Mexico, which was founded by a man who had come from as far as they, Charles B. Eddy. An adventurous, stone-eyed New Yorker, Eddy came to New Mexico in 1880 and began ranching right where the city of Carlsbad now sits. He, too, fought for water, and in his case it was the Pecos River itself that he was after. Four years after he arrived, a devastating drought killed a third of his stock, and Eddy decided that the only way to survive was to use the river to irrigate the surrounding desert so it could be farmed. In 1888, he teamed up with some locals to form the Pecos Valley Land and Ditch Company, and embarked on a massive construction project that eventually brought water to twenty-five thousand acres. At the time, the area was part of the infamous Lincoln County, and if Eddy had any doubts that he wasin the Wild West, he needed to look no further than his principal partner: Pat Garrett, the same man who, as sheriff seven years earlier, had put a bullet from his Colt .44 through the heart of Billy the Kid.
The pair made a good team. The combination of Garrett’s western know-how and Eddy’s New Yorker’s flair for selling saw the creation of a town out of more or less nothing. Eddy printed up brochures he ran in East Coast newspapers, advertising of a “land of milk and honey” along the Pecos, and a trickle of settlers soon followed. Ironically, the very water they were harnessing wiped out much of their efforts in 1893, after the Pecos flooded. The irrigation system would be rebuilt and expanded in later years, but after that the residents of what was now called Eddy County decided that they could no longer base their livelihood on the rise and fall of the Pecos. Looking for a more permanent draw, they turned to the river once again, this time hawking its curative powers. A local wag had noticed, or claimed, that the Pecos near Eddy had nearly the exact same mineral content as the famous spa in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, and the town seized on the opportunity and quickly renamed itself after it. Soon the ads were once again flowing in the East Coast papers, but unfortunately the spa idea never quite caught on. Carlsbad found itself limping toward the next century.
In 1898, a local cowboy named Jim White noticed an unusual smoke column percolating into the desert sky, and he hiked over to investigate. Drawing near, he realized to his awe that the dark cloud was really a stream of bats—over a million of them—emerging from what appeared to be a bottomless hole in the ground. Intrigued, he returned a few days later, roped down into the hole,and discovered what he immediately recognized as one of world’s great geological treasures.
“I came to more and more stalagmites—each seemingly larger and more beautifully formed than the ones I’d passed,” he later told a biographer. He continued:
I entered rooms filled with colossal wonders in gleaming onyx. Suspended from the ceilings were mammoth chandeliers—clusters of stalactites in every size and color. Walls that were frozen cascades of glittering flowstone, jutting rocks that held suspended long, slender formations that rang when I touched them—like a key on the xylophone. Floors were lost under formations of every variety and shape. Through the gloom I could see ghost-like totem poles, tall, graceful, reaching upward into the darkness. I encountered hundreds of pools filled with pure water as clear as glass, their sides lined with crystalline onyx marble. The beauty, the weirdness, the grandeur and the omniscience absolved my mind of all thoughts of a world above—I forgot time, place and distance.
Once again, water had played a central role—in this case an epochal one—in the creation of the caverns: twelve million years of rainfall seeping through the limestone remains of a prehistoric coral reef that once stood on the edge of the biggest water of all—the Permian Sea. The water and limestone combined to form sulfuric acid, which gnawed away at the
The pair made a good team. The combination of Garrett’s western know-how and Eddy’s New Yorker’s flair for selling saw the creation of a town out of more or less nothing. Eddy printed up brochures he ran in East Coast newspapers, advertising of a “land of milk and honey” along the Pecos, and a trickle of settlers soon followed. Ironically, the very water they were harnessing wiped out much of their efforts in 1893, after the Pecos flooded. The irrigation system would be rebuilt and expanded in later years, but after that the residents of what was now called Eddy County decided that they could no longer base their livelihood on the rise and fall of the Pecos. Looking for a more permanent draw, they turned to the river once again, this time hawking its curative powers. A local wag had noticed, or claimed, that the Pecos near Eddy had nearly the exact same mineral content as the famous spa in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, and the town seized on the opportunity and quickly renamed itself after it. Soon the ads were once again flowing in the East Coast papers, but unfortunately the spa idea never quite caught on. Carlsbad found itself limping toward the next century.
In 1898, a local cowboy named Jim White noticed an unusual smoke column percolating into the desert sky, and he hiked over to investigate. Drawing near, he realized to his awe that the dark cloud was really a stream of bats—over a million of them—emerging from what appeared to be a bottomless hole in the ground. Intrigued, he returned a few days later, roped down into the hole,and discovered what he immediately recognized as one of world’s great geological treasures.
“I came to more and more stalagmites—each seemingly larger and more beautifully formed than the ones I’d passed,” he later told a biographer. He continued:
I entered rooms filled with colossal wonders in gleaming onyx. Suspended from the ceilings were mammoth chandeliers—clusters of stalactites in every size and color. Walls that were frozen cascades of glittering flowstone, jutting rocks that held suspended long, slender formations that rang when I touched them—like a key on the xylophone. Floors were lost under formations of every variety and shape. Through the gloom I could see ghost-like totem poles, tall, graceful, reaching upward into the darkness. I encountered hundreds of pools filled with pure water as clear as glass, their sides lined with crystalline onyx marble. The beauty, the weirdness, the grandeur and the omniscience absolved my mind of all thoughts of a world above—I forgot time, place and distance.
Once again, water had played a central role—in this case an epochal one—in the creation of the caverns: twelve million years of rainfall seeping through the limestone remains of a prehistoric coral reef that once stood on the edge of the biggest water of all—the Permian Sea. The water and limestone combined to form sulfuric acid, which gnawed away at the
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