Though nature lovers usually find the life zones more fascinating than
any other aspect of plants in the mountains, there is one other much
more important. It is the misuse, injury, and destruction of native
plant life. Because scientists are generally alert to the conservation
of what is useful and beautiful in natural resources, I venture to bring
up the matter here.
A useful case history is provided by Silver City, New Mexico. It was
founded in the early seventies as a silver camp, which would fairly
guarantee a certain amount of reckless haste and rowdy carelessness.
Point two was its location on a foothill watershed only twenty-seven
square miles in area. Point three was an extreme concentration of
livestock near the town. Point four was the fact that the annual
rainfall was crowded mainly into July, August, and a part of September.
Mines are naturally users of timber. Obviously, shafts and tunnels have
to be timbered. More than that, little smelters nestled back among the
hills were also hungry for wood. And since coal was expensive and hard
to get, most of the adobe cottages were heated many years by juniper,
oak, and piñon firewood. All these matters were naturally, if not
actually, inevitable under the circumstances.
The massive ore wagons and freight wagons had to be drawn by four- to
ten-horse teams—and the horses kept on eating. Then because it was also
a ranching country, each cowboy had to keep a _remuda_ of saddle
horses—and they ate too. Also, the few cows that provided milk for the
children grazed hungrily over the stony slopes. Most of all, the range
cattle, which had no provender at all except that which the competitive,
half-starved steers could provide for themselves, overgrazed every
square foot of pasturage down to the bare soil. The government’s
open-range policy made overgrazing inevitable because no ranchman could
protect his pasturage since it was all unfenced. The cow that got there
first got the grass. That passed as land management, which proves that
some statesmen then were about as wise as some of the Wizards of
Washington now. But the advent of fences caused the cutting of millions
of fence posts where none should have been cut.
[Illustration: Elk]
When the grass went, its roots went, and when its roots went, there was
nothing to hold the soil, and then it, too, started to go. And go it
did. A deep hole formed in Main Street, as it is still called on the
Silver City town plat. The best explanation I can find of that hole is
that earth was taken out of it to form adobe bricks for the walls of
houses and corrals (that clay did make good adobe!). Meanwhile, the
woodhaulers’ wagons had greedily carted away the trees from each little
canyon, while the narrow steel tires cut deep ruts which formed two deep
gullies at the first heavy rain. Then the parallel gullies proceeded to
wash out deeper and create a middle ridge or high center on which axles
got stuck. Since there was nobody responsible for making a new road,
there was no choice except to move over and form another track and use
it until in turn it became unusable. (By this simple kind of
destruction, the old Santa Fe Trail, it is said, reached a width of a
hundred feet.)
But the water descending the slope kept increasing its destructive
velocity as the denuded ground approached the bareness of a tin roof.
Villagers observed that the hole in their Main Street was becoming a
waterfall after each rain, and that the ruin was passing into a big-time
operation. The town built a dam to restrain the floods. It washed out in
the first one. Soon Main Street followed it down the drain, which by
this time was already a hideous gash in the earth many miles long and
twenty feet deep. Then the water began on a really different scale of
destruction. One furious flood washed away the cabin in which Billy the
Kid’s mother lived. More than that, it washed away the wall of Judge
Newcomb’s house and abducted his Steinway from the second floor. A few
yards from the spot, an old photograph taken in 1891 shows a
woodhauler’s ox team lying in the street there. It gives no hint at that
time of the famous Big Ditch—the only name that Main Street, Silver City
has had now for the last forty years.
By 1927, after many other attempts had been made to tame the floods a
steel bridge about one hundred feet long and thirty feet above the floor
of the “canyon” was swung into place. In 1935-1936, the Soil
Conservation Service went to work in earnest, made the watershed a
demonstration area, and spent a third of a million dollars there in a
short time.
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.
[Illustration: 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.]