Mr. Mayberry was murdered by Martin Nelson, along with six other victims, in Bonito City, NM. He was first burried in Bonito, but when the city was overtaken by the new Bonito Lake, his body was moved to Angus Cemetery, along with the other victims.

Killings Began Town's Slide,
Lake Later Finished It Off

By David Bowser

BONITO LAKE, N.M.— Beneath the placid waters of this picturesque lake north of Ruidoso bubbles a macabre tale of greed and murder.

"Before Bonito Lake was built, there was a little community back in the late 1800s where the lake water is impounded," says Robert Runnels, a hunting guide and outfitter whose family has lived along Bonito Creek for the better part of the last century. "They called it Bonito City."

"Nobody seems to know when Bonito City was first established," says Peg Pfingsten, who now runs cattle and horses around Lincoln and San Patricio. "It just kind of happened."

"Bonito City grew out of the mining era, silver and gold mining," adds Keith Kessler, Bonita Lake manager for the City of Alamogordo. "It had a post office and a church."

It was here in what was then a peaceful community nestled in the mountains that violence erupted one night, leaving death and destruction behind.

On May 5, 1885, a man named Martin Nelson killed the local doctor, Dr. R.F. Flynn; the grocer, Herman Beck; the owner of the saloon; and most of a family named Mayberry.

In his book, Mysteries and Miracles of New Mexico, author Jack Kutz repeats the local folklore that Nelson was possessed by the devil. In the best Western tradition, Nelson was a stranger who came riding into town and spoke nary a word, according to Kutz. After taking a room at the hotel run by the Mayberry family and having dinner there, he retired to his room, only to arise in the middle of the night and begin a shooting rampage that would terrify the peaceful community of Bonito City.

Some local folks tell a different, though no less violent, story.

"He was supposedly living with some Mayberrys, and they had a falling out and he killed all of them," says Benny Runnels, Robert Runnel's brother.

Robert Runnels recalls that Martin Nelson was a miner. Pfingsten agrees. Most of the people in and around Bonito City were involved in mining at the time, Pfingsten says. Nelson was drawn to the area in search of the gold and silver which were being taken out of the surrounding mountains, but he was apparently interested in making his fortune without the hard labor of digging in the ground.

"Nelson was kind of a drifter who came into that country," Pfingsten says. "He was a gunslinging son-of-a-gun, apparently."

Pfingsten explains that many of the people around the community lived up in the forests on the mountains, trying to develop mining claims, relying on gardens and game for a subsistence living.

"My dad was just a kid up there," Pfingsten says. "They'd plow up a little strip of land and put a fence around it in that high country and plant potatoes. That's what they lived on mostly up in that mining country from 1880 on to 1890. They lived on cabbage and turnips and potatoes, and deer meat when they could find it. It was pretty slim pickings in the wintertime."

Nelson spent some time at the Pfingsten cabin, mostly talking about mining rather than prospecting.

"They were up there at this little old cabin they had," Pfingsten says. "Dad was messing with the stove, fixing something to eat. Bang! A damn pistol went off and he jumped."

Pfingsten's father turned to Nelson and asked him what he was shooting at. Nelson retorted that there had been a fly on the calendar.

Pfingsten says Nelson would reportedly sit on a porch in Bonito City and scare sparrows out from under the eaves of the buildings there. When they would fly across the street, he would shoot the sparrows on the wing with a six-shooter.

"He was kind of a gun-toter, I guess," Pfingsten says.

The story of the grisly killings was told to Pfingsten by Mrs. Tom Grafton. She lived up the canyon from Bonito City at the time, and was still there when the cemetery was moved in 1933.

"Nelson and the Mayberry girl were going to run off, and he was short on money," Pfingsten says. "There was a doctor there at the hotel. Nelson decided to hold this doctor up because he had a little money. The doctor made a grab for the gun, and Nelson killed him. It scared him so he ran down to Mayberry, and he shot him."

Some men came out on a porch on the other side of the street to see what the noise was, and Nelson shot them, too. Then he went upstairs and killed Mrs. Mayberry and Bobby, her son, a six or seven year-old boy. The girl ran off and hid.

After the flurry of gunfire, Nelson took off up Littleton Canyon. The neighbors got up a posse and went after him.

"They trailed him and caught up with him up there and shot him," Pfingsten says.

The victims of the night's violence were buried in the town's cemetery — except for Nelson, who was buried off by himself across the valley.

"He was buried right over here along this bank," says Kessler, pointing down from the road that goes around the lake. "They buried him face down and to the west so he'd never rest."

In his book, Kutz says the hotel was abandoned after the killings and that people began moving away from Bonito City.

If so, it was a gradual depopulation, at least until the early 1930s. In the interim, the railroad began replacing mining as a focus.

The Southern Pacific had come in looking for water, and by the turn of the century had bought up most of the water rights and property along Bonito Creek. A pipeline took water out of the creek and transported it to a watering station for the railroad.

"They were having problems with the water quality down in El Paso," says Kessler. "The hard water down there would ruin their steam engines."

In 1907, the SP laid a wooden pipeline 132 miles to Pastura, between Vaughn and Santa Rosa.

By the late 1920s, the railroad needed still more water and petitioned the government to dam up the creek.

The dam was completed in 1931.

The best place to build the lake just happened to be in the wide-mouthed area of the canyon where the town was, Kessler says. There wasn't much in the way of objections, because by then, everybody who lived in the town worked for the railroad.

"They abandoned the town to build the lake," Kessler says. "A lot of people probably didn't have a whole lot of gripes about that. They were given other land down the canyon to live."

They did dismantle some of the buildings, Kessler says.

One of the less enjoyable jobs was moving the town's cemetery.

"They had to dig up the graves and move them down to Angus, down the hill there," Kessler says.

"In 1933, the water was coming up in the lake," Pfingsten agrees. "They'd cut off all the timber where the water would be, and part of that was this graveyard. The railroad had an obligation to move the graveyard, so they sent my uncle and one cousin and three or four Okies that were working for us to move the graveyard."

The hired hands wouldn't dig up the bodies, Pfingsten says. "They'd go dig the new graves, but they wouldn't dig up the bodies, so this cousin and me and my uncle dug the bodies up. My uncle was a carpenter, and he'd made caskets for all of them."

Pfingsten says they dug down until they started hitting the caskets.

"They were made out of native pine boards," he says. "The doctor had some kinfolks down in Texas. They sent somebody after his casket. We took the rest of them."

The bodies were transferred to the new caskets and carried down the canyon to the Angus Cemetery, where they were reburied in a common grave.

All but Nelson. Pfingsten helped move him, too, but not to the site where his victims were reburied.

"He was buried with his boots on," Pfingsten recalls. "He had a green felt hat on, and it had five or six bullet holes in it."

Nelson's grave is downhill east of the Angus cemetery.

"It's 50 feet above the road, and it's grown up around it where you can't hardly find it, but it's got a tombstone," Pfingsten says.

The tombstones for all the relocated graves were made on-site, of concrete. "We had to pour those tombstones up there. They had the forms made in El Paso with the backward letters on all of them with all the names."

Mrs. Grafton was there at the first funeral for Nelson's victims, and she was there when they were dug up to be moved.

Pfingsten was born in 1913. He remembers Bonito City as a pleasant place with an orchard and several big cottonwood trees. There was a store and seven or eight houses.

"The town was up the canyon a way from where the dam is in what is now the wide part of the lake," Pfingsten says. "Up until five or six years ago, there were some big old cottonwood trees on the water up there, but they've died since then."

Some people tell of seeing the Bonito City church steeple rising out of the water when the lake level is down, but neither Pfingsten's recollections nor Runnels' experience support such stories.

"I remember the town, but I don't ever remember a church there," Pfingsten says. "They had a church at Angus. A lot of the people up there, if there was a preacher in the country, they'd have church services in their homes."

Church or not, "I'm sure they tore down all those old structures when the lake was built," Robert Runnels adds. "They didn't want all that debris in the lake.

"There are people who come up here today looking for the steeple. I've dropped this lake 14 feet before, and I've never seen the steeple of a church in there."

The reappearing steeple isn't the only story about Bonito City that has its mysterious elements. The Kutz book says blood was reported flowing in the creek where Nelson had died, and strange sounds could be heard in the deserted hotel. Investigators, the book adds, reported finding fresh blood on the spot where Dr. Flynn had been shot.

There seems to be little in the way of documentation for those parts of Kutz' tale, but in the dead of winter, when snow blankets the canyon and the lake is cold and deserted, strange sounds emanate through the canyons.

Kessler explains that it's not unusual for the lake to freeze over in the winter, and when it does the cracking of ice can be eerie. More than once, according to Randy Horst, part of Kessler's crew, men working along the shoreline in the silence of the winter have mentioned the groaning coming from the lake.

"There are some weird noises out here," Horst says.

In the early 1950s steam engines became obsolete and the Southern Pacific Railroad sold Bonito Lake to the City of Alamogordo.