Afternoon in Sierra County: Chloride, NM

We decided to take a Sunday jaunt to Chloride and Monticello, old ghost towns in Sierra County between the Gila and Truth or Consequences. I fell in love with this area and I want to share it with you, dear readers.

There is an indescribable magic lingering in these ghost towns of Sierra County. The austere desert of the Jornada del Norte continues along Hwy 159 to Cuchillo. I can easily see why this area was named the Journey of Death by early Spanish conquistadores, as it is a vast expanse of sun-pounded sand, populated only by rattlesnakes and other tough animals and thorny plants. There isn’t a spot of shade or a drop of water in sight.

Cuchillo was the first town we passed through. Built into a desert canyon, there are definitely signs of life, but the town is mostly a ghost town. A historic church remains, alongside a defunct bar and a few abandoned buildings and rotting trailers.

Cuchillo was once called Cuchillo Negro. The area was home to many Apaches and then white settlers began to farm along Cuchillo Creek around the 1860s, leading to many violent skirmishes. As a result, the town was arranged around a walled plaza that served as the town’s central defense point. One such skirmish with Apache chieftain Baishan, called “Cuhillo Negro” or “Black Knife” in Spanish, resulted in him becoming the town’s namesake.

Cuchillo Negro started appearing in the census around 1880 and changed its name to just Cuchillo to maintain its post office in 1900. Agriculture flourished in the region with over 450 acres fed by a community irrigation ditch system built off Cuchillo Creek by 1928. Now, fewer acres are irrigated, but farming and ranching still thrive in this area. It is a bit jarring to see the verdant fields within the river valley at sharp contrast to the sand and mesquite scrub everywhere else.

Soon, the desert started to give way to grassland and pigmy forest as we climbed in elevation. There was lots of evidence of ranching, including the cutest spur mailboxes.

A herd of deer and the open range cattle made us slow down to a crawl.

We stopped for drinks at this cute little general store in Winston. There is not much to this town beyond the store and a DOT yard.

From there, we traveled down “Wall Street” to Chloride. I was surprised how remarkably well-preserved the town is. Turns out, it’s all thanks to Donald and Dona Edmund, and their daughter Linda.

The Edmunds own most of the town and have restored most of the historic buildings, converting them into something we can appreciate in modern times. They tirelessly work to keep the history of this classic Wild Western alive. Linda was available at the gift shop when we arrived and talked to us at length about the town and its many historical gems.

In the late 1870s, a freighter named Harry Pye was running a load through the Chloride Canyon when he thought he found silver float in the creekbed. He had the rock assayed and found out he was correct and the area was rich in chloride of silver. He waited two years for his military contract to expire and then he took two men to the canyon to stake a claim. Apache raids ended up killing Pye.

However, others soon flooded the area. It became the central town of the Apache Mining District, where rich silver ore and other minerals were mined. Chloride was big for its time, with eight saloons, restaurants, stores, a Chinese laundry, a confetionary, and more. It had about a thousand residents by 1880s. Shootouts, saloon girls, and all the other elements of a Wild Western town were present here, lending a strange energetic buzz to its present quietness.

But then the boom went bust in 1893 when gold became the country standard and the worth of silver dropped over 90%. Most people moved away. Buildings became abandoned and many fell apart. The Edmunds have been instrumental in preserving a few small relics of the once-glorious mining town.

The old saloon and dance hall, which sat abandoned for 50 years, has been lovingly restored into an art gallery and gift shop. The unique crafts of over 30 artists are displayed here.

The old store has been converted into a museum. It is crammed with the dusty relics of a time that is not that long ago, yet that feels utterly alien to us from a modern lens. In Chloride, though, you feel a bit closer to the Nineteenth Century than usual. It is a delightfully disconcerting feeling, almost like being transported to another world.

The museum and gift shop both have many books written by local authors, including Donald Edmund, who have all worked to preserve the stories of old timers from the area. A brief perusal of one of Edmund’s books, The Stories They Told Us, reveals glimpses into a world of cattle driving, bitter winter storms, near death from appendicitis, and gold legends.

The stairs to nowhere lead to the second story which once housed a printing press.

There are also picnic tables and public restrooms and a campground. We enjoyed a little picnic here while taking in the old mining equipment preserved around Chloride.

The picnic area is next to the Grafton Cabin. The Grafton Cabin has an interesting history. The town of Grafton once stood northwest of Chloride. It was a mining town that boomed in the early 1880s, but by 1892, it had dwindled in population due to constant Apache raids. Now all that remains is a few abandoned buildings. The owner of the Grafton Cabin decided to donate it to the City of Las Cruces in 1976. The Grafton Cabin was disassembled and shipped to Las Cruces, where it was displayed in the Downtown Mall (now the downtown plaza). When the cabin needed to be moved for street construction in 2006, Donald and Dona Edmund raised the money through their Pioneer Store Museum in Chloride to have it returned to an approximation of its original location.

It is now locked but you can walk around it and view where miners used to live in the Nineteenth Century. It looks snug and sturdy! I imagined this is the sort of place James McKenna lived in when I read Tales from the Black Range.

We honestly wanted to stay in Chloride forever. The town was so peaceful, a nice break from the constant hum of vehicles in our city. The sky was never-ending, a shocking, reverberating blue broken by the occasional giant cotton ball cloud. The mountains of the Gila loomed over the town and called to me to explore deeper. If only we had four wheel drive!

But we had to get going to make it home by nightfall, so we headed back to Cuchillo and caught Hwy 142 to Monticello. You can read about that adventure here!