SILVER CITY -- The Silver City Museum will host a book signing with local author Nancy Coggeshall, author of "Gila Country Legend: The Life and Times of Quentin Hulse," at 2 p.m. today at the Museum Annex, 302 W. Broadway, two doors down from the museum.

In the book, recently released by University of New Mexico Press, Coggeshall tells the story of the larger-than-life rural Western rancher whose reputation spread well beyond the rugged Gila Wilderness he called home. Drawing on oral history, archival sources and her personal association with Hulse and the Gila, Coggeshall brings this unique New Mexican to life.

Coggeshall describes Hulse and the book on her Web site, www.nancycoggeshall.com:

"A product of New Mexico's Southwest, Quentin Hulse (1926-2002) lived and worked from the bottom of Canyon Creek in the Gila River country on the northern border of the Gila Wilderness. The force of his character and personality impressed people so deeply that stories about this legendary rancher, packer, guide and hound man were told even in Tasmania and Baghdad. His photograph appeared on a tourist postcard and souvenir novelty license plate in the 1950s. The Men's Channel broadcast footage of a 1962 lion hunt with him on New Year's Day 2005; boys were named for him and a song was written about him and recorded in 2003.

"Descended from genuine frontier stock, Quentin was raised during raw, woolly times, following his father's vocational pursuits between ranches, mines, and towns until the family acquired the ranch at Canyon Creek. He witnessed a point-blank shooting when he was 10. As a seaman first class and a member of a beach battalion team on the USS Burleigh, an attack transport, during World War II, he landed on the beach at Okinawa 'before a Marine laid a track.' And he was shot in a bar near Silver City when he returned from the war. His reputation as a hard-drinking hound man notwithstanding, Hulse was most at home in the Gila Wilderness, where he ranched and guided for more than 50 years. As a prankster, he ranks with the like of Randall Patrick McMurphy, the good soldier Schweik, Yossarian and Cool Hand Luke."

Nancy Coggeshall has been freelancing for more than 30 years, writing from Rhode Island, New Mexico and Quebec. Her book reviews, feature articles, and profile pieces have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers from Equus Magazine and Western Horseman to the Bloomsbury Review and the Albuquerque Journal.

Two of her articles were anthologized in the Harrowsmith Reader, and she won the Writer's Digest first prize for interviewing in 1978. She has lived in New Mexico for more than 20 years and presently resides in Catron County.

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