Come ride with me. Come ride,
and be my shotgun gal.
Come ride Chibola's hills,
re-blaze the Beefsteak Trail*.
Come map with me the scrub-land,
the ponderosa pine,
the juniper and pinyons,
Apache plume come find.
Come ride the dirt and dust and stone
where cattle guards still reign,
where "speed bump" means the washboard gravel
on the road up from the Plain**.
Paul Guernsey, © 2020
*Beefsteak Trail – a “cattle trail in the United States, stretching 125 miles westward from Magdalena, NM.”
“While miners combed the mountains for mineral riches during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stockmen drove tens of thousands of sheep and cattle to stockyards at the village of Magdalena, then linked by rail with Socorro.[14] In fact, the last regularly used cattle trail in the United States stretched 125 miles westward from Magdalena. The route was formally known as the Magdalena Livestock Driveway, but more popularly known to cowboys and cattlemen as the Beefsteak Trail. The trail began use in 1865 and its peak was in 1919. The trail was used continually until trailing gave way to trucking and the trail official closed in 1971.”
[Reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cibola_National_Forest)%5D
**The Plains of San Agustine
[Reference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_of_San_Agustin ) ]
[Reference ( https://www.trails.com/us/nm/datil/plains-of-san-augustin-the-beefsteak-trail-magdalena-to-apache-creek ) ]
TheGuern 