Category: American West

Etown’s Moreno Hotel Opens With Elegant Dinner

On Wednesday, July 1, 1868, the newly constructed Moreno Hotel opened in Elizabethtown, New Mexico with a dinner for 83 guests, and Etown congratulated itself on its prosperity. The hotel was a living symbol of how far the town had come since its gold-mine camp beginnings early the previous year. This inaugural dinner was served on “the finest china in the territory” and accompanied by bottles of Mumm’s Dry Imperial Champagne. The hotel was nicely located on 3rd Street between Broadway and Washington and would have had a fine view of Baldy Mountain on the eastern side of the valley as well as the various gold mining claims on the Moreno Creek in the valley directly below the town.

July 1 illustration.Mumm champagne label

It’s not clear who owned the Moreno when it opened, but two months later, it passed into the hands of Augusta Forbes, a German-born woman who, when she divorced her runaway husband the following spring, was granted the right to revert to her maiden name of Augusta Meinert as well ownership of the hotel and “all the personal property, household, and kitchen furniture now on the premises.”

Meinert operated the hotel for about four and a half years. She remarried in late December 1872 and formally handed off the Moreno to her new husband, Chancy Storey a month later. She seems to have retired from active involvement in running the business at that point, because she’s listed as a housewife in the June 1880 census while Chancy is listed as a hotel keeper, presumably of the enterprise that had such an elegant beginning twelve years before.

Sources: Colfax County Real Estate records, 1868-1888; U.S. Census Data, Colfax County, New Mexico Territory, 1870 and 1880.

OLD BILL – 1 of 6

Old Bill and the two mules had been stumbling south, half-blinded by snow, for three days. When he came over the top of the rise and looked into the valley below, he passed his hand over his face. He must be hallucinating.

He looked again. Sure enough, that was a valley below. The snow was thinner there. A herd of elk had worked large patches clear. The wolves patrolling in the snow beyond the herd were breaking through, snow almost to their hocks.

He studied the layout. Elk, snow melt for water. Bound to be Injuns. He passed his hand over his face again, warming his eyes, and looked again. Sure enough, smoke rose near the hills at the valley’s southern end.

He was coming in peace with little more than the mules and his clothes. They’d feed him, sure. Had probably already seen him. “C’mon, you mules,” he said.

from Moreno Valley Sketches

 

 

Kit Carson’s Home is Attacked!

On June 26, 1850, while Kit Carson was traveling home from Missouri with trade goods, a band of Native Americans attacked the Carson’s hamlet of Rayado, in the shadow of the Cimarron mountains. Despite the presence of a company of Army dragoons at Rayado, the Indians—no one was sure if they were Ute or Jicarilla Apache—drove off six horses, four mules, and 175 head of cattle valued at over $5000. Two Rayado men were killed: an unarmed Army bugler and a civilian (possibly trapper William New).

The dragoons had been stationed at Rayado in response to the Indian raids against the communities on the eastern mountain slopes and on the Santa Fe Trail on the eastern plains since the middle of 1849. Some of the violence was undoubtedly triggered by events in August 1849, when Jicarilla Apache Chief Chacón took his band to Las Vegas to make peace, but was attacked by an armed party led by Lt. Ambrose E. Burnside, the future Civil War General. Burnside’s men killed fourteen Jicarilla and  captured the daughter of Chief White Wolf, who was then incarcerated in a Las Vegas jail. She was shot and killed during an escape attempt later that year.

June 26 illustration
Source: Fort Union and the Frontier Army of the Southwest by Leo E. Oliva

Following the June attack, the army sent another company of dragoons from Las Vegas and called for citizen volunteers to assist with a campaign against the Indians. The resulting expedition doesn’t seem to have helped much, although people died. Only after Fort Union was constructed in the Spring of 1851 did things settle down a bit.

Rayado had been established in 1848 by Lucien B. Maxwell and Christopher “Kit” Carson on land owned by Maxwell’s father-in-law. The idea seems to have been to raise stock. When the military unit was stationed there, Maxwell took the opportunity to rent out living space to them as well selling them fodder for their animals.

 

Sources: Howard Bryan, Wildest of the Wild West, Clear Light Publishers, 1988. Leo E. Oliva, Fort Union and the Frontier Army of the Southwest, Southwest Cultural Resources Center, National Park Service, 1993; Marc Simmons, Kit Carson and His Three Wives, UNM Press, 2003.

Colfax County Serial Killer’s Wife Bears Him a Son

On June 24, 1869 a baby boy was born to Charles and Gregoria Kennedy, presumably at their cabin at the foot of Palo Flechado Pass on the road between Taos and Elizabethtown. Baptized in September that year at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Taos, he was the only living child of Charles (age 31) and Gregoria (age 17) when the U.S. census taker arrived at the cabin the following summer. Charles Kennedy would become known in New Mexico Territory as the serial killer whose wife turned him in after he killed their child. Following a hung jury in Elizabethtown in Fall 1870, a mob led by Colfax County rancher and gunslinger Clay Allison would spring Kennedy from jail and see that justice was done anyway—at the end of a rope.

June 24 illustration.Christening record
Samuel Kennedy (Canady) Christening Record

Legend has it that Allison then took a butcher knife to Kennedy’s neck, severing his neck and presenting it to hotelkeeper Henri Lambert for display outside his establishment as a warning for all evildoers in Colfax County. It is also said that before he died Kennedy confessed to killing twenty-one men. Without the birth and subsequent death of that little boy, many more men might have died at his father’s hands.

If you’re interested in a fictional account of these events, please consider ordering my novel The Pain and the Sorrow, which will be released by Sunstone Press in early August.

 

Sources: New Mexico, Births and Christenings, 1726-1918; Howard Bryan, Wildest of the Wild West, Clear Light Publishers, 1988; Southwest Sentinel, Silver City, NM, November 24, 1885.

Let The Evictions Begin!!!

In the summer of 1870, the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company closed their sale with Lucien B. and Luz Maxwell for the Beaubien-Miranda Land Grant and the Company began moving to take full possession of the land. This move began with sending notices to anyone who hadn’t arranged with Maxwell for formal title to their land, including miners who had paid Maxwell for the privilege of working their mines or farmers who had been providing produce in lieu of cash money. These “squatters” were informed that they must either make arrangements with the Company or leave. When they didn’t the Company initiated ejectment proceedings. Conveniently, Stephen B. Elkins, a member of the Company Board and the company’s attorney, also happened to be New Mexico Territory’s U.S. Attorney General at the time. None of these cases appeared before the court in the Fall 1870 session, so it appears that there was some time provided to the persons in question who had the resources to make the necessary “arrangements.”

The process was not a smooth or a simple one and the Company’s actions reverberated as far as the East Coast. By the summer of 1875, a series of articles had appeared in a New York newspaper criticizing Santa Fe ring members Elkins, Catron, Palen and others. One of the authors was the Reverend Franklin Tolby, who used his pulpit as a platform for preaching against the Land Grant Company’s eviction process and advocating that the government buy at least of a portion of the grant  as a reservation for the local bands of Utes and Arapahos—a solution to the “Indian problem” that Kit Carson and Indian Agent William Frederick Milton Arny  had proposed prior to the sale of the grant. After all, they’d been here first. This, of course, didn’t happen and local settlers would continue to be evicted and tensions would continue to rise throughout the first half of the 1870’s, beginning with a riot in Etown in 1870 and reaching a crescendo in 1875 with Reverend Tolby’s death and the lynching of a (possibly) innocent man. Stay with me as I look at Reverend Tolby’s activities and death, and the resulting lynching, in the months to come….

Sources: David L. Caffey, Chasing the Santa Fe Ring, University of New Mexico Press, 2014; Stephen Zimmer, For Good or Bad, People of the Cimarron Country, Sunstone Press, 1999; Victor Westphall, Thomas B. Catron and His Era, University of Arizona Press, 1973.

SLICK

The rain was behind him and gaining fast.

Timothy looked back, down the valley, and kicked at the mule, but it was hot and the mule had been going for a long time. Its pace quickened for a few yards, then dropped back into an easy trot.

The boy groaned and looked back again. His mother had told him to take his slicker, but he’d been in a hurry. “C’mon Boss,” he begged, but the mule just flicked its ears and jogged onward.

Somehow, they made it to the barn before the clouds reached them. Timothy turned the mule into the stall and made a dash for the house. The first raindrops bit into the dust as he reached the steps.

His mother opened the door. “Get wet?” she asked meaningfully.

He grinned at her. “Dry as a bone!” he said.

from Moreno Valley Sketches II

 

THE SERIAL KILLER NOVEL

Pain and Sorrow cover.framed

My novel about New Mexico Territory’s serial killer Charles Kennedy and the teenage wife who turned him in is now available for pre-order!

The Pain and the Sorrow is set in the 1860’s in Taos, New Mexico Territory and the mountains east of Taos. It tells the story of a teenage Hispanic girl who marries an American man who turns out to . . . . Click here or on the cover image to find out more!

Published by Sunstone Press, The Pain and the Sorrow will be available on or before August 1.

Eagle Nest Lake Application Goes to NM Territorial Engineer

150 years ago today, on June 12, 1907, Colfax County rancher and businessman Charles Springer submitted an application to the New Mexico Territorial Engineer to build a dam at the head of the Cimarron River, thereby creating what would become known as Eagle Nest Lake.

June 12.illustration.b

The application called for impounding 113,700 acre feet of what it called “surplus flood waters”  from the Cimarron and its tributaries: Cieneguilla, Moreno, and other creeks in the Cimarron watershed.  The water would be “used for power plants as it goes down Cimarron canyon and for irrigation, for supplying cities and towns and water users generally, . . . for irrigating, mining power and other purposes.”

June 12.illustration

Charles Springer, who had arrived in the Territory in 1878, was brother to Frank Springer, one-time attorney for the Maxwell Land Grant Company. The Springer application to dam the headwaters of the Cimarron was approved in August 1907. Due to a variety of issues, including lack of capital and the need to buy the lands to be flooded from the people who owned them, construction of the impound dam did not get underway until Spring 1917.

 

Source: Anderson, History of New Mexico Its Resources and People, Pacific States Publishing, 1907; June and August 1907 application for NM State Engineer permit #71

 

HOLLOW

Lucien Maxwell, single largest landowner in New Mexico Territory, stepped from the Middaugh Mercantile porch into early June sunlight and gazed unseeing across the green valley. On the flanks of Baldy Mountain, construction workers scurried like ants around a long wooden aquaduct-like structure. When finished, the flume it held would carry water from the Red River’s source to Baldy Mountain’s base. Then high pressure hoses would spray the sides of the gulches that drained the mountain, flushing out gravel and the gold the miners hoped it contained.

They were calling the flume the Big Ditch. It was a first for New Mexico Territory. Maxwell was a major investor, likely to make a substantial return both from water sales and from men wanting to buy mining rights. Yet all he could see was the letter in his hand.

Kit Carson was dead. Kit, the companion of so many of Lucien’s wilderness adventures, always so full of energy, so confident in his quiet-spoken way, with his sixth sense for trouble and how to meet it. Yes, Kit had been ill, but it was still incomprehensible that he could be gone. Lucien Maxwell gazed at the men scrambling across the hillside opposite and could feel no joy in their activity and its outcomes. It all seemed rather hollow, somehow.

 

Copyright © 2016 Loretta Miles Tollefson

Baldy Mountain Mining Problems Solved!!!!

May 28 illustration.Big Ditch route map
Source: Red River Museum pamphlet

The miners in the Elizabethtown, New Mexico area were mighty frustrated. There just wasn’t enough water to satisfy their need to wash the gold out of the flanks of Baldy Mountain. They were willing to pay, but there was no one selling. But on May 28, 1868, their problem appeared to be on the way to being solved, because construction began on the Big Ditch.

Designed by a East Coast-educated former Army Engineer Capt. N.S. Davis, the Big Ditch project would employ over 400 men to construct a 41-mile system of reservoirs, dams, and wooden trestles that would funnel Red River’s headwaters to the placer mines on Baldy Mountain’s western flanks. About 7.6 million gallons per day (600 miner’s inches) were anticipated, water enough to supply all the miners in the district.

Or so they thought. The problem was that, as the water sat in the three reservoirs, then flowed through the landscape and the primarily wooden flumes on its 41 mile route to the mines, leakage in the flume and evaporation into the dry New Mexico air sucked much of the anticipated liquid right out of the system. When the water bean to flow the following July, only about 1/6 of the expected amount actually reached its destination. Just over one million gallons a day, or about 100 miners inches, remained for the miners to use.

May 28 illustration.Big Ditch flume

Not only was there not enough water, selling what there was wouldn’t return the $280,000 cost of construction to the original investors. The price of 50 cents per miner’s inch simply didn’t cover the amount invested. The Big Ditch changed hands several times until it was eventually sold to Irish-born Matthew Lynch, who jerry-rigged the system sufficiently to provide for his own hydraulic mining operations and leave a small surplus to sell. So the Big Ditch did turn out to be useful, just not to the level originally projected.

Sources: Red River City, A history of northern New Mexico, J. Rush Pierce, JRP Publications, Red River, NM, 2008; The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Sunstone Press, 2007.