When we first moved to New Mexico, we went out sight seeing every chance we got, learning the country, and hunting old homestead cabins and gravesites to photograph.. Since my husband's father had hauled salt to ranchers from the Salt Lake years ago, we decided to go there and look around.
We took road 601, just west of Quemado, New Mexico and headed northwest. Then we saw the remains of a little old rock house off to the left of the road. There didn't seem to be a road to it, but we went up a creek. Perhaps the creek had been a wagon road in the past. The little house had two small rooms and it looked like it had a flat roof laid up with poles and covered with dirt and rocks. There had been a fireplace in one end. I did notice that the corners of the building had been laid up nice and straight, even though there was no mortar between the rocks. This seemed to be the old Spanish architecture that we'd seen so much of in the sheep country of New Mexico.
I noticed a large rock that didn't seem to fit the landscape near a withered little tree out away from the east side of the house. When I went over to it, I saw that it had writing deeply scratched into the rock and that the writing was in Spanish. I read: