| New Site | Old Home | Search | Communities | Counties | Southeast | Southwest | |
 |
| |
| ||||||||||||
Drusilla Claridge
Last updated on Monday, July 07, 2003
Drusilla Claridge has combined a fascination with history and an appetite for the outdoors since coming to New Mexico 23 years ago. She has participated in reenactments of the Rocky Mountain fur trade rendezvous, wearing authentic period Cheyenne clothing, and sleeping in a teepee. She has handled horses since she was a teenager, and has travelled horseback in the Gila Wilderness. She frequents New Mexico's hot springs, and has participated in a sweatlodge ceremony conducted by a Jicarilla Apache.
Drusilla Claridge Dru worked on the Gila National Forest as a fire lookout in 1979, 1988, and 1989. The journal she kept was excerpted in a piece published by Stackpole Books. The book, Go Tell It On the Mountain, an anthology of lookout writing, includes the works of Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock, Jackie Johnson Maughan and others. In the summer of 1996 Claridge went back to tower work.
Dru worked on the historic districts of Silver City, New Mexico, reading nineteenth century newspapers, conducting oral history interviews, and photographing historic adobe buildings. Her work, writing technical documents on the history and architecture of Southwest New Mexico, allowed significant properties to be listed with the National and State Registries of Historic Places.
In the late 1980s, she lived in remote Quemado, New Mexico, and reported for the Catron County Courier. She also visited every lookout tower on the Gila National Forest, photographing them for the U.S Forest Service.
Her historical novel, Peacock Ore, is now available from 1st Books Library. The book depicts two cultures and their fight over the Mogollon mining district in the 1870's. On one side was the great Apache chief Victorio, with his sister Lozen, warrior and medicine woman; on the other was Sergeant James Cooney, with his Irish miners. The Silver City Daily Press pronounced it a "must read for Southwest history buffs." To order a copy, call 1-888-280-7715, or visit www.1stbooks.com .
In addition to writing, Dru also creates desert landscape pastels.
Articles by Drusilla Claridge
I used to lug rocks home. I saw a work of art in the form of an easily pocketed little rock, and just had to claim it for my own. In the Southwest one finds so many interesting rocks, this is a common response to a stroll in the country. You can't do this just anywhere, believe it or not - the Park Service doesn't permit it in the National Parks, for example. There are places where rocks should not be picked up: At Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, a green glass, 'trinitite,' was created by the blast, and though visitors were begged not to pick it up, they did, and it's all gone.Flatlanders need not apply. The road to Mogollon, known as the Bursum Road, climbs 2,080 feet from the San Francisco River Valley to the old ghost town, nestled in the Mogollon Mountains. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” you might say, but the climb is seven miles in length - over 2,000 feet in seven miles, and not one of the switchbacks has guardrails. Sometimes the unseen hand of fate descends to arrange a unique opportunity. When visiting Steins (pronounced Steens) Railroad Ghost Town, just off I-10 in southern New Mexico near the Arizona state line, I had the chance to take a rare photograph.The Bursum Road runs throughthe middle of Mogollon. Photo by Carla DeMarco
One of my favorite drives is along the Bursum Road, which turns east from Hwy 180 about 4 miles north of Glenwood and climbs to Mogollon, Willow Creek, and Snow Lake. The Bursum Road takes the traveler from desert heat at the San Francisco River to alpine woods of aspen and fir in the Mogollon Mountains.
It came as a surprise to find out that not everyone finds this enchanting drive the perfect summer outing. What's the problem?
The high valley in which the tiny town of Luna, New Mexico, sits is surpassingly beautiful. The San Francisco River courses by under enormous cottonwood trees, and the green valley stretches between piney mountains. Luna itself, rustic and basic, could hail from an era when cowpokes rode alongside their herds, ropes a-twirl, spurs flashing in the sunlight.
Actually, an even more radical time shift is required of the visitor who would take in everything Luna has to offer. With the re-opening of the Hough Ruin (pronounced HUFF), one must stretch one's imagination 700 years back in time, when another civilization peopled this lovely valley.
The North Star Road (Forest Route 150 on the Gila National Forest map), an unpaved road connecting New Mexico's Mimbres Valley with Wall Lake, has an undeserved bad reputation. On checking with the Mimbres Ranger Station, I was cautioned to use a high clearance vehicle. I have driven the entire route several times, only once with a high clearance vehicle. I cross-examined the Forest Service person about creek crossings and they all seemed to be fine, so I gassed up my Subaru wagon. We loaded it with a picnic supper and took off For attractive, comfortable, and convenient lodgings in Silver City, no place surpasses the Palace Hotel. The hotel's charm combines old world elegance with down home Western comfort. Situated on the corner of Broadway and Bullard Streets, the heart of downtown Silver City's historic district, the Palace Hotel is within walking distance to shops, galleries, and restaurants. Certain stories are so evocative of time and place, they enter a zone of both fiction and common knowledge. The story of the Johnson Massacre is such a story. It has been retold in books and magazines claiming to report real life in early New Mexico. The story has been borrowed by the movies, for its dramatic qualities give themselves to the medium of film. Let me tell you the legend, and the real incident which gave rise to it. Victorio's Mimbres Apaches were concentrated family units which had once populated the Mimbres and Gila Rivers, and Mogollon Mountains. Through attrition from contact with encroaching Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers, their numbers dwindled, and in 1870 the Mimbres Apaches were given a small reservation, Ojo Caliente or Warm Springs, northwest of present Truth or Consequences. From the tower we could see much of the Gila's three million acres. Visible over the treetops were wooded hills, bare mesas, canyons and ridges, and Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. To the west, the Mogollon Mountains glowed in the sunset at 11,000 feet. To the north were the bare and lonesome Plains of San Agustín, cut by curiously shaped hills.
|
||||||||||||
