Report from Santa Fe; Michael McGarrity

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills, and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is author Michael McGarrity. Thank you for joining us. It's always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for inviting me. Well, we are celebrating the result of 10 years of work. The last part of the Great American West Trilogy, it's called the last ranch. It's a trilogy that started 10 years ago or seven years ago. The hard country was published in 2012.

So the first of the trilogy is hard country. The second is backlands, and the third, I mean, people ran right out because they wanted to know how it turned out, is the last ranch. What were you doing in this trilogy? Well, it didn't start out as a trilogy, it started out as a prequel to my crime series, and it just grew, it sort of had a life of its own. I had done a lot of research into the ranching background of my protagonist, Kevin Kerney, in the crime series, and as I started writing, I began to realize that I couldn't possibly tell the story I wanted to tell in one book. So I approached my editor with the idea of turning it into a trilogy, and fortunately he was 100% behind it, and I was able to finish hard country and then move on and begin backlands and from there, the last ranch.

The funny thing that I have to tell you, though, is that my idea was simply to tell a story about what happened to my protagonist, Kevin Kerney, in the crime novels that made him want to become a cop after he returned from Vietnam. I still haven't told that story. And you're going to do that. I understand you're working after 10 years on the trilogy. You're now working on Residue. Tell us what that is. Well, Residue is going to be what did happen to him soon after his return from serving in Vietnam that made him become a police officer. So it's going to be a cold case investigation that's opened up into a missing person disappearance that's over 40 years old, that brings Kerney back around into looking at what happened to a person that he once cared a great deal about. Well, you already had done 12 novels on which I want to show them. These are the Kevin Kerney mysteries. This was the first one.

That's the first one. Two of them. Two of them. Two of them. Two of them. Two of them. Two of them. Two of them. Two of them. So much that they were wondering about his antecedents. But you really wrote the war and peace version of the Kerney family. Well, I did. And from what I understand, no other writer, at least in the crime fiction genre, has ever done a prequel trilogy about any of their main characters. So supposedly I've broken new ground. And how hard was it? With your first 12 books, wasn't it pretty much a piece of one a year? Well, it was sort of that. You know, there's a lot of movement there. Changing genres was hard. Writing contemporary fiction isn't quite as difficult because the world you're drawing on is the world of today. So you're writing about characters in contemporary society acting as they normally would, as you would, and I also do.

Historical fiction was a completely different issue. It had to deal with getting the language right, getting the landscape right, getting the people right. And I didn't want to mess it up. And on top of that, the other thing I didn't want to do was write a genre western. I didn't want to write an odor, if you will, or a dime store version of a western novel. I wanted it to be not necessarily western fiction that I was creating, but a family saga told through historical fiction. And that meant digging in and doing a lot of research and challenging myself to write a better story each time out. But this is the genius of your work here because the way you weave in real historical events, so you see them in context. You have my favorite writer, Eugene Menlove Rhodes, who wrote Paso Parque, one of my favorite stories.

Albert Fountain, Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, the White Sands Proving Range, it's all just woven in. You see in the context of the Kerney family's life how these large events in history, and so it gave me such a different perspective because you made me see it from their point of view. Well, and the story needs to be told of what it takes both historically and in the here and now, to ranch. And to be able to tell the story of people who have put down those roots and struggled through hard times mostly with a few bright years along the way to create a life for themselves and for their family and for their children and grandchildren was something I felt that was important to say and important to do. So in a way, the trilogy is kind of a testimony to New Mexicans of all stripes who have endured over the last hundred and so years that the books cover.

It's kind of a salute to them, if you will. And we know other families that are still continuing this struggle. We'll get back to the plight of ranchers today. Can you talk about the first generation that you start with and what year, what were the years? Well, hard country. Hard country opens in about 1875 with the movement west of a fellow by the name of John Kerney who suffers a major loss in his personal family life. And it comes into the Tula Roza right at the time when it's basically being, if you will, discovered by the Texas Stockman who are moving their cattle west over the open range looking for new brows and new grazing. Wait, I just want to make sure people know about the city of Tula Roza. But would you give us a little tiny geography lesson about where is the Tula Roza basically? Well, the Tula Roza basically extends from the Sacramento mountains on the east to the

San Andres on the west and covers thousands of square miles. It's in the south central part of the state. And when this all began, there were very few settlements there. A little village of Tula Roza was a Hispanic village that had been settled by people who had been washed out by flooding along the Rio Grande. They had come there to settle only to be attacked by the muskalaeros who live in that range and consider it their home ground. So this vast expanse of territory larger than several states combined, I mean larger than Rhode Island, larger than Delaware, maybe even close to the size of New Jersey, is this closed basin, really, where everything flows inward. And there's really no outlet. And so when it was discovered by the Stockman, what they found was this vast, wonderful,

what they thought was endless grassland that would go on and on forever because it had never been grazed. So it's in the south central part of the state, it's a beautiful, beautiful slice of country. And unfortunately, most of it is off limits because it's now part of White Sands Missile Range and Holliman Air Force Base and the McGregor Range that's north of Fort Bliss. So it's been off limits to civilians for over 75 years. But one of the things I learned so much was the power of the military in shaping what was happening to the land in that basin, that the Kerney men was starting in 1875 with John Kerney and going up all the way through Matt, Kevin Stan, were fighting the Army's control.

They were draconian and the Kerney Ranch was the last ranch. The last ranch. The last ranch. It's all based on historical fact. And there are still survivors that were displaced from their ranches on the Tula Rosa who really feel aggrieved, really feels if justice has not been done, their interests have not been served. Originally, the Army said, we just want you off the land for 20 years, then you can come back. That was a big falsehood. That on top of that, when they started negotiating what they were willing to pay, it was in many cases virtually nothing. And people had to move lock stock and barrel, and let's literally lock stock and barrel within days in certain cases. And we're wiped out, became bankrupt as a result of it. One of the very moving part of the book was the story of John Prather, this rancher who fought, fought, fought.

He came in the 1880s. He himself, he was in his 90s. And they tried to take away his ranch. And one of the lawmen even said, I didn't get in, or was it an armman? I didn't get in this to take an old man off his ranch at the homestead and built with his hands. Of course, that's a true story. I know it is. That I borrowed whole cloth from fact. And actually it made the national news. You bet. People, reporters flew out from all over the country to cover it. And it forced the army to back down, well, how much did they back down? Well, they let John have 20 acres in his ranch house until he died. And now they have control over that too. So there's a lot of hard feelings in the basin still from people about how the military conducted themselves during the era at the end of World War II, when they were setting up the V to rocket program and testing it at White Sands Proving Ground, which later became the missile range.

And there was even some talk recently about the fact that our president went to Japan to Hiroshima, but he had never visited any of the people in New Mexico who had been affected by the first atomic belast at Trinity site. So there's our twins. The downwinders. There's hard feelings about that too. To tough, tough, beautiful land I write about. And you got to believe that that's pretty much the way the people are down there too. Well, you mentioned how, with World War II, the economy was changing. And so this was part of the world that was expected to raise the beef for the soldiers. And yet, the army didn't get that connection there, that we needed these ranchers ranching in order to supply the things that were needed because of the war. Well, it went way beyond ranchers or the army. It was politics at an international level.

For example, when World War II ended in Europe, when the European campaign ended, they allies divvied up the German scientists, basically. They said, I'll take any meany-miney-mo, right? And so to get those German scientists into the country, some of them were card-carrying Nazis. They had to sneak them across the Mexican border. What was that operation called? Operation Paperclip, yeah. So there was shenanigans going on that was in a way far greater than what the army was doing to some ranching families on the Tula Rosa. While we're speaking today with Michael McGuerity about his wonderful book, The Last Ranch, the third part of the Great West Trilogy, there were other elements because of the war. One thing that happened, and you write so beautifully about the transition from World War II, suddenly, the small cities were expanding like crazy because of the military

presences, like cruises, T or C, I mean, the world was just accelerating. It was. What happened, and still happening, is that war economy drove growth in the southern part of the state like nobody's business. I mean, Las Cruces was a sleepy little town of 10, 12,000 people at the end of World War II, Alamogordo was a new town basically less than a half a century old that was a ranching community and a real road stop, and that was about it. And then all of these other little hamlets and villages around were just what they were. Alamogordo and Tula Rosa and Hot Springs, they were just little small towns. They weren't even cities. And the growth of Holliman Air Force Base, the growth of White Sales Missile Range,

the expansion at Fort Bliss into the McGregor Range has fueled an economy that is government depended even to the state. And another factor you point out in the late 60s, here comes the interstate highway system. So all of those burgeoning cities are now connected by a vast interstate, and bringing more people and more commerce, but the process is not over. That's what I felt so privileged to watch the decades of this family's progress. And then I looked at the plight of ranchers of other ranchers. Now this was one particular area, and there was a lot of government influence on what happened. But overall, the whole plight of ranchers now is that they're fighting the drought, well that you would speak beautifully about the drought here, five or six years of no rain.

What to do? Well, you know, we tend to have a very short memory. I don't know why, but one of the things that I talked about in the last ranch is the drought of the 1950s, which went on for almost a good seven years, and just decimated ranching and farming throughout. The national media reported it as a Texas drought. And I say in the book that the New Mexicans had just wished that the drought had droughted state on the other side of the state border, because it wasn't just a Texas drought. It was something that really affected New Mexico very badly economically. And also socially, I mean, again, that was another reason that ranchers were forced off the land. There was nothing they could do. I mean, the land was no longer productive. They didn't have the water. They didn't have the grassland, so they couldn't make a living at it.

That is a condition that we still face today. And it's one that we don't really give enough attention to because we've turned into, in the last 75 years, we've turned into an urban society in New Mexico. We're no longer a rural people the way we were at the start of World War II. Because of that, the needs of the ranchers are often not given the kind of priority they deserve, especially in our legislature, and in the way we treat the various different rules and regulations that come down from state and federal bureaucracies and agencies. They're not appreciated when it comes to issues of wolf reintroduction. They're not appreciated when it comes to issues dealing with how many big game permits

are going to be allowed when it comes to certain species of animals. They are certainly not given their due when it comes to water rights. All of the big urban areas, they want the water, and if agriculture is using 90% of the water to grow their crops, well, that's not the way it should be. That water should come to the cities, come to the developers, come to the municipalities. So, ranching and agricultural families really feel as if they've gotten the short end of the stick in terms of the contribution that they make not only to the economy, but actually to the preservation of the rural lifestyle that still gives us great, enormous beauty and pleasure because they're out there sticking on the land and keeping it from

being developed. We need to give them more attention, I think. But as you mentioned in the last ranch, Kevin's mom and dad, Kevin Kerney, Matt and Mary, one of them, during the drought, when they couldn't feed or water their own cattle, one was a teacher, one worked at the Ag at State, and so they had to have a job to support. To support the ranch, and Kevin is such a wonderful figure, well, and his dad, because not only were they military, they served in the military for every war since, you know, for the years, but also, they were determined to keep that last ranch, to keep it. And the most, you know, the most poignant, beautiful part of the end of book, too, here, where the Matt's dad, Patrick, who lived on the ranch his whole life, that was his whole life. Finally, he dies, and they have to sneak in to bury him because it's now surrounded by the White Tens proving that they go to the family plot, and you describe the last

real rancher being laid to rest in the family cemetery in the last ranch, looking out over the beautiful, truly, rocobase, and knowing that those times were gone, they never come back. I got it. Yeah. That was a poignant for me to write. One of the things that I used to say about my crime novels is that they were never ought to be a biographical. They probably weren't because a lot of what I experienced for a quarter of a century and criminal justice, I was able to draw on for those stories. But when I got to writing the trilogy, I had to start drawing on some of my own life, to be able to create the complexities that existed between various members of the family and their relationships with other people and their friendships and their spats and their disputes and their tough times, both in terms of relationship and relationships,

but also in terms of surviving, of getting along with not much and making do. There's part of me in the last ranch, and part of me in the first two novels as well. I don't know if you've noticed or not, but this book has a dedication that comes at the end of the book, not at the beginning. And it's kind of my version of the only memoir I'm ever going to write, because it sort of covers my life from my early childhood, pretty much right up to the present. And I don't give a lot of information away. No. You don't give any last names. No. But I finally saw the whole bunch of people there, and all the people that have touched me one way or another. It's very beautiful. I did indeed. I studied it. I really read it. And I know a lot of those people, and they are remarkable, remarkable. But not only do you build a monument to the people that you've met, known, and loved, and then this incredible family, but you use the landscape and this beautiful, to the

reservation almost as a character. It's a lot in the tradition of Max Evans with the high-low country and Tony Hellerman with the Navajo lands, you have made a personality almost, a presence of this beautiful land. No one did it better than Gene Love. Gene. Gene Manloved. Gene Manloved. It's OK. It's OK. But Gene Roads could write about the Tula Roza like nobody else I've ever read. I think he knew it. He knew it backwards and forward, and he had an enormous admiration for it. I tried to emulate him as much as I could in being able to draw a picture for readers of what it was like then and what it's like now, which is not an easy thing to do. Maybe it's easy for travel writers.

I have a feeling maybe they're better at it than I am. Well, they've got a picture from my dear friend, a picture from Tula Roza. But for me, it was a task. One that I took on readily and enjoyed, but one that was not easy to accomplish. And yes, the land does become a character because it informs who the people are. It informs what lives there, what grows there, how it looks at different times of the year, different times of the day. And I had to go out and see that and capture it so that I could draw on it and make it come alive on the page. Well, that's why the first book of the trilogy, Hard Country, you know, this is a challenging landscape, beautiful and again, so dependent on elements outside of their control, rain and storms and all of that. But so you've taken us through decades to where we are now, but as a historian, you also have to have a sense of the future too.

So what elements do you see that are going to further affect ranchers in this, this hard country? Okay. I think the whole issue of climate change is a monster that we have yet to really adequately deal with. I think water is going to become more precious than gold in terms of it becoming a commodity that people continue to buy and sell. I think uncontrolled growth, vis-a-vis the chamber of commerce, mentality that all growth is good, you've got to put the brakes on somewhere and say, no, we don't need more subdivisions necessarily. The issue of affordable housing is important in our state because we don't have any really, at least not around my neck of the woods, and then the whole issue of dragging New Mexico

into the 21st century when it comes to education is totally vital, totally vital. We've got to stop saying that we can't do this and we can't do that, especially with the vast billions that we have in the permanent fund and start doing some of the right things that are going to protect the land, protect the water, protect agriculture and ranching, and start to get out of the bottom tier in terms of education and employment opportunities. We can do it, but we have, I think we're a fractured society right now and I think we're broken. And until the voters of this state and countries say, enough is enough, it's time to do what's right for the welfare, for the well-being and for the safety of our citizens, we're not going to get where we need to go.

Michael, I mean, complete, accord with you, except you're calling for leadership. Yes, I am. And we are not seeing that leadership. We don't, who do we know that has a sense of our history and a vision for where to take us for one of the vision the people perish? Well, as long as we have a system where politics is a career and not public service to do the common good, we're in trouble. We're in trouble. I think that's... And I'm not talking about one party or the other here. I'm talking about it across the board. There are people out there that are desperate to offer that kind of leadership, but when you have a system that's run on a seniority basis and run on platforms of, I'm right, you're wrong. And with industry-based agendas that give them the money to get elected, they're going to represent being oil and gas, being agriculture, being education. It's all washed by the idea that, you know, it's a free market system, it's a capitalistic

system, and as long as it's legal, I can go out, make my money anyway I want. And where's the put back? Where's the goodwill that says, we've got to take care of our brothers and sisters, we've got to take care of our elderly, we've got to take care of our young, we've got to take care of each other. And those are the values I'm sorry we've run out of time. Those are the values that you portray so beautifully in this trilogy, the Great American West trilogy, start with hard country, I really think people should read the whole trilogy, start with hard country, go to backlands, and then do yourself the favor of reading this wonderful, the last ranch written by our guests today, Michael McGarrity, thank you for joining us. Thank you for allowing me to have my tie, Ray, you don't know, no, I'm in full accord. So, and I'd like to thank you our audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Most archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from

Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future, and by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tos, New Mexico.