Tag: New Mexico history

Supreme Court Rules in Land Grant Company’s Favor

Supreme Court Rules in Land Grant Company’s Favor

On Monday, April 18, 1887, the U.S. Supreme Court finally confirmed the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company’s right to almost two million acres in northeast New Mexico.

The controversy over the grant’s size had been going on since the early 1870s. A survey when the Company bought the grant identified around 2 million acres, land that  that included much of what is now New Mexico’s Colfax County and stretched north into Colorado.

But there was a problem. Not everyone agreed that the grant was that large. In fact, U.S. General Land Office surveys insisted that grants issued by Mexico were limited to only 22 square leagues—a far cry from the 2 million acres claimed. Based on this judgment, the Land Office declared much of the acreage open to settlement. When its agents began issuing deeds to eager homesteaders and ranchers, trouble ensued. But the Maxwell Grant Company intended that land for its own uses and this was the American West—might made right. People died.

Map of final Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company boundaries

At the same time it was using guns and intimidation to keep people off its wide-open spaces, the Company also sought legal recourse. It turned to Washington with a request for an official government survey of the grant based on the geographical descriptions in the original 1840s documents. The request was refused.

Then in 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed another New Mexico land grant to encompass more than 22 square leagues. The Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company swung into action. Three weeks after the decision, the Maxwell grant was being resurveyed. It took another eleven years, four days of oral argument, and 900 pages of testimony, but the Company finally got its land.  

With that ruling, the Colfax County War, which had begun in earnest in September 1875, finally wound down, making it a longer feud than New Mexico’s more famous Lincoln County War, which had lasted a mere three years (1878-1881).

And proving that if you hang in there long enough—and have enough money—you might just get what you want, after all.

Sources: Howard R. Lamar, Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, New York: Harper & Row, 1977; Lawrence R. Murphy, Philmont: A history of New Mexico’s Cimarron Country, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972; Stephen Zimmer, For Good or Bad, The People of the Cimarron Country, Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1999; Maria E. Montoya, “Maxwell Land Grant”, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ha.026, accessed 1/20/22.

BOOK REVIEW: Wildest of the Wild West

BOOK REVIEW: Wildest of the Wild West

Howard Bryan’s Wildest of the Wild Westis one of the first books I read when I began to explore the possibility of turning pieces of New Mexico’s history into fiction. While Bryan’s book about the town of Las Vegas is nonfiction, it reads like a story. Certainly, some of the events he retells could be lifted straight from a traditional Western novel.

We find an Italian hermit living in a cave above the Spanish-speaking town and revered as a holy man and miracle worker, Jesse James and Billy the Kid soaking in the nearby hot springs, Doc Holliday opening his final dental practice only to abandon it for a saloon and gambling hall, and Hoodoo Brown, formal justice of the peace and informal protection racketeer. Then there’s the actress/singer/poet/faro dealer known as Monte Verde who was actually the famous Confederate spy Belle Siddons. And the enigmatic “Mysterious Dave” Mather, who seems to have robbed a train while serving as Las Vegas Town Marshal.

The stories of these various characters is woven into a coherent narrative of Las Vegas’s history which Bryan tells with humor and verve. If you like nonfiction that reads like a novel, I highly recommend Wildest of the Wild West.

A Reward for El Coyote’s Death

A Reward for El Coyote’s Death

On Tuesday, March 6, 1838, Carlos Santistevan asked the New Mexico government for 50 pesos for killing rebel leader Juan Antonio “El Coyote” Vigil five-and-a-half weeks earlier during the battle of Pojoaque Pass. Vigil had co-led the New Mexico revolutonaries with José Angel Gonzales since late the previous year, and had issued the January 1838 call to arms that initiated the final phase of the rebellion and the battle just north of Pojoaque Pueblo.

We don’t know precisely how El Coyote Vigil died, but we do know what happened to his body afterward. It was hung at the nearest crossroads as a warning to anyone with further insurrectionary ideas.

Vigil, from the mountain village of Truchas east of Chimayó, seems to have spent most of late 1837 in Taos. There, he’d threatened Padre Antonio Jose Martínez’s life if the priest didn’t stop preaching against the revolution. This frightened Martínez enough to send him fleeing south to Santa Fe. But it also angered the priest. Once in the capitol, he volunteered to serve as Governor Manuel Armijo’s military chaplain during the January campaign.

The cliffs of Pojoaque Pass in the distance. Courtesy: RanchoJacona.com

Martínez was at Armijo’s side at the battle of Pojoaque Pass and afterward. While the governor gave the order to hang Vigil’s body at the crossroads, one has to wonder if the priest had anything to do with the idea. Certainly, he doesn’t seem to have hesitated to comply with Armijo’s order later that day to hear José Angel Gonzales’ confession before he was taken out to be shot.

If you’re interested in learning more about Vigil, Gonzales, the rebellion, and the loyalist response, check out my recently-published novel There Will Be Consequences. You can find more information here.

 Sources: Lansing Bloom, “The Insurrection of 1837,” Old Santa Fe Magazine, Vol. II, Santa Fe: Old Santa Fe Press; Fray Angelico Chavez, But Time and Chance, the story of Padre Martinez of Taos, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 1981; Janet Lecompte, Rebellion in Rio Arriba, 1837, UNM Press, Albuquerque, 1985; Ralph E. Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Vol. II, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, 1911.

Didn’t I Already Write This Book?

Didn’t I Already Write This Book?

When I finished writing No Secret Too Small, I had every intention of moving directly into another novel about the Locke family and their friends, this one focusing on the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition.

But New Mexico’s 1837 revolt wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept thinking about all the people who’d been involved on both sides of the rebellion and how little I’d been able to plumb the depths of their experience in No Secret Too Small. There was so much more to explore.

“What did it feel like to be there?” is always the first question I ask about historical events. For example, how did it feel to be Governor Pérez on the night he fled Santa Fe? Why did he return the next day? What was Taos Pueblo-born José Angel Gonzalez’s reaction to replacing Pérez? What was it like for him to try to govern a divided New Mexico? And what exactly was Manuel Armijo doing in the meantime?

And all the others: Santa Cruz de la Cañada alcalde and rebel leader Juan José Esquibel. Gambling salon owner Gertrudes “Doña Tules” Barceló and the women who went with her to the rebel camp. Padre Antonio José Martínez  of Taos, trying to keep the rebels there in check. The children of the families who refugeed to Santa Fe. The spouses of the rebels. What was it like for them?

I just couldn’t let it go. I had to tell their stories. But whose should I tell? The rebels? The government officials? The refugees? Any point of view I chose limited my ability to explore the full complexity of events, reduced my scope for examining the class differences, long-standing racial divides, and deep-seated frustrations that I believe lay behind the rebellion’s more immediate precipitating factors.

So I decided to take a huge risk and tell all the stories in one book. Well, not really. But at least part of them. All the points of view. Each section of the forthcoming There Will Be Consequences (February 2022) moves the narrative forward in time and tells that portion from a different perspective, including the wife of a rebel leader, Pérez, Doña Tules, Gonzales, Esquibel, Armijo, Martínez , and others.

Is this too many points of view? My editor tells me it works. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.

Cover Reveal, There Will Be Consequences

Cover Reveal, There Will Be Consequences

Here it is, the cover of my forthcoming biographical novel There Will Be Consequences! Thank you to everyone on my author Facebook page who provided feedback about the image and color options!

I’m very pleased with the end result and want to give a huge shout out to D.K. Marley at TheHistoricalFictionCompany.com for her design work on this.

You can find information about There Will Be Consequences at Amazon and Books2Read. Ebook preorders are now open!

New Old New Mexico Ebook Set Available!

New Old New Mexico Ebook Set Available!

I’m pleased to announce that the first three novels of my Old New Mexico series, Not Just Any Man, Not My Father’s House, and No Secret Too Small are now available in ebook form as a “boxed set” titled The Locke Family Saga.

This story of secrets, prejudice, and the power of love, is told in three books, each from the perspective of a different family member. 

In Not Just Any Man, Gerald must survive the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the Mohave Indians, the arid south rim of the Grand Canyon, and the fellow trapper who hates him for the color of his skin before he can return to Taos and the girl he hopes is waiting for him. Can he prove to himself and to her that he is, after all, not just any man?

In Not My Father’s House, Suzanna does her unhappy best to adjust to married life in an isolated valley of the Sangre de Cristos, but postpartum depression, the cold, and the lack of sunlight push her to the edge. However, the mountains contain a menace far more dangerous than Suzanna’s internal struggles. The man Gerald killed in the Gila wilderness two years ago isn’t as dead as everyone thought. And his lust for Suzanna is even stronger than his desire for Gerald’s blood.

In No Secret Too Small, 1837 New Mexico is teetering on the verge of revolution when the Locke family experiences an upheaval of its own. Eight-year-old Alma’s father, Gerald, has never told her mother that his grandmother was a runaway slave. When his father shows up, the truth comes out. Stunned and furious, Suzanna leaves, taking Alma and six-year-old Andrew with her. However, by the time they reach Santa Fe, rebellion has broken out. Will the Locke family survive the resulting chaos? 

The Locke Family Saga is available at your favorite ebook retailer, Amazon.com, and Barnes and Noble.

Maxwell Land Grant = Trouble

Maxwell Land Grant = Trouble

Mid-April 1871 was a busy time for the newly-formed Maxwell Land Grant Company. Lucien and Luz Maxwell had received their cash for the grant, moved out of the house at Cimarron, and were busy spending their money. Lucien had used a good chunk of it to set up the First National Bank in Santa Fe. He’d also bought land at Fort Sumner. While Luz turned the former the officers quarters into a home, he bought racehorses.

However, the Company wasn’t having an easy time establishing their control over the former Beaubien-Miranda Land Grant’s vast acreage. There’d been an initial dust-up in late 1870, when the Elizabethtown miners rioted against the new owners and the Governor had to send soldiers in to squelch them. But that wasn’t the end of it. In early April 1871, the Cimarron Squatters Club organized a mass protest and fundraising meeting in front of the county courthouse. 

The Company apparently decided to demonstrate a little force in response. They sent a group of employees into the Ute Creek placer mines and took over. That strategy didn’t work out too well—the miners disarmed the Company’s men and held them hostage.

Again, the Governor got involved. This time he came himself, forced the miners to free the prisoners, ordered them to abstain from further violence, and then got the Army to station soldiers from Fort Union in the area to enforce the peace.

The soldiers’ presence does seem to have calmed the boiling pot for a little while. But it was bound to boil over again—the Company was enforcing rent payments Maxwell had never bothered to collect and also kicking people off range and farmland Maxwell had allowed them to use.

Maxwell Land Grant Map, circa 1870

Whether the Company was within their rights isn’t clear. Things got even murkier in late January 1873, when the U.S. Department of Interior ordered much of the Grant’s acreage to be treated as public lands. This brought more settlers (the Company called them “squatters”) into the area and, with them, more unrest. 

With the newcomers came Methodist Episcopal missionary Rev. Franklin J. Tolby. Tolby sided with the settlers and miners and didn’t hesitate to speak his mind. In mid-September 1875 he was ambushed and killed on the canyon road between Elizabethtown and Cimarron, and the Colfax County War was on in earnest.

The conflict didn’t end until April 18, 1887, when the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the Company’s right to almost two million acres. Even then, the violence didn’t come to an immediate halt. However, even the most ardent settlers didn’t have any legal arguments left in their arsenal and the Colfax County War gradually faded away.

Once again, money and political power had prevailed in the fight for control of New Mexico’s lands.

Sources: David L. Caffey, Chasing The Santa Fe Ring, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014; Harriet Freiberger, Lucien Maxwell,Villain or Visionary, Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1999; Larry Murphy, Out in God’s Country: A History of Colfax County, New Mexico, Springer, NM: 1969; Lawrence R. Murphy, Philmont: A history of New Mexico’s Cimarron Country, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972; Moreno Valley Writers Guild, Lure, Lore and Legends of the Moreno Valley, Angel Fire, NM: Columbine Books, 1997; Stephen Zimmer, For Good or Bad, The People of the Cimarron Country, Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1999.

Railroad Finally Reaches Albuquerque!!!!

Railroad Finally Reaches Albuquerque!!!!

On Monday, April 5, 1880, after almost 30 years of waiting, the New Mexico and Southern Pacific railroad, a subsidiary of Atchison, Topeka And Santa Fe, arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Territory’s first hope for a railroad that connected it to both coasts had been in 1853, when a survey was completed from Albuquerque toward Arizona and California. But then the nation got caught up in the conflict that would lead to the Civil War and nothing happened.

After the war, all eyes were on the transcontinental rail link which lay to the north, along the 32nd parallell. When that final spike was pounded into place at Ogden, Utah in 1869, the next logical place to build was on or near the southern border. Surely now it was New Mexico’s turn.

In the early 70s, it looked like that turn had come. Various rail lines built steadily west across Kansas and Colorado.

Then came the financial Panic of 1873. Once again, everything ground to a halt. Ranchers and farmers in New Mexico must have fumed as Texans loaded cattle and Californians boxed up grapes and pears and sent them east by rail while New Mexico still received its mail via stagecoach and had to use Santa Fe Trail freight wagons for anything larger.

Albuquerque in 1889. Source: U.S. Library of Congress.

But then the great day finally arrived and a train chugged into Albuquerque. The new track was positioned over a mile east of the town plaza. This resulted in a flurry of real estate,  commercial, and other activity. Albuquerque took on the characteristics of a boomtown, with brawls, thefts, and shootings and the inevitable ad hoc vigilante groups to try to keep them under control.

Was the arrival of the railroad a good thing? I suspect not everyone thought so.

Sources: David L. Caffey, Chasing The Santa Fe Ring, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014; Lawrence A. Johnson, Over The Counter And On The Shelf, Country Storekeeping in America, 1620-1920, Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1961; Morris F. Taylor, First Mail West, stagecoach lines on the Santa Fé trail, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Josefa Jaramillo is Born in New Mexico!

On Thursday, March 27, 1828 in Portrero, New Mexico, María Josefa Jaramillo was born to Francisco Esteban Jaramillo and María Apolonia Vigil in Portrero, New Mexico. Her parents moved to Taos before the end of the year, María Josefa and her older siblings, including three sisters, in tow.

Josefa, called “Josefita” by her family, and her older sister Ignacia would grow up to ally themselves with two prominent americanos—Christopher “Kit” Carson and Charles Bent. In the early 1830s, the now-widowed Ignacia entered into a common-law marriage with American merchant Charles Bent. About ten years later, on February 6, 1843, Josefa married  newly-converted Catholic Christopher “Kit” Carson, exactly seven weeks before her fifteenth birthday.

Source: Kit Carson and His Three Wives, Marc Simmons

Four years later in mid-January, while Kit was away and Josefa was staying with Ignacia and Charles in Taos, the Jaramillo girls’ brother and Bent were killed by an angry mob. The nineteen-year-old testified at the trial of the accused men.  Refined in dress and manners, she had a heart-breaking beauty, one observer said, that “would lead a man with the glance of the eye, to risk his life for a smile.”

After that, Josefa’s life settled down a little, though it seems to have never been truly calm. Carson was gone for long stretches of time: trapping and hunting, and serving as a scout for John C. Fremont, as a courier during the Mexican war, as a military officer during the Civil War, and as commander of the troops that forced the Mescalero Apaches and Navajos onto the Bosque Redondo reservation in 1863-64. In the meantime, Josefa moved from Taos to Rayado to Bent’s Fort and back again, then followed Carson to Fort Garland and finally Boggsville, Colorado.

But Carson and the woman he called “Chepita” and “Little Jo” seem to have had a loving relationship. They had eight children, the last one born just ten days before her death in April 1868. Carson followed her a month later. They are buried side by side in a small cemetery in Taos, ending their journey together in the town where it began.

Sources: Don Bullis, New Mexico Biographical Dictionary, 1540-1980, Vol. I, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque: Rio Grande Books, 2007; Lewis H. Garrard, Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955; Leroy R. Hafen, Ed., Fur Traders of the Far Southwest, Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997; Howard R. Lamar, Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, New York: Harper & Row, 1977; Marc Simmons, Kit Carson and His Three Wives, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003

Thomas Catron is Named U.S. Attorney for New Mexico!!!

In early March 1872, Thomas B. Catron was named U.S. Attorney for New Mexico Territory, replacing his good friend Stephen Elkins, who’d just been elected New Mexico’s delegate to Congress. Catron had come to the Territory in 1866 at Elkins’ urging. He used his appointment to become a powerhouse in New Mexico politics and the center of what became known as the Santa Fe Ring, a group of men who sought to keep New Mexico’s political and financial power firmly in their own hands.

Catron and Elkins were business as well as law partners. They focused their efforts on anything that would increase their wealth, including banking, mining, and land speculation. Elkins left the Territory in 1877 and moved to West Virginia, but Catron stayed and continued his business and political activities. He served as Santa Fe’s mayor, president of the New Mexico Bar Association, and—perhaps most importantly—kingpin of New Mexico’s Republican party.

Source: Thomas Benton Catron and His Era by Victor Westphall

These positions and his control of the Santa Fe Ring enabled Catron to amass huge landholdings, many of them fraudulently. By the end of the 1800s, he reportedly owned around two million acres in New Mexico land and had a financial interest in another four million, much of it former Spanish and Mexican land grants.

It seems fitting that Catron County, one of New Mexico’s largest counties in terms of area but smallest in terms of population, is named after Catron. I suspect he was one of those people who didn’t tolerate others well unless they could benefit him in some way, so he needed a certain amount of elbow room. Naming a county for him that contains plenty of acreage but not many people seems appropriate.

Sources: Don Bullis, New Mexico: A Biographical Dictionary, 1540-1980, Vol. 1. Los Ranchos de Albuquerque: Rio Grande Book, 2007; Howard R. Lamar, Ed. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, New York: Harper and Row, 1977; Hal Stratton and Paul Farley, Office of the Attorney General, State of New Mexico, History, Powers & Responsibilities, 1846-1990. Santa Fe: State of New Mexico, 1990; Victor Westphall, Thomas Benton Catron and his era, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973.