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Smuggler and cow-thief, there is a story in their passing which centers about a deep gorge near the place where the boundary between New Mexico and Arizona meets the international line. That story goes a long way back. Down in the southwestern corner of the Animas valley the Guadalupe Cañon trail approached the gorge from which it got its name.
All these ruins ought to be re-examined, and so far excavated as to recover complete ground plans. Near the mouth of the river are said to be still other ruins, and still others on the east side of the river, which we had no time to examine. The valley of the Animas River is here broad and beautiful, about three miles wide. The river passes nearly through the center of the valley.
At Moro Station, on the Las Animas, the last camp we would find until we reached the eastern edge of the plains, we found a large, fat mule that belonged to the Government. Lieut. Gully gave the station keeper, a young man, a receipt for the mule, and we took it with us, as we were, in one sense, in Government employ. We were carrying a mail, and on general business for the Government.
Then, with the sudden flare of recklessness which invariably came to him sooner or later, he in his turn flung away the silver over the unpainted bars. So the incident passed and was forgotten by the rustlers. The Mexicans did not forget. Old Man Clanton started with a Tombstone butcher and three others on a journey for the Animas valley a few weeks later.
Two years afterward, in 1828, the proprietors of the primitive stockade in the remote wilderness found it necessary to move closer to the great hunting-grounds lower down the valley. There, about twelve miles northeast of the now thriving town of Las Animas, the Bents commenced the construction of a relatively large and more imposing-looking structure than the first.
Thousands of doubloons are believed to be hidden in the canon, and thousands of dollars have been spent in searching for them. After weeks had lapsed into months and months into years, and no word came of the missing regiment, the priests named the river El Rio de las Animas Perdidas the River of Lost Souls.
Next Aretius, who thought it hard, yea impossible, to bring in excommunication at that time, saith also, Dabit posterior aetas tractabiliores forte animas,—peradventure the following age shall bring forth more tractable souls; and thereupon he adviseth not to despair of the restitution of excommunication.
They were not clouds, however, but the sierras of the range weirdly named Cuchilla de las Animas Ghost-haunted Mountains. At length, like a person who puts his binocular into his pocket and begins to look about him, I recalled my vision from its wanderings over illimitable space to examine the objects close at hand.
For ourselves, we are much more disposed to look indulgently on the pleasures which he allowed to himself than on the pain which he inflicted on his neighbors: "Atque utinam his potius nugis tota illa dedisset Tempora sævitiæ, claras quibus abstulit urbi Illustresque animas, impune ac vindice nullo."
When the outlaw went eastward into the valleys of the San Simon and the Animas the two young Clantons went with him. The cow-thieves of the San Simon and the Animas did not go to the trouble of altering brands or "sleepering," as their successors have in later years, but drove entire herds and sold them, as they were, to shippers.
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