August 2018 20 One of those prospectors was Jimmy McKenna, an Irish man who came to the area from the east seeking his fortune. He was well educated for the times and left a written account of his experiences that pulls the reader right into the wilds with him and his burro, called Old Hog. This is an account of some of the adventures of Jimmy and Old Hog in the wilds between the Mogollon Mountains and Kingston, New Mexico Territory. Jimmy McKenna headed west on a wagon train out of Kansas City, Missouri in 1877. He decided to try his luck in the mining camps of Colorado and New Mexico. At Dodge City, he joined up with three other men with the same goals and they headed for Elizabeth Town, a gold camp in the Rockies, 100 miles west of Trinidad. His partner Allen and another man, Martin, a grizzled old veteran of the California gold fields, worked a claim Allen had filed on Ute Creek until it began to get cold in the Rockies. They headed south to Hillsboro, New Mexico, near the Black Range, one of the most scenic mountain ranges in the west that ran north for some 125 miles from Cook’s Peak, not far from Deming. The range is about 12 miles wide. Its abundant mineral riches were just beginning to be found when McKenna arrived in the area. Allen and Martin went their own ways from Hillsboro, Allen into the camps in Arizona and Martin up into the Black Hills to prospect. Jimmie worked about Hillsboro for a time, then headed to Silver City, Pinos Altos and then to Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Later he drifted back to Lake Valley and Hachita, New Mexico Territory and then again up into the Black Range area, which seemed to attract him constantly in his wanderings. Homesteading in the Wilds Jimmie filed a homestead on 150 acres he had staked out in Gila country, not far from the famed Gila Hot Springs. Wild turkey and deer were in abundance. He raised hogs, chickens, grew corn and vegetables and lived in a solid log cabin with a shake roof he and some friends had put up for his home base. At times he hunted deer and turkey and packed his kills into Kingston to sell to meat vendors. Then one day in 1884, Jason Baxter drifted into the Hot Springs area and Jimmie met him. Baxter was a man Jimmie could relate to, respect and learn from. A Civil War veteran who had been one of Quantrill’s Raiders, Baxter had gone west after the war ended and took up hunting, prospecting and trailblazing. With nearly 20 years in the mountains and deserts of the Southwest under his belt, Baxter knew of gold finds, mineral deposits, water holes and deep unexplored canyons that “newcomers” like Jimmie had only heard about in tales around campfires. Hunting for a Living McKenna, his partner Poland and Baxter soon put together a hunting and prospecting trip that would earn them enough to stake them and allow a prospecting excursion into the mountains to old diggings that miners had found in the late 1860’s. Baxter knew of these diggings and the men who mined them. He was a frontiersman who mapped in his mind everywhere he had wandered, remembered each creek, mountain, and peak he had ever encountered. The trio hired a Swede named Nelson as a packer and headed into the Black Range and then into the Mogollons for game. The winter was one of the best for game anybody could remember. The deer were fat and the turkeys abundant. As the hunters felled and dressed their game and took it to their camps, Nelson would pack it onto burros and trail it into Las Cruces or Kingston where eager butchers and miners would buy it. All through the winter, the hunt went on. Some of the meat was jerked on site for the hunters’ stores and the coming prospecting excursion. As spring came, the hunters made their way back slowly towards McKenna’s homestead, seeking out a couple of old mine sites Baxter had heard of many years earlier in areas he had been familiar with. It was a disappointing trip. An earthquake had hit the area where the digs were and had leveled many familiar peaks and filled canyons that Baxter had prospected in 20 years earlier. The diggings the sought had been obliterated by this natural violence and they could find none of the old mines. Heading on to McKenna’s cabin, they worked along the Gila and found the streams leading into it from the mountains full of trout, which they fished as they went. White Creek Disaster They finally got to the cabin of two brothers named McKenzie on White Creek, an area where several ranchers had settled. A stray dog that had joined the trio as they worked their way down the Gila was with them. The McKenzie brothers went into town the day after Baxter, Poland and Jimmie arrived, leaving the trio camped a short distance from the cabin. The stray dog was restless that night and Baxter thought that the pup sensed intruders in the area. Poland and Jimmie decided to spend the day trout fishing, but Baxter, an ardent reader, had received a stack of newspapers from the McKenzie brothers and he decided to stay in camp and read them. Just as the two fishermen were about to leave camp, their burros came running past the camp. They had been up at White Creek grazing and something had scared them and sent them running back to camp. McKenna grabbed his rifle and a switch and went out to gather them. His burro, Old Hog, wouldn’t go back up the creek where the animals had been pastured. He wanted to stay in camp and balked so hard, McKenna let him, driving the others back to pasture. Once he had the burros back to where they had been grazing, Jimmie noticed fresh tracks. Back in camp, he told Baxter of the tracks but the old frontiersman just shrugged and it was probably Mexicans or Indians that had scared the stock. It was afternoon before Jimmie and Poland headed up White Creek. They decided to split up, with Poland going down the river to a box canyon and fishing up and Jimmie going up to a falls and fishing down. They would meet halfway with their catch. Things didn’t quite go as planned. It was almost sundown when Jimmie, waiting by a deep pool where Poland was supposed to meet him, began to get uneasy. Finally, he figured Poland must have missed him and gone back to the McKenzie cabin. Jimmie set out along the river working his way towards the brush. APACHE TERROR HAUNTS PROSPECTOR Prospectors and their burros roamed the Mogollon Rim, the border area between Arizona and New Mexico territories and the western areas of New Mexico in the 1880’s seeking gold and silver finds at great personal risk. This was the lands of the Apaches and Mescaleros, the land of the great war chief Victorio, a wilderness where sudden death at the hands of Indian bands was a constant companion of the prospectors and miners who were brave enough to enter it. continued on page 22