Baxter Black, Who Elevated Cowboy Poetry to Folk Art, Dies at 77

(NYTimes) Baxter Black, the country’s best-known cowboy poet, whose witty, big-hearted verse about cowpokes, feed lots and wide-open vistas elevated the tradition of Western doggerel to something of a folk art, died on June 10 at his home, a ranch outside Benson, Ariz. He was 77. Continued

Fitzsimmons-Maher Prizefight

Judge Roy Bean

(Wikipedia) The Fitzsimmons-Maher Prizefight (February 21, 1896), also considered, unofficially, as the 1896 World Heavyweight Championship, occurred between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher on a sandbar in the Rio Grande River just far enough outside of the American city of Langtry, Texas ... Continued

David Thomas: Zeroing in on Southern New Mexico History

(Wild West) ... After launching a software company and writing computer programming manuals, he went on to author well-received books about New Mexico history, including several about the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. Thomas, 75, recently spoke with Wild West about his writing and some of the more interesting figures from the Mesilla Valley. Continued

Bob Wills in New Mexico

Mural honoring Bob Wills in Roy, New Mexico (Sixgun Siding)

(ilovenewmexicoblog.com) My daddy grew up in Porter, New Mexico, the youngest of ten children. He delights in telling what I think of as "baby of the family" stories (I have a number of my own. . .), about how the older brothers used to torture him by hiding behind the tank and jumping out to frighten him when he had to walk to the windmill after dark to turn the pump off, or how he sometimes had to stay in and help Granny Terry in the house because he was the baby.
Or how he had to be the designated driver of my Grandpa Terry's 1936 Ford sedan when his older brothers and the local boys wanted to go to Tucumcari to tomcat around during World War II. When he was eleven years old. Continued

James Bell

James Bell, the good cop, forever shackled in legend to Bob Olinger's bad, 
both shot and killed by Billy the Kid in 1881. Cedarvale Cemetery, White Oaks, New Mexico.

John R. Brinkley

Courtesy of The Radio Historian

(Wikipedia) John Romulus Brinkley (later John Richard Brinkley; July 8, 1885 – May 26, 1942) was an American quack who fraudulently claimed to be a medical doctor. He had no legitimate medical education and bought his medical degree from a "diploma mill". Brinkley became known as the "goat-gland doctor" after he achieved national fame, international notoriety and great wealth through the xenotransplantation of goat testicles into humans. 

Although initially Brinkley promoted this procedure as a means of curing male impotence, eventually he claimed that the technique was a virtual panacea for a wide range of male ailments. He operated clinics and hospitals in several states, and despite the fact that almost from the beginning, detractors and critics in the medical community thoroughly discredited his methods, he was able to continue his activities for almost two decades. 

He was also, almost by accident, an advertising and radio pioneer who began the era of Mexican border blaster radio. Continued

Pompey Factor

(Wikipedia) ... After having lived in Mexico for the previous two decades, Factor and other Black Seminoles joined the US Army as Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts in August 1870, and served in the Red River War. On April 25, 1875, he was serving as a private by the Pecos River in Texas where, "[w]ith 3 other men, he participated in a charge against 25 hostiles while on a scouting patrol." A month later, on May 28, 1875, Factor was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the engagement. Two of the other men who took part in the charge, Isaac Payne and John Ward, both Black Seminoles, also received Medals of Honor. Continued

Why This Woman Chooses to Live in a Ghost Town

(Outside) As one of the only inhabitants of an abandoned railway stop in eastern New Mexico, Debra Dawson has been social distancing for decades. Attracted to its history and surrounding landscape, she's found happiness far away from just about everyone. Continued

Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84

(NYTimes) Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas, died on Thursday at home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84. 

 The cause was congestive heart failure, said Diana Ossana, his friend and writing partner. 

 Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006. But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. Continued

Also: The Essential Larry McMurtry

Charles Portis

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette True Grit Illustration (John Deering)

(Wikipedia) Charles McColl Portis (December 28, 1933 – February 17, 2020) was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968), both adapted as films. The latter also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. A newer film adaptation of True Grit was released in 2010. Portis has been described as "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction." Continued

Historic 1866 Texas well produced just 10 barrels of oil

(American Oil and Gas Historical Society) In December 1859, less than four months after Edwin L. Drake’s first U.S. oil well drilled in Pennsylvania, a similarly determined petroleum explorer named Lyne (Lynis) Taliaferro Barret began searching in an East Texas area known as Oil Springs. The 1848 invention of “coal oil” — kerosene — had prompted demand for an illuminating fuel made from oil, inspiring speculation and drilling. Continued

Crazy Fourth: How Jack Johnson Kept His Heavyweight Title and Put Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the Map

Jack Johnson

(Amazon) In 1912 boxing was as popular a spectator sport in the United States as baseball, if not more so. It was also rife with corruption and surrounded by gambling, drinking, and prostitution, so much so that many cities and states passed laws to control it. But not in New Mexico. It was the perfect venue for one of the biggest, loudest, most rambunctious heavyweight championship bouts ever seen. In Crazy Fourth Toby Smith tells the story of how the African American boxer Jack Johnson--the bombastic and larger-than-life reigning world heavyweight champion--met Jim Flynn on the Fourth of July in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Continued

Singer Trini Lopez, 83, dies of COVID-19 complications

(Chicago Sun Times) RIO RANCHO, N.M. — Trini Lopez, a singer and guitarist who gained fame for his versions of “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer” in the 1960s and took his talents to Hollywood, died Tuesday. He was 83.
 ... Buddy Holly saw Lopez at a small nightclub in Wichita Falls, Texas, and introduced him to Norman Petty, his record producer in Clovis, New Mexico. Holly died in a plane crash six months later, and Lopez briefly replaced him as lead singer of The Crickets. Continued

Rudolfo Anaya R.I.P.

(Wikipedia) ... Rudolfo Anaya was raised in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His father, Martín Anaya, was a vaquero from a family of cattle workers and sheepherders. His mother, Rafaelita (Mares), was from a family composed of farmers from Puerto De Luna in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico. Anaya grew up with two half-brothers, from his mother’s previous marriage, and four sisters. The beauty of the desert flatlands of New Mexico, referenced as the llano in Anaya's writings, had a profound influence on his early childhood. Continued

Estella García

(Wikipedia) Estella R. Garcia was an American artist who was a part of the Federal Art Project. Garcia was a teacher at the Melrose Federal Art Center in Melrose, New Mexico where she taught colcha, a traditional form of wool embroidery, to both Hispanic and Anglo students. The facility was considered to be located in the smallest town to have such a federal art center. Continued

Dee Brown

(Wikipedia) Dorris Alexander "Dee" Brown (February 29, 1908 – December 12, 2002) was an American novelist, historian, and librarian. His most famous work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), details the history of American expansionism from the point of view of the Native Americans. Continued

John Tunstall

(Wikipedia) John Henry Tunstall (6 March 1853 – 18 February 1878), born in London, England, became a rancher and merchant in Lincoln County, New Mexico, where he competed with ethnic Irish merchants and politicians who ran the town of Lincoln and the county.
He was the first man killed in what developed as the Lincoln County War, an economic and political conflict that resulted in armed warfare, perhaps compounded by ethnic rivalries between an Irish group and others of English descent. Continued

Charles Portis, Elusive Author of ‘True Grit,’ Dies at 86

Portis is the one who isn't John Wayne (Encyclopedia of Arkansas)

(NYTimes) Charles Portis, the publicity-shy author of “True Grit” and a short list of other novels that drew a cult following and accolades as the work of possibly the nation’s best unknown writer, died on Monday at a hospice in Little Rock, Ark. He was 86. Continued

"Madam Candelaria" dies at age 113

 

(TDbD) On this day in 1899, Andrea Castañón Villanueva (Madam Candelaria), who claimed to be a survivor of the battle of the Alamo, died at age 113 in San Antonio. She said she had been born in Laredo in 1785, though other sources say she was born at Presidio del Río Grande.
She came to San Antonio when she was about twenty-five and married Candelario Villanueva, who she said was her second husband; thereafter she became known as Madam or Señora Candelaria. She was the mother of four children and raised twenty-two orphans. She nursed the sick and aided the poor. Continued

Chief of the Pastores Casimiro Romero

Just northeast of the New Mexico line on U.S. 54

 "Moved to Texas, 1876, from New Mexico-- wife and two children in a coach, goods in 14 wagons. Owned 6,000 sheep. A Castilian Spaniard by birth, Romero spoke for pastores (sheep herders), who built eleven haciendas and plazas in Canadian River area. Cattle rancher Chas. Goodnight in late 1876 made a pact with Romero to respect right of the pastores to valley of Canadian River. But, railroads and cattle ranches in 1880s cut into sheep lands. Romero returned to New Mexico, selling Texas lands, 1897. He is memorialized in this area by town of Romero (3.5 miles southwest of here)." Romero spent his last years ranching sheep on a couple of quarter sections near Bard, New Mexico. He is buried in an unmarked grave in the Endee Cemetery.