This is a photo gallery of images taken from New Mexico.  Many of these photographs represent landscapes and idealized visions of what the surrounding countryside of Sangre County, and the mythical town of Haxan, look like. 

I've included relevant text and descriptions for each picture.  I hope they will give context when the photographs are compared to the published stories themselves.

I hope to include more pictures in the future which can be used by readers and fans alike of Haxan as added content, and source material, to this world.

Enjoy!

  How I Tried to find Haxan

                  by Samuel David Peake

The following was sent to me, via mail, by a man claiming to be the great-grandson of Davie Peake, the person known as "Piebald" in the Haxan stories.

This is a transcript of an audio recording (which I have heard) describing how Davie Peake and his son, Samuel David Peake, tried to find Haxan.  With the great-grandson's permission (and a promise to protect his identity) I present the letter as I received it.

Transcribed from the audio recording:

My name is Samuel David Peake. My father, David Peake, was nine or ten years old when he lived in Haxan, New Mexico. That was in 1874 or thereabouts. We don't have a better idea of his age since his birth certificate was lost when Haxan disappeared. 

My father remembered Marshal Marwood and the residents of Haxan. He often talked about them to me and my brothers. We loved hearing the stories of what life was like in the days of the Old West.

We always believed our father was telling us the truth.

My father told me he left Haxan when he was much older.  He got married and raised our family, but never returned to his real home until the end of his life in 1952. 

I remember he told me one June morning, "Sam, I want to find my home."

We were living in Cincinnati at the time. Though he was elderly, my father's memory was always sharp and clear.

"This is our home, Pa," I said.

"No." He shook his head.  "I want to find Haxan."

We had had discussions about this before. Towns flourished and died in that sere country. That a town might have existed and  become lost was no secret. Today the West is littered with the remnants of ghost towns.

But there was no proof Haxan had ever   existed. Yes, a private collector had a purported copy of Magra Snowberry's birth certificate, and there were government records of a Marshal Marwood who served in the New Mexico Territory during the time in question. I had seen these myself but they weren't proof.

But, given a town of three thousand people once existed and no one remembered, given that the railroad never came to Las Cruces until the late 1880s, it was vexing when my father insisted this town had existed.

At this time, near the end of his life, my father was frail with long white hair, deep blue eyes and narrow, freckled hands. Yet, he seemed so desperate, so eager to find this place once and for all before he died, I decided I would try and help him.

After contacting various departments in the government to receive permission to enter those protected lands, which took a lot of time, we flew to Las Cruces, rented a car, and drove across the San Augustine Pass down into where my father remembered Haxan to be.

Of course, Haxan existed in Sangre County, again of which there was no record in New Mexico history. But my father believed he remembered the valley, or something like the valley, where the town had existed.

Mountains photographed by Samuel David Peake in September, 1952

We drove up into the valley in a jeep and walked all over that place, spending an entire day.  There was nothing but scrub brush and the San Andreas Mountains lying hard against the blue sky.

That night, in a motel in Alamogordo, my father broke down.  "It's gone," he said.  "My home is gone."

I did what I could to comfort him. The following day we caught a flight back to Cincinnati. My father died two weeks later.

Finally, in 1982, the thirty year anniversary of my father's death, I vowed to return one more time and try to find that town. I received permission from Washington to again enter that federally protected area. I spent three  days there, and on the last day I found something.

There was some little rain the night before and it had washed away part of the sand where I could spot sharp edged stone. With my heart beating I dug up a stone face and uncovered about two feet square of a brick floor in the desert that, according to my father, was where Haxan had existed.

I'm not saying this proves anything. It's just what I found when I went looking. I will always remember my father.

I miss him, and I believe he lived in Haxan.

Stone face, found and photographed by Samuel David Peake near the San Andreas Mountains, September 10, 1982

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                                       --Kenneth Mark Hoover

As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a young cowboy, all wrapped in white linen
Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay.

"I see by your outfit, that you are a cowboy."
These words he did say as I slowly walked by.
"Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story,
For I'm shot in the chest, and today I must die."

"Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
And play the dead march as you carry me along;
Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o'er me,
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong."

         --Traditional cowboy ballad, original author unknown