Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Two emails caught my attention last week – one about the future, the other about the past.
The future came from Mario Caswell. He’s a proud dad whose daughter will likely be seeing her name in the newspaper a lot these next few years.
Caswell tells us:
“My daughter Janaeh Caswell is an eighth-grader at Yucca Middle school.
“They had a game Thursday against Lovington. They fell short, 33-31. But my daughter had an amazing game.
“I’m a youth coach and also have coached at the Freshman Academy so I record her games and stats.
“This game she finished with 17 points, 15 rebounds, 14 blocks and five steals.
“A triple double at her age is an amazing accomplishment. It would be nice to put it in the paper showing love to our youth.”
Done.
Troubles follow Cage Riley
The email about the past comes from Josh Riley, a history teacher who lives in Tennessee. Riley is doing family research and believes he has connection to Cage Riley, whose family settled in what’s now Curry County about 1890.
Josh Riley found an archived article on our newspaper’s website title, “Original Clovis settlement named after outlaw.”
The story, written by the late great historian Don McAlavy, ended “One page here won’t tell the whole story of our Cage Riley and his kids.”
Josh Riley wants to know the rest of that story. He’s in luck. McAlavy devoted more than a page to Cage Riley in McAlavy’s book “Eastern New Mexico High Plains History.”
That story doesn’t offer proof that Cage Riley was an outlaw, but it offers anecdotes about “troubles” that seemed to follow Riley and his family.
Once, according to McAlavy, Riley found himself in a house in Oklahoma, surrounded by lawmen.
“During a pause in the shooting,” McAlavy wrote, “Cage hollered out to them if they’d let his wife come out and be allowed to go free. When they allowed they would, Cage dressed up in his wife’s clothes and got away.”
A more-often-repeated story about Cage Riley and his family occurred in the San Jon Valley north of Clovis. A rancher named Boss Jackson had a dispute with Riley and decided to try and make him leave the range. Jackson and two other men came in the night to run them off.
On arrival, they found Riley and his large family behind a corral fence, armed with revolvers, rifles and shotguns.
“We tried to run Cage out of the country,” McAlavy quoted one of Jackson’s men, “and I don’t mind facing a man with a gun. But when we saw the whole family with guns, including little kids with shotguns, we turned and ran. You never know what a little kid with a shotgun would do.”
Some have said Cage Riley was the namesake for Riley’s Switch, the small settlement that preceded Clovis. But there were multiple Riley families in the area in the early 1900s and more than one of them made the same claim.
What’s known for sure about Cage Riley is that he died in 1960 at age 91 in Fort Sumner. McAlavy wrote that he had 11 children. And his story needs way more than one page to tell.
David Stevens is editor and publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at: