Magdalena

"Well, Magdalena was, well it was a mining town and a ranch town and a frontier town, end of the railroad. Well, they used to bring cattle in from all over. See, that was the closest shipping point. Holbrook was the next one, Arizona. So you had to take the cattle either from The Divide this way, or even beyond the Divide, you had to bring ‘em to Magdalena or take ‘em to Holbrook. ‘Cause there were no trucks hauling in those days, so they drove the cattle to the railroad point. And Magdalena was real exciting during shipping season, there’d be big herds of cattle out there, out on the hillsides, waiting their turn to get in the corrals and get on the train and get shipped. And there were bars, more bars than grocery stores, and four hotels, and Kelly was wide open, they were shipping ore out of there, and uh, the mines closed down, and the shipping started dwindling. When trucks came into being people quit, you know, driving cattle that far."

I asked Evelyn if she liked to dance.

“Well, I’ll tell ya, I met my husband at a dance hall. They had an old dance hall, dairy, up by this side by Magdalena, and they would clear the barn out and have dances on Saturday nights, so we’d come from Rosedale, that’s the only place we could come to dance, and people from all around, and that’s where I met my first cowboys, and I met Dean there, and we called it the Cow Chip Ballroom. It’s all just ruins (now). Oh, it was wild. This one lady had a whorehouse out on the hillside, and the cowboys would go out there, and Dean’s dad was – it would make him so mad when the cowboys would go out there, he just thought that was terrible. He was kind of a – he was pretty straight laced. I never even really knew where it was. Is wasn’t my time.

“There were a lot of homesteaders lived there, between here and Magdalena. People homesteaded that country in the ‘30s. And they homesteaded that country around Bingham at the same time. They came west where they droughted out and everything – starved out. Moved, came there and tried to make it – there was no water, you know. The story of those homesteaders is pretty grim. Lola McWhorter can tell you, she’s still here. She can tell you – her parents homesteaded in Pie Town. And she can tell you all about it. She can sure tell you about it, ‘cause they – it was about as tough as it can get."