Hazel P. Johnson

Obituary For Hazel P. Johnson

Hazel Potter Johnson died peacefully in her sleep on February 9, 2024, in her home at Cutter, New Mexico. Hazel was born November 3, 1929, in Tularosa, New Mexico and went on to live to be 94 years old. She saw many things in those years. She was born just as the Great Depression hit and went on to see sixteen presidents elected as well as all the wars and conflicts that have arose in those intervening years.

Her memories were a conglomeration of who’s who in New Mexico history. She was five years old at cowboy poet Eugene Manlove Rhode’s funeral. She remembered the processional from the Engle train depot as it made its way to his final resting place on his San Andres ranch. He was a neighbor and friend of both the Henderson and Potter families. She also knew Jim Gilliland that was tried and acquitted of the murder of Henry Fountain alongside Oliver Lee. Hazel and the other kids in the San Andres called him Uncle Jim.

She was sixteen years old when the atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site just 40 miles north of their ranch. They were awake and they heard a huge boom and the hillside lit up. At first, they heard it was an ammunition dump that had exploded. It was later after the bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II that they found out it was actually an atomic bomb that exploded.

Many people remember her as a kind but tough woman with a pioneering spirit. These attributes were engrained in her. Her father Pleasant Ernest Potter was a descendant of the pioneering Potter, Van Winkle and Snow families that moved to Texas in the 1850s from Missouri and Arkansas. In Texas they survived Comanche attacks and feuds that garnered from the bad blood in the remnants of the Civil War. It was in the 1880s that these families came to New Mexico to settle in the Weed and Mayhill area in southeast New Mexico. Then in the early 1920s the Potters moved to the San Andres Mountains.

Hazel’s mother, Bessie Henderson, was a descendant of the Henderson, Ritchey and Hines family that were some of the first settlers in Missouri. Bessie’s father, Finis Henderson, traveled as a babe in a prairie schooner with his parents, Stokely and Mary Frances (Hines) Henderson, to the Gallatin Valley of Yellowstone in Montana where his Uncle Abel Bartlett Henderson was instrumental in discovering gold and was contracted by the United States government to build the National Park Road in Yellowstone. There they mined and built a home on their ranch. In the summer of 1877, they survived an attack by Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce warriors as they fled to Canada. After several hard winters, they sold their ranch and mining claims and moved to Sterling City, Texas. From there they moved to New Mexico into James Canyon near Cloudcroft. Then in 1902 they moved to the San Andres Mountains. It was there that her parents met and raised Hazel and her older brother Richard. They raised Angora goats as well as cattle and horses until the Army took over the ranch to create White Sands Missile Range.

Hazel met her husband Wayne Johnson, a native of Jamestown, North Dakota, in Hot Springs, New Mexico and was married 6 months later on July 31, 1946. Together they raised six children. While Wayne helped after work and on the weekends, it was Hazel that managed the Johnson/Potter ranch that was located on the West side of the San Andres that was purchased by her father and uncle, Ernest and Uel Potter, in the 1940s.

It is this era of Hazel’s life that people recognized her pioneering spirit that came so naturally to her. She was a hardened rancher that supplemented the family’s income in the winter by running trap lines. They also hosted many hunters at their ranch. She enjoyed hunting so much that one year she put her foot down and told all the men that they each had to take turns cooking and cleaning because she was not their maid.

They sold the ranch in 1985 and settled full time at their home in Cutter. Hazel and Wayne were married almost 56 years when Wayne died in 2002.

Over the years Hazel was active in the Truth or Consequences Fire Ladies Auxiliary, the Chamiza Cowbelles, a superintendent for the Sierra County Fair, presiding judge in many elections, a substitute teacher for the T. or C. Schools and various other pursuits. She was even hired by Sierra County to clean the old cemetery when she was in her 80’s. Hazel remained very active into her 90’s and her contributions to the community have been immense.

Hazel was preceded in death by her parents, Ernest and Bessie (Henderson) Potter; her brother, Richard Potter; her husband, Wayne Johnson; her sons - Wayne Jr., Henry, and Mick Johnson; daughter-n-law, Thelma (Vienna) Johnson; grandsons - Kenneth Muncy, Duane Muncy, and Timothy Johnson; and great-grandson, Christopher Lane Thames.

She is survived by her daughters - Helen Cobos and Cynthia Shetter; her son Gust (Kathy) Johnson; and daughter-in-law, Bonese Johnson. She is also survived by her grandchildren Martin (Nicole) Cobos, Thomas (Brandie) Cobos, Chris Cobos, Tressa Woolf, Michael (Jamie) Johnson, Jeremiah (Crystal) Johnson, Casey Stratford, Michelle Gibson, Julia (Josh) Fulfer, Augusta Johnson, Samantha (David) Mankins, Shelly (Fernando) Batres, Mary (Darren) Land, David (Elaine) Muncy, Danny (Becky) Muncy and Brent Markley; and 35 great grandchildren and 15 great-great grandchildren.

Services will be held 10:00 AM Saturday, February 17, 2024, at the First Baptist Church, 220 N. Broadway with graveside services to follow at Vista Memory Gardens in Truth or Consequences.