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A long walk in the hot sun
for an ice-cold chocolate soda
Memories of Fort Bayard, New Mexico
by Bob Ingraham
When I was very young, but old enough to escape my mom's apron strings, I lived in Arenas Valley, New Mexico. Our community consisted of a few-score houses clustered around a tiny post office, approximately six miles east of Silver City and two miles west of Fort Bayard.
Arenas Valley offered a lot of recreation for my rowdy friends and me. When we weren't in school, we spent much of our time trying to murder sparrows with our BB guns, impaling beetles on cactus spines, vaporizing tomato cans and ant hills with M-80 firecrackers, or brandishing near-lethal spears made from yucca stalks tipped with flattened, sharpened six-inch spikes.
We often staged elaborate sessions of Cowboys and Indians (or Good Guys and Bad Guys). My favorite persona was cowboy movie star Rex Allen, and my favorite sidearms were a pair of toy revolvers: matched, full-scale, white-handled Colt .45s, worn backwards, just like Rex wore his sixguns. (Our games weren’t always just games. I had my own .22 rifle and, with my parents’ permission, often went target shooting or rabbit hunting. A box of 50 long-rifle cartridges cost...50 cents!)
My friends and I might have seemed typecast for William Golding's Lord of the Flies, but we weren't completely without redeeming qualities: we often sought more civilized pursuits in neighboring Fort Bayard.
A desert oasis
Fort Bayard drew us like an oasis in the desert, because it was an oasis in the desert. Whereas Arenas Valley was as dry as a bone (the word arenas means sand in Spanish), Fort Bayard seemed lush and green by comparison. Federal dollars and deep wells ensured that lawns and shrubs were well watered; in Arenas Valley, our own shallow wells often ran dry.
Fort Bayard has a long history. In the days of the Indian Wars, when Geronimo terrorized local settlers (and the settlers sometimes terrorized the Indians), it had been a U.S. Cavalry fort, home of the famous Buffalo Soldiers. Sometimes in our wanderings we kids would find old spent cartridges and lead bullets. When I was growing up, though, Fort Bayard was no longer a fort, but a small community surrounding and supporting a large Veterans Administration hospital, a sanitorium for TB patients.
Fort Bayard was similar to nearby, self-contained "company towns" like Santa Rita and Hurley. The complex of hospital buildings was surrounded by many other buildings. There was a "Doctor's Row" of large white houses for the physicians and their families, and there were other rows of smaller white houses for support staff and their families. But Fort Bayard wasn't quite self-contained.
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A panorama images shows Fort Bayard as it was about 1915. Click on the image for a larger view.
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I recall a post office and a movie theatre, but I don't think there was anything more than the Canteen for shopping. There was no school or church, although there was probably a chapel for the patients. Kids from Fort Bayard attended schools and churches in Silver City and Bayard.
When a Boy Scout troop was formed at Fort Bayard in the mid-1950’s, I joined up with several other kids from Arenas Valley. We were the Coyotes, and our song was sung to the melody of the "Caissons Song": "Over hill, over dale, / We have hit the dusty trail, / And the Coyotes go marching along." We met regularly at the Sojourners' Hall in Fort Bayard.
It was at Fort Bayard that I took and passed the test for my Boy Scout Stamp Collecting Merit Badge. The test was administered by the postmaster at Fort Bayard, and for the occasion I was allowed to go behind the wrought-iron wickets and into the inner sanctum. After I had passed the oral test with flying colors, I got a brief tour of the post office, which included a look directly into the drawer full of stamps! I remember seeing a partial sheet of what must have been the Special Delivery issue of 1951.
Like an emerald
Fort Bayard was like a gem — an emerald, perhaps — in the rough brown setting of southwestern New Mexico. The buildings always seemed freshly painted, the streets and sidewalks swept clean, the grass freshly trimmed and watered, the trees carefully pruned. Even the TB patients who wandered about in government-issue green pajamas seemed especially tidy and orderly. On a hot day, Fort Bayard always seemed cooler than Arenas Valley, and it might well have been.
It was easy for us kids to get to Fort Bayard from Arenas Valley, as long as we were willing to use our muscles.
Sometimes we rode our bikes along the little-used asphalt road that connected the two communities and ran through the protected wildlife area that we called the "Reservation." That bike ride was spiced by Snake Hill, a serpentine section of roadway that dropped steeply into a valley through which ran a seasonal stream of clear water. The drawback was, of course, that we had to pump our bikes up the other side, and this before the days of 10-speed bikes. (Sometimes, Snake Hill itself was our destination, and we would make the run two or three times just for the thrill of the speed and the wind in our faces.) Snake Hill seemed to belong to us Arenas Valley kids. I recall seeing Fort Bayard kids there only once. And why would they bother? People who live in an oasis don't visit the desert for fun.
Over hill, over dale
Sometimes we walked to Fort Bayard. We were used to walking, and intimately knew every square yard of our greater neighborhood. It was nothing for us to fill our army surplus canteens, get our mothers to make sandwiches for us, and set off for a day of exploring, sometimes north into the foothills of the Pinos Altos Range, or eastward into the arid Reservation, where we would sometimes see the small resident herd of pronghorn, and would be almost certain to encounter jackrabbits, cottontails, horned lizards (in those innocent days we called them "horny toads"), bullsnakes, lizards, buzzards, eagles, hawks, and owls.
Scenery in the "Reserve“ between Arenas Valley and Fort Bayard. In the right-hand photograph, near the horizon at the left, you can just make out some of the tall poplar trees and buildings of Fort Bayard. You can see them clearly in this detail image.
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Once during a long summer school holiday, some of us decided that it was so hot that only one activity made sense at all: we would walk to Fort Bayard to buy a chocolate soda at the Canteen.
I don't remember who our group included. Ernest and James Harper, probably, and maybe Danny Sanders. It must have been into the high 90s that day, for the walk seemed longer and hotter than usual. We were relieved when we finally trudged on burning feet past the rows upon rows of white tombstones in the cemetery (a great many of Fort Bayard's TB patients had succumbed to their disease over the years).
The cemetery at Fort Bayard, New Mexico: A sober reminder of the original purpose of Fort Bayard as a TB sanitorium.
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Although I was blissfully unaware of it at the time, the Fort Bayard cemetery is hallowed ground in a personal sense: My sister, Helen Francis, who has long been interested in genealogy, learned only a few years ago that one of our distant relatives, David Lusty, is buried there.
As a young man, David went off to the Philippines to fight with the U.S. Army in the Spanish American War — and contracted tuberculosis. He was sent back to the States, to Fort Bayard, where he died on May 13, 1902. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
Bob Ingraham Photo
Once we had passed the cemetery, we walked past the Sojourners’ Club, and down the hill and into the cool quonset-hut interior of the Canteen.
An unused real-photo postcard shows the Canteen at the Fort Bayard (New Mexico) Veterans Administration Hospital, ca. 1950. Although the hospital was a government facility, civilians who lived in the area had free access to the Canteen.
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In the 1950s, Fort Bayard seemed very much a military hospital, with manicured grass and shrubs and white buildings. The Canteen, more military than civilian, more utilitarian than commercial, was more for the patients and the employees of the hospital than for us, but we were made welcome.
I don't remember who served us, or the cost, but I do remember — how could I possibly forget? — the rich chocolate soda in a classic tall soda glass, served with a straw and a long-handled spoon.
A perfect chocolate soda
On that day, my concept of the perfect chocolate soda was firmly fixed in my mind: never before had a chocolate soda been so convincingly chocolate, so chillingly frosty, so smoothly delicious.
Fort Bayard still exists, of course, but now as a state-run hospital for permanently disabled patients young and old, operated by a company based in Florida which has formerly operated prisons. When I was last there, in 1999, its grounds and buildings were showing clear signs of age and neglect. The Canteen certainly was no longer in evidence. But I understand that there is a interest in restoring the "Fort" to its former appearance, if not its former role. For several years, a Buffalo Soldiers re-enactment has been held, and U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (a school classmate of mine) has sponsored legislation that would protect Fort Bayard‘s historic status.
Arenas Valley has fallen on hard times, and no longer seems like a community. Weeds grow where once there were gardens and orchards. Fences sag and houses peel. The post office has been closed for years, and even the road between Arenas Valley and Fort Bayard is gone. There are probably a few children living there, but I doubt that they ever walk between Arenas Valley and Fort Bayard. Indeed, without the prospect of an ice-cold chocolate soda, why would they bother?
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