On the New Mexico Range
Ink on wash
50 x 75 cm
Signed
EXHIBITED
Jonathan Grant Galleries, Peter McIntyre, Places and People, at Home and Abroad
ILLUSTRATED
Peter McIntyre, Places and People, at Home and Abroad [Exhibition Catalogue]. Auckland, New Zealand: Jonathan Grant Galleries.
On the New Mexico Range
Over the mountain from Taos lies the yellow-grass cattle country, vast sweeps of gold fading away to a powder-blue line of mountains, and there we made an expedition with several other artists from Taos to watch the roundup on Dick Wooton's Ranch.
This country around Cimarron and Wagon Mound is right on the Old Spanish Trail to Santa Fe. In fact, Wagon Mound was a guiding feature on the trail, its wagon shape standing clear and abrupt above the plain. Cimarron also has its history of a later day; you can still see the bullet holes in the ceiling of the bar there.
Not since student days had I gone out sketching with fellow painters, so this was like old times to me. There was Bob Longheed and his wife Cordy from Connecticut, Ned Jacobs from Denver, and Eugene Dobos, whose witty sculptures adorn the galleries of Taos.
Out in the cold, grey dawn stood a knot of horsemen - heads down and shoulders hunched, huddling together against the morning wind, horses and waving grass seeming to move together, colours muted in the flat dawning light - and there you have the cover of this book.
All day the riders moved across the yellow prairie, appearing and reappearing on the waves of the land, a horseman galloping along the skyline, a knot of cattle appearing over a rise, and once a herd of distant antelope sped like fleeting dots across the undulating land. In the late afternoon sun the growing mob of cattle spread out before us, moving in ever fading tones of reddish brown into the enveloping dust fall. Calves bellowed to mothers; riders slumped wearily in the saddle; and I had seen my first roundup and gathered another fragment of the American West.
The old Spanish adobe Macarthur ranch house at Wagon Mound gave us a glimpse of a wonderful era. Great iron gates surmounted by a bell opened onto a tiled courtyard, all overhung with vines. Cool and welcoming rooms and deep couches were a soothing balm to our motel-weary souls – so were long, cool drinks out with Patty’s sister and brother-in-law, the Douglas Frasers, while travelling through New Zealand, so New Mexico moved a little nearer to distant New Zealand.
In the morning we watched the hands at work with the cattle coming into the yards, and on hearing the cowboys speaking Spanish were reminded of New Mexico’s past. Almost like an arranged finale, out on the prairie two huge bulls staged a spectacular fight, heads down, horns locked, and dust flying, while a third lumbered in and out around them for all the world like the referee at a boxing match. These were the sights, this was the land, and these were the people that brought New Mexico out of the lines of a map into sharp, full, rich colour for us.
Peter McIntyre’s West, page 15
