Westward Ho Moments

Emanuel LeFevre or so he says

The man from Rolla

Last Saturday we took a jaunt to Rayado, New Mexico where we had learned there was a Kit Carson Museum. Though we have our own Kit Museum here in Taos, the open road called and we headed east on US 64, through Angel Fire, Eagle Nest and Cimarron Canyon to tiny Rayado. Do we have names.

Rayado and the museum reside on the monumental EX UU Bar Ranch and are part of Philmont Scout Ranch about which I dreamed in the early and mid-fifties.

At Rayado we found the appropriately named Rayado Trading Post which does double duty as the Kit Carson Museum and is manned by college age reenactors playing frontiersmen and offering tours of the old post. Among them were two young men: one hailing from Saint Joseph’s College in Brooklyn Heights, Nuevo York and the other from Springfield, Missouri. The former, clearly a method actor, called himself Emanuel LeFevre, who came west from Quebec or Saint Louis. Contestant number two, an Eagle Scout, was a student at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri. That's him with his trained chicken Rosita below.