Cloverdale, On The Edge Of Forever

 The dirt road that leads to Cloverdale is, for the most part, well-maintained. However, there are some  stretches of washboarded road, which makes for slow going. Washboarded roads can be rough on a vehicle's suspension and axles, so anyone that ever wants to visit Cloverdale should be aware of this. I seriously doubt the road has been improved since I last went there in February of 2009. I had the advantage of going there in the winter. The dirt road was harder than usual after a succession of winter freezes, so that made driving somewhat easier than it was the one other time I visited this remote ghost town, which was in late summer several years earlier.
  As one drives south on Cloverdale Road, he or she will discover a gradual greening of the land. The landscape changes from harsh, unforgiving desert to a luxurious grassland. Such is the location of Cloverdale. A grassland may not sound very impressive, but in the New Mexico Bootheel, it is a soothing respite to the harshness of the nearby desert. This is also a very ecologically diverse grassland. The 'entrance' to the grassland is first marked by a grove of cottonwood trees. The grass cover is very short and thin at first, but becomes taller, thicker and more luxurious farther south, reminiscent of the African savannas.
  In 1880, a ranch was started in the area that would later become Cloverdale by Michael Gray and his two sons. One of his sons described the area as "a big, green meadow of about a thousand acres which was at the time covered with red top clover and watered by numerous springs."
Michael Gray had paid a cattle rustler $300 for his squatter's claim to the ranch. A year later, one of Gray's sons was killed in the Guadalupe Canyon Massacre. As a result, Gray moved his family to Arizona, but in the meantime he continued to occupy the ranch on his own to "prove up" his claim. On November 20, 1883, shortly after receiving legal title to the ranch, he sold the ranch to George Hearst and his partners for $12,000. George Hearst was the father of William Randolph Hearst who made a fortune in the newspaper business. William Randolph Hearst is the grandfather of Patty Hearst, who became famous in the 1970s with the staged kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. 
  After George Hearst purchased the ranch, him and his business partners established the  Victorio Land and Cattle company, which is still in operation today. The Victorio Land and Cattle Company along with the Pacific Western Land Company and the Gray Ranch occupy a huge portion of the New Mexico Bootheel today. The Gray Ranch later split off from Victorio and became an empire of its own.