Beatty’s Cabin

Despite the chill November night, the iron cook stove in the corner of Beatty’s Cabin kept the room cozy. Two big, soft, gray elk hides were draped over the yard fence, while eight quarters of fresh red meat hung under the shed back of the cabin. An unusually fine set of twelve-point elk antlers leaned against the outside of the log cabin, where the saddles hung. Two successful hunters were proudly happy, the other three hopeful for tomorrow. We had eaten our fill of fresh elk liver and bacon, hot biscuits, milk gravy, and French fried potatoes. The two lucky nimrods had told and retold their exciting experiences of the day. Then, perhaps prodded a little, I had unwound a few tales of the many thrilling events of the area since the old-time prospector, George Beatty, built his two-room log cabin on the little grassy flat across the creek right here in the heart of this primitive Pecos high country about eighty years ago. I had told them of my own first pack trip to Beatty’s Cabin as a ten-year-old boy, way back in 1896; about George Beatty and his “sure good bear knives”; about naturalist L. L. Dyche’s hunting excursion after grizzly bear among these very canyons and ridges; about Dyche’s strange honeymoon trip to Beatty’s Cabin with his timid, diminutive Kansas bride, sixty-nine years ago; about the discovery of an outlaw cabin at the head of the river and capture of the outlaws; about the bishop-raised Indian, Miguel Lamy, getting mauled and chewed up by a bear, but finally killing it with a butcher knife; and about the perilous winter rescue of a bunch of snow-trapped horses. They might have kept my tongue wagging all night but, having helped to dress and pack in the big bull elk, I was, perhaps, more tired than the younger men. At last, I said, “You guys can sit up all night throwing the ‘bull’ if you like; I’m going to bed.” “Elliott, stories such as those ought to be in a book,” Angus said, “Why don’t you write it?” “Not tonight! But maybe I’ll find time to try it someday,” I replied. “What will you call it?” asked Bill. “Hell in the High Country?” “Not exactly,” I said. “Anyway naming a book before it is written might be like naming an unborn child John Henry; it might have to be changed to Mary Jane.” All the same, I knew right then that the title would have to come to me out of my many fond memories of the area. “This spot is the hub of the Pecos Wilderness area, finest mountain country anywhere,” I said, “for a century or more, the pivotal axis for thrilling experiences and rugged adventures, many happy, a few tragic. With salty horse-sweat stinging my crotch from riding behind a pack saddle, I got my own first inspiring glimpse of the remote Pecos high country. On that very same adventuresome trip, I explored Beatty’s old cabin and prospect holes. Scores of times since then, while on all sorts of missions, I have camped right here at Beatty’s Cabin—and that’s my title: simply BEATTY’S CABIN.” So it was on a frosty hunters’ night, with the babble of the upper Pecos water and the whispers in our ears of mountain breezes among the spruces, that a book came into being, nebulous at first, but taking form gradually, chapter by chapter, until this outdoorsman’s volume is humbly offered for your entertainment—and approval—I hope.