EDITOR'S NOTE: Caprock Chronicles is edited each week by Paul Carlson, emeritus professor of history at Texas Tech. This week’s essay, written by Carlson, reviews the history of a Texas Technological College geology department field school in the mountains of New Mexico.
Between 1927 and 1941 the geology department at Texas Technological College conducted summer geological field schools in New Mexico.
Leroy Thompson Patton (1880-1956), professor and head of the department from 1925 to 1948, directed the school until 1940, when, he said, he had become “burned out.”
He skipped traveling to New Mexico some sessions during the 15-year period in order to take students elsewhere, such as Pagosa Springs, Colorado, but for the most part he brought separate groups of students each summer session to Nogal Mesa, southwest of Capitan.
In the first years of the field school, Patton and the students traveled in an Army surplus vehicle to New Mexico. It looked like an old bus. Then, in 1930, the college - led by Paul Whitfield Horn, its first president - bought a bus for Patton’s use.
In 1927, Patton took eight students to New Mexico. They left Lubbock on June 7 and returned July 14, the school year’s first six-week summer session. They studied rock formations, making notes about their findings, and the students listened to lectures from “Prof” Patton.
The trip in 1927 was largely a traveling class. The group of nine rode to Carlsbad, New Mexico, then to Roswell and into Ruidoso. They camped out each night, swam in lakes and rivers where they could, and learned about rock formations and what lessons about oil and water the materials might provide.
Patton and the students went to Cloudcroft, Alamogordo and White Sands, Las Cruces and the Rio Grande. They climbed to the top of Sierra Blanca, where “Prof” stood at 12,003 feet above sea level and gave his students a lecture on the canyons and rock formations below them.
They rode to Capitan and, in doing so, passed by Nogal Mesa. They also traveled to Carrizozo on US 380 and visited the isolated, and abandoned, pueblos beyond there, where for hundreds of years Indian people had farmed in the desert environment.
After returning to Ruidoso, they headed home, passing through Roswell, where they camped on grounds of the 36-year-old New Mexico Military Institute. East of Roswell, they visited Bottomless Lakes, their last stop on the geology trip.
In subsequent years, Patton took students to Central Texas, to Pennsylvania and to Colorado, but nearly each year during at least one summer session he was in the Ruidoso area.
Most often, the Tech students studied at Nogal Mesa. Located between Ruidoso on the southeast, Carrizozo on the northwest, and Capitain on the northeast, Nogal Mesa is a flat tabletop some 7,250 to 7,600 feet in elevation. “Traveling east from Carrizozo,” writes Gary Cozzens, "one can see the Mesa sitting between Tucson Peak on the left and Nogal Peak on the right."
Much “of the area is forest,” Cozzens suggests, and “in fact, the Lincoln National Forrest and Smokey Bear Range District occupy a large portion of this land.”
The village of Nogal, or what is left of it, on NM 37 sits at the western base of the Mesa. Patton often purchased supplies at a store in the tiny town.
In the early years, Patton, who wore safari-style clothing with high-laced boots and a desert hat, and the students camped at Nogal Lake. Sometimes they camped on “Tech Hill,” located on a ridge above the now-empty Nogal Mesa Ranger Station.
They slept in tents at first, but Dick Cox, a member of one of the pioneering families on Nogal Mesa, said, “Tech got an old Army barracks and moved it to the top” of the hill.
He noted that the students “would stay there, but there was no water supply, so they would ... come to our house at Nogal Lake to fill their water container with a garden hose.”
In the evenings, while the boys filled their water containers, a large tank on wheels pulled behind the bus/truck, Patton lectured from the truck.
“Every evening about five o’clock,” Cox said also said, the students “went to where a spring came out of the bluff — it was actually a leak” in Nogal Lake.
“There was a six-inch pipe that would come out of the bluff and [its water would] hit a rock,” he said. “The professor would make the boys take a shower at this site in ice-cold water.”
Cox remembered that Patton “would really work the boys. He would have them up early. He had an old Army truck with a speaker. He would lecture to the boys while he drove.”
Patton’s students studied rock formations, stream meanderings, canyons and rocky outcroppings. If Cozzens and Cox are correct, they studied outcroppings to see how water ran through the mountains.
Patton directed the field school for the last time in 1939. Two years later, the summer of 1941, was the last time students went up to Tech Hill. “That December,” writes Cozzens, “Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they never came back.”