Settlers who stayed best of the best in my book

Our Leadership Portales class, organized by the Chamber of Commerce where I work, recently finished up its annual section on “History and Heritage,” dealing with everything from when Clovis hunters butchered ancient bison just north of town to the travails of our local water situation.

I lead a history windshield tour around town and my favorite stop is a place nearly everyone in town has noticed but no one has a clue what it symbolizes. The little structure next to a windmill on the J.P. Stone Community Bank south branch property on 18th Street is actually a recreation of the J.G. and Annie Greaves homestead near Kenna. The structure is an actual dugout furnished much the same way that a homesteader in eastern New Mexico, like the Greaves family, would have furnished their underground abode.

In the book, “Six Miles to the Windmill,” former Portales News-Tribune editor Gordon King Greaves organized his mother’s (Annie King Greaves) notes along with other research into what became the book, published years after her death.

J.G. Greaves landed in Kenna in 1908 while searching for a place to practice his trade of newspapering. Instead, he wound up filing on a claim near Kenna figuring he would be better off with his own land than working in town.

The couple started with more than many settlers around them but still it was hardscrabble from the start. They bought a team of mismatched, half-blind and aged horses along with a $6 wagon when they moved to New Mexico. The rookie sodbuster used the team to break ground for a dry farm and had to constantly haul water with the team and wagon from a windmill six miles distant.

With hard work and more than a little luck, the first year’s crops were outstanding. Subsequent years weren’t as bountiful. Drought, wandering cattle, insects and inexperience doomed their labors more frequently than not.

They got by eating jackrabbit sausage, prairie chickens, dried beans and corn in the winter. They heated the half-dugout structure with the cow chips they picked up on the Plains. A wagonload of chips would get the family through a bad three-day storm according to the book.

I always set the scene for my Leadership class on the lawn underneath the pecan trees before they head down the steps of the dugout by telling about Annie Greaves’ first night on the homestead.

According to the book, he had been working on the place while she stayed back in Texas with their newborn baby. Once it was ready she made the trip by train and got off at Kenna to join him in their new home. When she arrived, she didn’t see him at the train station, and after waiting a good while she began inquiring about his whereabouts and finally accepted a ride from a fellow in a wagon going that way.

When they got to the place she got off but he was nowhere around. She went in and recognized some of their things and so she knew she was in the right place. She put the baby to bed and waited on her husband. To keep from worrying she made herself supper, but he still hadn’t made it home.

With nightfall she lit the kerosene lantern figuring he would be in at any time and the lantern would help him find his way home. Coyotes soon began to howl and she was sure they were right outside the door and ready to eat her and the baby if they got through the door. She wedged a chair under the door handle and sat at the table in the dugout with a butcher knife in her hand, just in case.

Finally a few hours before dawn she heard the wagon coming and she ran down the road with baby in her arms to greet her husband. Despite that first terrible night, the young woman stuck it out.

They eventually got their own well and windmill and got relief from constantly hauling water and “proved up” the claim. Lots of settlers didn’t make it. The hardships for many outweighed the promise of the free land. Those that stayed were the best of the best in my book.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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