The Clovis, New Mexico story

This is the story of a Cinderella city. Its ingredients are not rhetorical narrative or moral criticism. It aligns the past as an organic process very much like the trains moving in and out of the long, narrow depot, rather than assembles facts to form a mosaic of incidents portraying its yesterdays in gathering its tomorrows. Here the concern is not the activity of politicians, the doings of county officials, schedules of railroad men, but the social and economic pressures of a moving world that gave it birth, blood, flesh and growth. Like fresh air blowing on skin. Clovis is a by-product of the pioneering spirit that held New Mexico in its grip at the turn of the century when railroads, homestead laws, acts of Federal and Territorial governments brought about changes in the social structured, and gave a shot in the arm to the Eastern Slope changing it materially and forever. The superstructure here is economic rather than ideological.^

The spiritual was a factor from the beginning because the people making the city were religious. Railroaders, farmers, store keepers, lawyers, doctors, teachers may have been arbitrarily influenced by the challenge of the land and the sky that is New Mexico, but their spiritual sense of values was the yardstick by which they measured all other considerations. Clovis seems to have no past. It seems to be in constant stages of experimentation. It defies tradition in its growth, development and prosperity. It never bowed to patriarchalism in merely re-establishing things as they were "where I came from"; the common cause buried that civilization and culture to the philosophy of "let's all put our shoulders to the wheel." Outwardly it appears as any other city. but the people are different, warm, kind, good.^

There are a few exceptions but these embellish rather than destroy the image, like highlights and shadows in a painting., Police, city officials, teachers, lawyers, bankers, railroad people, evoke admiration for kindness and efficiency. If Clovis has any enemies they were not of her making. The finger of progress may point to a change in all of this. If Clovis does change then it will have a past -- Book jacket.