesario Duran, Alcalde of Tularosa, led the group. Sheriff Jose Candelaria and his deputies were right behind him. Firing volley after volley they were able to ride into the enclosure where the soldiers were under siege.
The Apaches didn't like the odds. They made a fainthearted rush on the barricade. An arrow pierced Corporal Niever's wrist. A large Apache made it to the wall where he was shot, dragged inside and scalped. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the battle ended. When the dust settled behind the retreating Indians the soldiers and citizens maintained their positions for a long time, as if they couldn't believe their good fortune. It was over.
St. Francis de Paula Church in Tularosa.
Photo by the Author.
It stayed over. Tularosa was never again attacked by the Apache. The Hispanics crossed themselves, praised God, and promised to build a new church in His honor, which they did. In that same year they started construction on St. Francis de Paula Church which today graces downtown Tularosa. It is hard to believe that this elegant structure, shaded by ancient cottonwoods that line one of the oldest acequias in southern New Mexico, a calm white haven in a green oasis, was built to commemorate the last battle with the Apaches.
As you pass through a stone archway into the churchyard look to the right. A bronze plaque sits atop a stone base. On it are the names of the twenty-six men who marched out to help rescue the soldiers and defend their town.
I sit atop Round Mountain and look down at the cars whizzing past on US 70. Have they seen the cross and wondered? How many know the events that transpired here? Perhaps the next time I see Mr. Magoosh I will ask him to give me the Apache version of the Battle of Round Mountain.
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