CERRILLOS -- Residents of this village that still conjures up the specter of New Mexico's Wild West era are taking to the Web to pass on stories of the past. In the process, though a bit reluctantly, they are joining the wild frontier of the Internet age.

"Cerrillos has a kind of inertia," said unofficial Turquoise Trail historian Bill Baxter, who lives up N.M. 14 in the San Marcos area. "It doesn't change fast. It will be what it has been for a long time. It's not going to change easily and quickly."

Baxter is one of a growing number of area residents of this rough-and-tumble, gold-and-turquoise mining region who have joined the Spit and Whittle Club. They did so by posting their own remembrances, and stories they've heard about the village, on the newly created website, www.cerrillosnewmexico.com.

As part of its thrust into the 21st century, Cerrillos now also has a community Internet center built with a $70,000 grant from the Albuquerque-based Agave Broadband Co. The center can accommodate up to seven Internet users at one time.

The Spit and Whittle Club and its website are the brainchild of Todd Brown, who found his way to Cerrillos "from somewhere back East" about 40 years ago, met the love of his life, Patricia, and never left. Patricia Brown and resident Todd Yocham maintain the website.

Todd Brown also is the owner of the Casa Grande Trading Post, Petting Zoo and Cerrillos Turquoise Mining Museum, but he also is the unofficial leader of Las Candelas de los Cerrillos, the Cerrillos community association.

As such, Brown tends to the disposal of the occasional dead dog, maintains one of the town's two "P and C" cemeteries -- Protestant/pagan and Catholic -- and generally tries to look out for the welfare of the community in its dealings with county government. Cerrillos is under the civil authority of Santa Fe County and has no mayor or town council.

"I just wanted to have an outlet for everybody to tell their stories of Cerrillos," Todd Brown said of the Spit and Whittle Club, which was founded last October in an abandoned rail car, where Brown and a couple of others had agreed to meet.

The online club is the virtual version of three benches around town, where townspeople were known to gather to whittle and spit while they reminisced and told tall tales about the community.

The benches are outside the Casa Grande Trading Post on Waldo Street, in front of the Cerrillos (Mary's) Bar on First Street and the porch of the Simoni sweet shop, also on First Street.

To date, most of the Spit and Whittle postings are by Todd Brown, who relates such stories as the time he saw one of three meandering cows get hit by a train doing about 65 miles per hour -- the train, not the cow.

"That cow was shot 20 feet to the side of the tracks," Brown wrote. "It stood up, looked around and fell dead with all four legs up in the air."

Or the time he watched as a huge owl nearly carried off a newborn goat at the Cerrillos Petting Zoo, another of his business ventures.

"I did not believe what I was seeing," Brown posted. "A male Great Horned Owl had one of the baby goats up 6 feet in the air, held by his talons. He was trying to fly away with it. I yelled out; the owl dropped it back into the pen. The baby goat was OK. I put all the babies back in the barn and was more on guard into the nights."

Another resident who's told a story or two on the website is Tom Morin, an artist who creates wall hangings out of giant strips of colored sandpaper ("I am the only one in the world who does this").

Morin writes about the time about 12 years ago when an all-woman trapeze group, which happened to be living in Cerrillos at the time, decided to entertain the townsfolk with a two-day circus complete with stilt clowns and giant wild-animal puppets.

"On the appointed day," Morin writes, "the locals arrived to a stage set with high wire and other circus apparatus in place. There was straw bale seating for the audience, a popcorn concession and a ticket taker. ... Strange and wonderful things happen in Cerrillos! A Fellini village?"

And then there is Morin's posting about how during the Prohibition years, some residents dug tunnels from the Galisteo River to the cellars of houses in the village for transport of illegal booze.

"They were not dug very high as a lot of work was not the order of the day, especially [for] people looking forward to a drink," Morin wrote. "These entrepreneurs created a system of delivery by going through the Tabor property at the corner of First and River street to the then-Martinez cellar [8 First St.] and eventually to the What Not Shop on First Street. The people of Cerrillos always find a way."