Taylor Creek, a meandering stream high in the Gila Wilderness, is on average about five feet wide and a foot or so deep. It would hardly qualify as a rivulet in Perry County, but fresh water is extremely scarce in New Mexico, even in the mountains. For the Chiricahua Apaches, who used the area as a natural fortress, this humble stream bore an almost mystical significance.
I recently had the opportunity to ride on horseback through canyons carved by the mighty ancestor of Taylor Creek, splashing back and forth across the stream every few hundred yards as it wound through bedrock riddled with caves and abandoned mine shafts. This is the “real West,” if you’re looking for that kind of thing, a landscape where thousand-year-old cliff dwellings sit side by side with the abandoned camps of 19th century Basque shepherds and 20th century tin miners.
History is a kind of jumble along Taylor Creek, but there is a common denominator: fresh water, that most precious of resources, the essential elixir of life. You can still find the distinctive black and white pottery sherds of the Mimbres Indians, a branch of the Mogollon native group that pre-dated the Apaches, along the creek bed, but the rider’s eye is invariably drawn upward towards open sky, as if there were still the risk, in this late day and age, that an Apache raider might be scampering along the heights, waiting for the opportunity to ambush the peaceful horse train below.
Thirst was the unrelenting force that drove man and beast into these exposed canyons; thirst led many a traveler to his doom, and not just in these hills. They say that the history of the West is the history of water rights. Traveling the vast deserts of New Mexico in a car only goes so far towards explaining the murderous intensity of emotion that running water evokes in these parts. You really have to be mounted on the back of a sweating beast whose legs tremble with anticipation each time you near the stream, and whose enormous lips plunge greedily into the water, sucking it down by the gallon, to understand the strategic importance of even a tiny creek like this one.
Crossing the Gila Wilderness in the 19th century was a matter of negotiating these wind-blasted canyons, an ancestral stronghold of the Apaches, who saw the arrival of teamsters, miners, and settlers as nothing short of a military invasion, an assault on their homeland. Travelers slept with one eye open, and, if they were smart, wore a pair of Colt revolvers tucked in their belt and kept a Sharps or Henry rifle close at hand.
A love of guns is one of the eternal verities of this rough-hewn country. In the course of our Western adventure, we had a chance to get to know a family from Tucson, Arizona whose views on gun ownership might be described as “anything goes.” The youngster of the group, a nineteen-year-old heavy equipment mechanic named Conner, had already amassed a collection of 60 weapons, and was happy to show us his two “truck guns,” a 9mm automatic pistol and an AR-15 with a stock that had been modified to qualify it as a “pistol” rather than a long gun to ease the regulatory paperwork.
Conner was a great skeptic about life back East. He was perpetually asking questions with a focus on population density and concealed carry.
I’ve met plenty of gun lovers in Perry County — I consider myself one of them, to a degree — and a lot of enthusiastic NRA members, but nothing prepared me for the single-minded passion I found in Conner and his family. These were people who refused to travel anywhere with even the slightest restriction on carrying a weapon. Forget about Europe, Asia, or any of the other benighted countries of the world; there were huge swaths of the United States that were essentially “no-go” territory for these folks.
Strangely — at least, to me — they felt that their right to bear arms was everywhere under assault. It was hard for me to fathom what they meant. With hundreds of guns between them; a seemingly endless supply of ammunition; and the right to carry a concealed weapon virtually anywhere and at any time; nevertheless, they were very worked up about what they saw as the erosion of their Constitutional rights. The idea that the state might have an interest in limiting their access to the most deadly weapons of war was nothing short of fascism!
To be fair, I could see a historical correlation between the landscape — those deep, exposed canyons that slowed travel to a terrifying crawl — and a reverence for the weapons that might save your life in an Indian raid.
But times have changed. This isn’t the Wild West any more. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.
