Ghost Town Armageddon
Mike Smith
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The town of Chloride, New Mexico began in near silence—with a single man’s discovery in a mountain canyon, with a clatter of rock in the desert.
The town began when an expatriate Englishman named Harry Pye—a freighter, prospector, guide, and mule driver for the U.S. Army—made camp circa 1877 in what would one day be known as Chloride Canyon, about thirty miles northwest of the present-day southern New Mexico city of Truth or Consequences. It was there, in that canyon, that Pye chanced upon a brush-choked ledge of rocks agleam with silver ore—and in 1879, once his contract with the Army had expired, he returned, and built a cabin, and word soon spread of what he’d found there.
“So, Chloride boomed into a tent camp, wild and brawling and tough,” wrote Betty Woods in the February 1953 New Mexico Magazine. “After a while the brawling lessened. Harry Pye, prosperous and soon to be rich, saw the daily change. Not so many tents now. More log and adobe houses. But that’s as far as Pye saw Chloride grow. Apaches ambushed and killed him.”
Miners from all across New Mexico Territory continued journeying to southwestern New Mexico’s Black Range, eager to confirm what they’d heard about the area’s latent wealth. By mid-1880, an impressive tent city filled the canyon from end to end, and not long after that a townsite unfurled, initially dubbed Chloride City for the mountains’ abundant silver chloride. Sites for homes and businesses were distributed by lottery, and free plots were promised to any women willing to settle there. (“Brand-new girl in town,” read the notably excited top local news item of the April 3, 1891 Black Range, Chloride’s newspaper.)
Chloride boomed, despite the dangers of its isolated mountain setting. Justified fear of Apaches kidnapping children to sell into slavery in Mexico caused many townsfolk to keep their kids home from school, while outlaws and rustlers such as Rattlesnake Jack (whose real name, Billy Dieffenderfer, was a bit less fearsome) were a frequent menace. Also part of the town were alcoholism, gambling, and prostitution, as were happily drunken cowboys shooting up the town from horseback on Saturday nights. By 1890, according to F. Stanley’s The Chloride, New Mexico Story, the town of Chloride boasted nine saloons—though no church—three stores, a stagecoach stop, a hotel, the aforementioned weekly newspaper, and an estimated population of 3,000 people.
It was just outside of Chloride, in May of 1881, that a miner named Hugh G. Love was surprised by an angry bear, while pants-less. When the bear appeared, Love had been repairing his overalls. The animal ripped the half-dressed miner’s right hand off in a single bite, and Love, in turn, took the bear’s life.
It was near Chloride, in November of 1888, that a man named W. U. Grozier—a notary public, postmaster, and cattleman—became lost in a mountain blizzard, and survived only by disemboweling his frozen horse and hiding inside it for more than three days—a frostbitten nightmare that cost Grozier all the toes on one foot.
And it was in Chloride that the author of a scandalously perverse series of letters—sent to various townspeople, to women and men alike—was found to be the town’s elderly and once-respected doctor, a man subsequently tarred and feathered and run out of town.
Stories such as these became part of the town’s lore, were documented by The Black Range, repeated by old-timers, and recounted in books and magazines. Almost all of them were the sort of strange and quirky accounts that made the town unique, but none of them are quite as unusual as the story of Austin Crawford.
Born in Scotland in 1851, Crawford spent his first several years of life in Ireland. His father, an alcoholic, abandoned the family after the Great Irish Famine, to go to America in 1854—and before long his mother left as well, reconciling with the father, and leaving the children in care of an uncle. In 1861, the young Crawford and his four siblings reunited with their parents in the coal-mining towns of eastern Pennsylvania, and it was there that Austin grew up. Over time, Austin’s older brother, John Wallace “Jack” Crawford, left home to become a widely known poet and frontier guide of the American West, posthumously gaining immortality in such biographies as Darlis A. Miller’s Captain Jack Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman. Four of the Crawford siblings, including Austin, made their way west and eventually settled in Chloride, lured by the hope of mineral riches.
It was while living in Chloride, according to an unpublished account by resident Don Edmund, that Austin Crawford became a mining investor, a stone mason, and the builder of a number of the town’s rock and adobe buildings. Also while in Chloride, Crawford found himself involved in some of the town’s shadiest gambling outfits, bars, and brothels.
His life, it seems, was not one of complete honesty—or, as it progressed, of sanity. As the value of silver plummeted to a tenth of what it had been, thanks to a federal decision to back the dollar with gold instead of silver, the population of the town ebbed and dried away, and Crawford began to view his home with new eyes. Sometime in the 1920s, he found religion—though many old-time locals have hazily recalled that that religion was actually more of a cult—and as is sometimes the case, he seems to have found insanity along with it. Crawford, who only years before had seemed fine with the more illicit aspects of business in Chloride, now denounced the entire town as a haven of sin, and a home for evildoers.
God had come to him in a vision, he announced, and in that vision, God had warned him to expect a hail storm—a hail storm apocalypse that would destroy the wicked town of Chloride and annihilate its every sin-choked resident. To avoid sharing the fate of Chloride’s unrighteous, however, Crawford came up with a plan: he would build a protective house—a house to beat fate—a house with a pitched roof so steep that hailstones could only bounce off of it.
It wasn’t as good of a plan as, say, moving, but the townsfolk were probably grateful that it kept him occupied. Darlis A. Miller, Jack Crawford’s biographer, doesn’t recall having ever heard about this chapter of the younger Crawford’s life, and not all of the story’s dates seem accurate, and it may be that the story is partially folkloric, evolved from local gossip about an eccentric character—but in the minds of Chloride’s residents there is little doubt of its truth.
“Several of the old-timers told us that as youngsters they watched Austin go down to the creek, pick out a flat, square, red stone, carry it back up to his place, and painstakingly place it in a wall,” wrote Don Edmund in a recent correspondence.
The house Crawford built still stands today, and has become something of a Chloride landmark, immediately recognizable by its beautifully tessellated rockwork, by its three doddering chimneys, and, of course, by its sharply angled roof. This tattery little rock house contains three rooms, but none of those rooms are connected, and their doors lead to nowhere but outside. Every one of the three rooms has a basement, and the basements aren’t connected either. This unusual house has become nicknamed the “Doodle Dum” by a former owner who used it as an art studio, and in its way has outlasted the town itself.
As the value of silver continued to drop, as enmity developed between Chloride’s shepherds and cattlemen, and as the town’s residents grew older, or died, or moved away, Chloride nearly became a ghost town, with its population dropping to an all-time low of four in the 1940s. That number has since swelled, and today thirteen people call this shambling enclave home—restoring its buildings, enjoying retirement, or simply living out their days in homes that their parents or grandparents built.
The hail storm Armageddon that Crawford built the house for never did descend on Chloride, but the house wouldn’t have helped Crawford much if it had. As Crawford grew older, his already tenuous grasp on reality weakened even more, and by 1923, according to records in Don Edmund’s possession, Crawford had been moved north, to Las Vegas, New Mexico—to the New Mexico Insane Asylum, and it may have been there that he died.
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