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17: I Build a Roadhouse
- University of New Mexico Press
- Chapter
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After selling the ranches, I bought a couple hundred acres, approximately a township, at the location of the old Navajo Lodge in Datil. The original lodge had been a ranch house up in the mountains in White House Canyon, nine miles out of Datil. About forty years before I bought the place, Ray Morley, who owned the ranch, had taken the old house apart and moved it log by log down to Highway 60, a much-traveled route then, where he put it back together and renamed it The Navajo Lodge. It was built of rough-hewn, squarecut logs.Two stories high with gabled ends and a big center hall with a tall stone fireplace climbing up the front, it was very picturesque. Ray Morley was the brother of Agnes Morley Cleveland, who wrote NO LIFE FOR A LADY. Coming out here from the East and messing around with ranches and cattle, I felt like part of that book. Their mother practically started the town of Datil single-handed.She was the post-mistress, and she it was who talked her son Ray into moving the old ranch house down to the highway.Datil was built on the sight of Camp Datil,established in the 1800s by General Miles to protect people from the roving bands of Apaches under Geronimo. Ray Morley added several Navajo families to the place to give it 17 ❙ I BUILD A ROADHOUSE ❙ 106 ❙ ❙ I BUILD A ROADHOUSE ❙ local color. Travelers got to watch the Navajo women weaving their blankets,which they could also buy if they liked.Morley learned rattlesnake handling from the Indians, which he liked to demonstrate to gawping tourists. After Morley died, for a time the lodge continued as a hotel, but in the early forties it had burned to the ground. I thought I’d get in there and run one of these roadside joints, but first I had to clean away the debris of the old burned-down wreck.Once that was done, I started to rebuild. I didn’t have enough finances to build the big institution I had in mind. I had to start from scratch and put in the foundations myself, mixing the cement and all. You had a hard time buying any kind of supplies right after the war. This was around in about ’48. And getting plumbing supplies in particular was pretty near impossible.I was picking up supplies out of Army-Navy stores and different places in El Paso and Las Cruces, anywhere I could find them. But I did what I’d set out to do. Getting help where I could, and doing a lot of the work myself, I rebuilt the old Navajo Lodge. The lobby of my lodge, with the bar at one end, was about twenty-five by fifty feet. It had a huge big fireplace with everybody’s brand from the ranches around there embedded in the stones. Later I added eight or ten slab cabins. I did the plumbing in all those cabins myself—threading pipes, burying them in the ground, and connecting them. I put in those bathrooms myself, as well as the bathrooms in the main lodge building, which had eleven hotel rooms. I was finishing up the last of the lodge when I realized I had to build a separate cafe.I’d been trying to serve light eats in the bar and there just wasn’t enough room. So I went ahead and started the cafe addition onto the main building. Getting supplies together I had overdrawn at the bank somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars.Hard as I tried,I couldn ’t think how I was going to finish what I had started. Mr. Becker at the bank in Belen had written me several times about my overdrafts. 107 [34.201.16.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:34 GMT) ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ I wrote back and told him I didn’t know how I would catch up but I would catch up somehow. One day when I was dumping cement in the wheelbarrow and running the floor in the cafe building, Mr. Becker came by on his way home to Albuquerque. He’d been down to Reserve. I had a cement mixer going, one of those small ones, and I was about ready for the last load of the day. He asked me,“How much money do you think it’d take for you to finish...