Embree “Sonny” Hale Jr. is dead. I got a call from his daughter, Bobby, in December 2020. Waves of memories, mostly good, washed over me and contributed to my melancholy at his passing. One of the last times I’d seen him, sitting together at a table at the back of the Hillsboro General Store/Café, he told me it was “first time in 14 years I could buy myself a meal here”! How had he accomplished this wonder? Was he back to mining, cat-skinning, backhoeing, powder-selling or any of the myriad other ways he’d made a living in his 73 years? Nope, in 2008 he’d sold photos of petroglyphs at eight film festivals where a lady-film-maker was exhibiting a documentary she’d made about him. Embree Hale Jr (Sonny) had gone Hollywood! I had to applaud him for his creativity and adaptability: he’d done it out of love for the subject as much as for survival, but he’d gone Hollywood nevertheless.
Hillsboro, the site of our shared breakfast, sprang up on the banks of Percha Creek, in the eastern foothills of the Black Range of southwestern New Mexico in 1877, in response to a gold rush in the adjoining Animas Hills. It’s gone through its share of mining and cattle booms and busts since then, it’s gotten and lost the Sierra county seat, and now slumbers quietly most of the year except for Labor Day weekend when it hosts the annual Apple Festival.
And where Sonny has been successful at making a go of it in the place he was born in and loves dearly, many of small-time miners, ranchers and cowboys and contractors who used to inhabit this corner of the West have simply vanished. They’ve left, moved on over the last 20 years and quietly and progressively been replaced by part-time residents from Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso (or Minnesota), who’ve bought up the residences in the old mining camps as vacation homes or retirement refuges. Where there used to be a half-dozen working ranches, there are now two: the fee land on the others has been subdivided into 10 acre lots, the grazing allotments turned back to the Forest Service. And where 20 years ago there were nearly as many small mining operations, there are none. Given that under the current federal and state regulatory regimes they’re next to impossible to work as such, most of the patented mining claims have long been sold as cabin sites. I have a hard time seeing how this is better for wildlife, for the environment, for anything else related to nature than ranching or small-scale mining…but that’s the way it is.
Sonny spread a dozen photos he’d taken of pictographs, storms and sunsets along the Rio Grande Valley, from the latitude of Las Cruces, New Mexico, on up to north of Truth or Consequences, all nicely matted for sale, between us and was telling me about his new “career”. Things went quiet for a few seconds then he smiled quizzically, his blue eyes blazed under his shock of white hair topped by a cowboy hat and he said:
“My brain just turned to clabber!”. “Oh, yeah....I was saying that I’m about breakin’ even on this photography hobby now, which is a damned-sight better than I was doin’ the last few years of sellin’ powder.
“I won’t call it a business till I actually make some money at it! But I’m eating anyways. I went from movin’ $20,000 worth of powder a year, back when you were livin’ around here, to $900 before I give it up. I went up to Santa Fé to renew my license and the guy from the bureau pointed out to me that it’d cost me more than I’d sold for the last two years, so finally I just threw in the towel”.
It reminded me of the apocryphal story about the miner who was shipping ore to the Garfield copper smelter in Utah, and went in to the office to pick up his check. When the clerk totaled up all of his credits and subtracted all of his deducts his conclusion was that the old timer owed the smelter money. The old timer responded that he was broke, didn’t have a cent; that was why he’d made the shipment of ore to the smelter in the first place.
“Well what do you have that you can give me in lieu of cash?”, said the clerk. The miner responds “I’ve got some chickens”. The clerk scratches his head then decides “give me two chickens and we’ll call it even”, so a few days later the miner sends in the two chickens. The next time he hears from the miner is about a month later when he calls him up to say he’s making another ore shipment, and before the clerk can discourage him he adds “and don’t worry about a thing, I’ve already got two chickens picked out to send along with it”! That’s been the traditional attitude of the small miner, and applies equally to ranchers and farmers. They’re wedded to a way of life, not to a way to make a living.
Now the eastern foothills of the Black Range of New Mexico may or may not be a representative sample of what’s happened to the rural West, but it’s a corner I know well and I’ll give you my perspective on it. I worked there on and off from 1980 through 1988 as a geologist/prospector, paid by small miners and promoters to evaluate their prospects. Then, in 1990, I left the US for a twelve year prospecting stint in Latin America, and moved back (to Phoenix, Arizona) in July of 2002. I’ve made three trips over to my old haunts around Hillsboro since then, the last of them in January, 2008….just two weeks ago. The withered state of the local economy was a shock. Mining, ranching and logging, the traditional means of livelihood in rural areas and small towns of the American West, like Hillsboro and Kingston, have dried up and all but disappeared. They’re the victims of a long run of low commodity prices from the late-90s to mid-2000s, depleted resources and the cumulative effects of ever-more-restrictive mining, grazing and environmental regulation.
Nowadays the nearest (barely) operating mine is at Santa Rita, 30 miles as the crow flies to the southwest, and the grass is higher and the cattle thinner on the range than I ever remember. There are those who would call this progress and they’d applaud the gaily painted shingles proclaiming “Bed and Breakfast” that hang hopeful, but rather forlorn, on half the inhabited houses in town, and the front rooms that have been turned into antique shops or “art” galleries (one of the latter hosts Sonny’s petroglyph photo collection). They all sell the same mutable collection of curios: refrigerator magnets, hot pads, cup holders, tee-shirts, earrings, wood carvings, pottery and bad watercolors. The bolder cowboy motifs and accoutrements, the rattlesnake rattles and jackalopes of yesteryear, are pretty thin on the shelves. They’ve been replaced by a plague of neck-scarfed coyotes howling at the moon, and teal and pink Kokopelli flute players. I didn’t see much movement in any of them on the somnolent January day that Sonny and I passed in Hillsboro’s cafes and on her streets. Just a few gaffers who stopped their RVs long enough to stretch their legs, and Sonny hawking his photos to them in the General Store-cum-Cafe. God help us!
In the early eighties the area was booming. Gold got as high as $675/oz and silver $20/oz in 1980, prices neither metal has seen again until very recently. I worked on two exploration programs and at a small gold mine from 1982 to 1988, and there was at least a half-dozen similar ventures that I knew of within a 100-mile radius.
I met Sonny and his Dad in October, 1980 (his Dad died in ‘82) when I’d been charged with finding precious metals-bearing silica flux for the Hidalgo, New Mexico copper smelter of my then employer, Phelps Dodge Mining. Flux is anything that helps the copper concentrates fed into the furnaces melt more readily or helps separate the unwanted ingredients from the molten copper metal. Silica, specifically, combines with iron and makes it easier to separate from copper, while any gold and silver mix intimately with the copper giving a bonus that can be extracted in the refining process that improves the economics of the business. My search took me to the storied old gold and silver mining districts of Southwestern New Mexico and adjacent Arizona and, together with later consulting jobs between 1982 and 1988, got me acquainted with most all of the small miners that were operating in the country at the time. There was Dick Manning and his Challenge Ventures up at the Queen Mine in Mogollon, Dan Medley, who leased the Ingersoll, Gypsy and Wicks mines, Arvil Higgenbothom, the McCraveys, Ford Spooner and Ty Beams on the gold placers of Animas Creek, Johnny Thompson and Don Fingado up at the Virginia Mine. Cesar Fulton and George Omo at the Rattlesnake in Hillsoboro, Silas Glines and various others trying to make a go of it at Hermosa and at Winston and Choride where there was a boom going on around the re-opened St. Cloud silver mine. They were the usual mixture of hardworking small-time miners trying to make an honest buck and shyster promoters out to mine their investor’s pockets that you’ll find during any mining boom. Taken altogether they’re an entertaining lot and they perform a valuable if unsung service to society: arguably they’ve discovered as many or more mineral deposits than their principal competition: government and big-time corporate exploration programs.
Anyway, as I was saying, on one of my first flux prospecting trips I went up in the piney woods on the west side of Black Range to check out an isolated old silver mine at a place called Bald Hill. Sonny and his Dad greeted me when I pulled up to the mine-mouth, and kindly showed me around their little operation. I was intrigued enough that I made a subsequent visit to evaluate the property more carefully. On that trip I blew out a tire and left the company four-wheel drive perched teetering of the edge of a bluff. Sonny rescued me, took me home to Hillsboro, where I met his wife Margie. Together they fed me; gently got me hooked on the romance of the Black Range with their postprandial tales, and then put me up for the night with visions of horn silver dancing in my head. The next day Sonny pulled the Blazer back on the road with his back-hoe and sent me on my way.