Sag-Ashus – Cornudas Tales
Ole Sag’s great uncle, B. Tom Homsley, was born on a farm near Maverick, Texas on Oct. 22, 1893, and by 1904 he was living at Cornudas, in the Territory of New Mexico, with his older sister Mary and her husband Joe Neely. Most of our readers in the Dell City area will be familiar with Cornudas Mountain and some of its history, but for those who are unfamiliar with this area, Cornudas Mountain is located northwest of Dell City just across the state line in New Mexico. This week’s history lesson is an excerpt taken from the writings of our great uncle, and from to time we will share more of his experiences in the Crow Flat area. From this point forward we have copied his words verbatim.
“I started living with Mary and Joe Neely at the Cornudas and this is where we had several interesting experiences. This mountain had a lot of wild life such as panthers (mountain lions), coyotes, deer, wild cats, skunks, lots of rabbits, squirrels, quail, and last but not least law-dodgers. The law-dodgers could get in the rocks and hide and live on wild life. The Cornudas Mountain, which means horned in Spanish is a huge pile of granite like rocks. It was the only watering place between the Alamo Mountains and the Gould place, 20 miles north.
We were 75 miles from any store and we had to depend on Dan Stephens, the owner of the ranch to bring us supplies. One time he failed to bring us groceries so we began to trap rock squirrels and quails for meat. We ran out of flour to make bread, so we went 8 miles to our nearest neighbor, the Van Winkles, who were almost out, but they let us have gallon bucket of flour and that got us by.
We, like the Indians, had a little garden up on the side of the mountain a hundred yards from the house. Water ran off the rocks and wet the dirt where we raised lettuce, radishes, and onions. The garden was very small, but it produced well. We know that the Indians who were there raised some corn, because we found some corn cobs in a cave that were 4 inches long. There were some pretty late Indian activities there at the mountain. In 1880 a Texas Ranger and a Russian man were killed and a Texas Ranger, named Santiago Cooper, from Ysleta, was sent at times to settle Indian uprisings in the area. His name with the date 1879, is written on a rock in a cave around on the east side of the mountain from the big cave where the house was located. The Stephens boys related this story and told how Santiago wrote his name. They loosened the wagon wheel, found a stick and stuck it into the grease, and he wrote his name with this black grease.
As I mentioned before, I went to Cornudas in 1904 and lived with Joe and Mary Neely. Joe worked for Dan Stephens, who owned the Cornudas at the time. There had been a log house there at the Cornudas for 30-40 years. It was made out of logs from the old Butterfield Stageline Station. These logs had been hauled from Weed. I don’t know how long white people lived there before 1904. George McVay lived there during the 1890s.
Just inside this cave there was a man buried in a shallow grave with his boots on. When we went there, the toes of his boots were sticking out above the ground. A man fixed the boots so it did not happen again. There were other graves about 150 yards from the house around the mountain to the west. One was Mrs. Tenney’s, another was a cow thief’s, another was Mrs. Rey’s, and the last was an unknown girl who got real sick and died while passing through. The sides of the wagon were taken off to make Mrs. Tenney’s coffin. Some of the boards of the chicken house were used to make Mrs. Rey’s coffin.”
There are many more interesting stories told about our uncle’s boyhood adventures at Cornudas Mountain that we will share with you in future editions, but we will stop at this point because the next story is rather lengthy and would not fit into this week’s space. We hope you find this firsthand history interesting, and we look forward to sharing more of Great Uncle’s adventures in the future.
Let’s close this week’s get together on a lighter note:
“Never play leap frog with a unicorn.”
SAG