Living Conditions

The Gila National Forest has its offices in Reserve, NM that also happens to be the closest town to Negrito Fire Base where I will be stationed. Side note: Gila is pronounced with an "H" (hila = gila). Spanish influence I presume. Reserve is known as the location where Elfego Baca held off a gang of Texan cowboys who wanted to kill him for arresting cowboy Charles McCarty in 1882. In the 2000 census the population is recorded as 387.

Wikipedia has this to says about the gun fight. Take notice no references are provided for the information. The history of events is also contentious with the local population.

In the 1860s, Mexican-Americans established a string of villages along the river, naming them the Upper, Lower, and Middle San Francisco Plazas. In the late 1870s Anglo settlers began arriving. They renamed Upper Frisco Plaza as Milligan's Plaza, naming it after a merchant and saloon owner.

Milligan's Plaza was the site of the legendary Frisco Shootout of Elfego Baca. In 1882, or perhaps 1884, the nineteen-year-old Baca apparently appointed himself deputy sheriff and rode 130 miles from Socorro to the Plaza. There he set about bringing justice to the Mexican-American community which had been beset by drunken cowboys.

Outnumbered by 80 Texans, Baca holed up in a jacal, the flimsiest kind of hut, and was besieged by the mob. Bullets and dynamite could not dislodge him, and in a gun battle lasting 33 hours, he inflicted death and grievous injury on some of his adversaries without being injured himself.

Map location:
Even my New Mexico geography is poor. I had to look at the map just today and realized I had Santa Fe and las Cruces geographically switch in my head for the longest time.

Reserve via google maps:


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Negrito Fire Base:


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The image quality for remote places has improved a ton. Last time I looked up Negrito Fire Base its was a blur.