The Road To Mangas
A glimpse into the people and beliefs of this history-laden path.
By: Art Martori 03/01/2009
The dirt road to Mangas almost loses itself amid low hills as it winds through the windswept plains of New Mexico’s high desert. It isn’t a drive for the faint of heart. Or the directionally challenged.
Just when getting lost in this time-forgotten patch of nowhere seems unavoidable, signs of life rise out of the scrub.
Outside Quemado, 15 miles off U.S. 60, the ghost town of Mangas is little more than a few crumbling adobe buildings, dust and endless sky. This is private land, owned by the cattle operation, Mangas Ranch. People who wander in out of the dust simply aren’t welcome.
That is what an aged man bellows at me, or something to that effect. Short and wiry, he dismounts a sputtering tractor and strides toward me across the corral, where just moments ago he was stacking bales of hay. Apparently the patch of brown grass in front of an old house where I stopped isn’t a good place to park.
“You gonna drive into my living room?” shouts the man, stomping across his front yard. He doesn’t get many visitors out here. Most days, he’s hard at work on the ranch, the old man snaps at me.
“Or talking to writers from Phoenix,” he says, finally cracking an impish grin.
This place could take its name from Mangas Coloradas, chief of the Chiricahua Apache. It was once within his homeland, which reached across the Rio Grande into Mexico and out west into Arizona.
Mangas, a conflicted man, alternately terrorized and then reached out to strangers. By the mid-1860s, he and the Apache were embroiled in a war with the Army. Soldiers finally captured Mangas at Fort McLane, near present-day Hurley.
His death was as terrible as it was treacherous. With a promise of peace, the Army lured the aged warrior to meet them. Then they tortured and killed him. His mutilated remains now lie somewhere in western New Mexico, or so the stories go.
There are rumors about his grave site. Perhaps it’s among these crumbling adobe buildings, deep in Apache country?
At Mangas Ranch, it’s hard to say if this man is as coarse as he lets on or just trying to scare off city slickers. Drawing a smoke from the pack in a breast pocket, he leans against a fence post and identifies himself as Narciso Baca, the 63-year-old owner of the ranch and few buildings that sit here.
“The city, the metropolis,” he calls it, noting his wife is also a resident. “We fight all the time about who’s Mayor.”
Baca wears a sweat-stained baseball cap pulled low over his weathered face. Dark sunglasses hide his eyes. He lights his cigarette, takes a drag and begins to unravel the story of Mangas Coloradas and this place. As Baca talks, his country drawl at times slips into a Spanish accent.
“I was born here,” he begins.
He tells me Mangas was founded when Spanish settlers moved to the region in the mid-1800s. As they farmed and raised cattle, Mangas grew into a bustling town.
Comments (2)
This is fascinating. What a great story. How about a follow-up?
What a beautifully written article and a beautiful story. I live in Arizona and have never heard of Mangas. Thank you for the education and the wonderful writing.
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