Cool and green is this shady little no-place town settled into a thin canyon straddling U.S. 180, an explicit sanctuary from the butte-and-mesa ranch land that serves as a buffer for the high Diablo Mountains and desert.
Arizona is just down the road, southwest New Mexico behind, and this summer morning is rich with sunshine and purple cholla blossoms, legends and lore.I have passed through the communities of Buckskin and Cliff and stopped to read all the historical markers, sped by the stray convenience stores called "trading posts," and realized that the new icon of Western America is the TV satellite dish that brings CNN and "Roseanne" civilization here to the nether regions beyond the Continental Divide.
Glenwood has tall trees and a pair of creeks, Whitewater and San Francisco, 450 people, a fish hatchery, the Crabapple Cabins for overnighting. Ellie's Restaurant has drawn the pickup trade. The Blue Front Bar & Cafe is hurting for customers, and the Lizard King Gift Shop is doing no business at all.
All Glenwood is, is a retreat from the monotony of vastness, and the turnoff to Whitewater Canyon, five miles east toward the mountains. In the canyon is the Catwalk, a remarkable feat of frontier engineering.
The Catwalk - a mostly metal walkway placed along the south canyon wall, 20 to 30 feet above Whitewater Creek - is a relic of early mining efforts back in the mountains. It follows the path of a one-time water pipeline serving an ore mill, and is 2 1/2 miles long, clinging to the wall in a sometimes perilous way. At points the canyon walls are so narrow the walker almost can touch both sides.
Aside from all that, the engineering achievement and canyon's physical beauty, there is another attraction. Butch Cassidy, the Western bad guy, once worked around here and probably trod the Catwalk, maybe even involved himself in a robbery or two. A Butch Cassidy factoid definitely makes the Catwalk more interesting.
That is the way of things out here, where everything is scenery and legend, and if either involves bad guys and Western mythology, so much the better. A historical marker north of Glenwood, for example, flaunts the exploits of Wild Horse Mary, who had a successful career as a cattle rustler long before affirmative action and gender equity could have found a spot for her in what traditionally was a man's job. The marker points the way to her former hideout back in a distant canyon.
Just beyond Wild Horse Mary's sign, the town of Reserve boasts of one of the West's most famous shootouts. Reserve today looks its role, being little more than one street with a courthouse, Uncle Bill's Bar and the Rode Inn Motel. The story here is that in 1884, Reserve, then called Milligan's Plaza, was a ranching center, and a rough place, mostly because all the cowboys were from Texas and enjoyed drinking and annoying the locals.
Elfego Baca was 19 and deputy sheriff. A cowboy named McCarty got drunk. Baca arrested him. In rode 80 cowboys to rescue McCarty. Baca retreated to a small adobe and wattle jacal, and the gunfight began.
The legend says Baca held off the cowboys for 36 hours, killed four and wounded eight. 4,000 rounds of ammunition were fired; the hut's front door had 367 bullet holes. Baca didn't get a scratch.
That's mostly hype. Few bullets were fired, only one cowboy was killed. Baca was tried for murder, acquitted, later became a district attorney, dying at age 80 in Albuquerque. But a movie about the gunfight made him a legend and subject of roadside historical markers.