Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Off Humbug Mountain and Over to Cimarron, New Mexico

By Carol Mell, 3-20-07

	Jesse James signed in as R.H. Howard in the guestbook that is still found in the lobby of the St. James Hotel.

I signed up for a writer’s workshop in Oklahoma City, the Will Rogers Writers Workshop. To get there from New Mexico my husband drove me, I’m still on crutches, through a remote part of our state and into the Oklahoma Panhandle for a visit to “No Man’s Land.”

Our plan was to return through the Texas Panhandle. You could say we were exploring the great cookware section of the country where one panhandle butts up against the other just like when you get too many cast iron skillets on your stove.

So I’m writing a backwards travelogue through some remote and flatter’n a pancake country I’ve never seen before.

Still in the mountains, we stopped for lunch in Cimarron, New Mexico about 60 miles from Taos. Like so many Western towns, Cimarron has more history than future. History is about all the 850 souls there have to trade. Most of them work out of town.

The main attraction is the St. James hotel at the intersection of Collision Avenue and the Santa Fe Trail. Behind it sits a small park where a well once watered the weary travelers and their animals. Abraham Lincoln’s chef established a saloon here in 1872 for the desperados and rustlers on the lam from Dodge City. By 1880 the saloon had become a hotel. Annie Oakley, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody, the James brothers, Wyatt Earp, Billy the kid and Blackjack Ketchum stayed there.

Locals say a notorious gunman, Clay Allison, danced naked on the bar. The day we were there a workman was putting in a nice wood floor around that bar. I tried to imagine the naked gunman but all I got was a couple of white haired ladies having lunch. Nowadays, the hotel advertises peace and quiet.

St. James is famous for ghosts, mostly from the 26 men who were killed there. The maintenance man at the hotel, Bill Blankenhorn, gave us a quick tour before lunch. Animal trophies decorate the lobby. Two deer still have their antlers fatally entangled on a plaque over the hall door. One of the rooms in the hotel is never opened because it is haunted. I asked Blankenhorn if he’d ever seen the ghost.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t seen it. But one time I looked up from the street and I saw the curtain draw closed, like someone had just been looking out. That was creepy.”

A broken tombstone tells how Cimarron’s first Reverend, F.J. Tolby was assassinated, shot in the back according to Blankenhorn, in 1875. “Lo matarás” is carved out in Spanish on that stone which puzzles me because of the future tense, “You will be murdered.”

My husband, being a minister, wondered how the poor schmuck had gotten crosswise with the locals, a situation we’ve experienced ourselves a number of times. Did the Spanish Catholics fear the Gringo minister threatened their traditions? Did he preach against all the gambling and prostitution that surely went on in that town? Did he try to dry out the town by interfering with booze shipments? Did he look at some Señorita the wrong way? Even today in New Mexico this kind of thing can happen when people come in thinking they know what’s best for the rest of us. That’s not a threat, just an observation.

Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of our journey in which I’ll tell you about the trouble with flowerbeds in Cimarron country and show you the cheesy tipi desperate townsfolk use to attract tourism.

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