In the New Mexico Magazine for August 1934, the really incredible story of the Big Ditch is exactly documented with old photographs and newspaper clippings. After a friendship of many years with old-time miners and ranchers at Silver City, I would not point an accusing finger at one of them. I appeal, however, for a greater vigilance over plant life and soils nowadays from everybody. In such protected areas as the Fort Bayard Reservation, the U.S. National Forest enclosures, and the frontier cemeteries, the imagination can visualize a New Mexico that is far different from what is here today—a close-picked, hard-used land where unwise woodcutting has continued through much of the last three centuries and where the thin ranges have been required to support in the last century alone perhaps more than one hundred million cows, sheep, and horses. The magnitude of the cause accounts for the magnitude of the effect.
A good many years ago, I wrote as the concluding paragraph to Sky Determines what seemed to some exaggerated praise for my adopted homeland. There is now less and less cavil from any readers. I believed the words true in 1934, and I stand my ground now.
Perhaps nowhere in the world is the natural setting nobler than in New Mexico—more beautiful with spacious desert, sky, mountain; more varied in rich, energizing climate, more dramatic in its human procession, more mellow with age-old charm. Endowed with sunshine that stimulates, and winter chill that toughens; with silence and majestic desert color that offer a spiritual companionship, it has enough. Here, if anywhere is air, earth, sky fit to constitute a gracious homeland, not alone for those who study and create, but as well for those who play, for those who sit still to brood and dream.
Tyuonyi Pueblo ruin
This large ruin in Bandelier National Monument lies along the banks of El Rito de los Frijoles. Narrow-leaf cottonwoods line the stream, and shrubs of the Upper Sonoran Zone cover the hillside slopes.
Dwellers in the Hills and Plains
by Levon Lee[1]
The vast sweep of New Mexico’s 77 million acres, which ranges all the way from the Alpine tundra of the tallest mountains down to the heat of the lower Sonoran desert, offers a home and sanctuary for many kinds of wild life.
Some of these animals are considered game animals; others may be pests, since they prey upon or destroy what mankind regards as its own. The coyote which takes a sheep from the small herder is wicked indeed in the eyes of the sheepman. Predatoriness on all living things by other things has gone on since time began and will continue—mankind being not the least predator.