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Embree (Sonny) Hale of Sierra County, New Mexico: Stories of His Life in Sierra County, and in the Black Range

by Rhonda Brittan | September 8, 2021
7 min read

Cover of Embree Hale memoirEmbree (Sonny) Hale of Sierra County, New Mexico: Stories of His Life in Sierra County, and in the Black Range, compiled and edited by Susan Roebuck for the Hillsboro Historical Society, Shushan Lights Publishing, 2021, 95 pages.

In the foreword to this rugged and touching book of transcriptions of recorded interviews with one of the most colorful characters to grace Sierra County in recent memory, editor Susan Roebuck lets the reader know that she has left Embree H. (Sonny) Hale’s remarks basically intact, allowing his voice and New Mexico dialect to come through—unforced and genuine.

While reading Roebuck’s summary of Sonny’s personality and endeavors ranging from working as a miner to pursuing a late-in-life quest to photograph every petroglyph and pictograph in New Mexico, this reader kept flipping to Roebuck’s photograph of Hale on the book’s front cover. Sonny’s untamed hair resembles the wild, pale grasses behind him. His appearance is that of a person whose spirit is truly present and deeply connected to the land he loves.

Hale interrupts his narrative of his life, which was cut short at age 84 by COVID-19 last November, with little asides and frequent laughter indicated by an “(L)” revealing his lighthearted nature. Hale relished life and the folks he encountered. Because he spent much of his life outdoors, these asides many times record his joyful observations of the natural world. “The sun’s goin’ down and just about to get into the dusk period of the evening. The kitty’s come out lookin’ around under the pickup. It’s sizin’ the situation up. Old black green-eyed kitty. He’s rollin’ on the ground. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,” he notices with pleasure.

The transcriptions are set up in blocks, reflecting the way Hale recalled things, in little chunks of time that tie his stories together. There are no chapters. The material is presented as one well-remembered life. The reader can forgive Hale for occasionally repeating himself in little hiccups as he gets his thoughts across, because he obviously enjoys the telling. And his calmly told tales are interspersed with lots of black-and-white photographs, making the book feel like one’s own family history.

Although Hale was born in Hot Springs (now Truth or Consequences), New Mexico, his family lived all over Arizona until World War II. When Sonny was 6, his father volunteered for service in the Marine Corps, leaving Sonny and his mother, Norene Faulkner Hale, in Phoenix. Feeling abandoned, Norene hitched up the family’s little trailer to their 1940 Ford and moved to Monticello, New Mexico. Norene taught school there.

While Sonny’s father, Embree Hale Sr., was away, Norene reconnected with an old high school sweetheart. They fell in love, and she decided to get a divorce. Embree Sr. subsequently met Georgia Dines, and they fell in love and lived together in Kingston, New Mexico (in whose cemetery Hale was buried late last year).

Sonny’s father was awarded custody of him. That summer, he stayed with his father and Georgia in Kingston. He enjoyed Kingston, but assumed he would go back to school in the fall in Monticello and stay with his grandparents. He mentioned this scenario to his father. “I knew it really hit him hard,” Hale recalls. “So I went to bed that night wonderin’ what in the world was going to happen. I wasn’t asleep yet and my dad come in, he got down on his knees and he held my hand and he looked at me. He said ‘You know son, I can’t live without you. I can’t stand it. I just can’t live without you.’ And my heart went out to him. He’d won me in court, but that night he won me, won my mind and soul.”

Sonny started earning his keep at age 13, operating a Caterpillar bulldozer from his relocated home base in Hillsboro, building roads and helping his father with odd jobs. One time his dad landed a job cleaning out a rancher’s dry water tank west of Dusty, New Mexico, on the Continental Divide trail. Without a truck or money to haul the Cat, they drove the dozer from Hillsboro at 2.5 miles per hour for eight to 10 hours a day. The trip to Dusty took more than 10 days, with father and son “making about 20 miles a day, just like the big old-time wagons you know. (L)”

In 10th grade, Sonny “got interested in dancin’. I got interested in women, and I saw the ticket to women was learnin’ how to dance.” Every evening about dark, he would walk a block away to Shirley Mackey’s house, where the neighborhood gals taught him how to dance. “Probably helped me in life more than anything I ever learned to do,” he reflects. “I still enjoy dancin’.  Because I’ve made friends with women I’ve taught to dance, and it’s amazing what has happened. It started out with the two-step and ended up with some tremendous relations in my life.” Then he thanks Shirley and shares a reminiscence of helping her family put the tombstone on her grave a few months before this particular recording was made.

After Sonny learned how to dance, he attended the hoedowns held once a month on a Saturday in Lake Valley. Folks came from as far as Las Cruces, Deming and Silver City to attend, as television entertainment was still a rarity. There was no alcohol permitted at the dance, but many husbands would drink out by their cars, leaving their wives unescorted inside. Because Sonny didn’t drink, he “danced up a storm,” avoiding the fights that could take place outside.

Over time, while still working the Cat, Sonny became interested in mining, and this became another of the ways he made his living for most of his adult life. Mining was key in the development of many Sierra County communities, as was ranching. Mining claims were easy to acquire, he remembered. Small mines really were important for folks with limited resources, keeping their families financially afloat in remote areas of the county. “Silver was king at Kingston and gold was king in Hillsboro,” he explains. “Because the price of gold stayed up until WWII, Hillsboro outlasted Kingston.”

Hale recounts lore of lost gold mines in the Caballos. One at the head of Animas Creek that had supposedly been mined by Buffalo Soldiers was mentioned in a 1904 government bulletin written by “Jones.” But without any substantive documentation, the stories became merely rumors, and that mine was never located. “Old cowboys, and old prospectors have spent their life looking for that mine,” Hale relates.

Perhaps the book could have used a glossary of mining terms or a map of the mines he refers to by name, but, generally, Hale’s descriptions are good enough to give the reader a feeling for the local territory.

When Sonny was 65, he gave up mining. His occupation had led him around the countryside, where he had seen petroglyphs everywhere and developed a love and appreciation for them. He spent the rest of his life scouting them out and photographing them. (His quest has been documented by director Erin Hudson in a charming 45-minute film titled “In Place, Out of Time,” which is available for screening on Vimeo.) Later, Hale would spend most of his days sitting at the counter at the Hillsboro General Store Café, selling his images of indigenous rock art.

This simply spoken memoir is best read slowly, permitting one to savor Hale’s stories and descriptions of the remarkably beautiful nights he spent in the quiet of the Black Range mountains. “Nice cool evening, slight breeze comin’ out of the southwest, it’s cloudy in the west,” he notices. “This morning the clouds were buildin’ up so pretty I thought it was going to rain.”

With his sharp memory and homespun style of speaking, the reader comes to feel as if she is sitting around a campfire with Sonny as he spins an oral history of Sierra County’s recent past. Anyone interested in the Southwest will enjoy this slice of local life.

Editor’s Note: To order a copy of Hale’s memoir, please send a check for $23.25 made payable to the Hillsboro Historical Society, P.O. Box 461, Hillsboro, NM, 88042. Please include your mailing address; postage is included in the purchase price.

Correction: This review erroneously gave credit for the cover photograph of Hale to the wrong person. The photograph was taken by Susan Roebuck, as the review now states.

author

Rhonda Brittan owned and operated Black Cat Books & Coffee, a used book store and community gathering place, in Truth or Consequences from 2001 to 2019.  In retirement, she has been able to spend more time with her husband at their Hillsboro cabin and taught herself to play an inherited ukulele. But she still enjoys turning people on to literary and non-fiction classics.

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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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