Category: Old West

Troops Save Gold Miner From Etown Mob

On Thursday, April 9, 1868, gold prospector William “Wall” W. Henderson killed a man in Humbug Gulch east of Elizabethtown, New Mexico Territory. Being a law-abiding man, Henderson went to Etown to turn himself into the authorities. The authorities seem to have been fairly weak at the time, because a mob of about eighty men threatened to take matters into their own hands. Fortunately, a messenger was able to reach the Fort Union cavalry troops stationed thirty miles away at Maxwell’s Ranch (today’s Cimarron) in time to request assistance.

April 9 illustration.Humbug Gulch Map
Source: 1889 Sectional map of Colfax & Mora Counties, New Mexico Territory

A sergeant and ten men travelled up Cimarron canyon overnight to reach Elizabethtown early the next morning and disperse the mob. They took Henderson back to Maxwell’s, out of harm’s way, and the miners went back to work. In fact, things calmed so much that Henderson returned to Elizabethtown and went back to mining. He was still there the following year, when he served as a member of the petit jury during the Colfax County District Court’s 1869 Spring session. And he did well financially. By the summer of 1870, Henderson had amassed $5,000 in real estate.

That year, he also stood security for Charles Kennedy’s bond to appear before the Fall Court response to embezzlement and assault charges. Ironically, Kennedy himself would be lynched by an Etown mob later that fall, following accusations that he’d killed and robbed a series of men at his cabin about ten miles south of Humbug Gulch.

Sources: Fort Union and the Frontier Army in the Southwest, Leo E. Oliva, Southwest Cultural Resources Center, National Park Service, 1993; 1870 Colfax County Census, Etown precinct; New Mexico Territory District 1 Court Records, 1869 through 1870.

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Calling the Jury, Elizabethtown, New Mexico Territory

Judge Palen flattened his palms against the rough wooden table that served as the Court bench and scowled at Sheriff Calhoun. “Are you telling me that you called twenty-one men for jury duty and only seven showed up?”

Calhoun was a big man, but he fingered the broad-brimmed hat in his hands like a schoolboy. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, go get fourteen more.”

The Sheriff nodded, turned, and crossed the creaking wooden floor.

Palen turned his attention to his seven potential jury members. “All right,” he said. “Now how many of you are going to have good excuses for not fulfilling your civic duty?”

Three of them sheepishly raised their hands. Palen nodded to his court clerk to begin taking their excuses and closed his eyes. And he’d thought this appointment as Chief Justice of New Mexico Territory and Judge of its First Judicial District was a logical step up from postmaster of Hudson, New York. He suppressed a sigh. How he missed the broad sweep of the river, the bustle of the town’s port. He grimaced and opened his eyes. Only four jurymen left. Damn this town, anyway. The whole of New Mexico Territory, for that matter.

from Moreno Valley Sketches II

 

 

New Mexico Territory’s Chief Justice is Fooled Again

Friday, April 1 was the first day of the Spring 1870 Court session in Colfax County, New Mexico Territory, and Judge Joseph G. Palen must have thought someone had pulled an April Fool’s joke on him. At the end of the 1869 Fall session, he’d made three local men responsible for selecting jurors for the Spring term, but it hadn’t done much good. Only six of the identified grand jury members had showed up, so the Judge ordered Sheriff Andrew J. Calhoun to bring in 15 more potential jurors. Which he did but eleven of them had excuses. The 57-year-old Harvard-educated Judge Palen must have wished he’d never accepted President Ulysses S. Grant’s offer to promote him from Hudson, New York postmaster to Chief Justice of the New Mexico Territorial Court and therefore Judge of the Territory’s First District, which included Colfax County.

April 1 illustration.1870 court transcript.resized

Something similar had happened at the beginning of the Fall 1869 session, Judge Palen’s first in Colfax County, and he’d thought he’d solved the problem by giving E.B. Dennison, Benjamin F. Houx, and John Sutton the task of ensuring there’d be enough jurors for the Spring Session. But even their fellow citizens couldn’t corral the miners and ranchers of Colfax County to do their civic duty.

Late that day, the Sheriff finally brought in enough men to fill out the grand jury panel, none of them with reasons strong enough excuse them from the task. However, Palen still had no petit jury members. It was the morning of Tuesday, April 5 before he had both panels in place. Which wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, except that the court session was scheduled to end on Saturday, April 9. There wasn’t much time to address the over 70 separate actions that came before the court during the week-long Spring 1870 session.

Sources: Chasing the Santa Fe Ring, David L. Caffey, UNM Press, 2014; Colfax County District Court Civil and Criminal Record 1, 1869-1871, Serial No. 14400; The Leading Facts of New Mexico History Vol. II, Ralph E. Twitchell, Sunstone Press, 2007.

 

Future St. James Hotel Owner Marries Virginia Belle

On March 28, 1868, former Fifth Army Corps cook Frenchman Henri Lambert married Anna E. “Molly” Stepp of Petersburg, Virginia, where Henri had been operating a restaurant following his service in the Union Army. Shortly after their marriage, Henry and Mary made their way to Denver by train and then south by wagon to Elizabethtown, where they arrived in May, 1868. Here, Henry worked as a placer miner until Fall set in, when he opened the first of the two hotels he would own in Colfax County. In the fall of 1871, the Lamberts moved to Cimarron, where Henri opened the saloon which would form the first story and basis of today’s St. James Hotel. Although Henri and Mary never had children, they did share their Elizabethtown home with her younger brother Nathan and in the mid 1870’s adopted a New Mexican boy named Jacob. Another brother, William, died September 1, 1881, less than two months before Mary’s death on October 28.

lambert-census-1870
1870 Elizabethtown, NM Census Record for the Lambert hotel and its occupants

Sources: http://genealogytrails.com/newmex/colfax/biographies.htm#lambert March 2015; Ralph E. Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexico History, Torch Press, Cedar Rapid, Iowa, 1911. p. 212; 1870 and 1880 Colfax County Census data; George B. Anderson, History of New Mexico, Its Resources and People, Pacific State Publishing Co., New York, 1907.  p. 696-697; https://www.findagrave.com/.

Taos Heiress Marries Mountain Man

maxwell-beaubien-marriage-record-pages-blended
The marriage record for Lucien B. Maxwell and Maria de la Luz Beaubien

On March 27, 1842, 12 year old María de la Luz Beaubien of Taos, New Mexico, married the mountain man and  merchant Lucien B. Maxwell. Maxwell was 23 years old and had been in Nuevo Mexico six or seven years. María de la Luz, commonly called “Luz,” was the oldest daughter of French Canadian-born Carlos Beaubien and María Paula (Paulita) Lobato. She would be 13 years old in June 1842. A beautiful girl, she had dark hair and hazel eyes. The year before Luz’ marriage, the Mexican government had granted her father and Nuevo Mexico’s Provincial Secretary Guadalupe Miranda joint ownership of the vast swath of land that would become the Maxwell Land Grant after Carlos Beaubien’s death in 1862. Witnesses to the Maxwell/Beaubien alliance included future New Mexico Territorial Governor Charles Bent and Maria Ignacia Jaramillo, Kit Carson’s future sister-in-law. Padre José Antonio Martinez officiated.

Sources: Harriet Freiberger, Lucien Maxwell, Vision or Visionary, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe. 1999, p. 41, 47; María E. Montoya, <a href="http://Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900” target=”_blank”> University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 50; https://familysearch.org/search/film/007854398?i=119

 

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Wild Knowledge

He wasn’t a man to pay much attention to girl children, but this one was different. She didn’t seem interested in cooking or clothes. More likely, she’d be in the canyon, fishing the Cimarron River. Her brother was the dreamy one, the one watching the fish swim ’stead of trying to catch ’em.

So the man was surprised when she came around the curve of the path and stopped to watch him cook the wild carrot root. He’d cut off the flowers and was slicing the root into the pot on the fire.

“Good eatin’,” he told her. “Back home, they say these make your eyes strong.”

She frowned. “Not that,” she said, shaking her head.

He was hungry. He lifted the last piece to his mouth.

“No!” she said sharply.

He raised an eyebrow at her and lowered his hand.

“That isn’t carrot,” she said. “It’s poison hemlock.”

from Moreno Valley Sketches

Future Urraca Ranch Property Sells For $660

In March 1861, Lucien Maxwell and Charles Beaubien sold what is now the Urraca Ranch wealthy Taos merchant Peter Joseph for $660. A Portuguese immigrant, Joseph had trapped and traded with Maxwell and Carson during their mountain man days. Although he died less than a year after the property transfer, in that time Joseph had a ten acre piece of the land (probably along Urraca Creek) surrounded with a board fence so it could be farmed. The eastern border of the Joseph Ranch was the Old Santa Fe Trail between Rayado and Cimarron and its western border was the Cimarron mountains. On the south, it was bounded by the Maxwell/Abreu properties at Rayado, and on the north by the ridge that separated the waters flowing into the Urraca and Cimarroncito creeks.

antonio_joseph
Antonio Joseph. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Joseph_(politician)

About five years after Peter Joseph’s death, his sixteen year old son Antonio gained full control of the property. In 1880, he sold the land to speculator Frank R. Sherwin for $8,500, almost thirteen times his father’s original investment. Antonio Joseph went on to become New Mexico Territory’s representative to Congress from 1884 to 1894 and to play an important role in the fight for New Mexico statehood.

 

Sources: Lawrence R. Murphy, Philmont a history of New Mexico’s Cimarron Country, UNM Press, Albuquerque, p. 135;     1880 Colfax County Census data; David V. Holtby, Forty-Seventh Star, U of Oklahoma Press, Norman, p. 7-15, 286.

 

 


 

Corn Damage, 3 of 3

Suzanna looked doubtfully at the tall, thick-bodied tan dog facing her. The man at Mora had generously loaned Gerald one of his three English mastiffs to test the theory that it would keep the deer from her cornfield.

“His name is Duke,” Gerald said, stroking the black-muzzled head. The dog’s tail wagged slowly as it studied Suzanna with sleepy brown eyes.

“He seems very docile,” she said.

“They were bred to hunt and are said to be very protective.” Gerald shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to see.”

She nodded and watched as Gerald and the dog headed toward the cornfield, their own two mixed-breed dogs romping alongside. The mastiff majestically ignored the other dogs and Suzanna’s lips twitched. Then she shook her head and went back inside.

The barking began at daylight the next morning: high yips from their own dogs and a deeper, more solid sound. Suzanna rose and went to the window. The mongrels were at the edge of the corn patch, dancing around each other. As she watched, Duke appeared at a steady trot, circling the field.

Suzanna grabbed her shawl and went out onto the cabin porch, where she could see the entire patch. There were no deer in the corn. Duke circled the field again, stopping occasionally to mark its boundary, lift his head toward the hills above, and bark menacingly. There were deer on the hillside, moving steadily upward.

Suzanna turned toward the house. Gerald was standing in the doorway, watching her.

“How long will it take a puppy to grow to Duke’s size?” she asked, and he chuckled triumphantly.

from Moreno Valley Sketches II

Moreno Valley’s Serial Killer Gets Married

kennedy-cortez-marriage-record

On Thursday, February 28, 1867, Charles Kennedy married Gregoria Cortes at the Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Church in Taos. Gregoria was the fourteen year old daughter of widower José Cortez of La Cordillera del Rancho, about two miles west of Mora. Charles was the 28 year old son of William and Fanny Canady (aka Kennedy) of Tennessee. Gregoria and Charles settled in the Moreno Valley at the foot of Palo Flechado Pass, on the road from Elizabethtown to Taos. There they kept a way station for travelers, and Charles Kennedy became embroiled in a series of lawsuits: one for selling liquor without a license, another for assaulting an Elizabethtown merchant with a deadly weapon, and still another for embezzling an Elizabethtown laborer’s money and goods. Kennedy was suspected of other nefarious activities, but nothing could be proven. Then, one day in the fall of 1870, his then seventeen year old wife appeared in Etown and denounced Kennedy as a serial killer. The subsequent Elizabethtown trial and lynching would make the Santa Fe, Silver City, and Indianapolis newspapers. The Silver City report said Kennedy claimed just prior to his lynching that he’d killed twenty-one men.

Corn Damage, 2 of 3

“The ears probably wouldn’t have ripened before the first snow, anyway,” Gerald said as he studied the deer-damaged cornfield. Beside him, the hired man Ramon nodded sympathetically.

Suzanna’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know that,” she said. “And if some had, then I would have saved them to plant next spring.”

Gerald shook his head. “It’ll take years to get a strain that’ll grow at this high altitude.”

Her chin lifted. “Then it will take years. You want to stay in this God forsaken valley, don’t you?”

He continued to study the damage. “I just don’t think a fence is going to keep the deer out,” he said mildly. “They can jump pretty much anything you put in front of ’em.”

“Then what would you suggest? Those mongrel dogs of yours have proven themselves useless.”

Gerald shook his head without looking at her.

“There is a man at Mora who has dogs called masteef,” Ramon said. He held out a hand, waist high, palm down. “They are this big and used for hunting.”

Gerald turned his eyes from the corn. “Do you think he would sell?”

Ramon shrugged. “When we were there last month he showed me puppies.”

“Ramon, you are an angel,” Suzanna said.

“We don’t know that this will work,” Gerald warned.

“It’s certainly worth a try.” She gave Ramon a brilliant smile and he grinned back at her sympathetically.

from Moreno Valley Sketches II