Gila Country Legend
296 pages, 6 x 9
30 halftones, 2 maps
Paperback
Release Date:15 Dec 2014
ISBN:9780826348258
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Gila Country Legend

The Life and Times of Quentin Hulse

University of New Mexico Press

If there was ever a "ring-tailed roarer" of the backwoods of New Mexico, he was Quentin Hulse (1926-2002). Hulse lived and worked most of his life at the bottom of Canyon Creek in the Gila River country of southwestern New Mexico, but his reputation spread far and wide. His western image appeared on a tourist postcard and souvenir license plate in the 1950s. Footage of a lion hunt led by Hulse and his hounds appeared on the Men's Channel in 2005, three years after his passing.

Hulse grew up primarily in western New Mexico when that ranch and mining country was still remote and raw. At the age of ten he witnessed a point-blank shooting, the culmination of an old-fashioned frontier feud. He followed his parents between mines and towns until his father established a ranch at Canyon Creek. While serving in the navy during World War II, he landed on the bloody beach at Okinawa. After returning from the war, he was shot in a bar near Silver City during a night of carousing.

Hulse was most at home in the rugged Gila Wilderness, in which he ranched and guided for fifty years. With compassion and nuance, Nancy Coggeshall tells the compelling biography of a unique western rancher constantly adjusting to the inroads of modernity into his traditional way of life. Drawing on oral history, archival sources, and her personal association with Hulse and the Gila, she brings this unique westerner, and New Mexican, to life.

Nancy Coggeshall has written a memorable, compassionate, and colorful biography of this pioneer who made a hard-scrabble living raising livestock and hunting dogs, and as an outfitter, mule packer, and hunting guide for city-dwelling nimrods and fishermen.'--Roundup Magazine
For those who didn't know Quentin Hulse, Coggeshall has brought a true Westerner back to life.'--Albuquerque Journal

Nancy Coggeshall moved from Rhode Island to New Mexico, after living in London, England; Toronto, Ontario; and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She quickly found herself at home among the ranching families and slower paced small-town life of the Land of Enchantment. She resides in Reserve, New Mexico.

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