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Reviews
| New Mexico Mining Heritage Guide. By John R. Park. South Miami, Fla.: Stonerose Publishing Co., 2003. 164 pp., illus., maps, notes, index. $14.95 comb bound (ISBN 0-9706697-3-9).
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John Park thinks of this book as "a history of the mineral resources industry of New Mexico, disguised as a travel guide" (p. 1). Well, no, it is more of a dictionary because of all the abbreviations and symbols used to encode the details—two pages full of them. Although dictionaries do not have an index, this 5.5 by 8.5-inch volume has a five-page index to its 318 entries, 22 textboxes, and 25 map locations. Park suggests that the volume is "in encyclopedic form," and he visited many of the sites with his wife during 2002 to check their condition and location.
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1
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New Mexico Mining Heritage Guide is great at providing a wealth of information about mines and mining-related subjects in New Mexico. How is a book like this described, which includes history and legend, personal comments, driving instructions, GPS coordinates, museums, caverns, website links, pictures, places to eat, etc.? The author tries to describe what the viewer will see when driving up to a site, what the business was, and what now remains. The author often indicates whether the site's present owners are friendly to visitors and if tours are possible. The book also includes 118 black-and-white photographs of the sites.
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2
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The guide has little space for flowery prose. It is very concise in its descriptions of mine sites, making heavy use of abbreviations and symbols. Besides the basic descriptions, the guide includes a number of additional details, such as tonnage of minerals produced or references to books and other sources on the site under discussion. Even the historical accounts are full of details of minerals in the area, other mines, equipment used and/or left behind, and comments about reuse of buildings and the mining area. The author even includes GPS coordinates for legendary sites such as the Lost Padre Gold Mine at N32° 27.201' W106° 30.925', which he says was once operated by a French priest and his followers. The author does provide a short history of the mine and his reason for choosing these particular GPS coordinates as the possible site of the legendary mine.
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3
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The only sites not listed are those in the White Sands National Park near Alamogordo, where the natural wonder of white gypsum sand dunes can be experienced with the alien visitation sites in Roswell just another 130 miles along Highway 70. I was privileged to visit New Mexico in the mid-1960s because of "an invitation from your friends and neighbors," as the draft notice read. The area around the White Sands Missile Range has a fascinating history that is often still visible because of the desert conditions. Because of "silver fever" in the 1800s, silver diggings are still visible on almost every hillside in the park.
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4
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| Park has crammed a lot of mining history and related manufacturing information into this book, but he has only touched on the wide variety of visitation sites and the geology of New Mexico. The information in the book would be more accessible if it were available in a computer database. As it is, the indexes help a lot, but readers will spend a lot of time locating information. Moreover, the surrounding listings are distracting. |
5
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