This is a small selection of the books available in our Museum Store. We accept telephone orders using VISA, Master Card, American Express and Discover. Call us at 575.538.5921 - Ask for the Gift Shop!

The Gila Cliff Dwellings are featured in the Silver City Museum’s newly released 2008 historical calendar. Seventh in a series featuring vintage photos of the area, the new calendar includes images of the Gila Cliff Dwellings dating from the 1890s through the 1950s, in the era when horses or Jeeps were required for access. Introductory text and captions trace the centuries of human interactions with the dwellings. The calendar is dedicated to the memory of Dawson “Doc” Campbell (1912-1998), who was the first—and often only—National Park Service staff member at the monument from 1942–1963. The 2008 edition is jointly published with Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (National Park Service), with additional support from the Trail of the Mountain Spirits Scenic Byway and Silver Imaging. The 2008 calendars are now on sale for $12.50 each at the Silver City Museum Store, the UPS Store and Western Stationers in Silver City and at the Gila Cliff Dwellings Visitor Center and Doc Campbell’s Trading Post. The calendar series was started six years ago as a fundraiser for the Silver City Museum Society and as a format for sharing images from the Museum’s photo archives. In recent years, historic photos from community members have also been included. Postcards featuring four of the 2008 calendar images have also been produced, and are available through the Museum Store. For more information, contact the Silver City Museum at (575) 538-5921 or toll-free (877) 777-7947, or drop an e-mail message to info@silvercitymuseum.org.

Two fortunate discoveries - silver and brick clay - were essential to the development of Silver City, New Mexico, in the early 1870s. The first discovery destined the town to be built; the second determined that it would be built to last. Silver City's unusual early commitment to permanence and progress not only produced an outstanding legacy of frontier Victorian architecture, but also allowed the town to survive against the odds which usually confronted remote Western mining camps. BTL traces the town's evolution through good times and bad, from its early booming years to the Great Depression, marking the effect of each decade's major personalities and events upon the built environment. It is a history with surprise twists, including a Main Street that was transformed literally overnight into a yawning chasm, sidewalks installed by women contractors at the turn of the century, and an electric plant that arrived just two years after New York City was lighted. New Mexico Architecture calls BTL "The finest monograph on the architecture of a single New Mexican community yet to appear... BTL is engagingly written for a general audience. The extensive use of period photographs and quotations from newspapers, diaries and memoirs bring the historic era to life. Indeed, this is as much a social history as an architectural history." Softbound, 132 pages with 84 historic and contemporary photographs, a new foreword by Marc Simmons, a picture glossary of architectural terms, and extensive listings of individual historic buildings.

Books abound with tales of 19th century outlaws, Indians, and cowboys, but few are as well-researched or told with such authentic flavor as Gila Book's newest release, Six-Guns and Single-Jacks by Bob Alexander. Alexander, one of the foremost writers in the field of Southwestern history, has achieved a new level of excellence with his latest offering. Step back in time as Alexander colorfully recounts tales of the violence and lawlessness that made Silver City and old Grant County, New Mexico one of the most dangerous places in the Southwest. Silver City's history, previously known only to a small cadre of Western enthusiasts, comes to life in the form of a violent cultural collision. There, settlers and Apache struggled for control of this rugged mountain haven, while later the likes of Billy the Kid used it as a launching pad for a lifetime of crime. True West magazine publisher Robert McCubbin writes, "As a long-time enthusiast of Western history, I can assure the reader he will find new and interesting facts in this well-told and thoroughly documented chronological account of a previously neglected area of the Old West. We are grateful for Bob Alexander's untiring efforts to ferret out much of the little-known history that has been buried away in old newspapers and dusty archives awaiting someone such as he."

Mildred Clark Cusey was a whore, a madam, an entrepreneur, and above all, a survivor. The story of Silver City Millie, as she referred to herself, is the story of one woman's personal tragedies and triumphs as an orphan, a Harvey Girl waitress on the San Fe railroad, a prostitute with innumerable paramours, and a highly successful bordello businesswoman. "...novelist Max Evans tells the rollicking true story of Mildred Cusey...who for nearly a half century lived happily and well off the wages of sin. Prostitution was, and is, a fact of life but unvarnished accounts from women involved in the trade are exceedingly rare. By any standard, Millie was a remarkable woman whose biography...provides an entertaining reading." -Bruce Dinges, Southwest West Books of the Year.

First published in 1936, Black Range Tales has become one of the classics of southwest Americana. In his inimitable style, "Uncle Jimmie" tells of prospecting, Indian fights, exploration, town life and all the characters from the early days of the Black Range, the Mogollons, and the rest of the Gila country of southwest New Mexico. The result is alternately humorous, poignant, amazing or insightful; a singular look at the times. And most of all these tales are true, for by golly, James A. McKenna was there.

In the spring of 1883, Apache raiders massacred Judge H.C. McComas and his wife Juniata and kidnapped their six-year-old son Charley as the family traveled on a desolate road in southwestern New Mexico Territory. At the time, the circumstances leading to this tragic event were not fully understood. In Massacre on the Lordsburg Road, New Mexico's pre-eminent historian Marc Simmon brings to light one of the last massacres of the Indian wars, revealing exactly why and how the three McComases met their deaths. With balanced, honest treatment Simmons constructs from long-buried fragments the full story of this little-known chaper in Southwest history. The reason why a reputedly wise and able man like Judge McComas would lead his family into such grave danger, the pursuit of the Apaches into Mexico by General Crook, and the ironic circumstances of Charley McComas' death during an attack by Crook's troops on the Apache camp illustrate that past events were as complex and sometimes as confusing as those today. Though academically thorough in its exploration, the popular style of delivery of Massacre on the Lordsburg Road will capture and hold the interest of general readers of Indian history. Marc Simmons is the author of numerous books on the history of New Mexico and the Southwest. 206 pages, clothbound, 24 photos.

Robert Nelson "Nat"Straw, 1856-1941, came to the Southwest in the 1870s. He worked on cattle drives, prospected for gold, and he lived for a time with the Navajos. But most of Nat's solitary life was spent in the Mogollon Mountains, where he slept under the stars and walked the long trails of the Gila Wilderness, hunting bears and wolves and other predators for the ranches in southwestern New Mexico. Nat's wild tales of grizzlies and mountain lions have made him a Western legend. His grizzly stories are still told around cammpfires in the deep canyons and high mountain meadows of the Gila Wilderness country where Nat spent nearly six decades of his life.

"Gila Descending is a joy to read. M.H. Salmon and his fiesty animal co-pilots have enough chutzpah to keep us laughing; enough literary audacity to delight and educate; and enough love of land, water and wilderness to stir the most hardened conscience." - John Nichols

". . .a delightful book. No reader could ask for a finer river to read about than the Gila, or a better companion to explore it with than M.H. Salmon. May the Government (ugh!) and God (we hope) long preserve them both." - Edward Abbey

From his early beginnings as a cowboy and self-taught mining engineer in the 1870s, Thomas Lyons - with partner Angus Campbell - would build an unparalleled cattle empire in southwest New Mexico. According to a livestock trade journal of the time, at its peak the LC Ranches controlled 1.5 million acres of range, grazed some 60,000 cattle, "and employed 100 wagons, 750 riding horses, 400 work horses, and 75 cowboys in season." But powerful men create powerful enemies. The murder of Tom Lyons in El Paso in 1917 remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the olde Southwest. A man of myth until now, this thoroughly documented account is Tom Lyons and the LCs in history.

Hattie S. Cosgrove was a hardware store heiress who came to the West in 1907. In the southwestern corner of New Mexico she fell in love with the vast and wild Gila River country and soon discovered the ruins and traces of the long-vanished Mimbres Indians. She began to dig in the abandoned villages for the beautiful painted bowls that depicted intricate geometric designs and naturalistic images of people, animals, fish, and insects. But Hattie soon realized that digging only for treasures would destroy the fast-disappearing remains of the Mimbres culture. She developed precise and scientific methods for recording her excavations, and her careful work let to a career as an archaeologist for Harvard University. Hattie's work in the Southwest and her haunting and beautiful drawings of Mimbres black-on-white bowls are a remarkable legacy of a vanished culture and a remarkable woman, archaeologist, and artist. Carolyn O'Bagy Davis, a fourth generation descendant of Utah pioneers, is a teacher, lecturer, quilter and the author of Pioneer Quiltmaker: The Story of Dorinda Moody Slade, 1808-1895 and Quilted All Day: The Prairie Journals of Ida Chambers Melugin. Softbound with 198 pages and numerous photos and illustrations.