The irrepressible Gilbert Quiroga brims over with tales about life in Patagonia over the last 70 years. You probably have not heard the one about the headless horseman that appeared one night at the Circle Z guest ranch in the late 1960s, when he was the foreman there. Gilbert knows the true backstory, and you’ll see why. But before we get into that, let’s hear some stories of how he got there, beginning in childhood.
“In first, second and third grade, I got a paddle on the butt just about every day,” he claim. “Rule at school was every time you spoke Spanish you’d get spanked. We all thought gringos hated us Mexicans, and I wasn’t going to let someone force me to speak English. I only knew cuss words. So I asked Wanda Lewis (De La Ossa), a bilingual girl standing at the fountain, how I’m supposed to say I’m thirsty. ‘It’s easy, Gilbert. Look at my mouth. You just say, I’m thirsty,” moving her lips slowly and getting him to repeat after her.
One teacher who took him under her wing made him Vice President of the eighth grade class. He laughed, “What the hell did I know about being a vice president? I couldn’t even spell it!”
Then when he moved on to high school, he said, “If it wasn’t for teacher Mrs. (Posy) Piper, I wouldn’t be speaking English today. She would rag on me to learn English because I couldn’t read or write it. I told her I don’t need to because I’m going to be on a horse for the rest of my life.”
He did go to work while in high school at the nearby Circle Z guest ranch. Gilbert learned “big powerful words” from all the movie stars and guests from around the world, from James Arness and Julie Andrews to Paul Newman and Lee Marvin. He credits them for taking him up another level with his English. His boss also gave him a subscription to Reader’s Digest and he diligently studied “Word Power,” the vocabulary feature. Friends and friends started saying to him, “Hey, you sound like a gringo!”
It was on property next to the Circle Z, where, starting in the ’50s, Gilbert and his older brothers were able to camp outside on weekends in exchange for cleaning the site. His mother had been widowed since Gilbert was one year old and had 15 children, not all her own, in her house often. She fed them on “beans and potatoes and the next day potatoes and beans,” plus cow heads a rancher would bring in.
Gilbert’s mother came down to the boys’ campsite on an orchard across from the shrine on the Nogales highway to clean out the cabin of an old railroader. Gilbert explained, “She set to make it livable, for us and her sometimes too. My brother Cano was the foreman at Circle Z and got us permission to stay there. We had apples, pears, apricots, walnuts! There were quail, rabbits and deer—whatever we could find to eat!
“Up above us further down the river was a rocky ridge. We were told that in the late 1800s the Apaches would come down from there to the river for water. If the stagecoach was going by, they would raid it. That was the legend. We never found arrowheads there, because rock hounds had been there before us. But we did find metates [the carved stone bowls used for grinding grains and seeds]. And we found stone houses, only high enough for people to sleep in.
“There were a couple dead trees in the orchard, just trunks. Mother wanted to clear a hollow stump, so she put creosol on it and set it on fire. We were enjoying the fire. It got very hot. Someone in heaven, Mother believed, said get out of there NOW! Big boom. Big plume of smoke and a lot of stuff like pieces of wood, dirt, came raining down on us. That was a hollow tree railroaders had stored dynamite in. Probably full of glycerin.
“Five little piggies [javelinas] would come down to the house. I would feed them milk, and I built a pen for them. There was always a lot of deer around. I shot one, dropped him. That was when birdwatchers were just starting to come here to seek rare birds. They were looking for rose-throated becards.
“They heard a gunshot and went to call for the Marshall. The Marshall arrived to see us hanging the deer up to skin. ’What do you guys have there? Venison?’ he asked. ‘No, no venison,’ I answered. I didn’t know the word. We had deer. And it was not in season for hunting.
“At our hearing, they let my brother Ramon go because he was very active leading youth in activities like Scouts and was on his way to college. The rest of us got six months’ probation. We were supposed to go back to court for the official sentencing. I didn’t go. Two weeks later, the Marshall came into the classroom and put handcuffs on me, right in front of all my classmates. I got taken to jail in Nogales for contempt of court. There was only me and an illegal who played marbles with me in there. I cried like a baby. The sheriff’s deputy took me out with him on patrol. I thought he was taking me home, but he was buying me a burger. This happened every day because I was always crying. Seven days later, my mother came to get me. My oldest brother had said don’t get him right away, see if he learns his lesson. It was cold in those cells. Scary too. We were in the cellar of the old courthouse. I’ll be damned if I ever do anything illegal again. I learned my lesson.”
Gilbert was best friends from elementary school on with Clint Haverty, a gringo. Clint’s father kept asking him, “Why are you hanging around that troublemaker?” His answer was that he loved Gilbert’s mother’s tortillas.
“Partners in crime,” Gilbert smiles. “We would skip class, go get a roll of baloney and Monterey Jack, no bread, take knives out and bullshit, sitting under the bridge and waiting for class to get over.
“That’s why the class voted us two the Least Likely to Succeed.”
Together, Clint and Gilbert learned how to make spaghetti and sew buttons in the mandatory Home Ec class for boys (while girls took Shop in junior high—yes, Patagonia was that progressive in the early 1960s!) and were smart enough to not join others tucked into a blanket inside an old tire rolling down out of control from the old dump at the top of the steep hill on Fourth Avenue. “But anytime something happened it was blamed on us,” he says.
In freshman year back in 1962, though, Gilbert was a hero for the day. “For initiation, seniors decided that year to pour a 50-gallon drum of molasses over us, girls too. These were big football player-seniors. I went running past the guys to tip the barrel over. I still have a scar where I almost lost my finger on the barrel edge cut by chisel. We got drenched with molasses. If you didn’t cooperate they’d make you go up to the ‘P’ on the mountain and whitewash it. I avoided it because I was in Dr. Mock’s clinic with eight stitches and an infection on my hand.”
The renegade reputation continued for this duo. As Gilbert told it, “One day the principal, Mr. Barela, came in all dressed up, and put his tie clip on the desk. He left the room, I took the tie clip to look at it. It said ‘TONY’. The Y broke off. I put the ‘TON’ back on the desk. When he came back and saw the clip, it was, ‘Gilbert, did you do this?’ Someone said ‘yes he did. Clint said he didn’t leave his seat. Mr. Barela’s answer? ‘Clint and Gilbert, meet me at the gym’. Everyone was brought out of class to sit on the balcony and watch. It was a chance for everyone to leave class, a win-win situation. Humiliating for me. Mr. Barela ordered, ’Clint, you hit Gilbert 12 times and if you don’t hit him hard you’ll be sorry because he’ll come back on you.’ I didn’t hit hard because he was my friend. So I didn’t give Mr. Barela that satisfaction.”
While still in high school, students would go down to Mexico. Gilbert remembered, “We would park on the street, and the bartender would come out to the car bringing a bunch of peanuts. One time, I took a handful and bit down on something. It was a cockroach. I asked a friend if he ever ate peanuts from there. ‘Yeah’ but one time he opened the drawer where the peanuts were stored and a bunch of cockroaches ran out.
“It was not uncommon to see all your classmates in front of El Recreo Bar, right on the border, next to the caverns. You could walk. I was the only kid in my class who had a car. I bought a 1958 Chevy Impala from a guy in Wyoming, $200. My boss fronted it for me and after I paid him off, took it across the line to get upholstered, bought an 8-track, and drove to school with all my country western music.”
Gilbert got his moment of fame a few years later in 1967 when the Roger Corman-produced biker film “Devil’s Angels,” starring John Cassavetes, was filmed in Patagonia. Hundreds of motorcycles were used in it. Half the town were extras. There was a beauty pageant for the movie, with locals like Cindy Matus as royalty.
“We worked two days on the scene where stands were set up in the middle of town for the pageant scene. I was wearing a green jacket with fake fur trim and a big black hat. One of the crew pointed at me in the stands, ‘You with the black hat, come over and shout, ‘Here they come!’ And the motorcyclists came rumbling in to crash the party. We were paid $10/day to sit out there for six to seven hours. In one scene they let my girlfriend (and later first wife) Peggy sit at the top of the ferris wheel for six hours.
“After they finished filming this scene, the art director took Clint and me up to Tucson to paint the inside wall of a house red with a big swastika inside a circle. I thought I was making a lot of money, $10/day. Most of it I gave to my mother.”
Back to the Circle Z, where Gilbert had been asked to return to work as foreman after working at Fort Huachuca.
“This had to be around ’69,” he says, “When they hired a Limey secretary. Mary was an Englishwoman who didn’t understand the culture of the west. We didn’t get along. One day the owner of the ranch had to go to Tucson. It was a rainy night. I went and saddled up a horse I had trained to rear, put on a raincoat with hood, got on the horse, rode it out front and started yelling as I pulled the horse up. People came running out of the lobby. I reared the horse again while yelling, and then galloped away. Out of sight, I took the saddle off the horse, and let the horse loose in the pasture.
“The deputy came. Can you believe it, the same one who had taken care of me ten or fifteen years earlier, buying me burgers. He asked if I had seen any commotion. ‘A headless horseman came riding by. Can you come with me to look at the tracks?’ We went down to the river, and fortunately stopped about 50 feet from where he would have seen the horse tracks start heading back to the ranch.
“Next day, people asked, did you hear about it? They told me the horseman’s coat was flashing in the night. I guess the raindrops on my raincoat were reflecting the porch lights. Every guest came up to me to ask if I knew anything about the headless horseman. ‘No,’ I’d answer innocently. Secretary Mary left soon after this.”
Those two renegades least likely to succeed? Clint is a Hall of Fame horse breeder in Texas. Gilbert worked his way up at the Circle Z to manager and got offers from guests to go abroad to work, drove a school bus in Patagonia for 37 years and taught many children Spanish as they rode in the front seats, raised five sons, and even served as Mayor of Patagonia. All the while keeping the over-50-year secret about the headless horseman. Until now.