Do You Remember Luna

Key Takeaways

Read in full 2026-09-01 from a scan of Kyle’s own copy. The detailed, page-anchored reading — including everything bearing on the Laney and Thompson families and the land — is the private research page for this book. That page is private; this one is the public catalogue entry.

What it is. The town of Luna, New Mexico writing itself down at one hundred. Twenty-eight chapters over 302 pages, each opening on a scripture epigraph, assembled from settlers’ diaries (Lorenzo Watson, Marcellus Simms, Bishop Gilbert D. Greer, Will Laney, Minnie Reynolds), taped interviews with the oldest residents, and family histories — compiled by a standing Book Committee over two years and paid for out of a “book fund” a single family started in December 1981.

Why it holds up. It is a community history that knows its own limits and says so. The compiler of its best chapter signs off: “I know there will be some discrepancies in this account. The people who gave me the information didn’t always agree and I tried to do the best I could with it.” It also names its own flattening effect — asked about any of its bishops, the compilers wrote, they almost invariably got back “Well… Everybody loved him. He was a very good man.”

The through-line. A hundred years of people trying to make a living in a high, cold, dry valley, and of the terms on which that got harder. The book is unusually honest about the losses: a scarlet-fever winter that put seven small graves on the hill; an arson in 1886 that split the town in half for three years and nobody was ever caught; a drought from 1900 to 1904 that the town had prayed for, because it drove the outlaws out — and drove out many of the honest people too, so that old-timers said afterwards that had they known the method, they didn’t know if they’d have had the courage to ask. Then the slow institutional squeeze: 34 grazing permittees in 1937 and 14 by 1983; a 1960 rule that all timber go to sealed bids, which ended the small salvage operator; the school closed for good in 1971. A Ranger’s letter of commendation praised a local man as a good ranger “in spite of the fact that he had two strikes against him. First, he owned cattle and second, he was a Mormon.”

What is best in it. Three things. First, the eyewitness economics — actual tithing receipts from 1893, freight rates, sawmill wage ladders, what a midwife charged and what happened when a family couldn’t pay. Second, two mapped gazetteers — a township-and-section map of all 26 area sawmills from 1883 to 1979, and a register of every local cattle brand with its full chain of transfer. Third, one genuinely fine piece of writing: Ralph Reynolds on his generation, “the transitional generation, because we started in the frontier, cowboy-farmer tradition, grew out, and survived during the hard times, and ended our Luna days as millhands and lumberjacks” — followed by nine pages on learning to fell timber with a six-foot crosscut, which he calls the most diabolical instrument ever invented with which to torture a body.

Bibliographic record, recovered 2026-08-29 from the companion volume published the same year by the same committee (Do You Remember… Luna Centennial Scrapbook — 1983):

• Compiled and written by a standing “Book Committee”: Phillip and Charles Rae Swapp, Buford and Evelyn Hulsey, and Alvin and Ruby Laney. Two years in the making.
• Published by the Luna Ward, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
• Printed by Adobe Press, Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico — Doug Rhodes, printer.
• First sold and signed 18 March 1983, at the Relief Society Birthday party in Luna. Stake President Thomas Biggs received the first copy.
• Printing cost $20,700, paid off entirely from sales by 19 July 1983.
• A centennial quilt made by Ruby Laney has one block per chapter of the book.
• 344 scanned pages; printed page = scan page − 15.

⚠️ Two 1983 volumes share this title. This page is the history of Luna. The Luna Centennial Scrapbook, compiled by Alvin and Ruby Laney, records the centennial year’s own events and is a separate, shorter book.

Connections

No cross-book interconnections identified yet.

Highlights

This is a scanned community history, not a Kindle read, so there is no highlight set. The full searchable text and the page-anchored reading live in the wiki: wiki/attachments/do-you-remember-luna/luna-book-ocr.txt.