BY the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the Mexican War, made public in Washington on July 4, 1848, the United States achieved its principal objectives: the acquisition of New Mexico and California and recognition of the Rio Grande as Texas’s southern boundary. Along with the new territory, the nation also acquired an alien population and a basket of prickly problems. Evidently it did not occur to Americans, dedicated to republican principles, to hold the people they had conquered in a subject state. Those Mexicans who chose to remain in their homes (the treaty gave ones who did not the right to remove to Mexico) were to receive the same privileges of citizenship as everyone else.
But this was a new experience for America—taking in at one scoopful so many foreign-born—and it created a distinct unease in many quarters. What effect would Hispanic customs have on American institutions? How could questions involving land grants in the captured territories be resolved? What would be the status of the Pueblo people, accorded the rights of citizens under Mexico, but now part of a country that had not yet extended such rights to Indians? Finally, what were to be the social consequences of suddenly bestowing free institutions upon, in the view of some Americans, an uneducated race of mixed-bloods?
There were even blunt spokesmen who went so far as to suggest that the United States had made a bad bargain, annexing New Mexico. Congressman Truman Smith of Connecticut, for one, told his fellow lawmakers in Washington that they had cheated themselves and had invited disaster by bringing people of low morals, such as the New Mexicans, into the Union. South Carolina’s Senator John C. Calhoun, even before the war had ended in 1848, had bellowed and pawed like an old bull and fulminated against granting equality to “colored” races inhabiting the Mexican borderlands. “Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race,” he pronounced pontifically before the Senate.1 And that sentiment was not his alone. Some years after the Civil War, General William T. Sherman, who heartily disliked the arid country and the people of the Southwest, was quoted as saying that the United States ought to declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico.
One result of such hostility was that New Mexicans for more than sixty years were repeatedly checkmated in their efforts to achieve statehood, and so their land remained until 1912 a territory whose officials were appointed from Washington. Upon that vexation were piled others—problems with hostile Indians and outlaws, problems of education and economics, difficulties involving land and water rights and territorial boundaries, and—most of all—the uphill job of adapting to a new pace and pattern of life, one ruled by the philosophy of thrift and hustle. All of these had become apparent as early as 1850, and any impartial observer, had he been asked then to assess New Mexico’s prospects for the future, likely would have volunteered a dim and pessimistic view. A country and people so unlike the rest of the United States seemed to have a poor chance of adjusting to the militant demands of American patriotism and economic nationalism.
Yet things were not so black as they appeared. The New Mexicans, like most pioneers, were accustomed to living by luck and hope, and they possessed some firm traits of character, often overlooked by American newcomers, that promised to see them through the hard times of their territorial days. Perceptive Richard Weightman, New Mexico’s delegate to the national Congress, recognized the moral assets of his constituents in 1852. “I have never met in any part of the United States,” he declared,
people more hospitable, more law-abiding, more kind, more generous, more desirous of improvement, more desirous that a general system of education be established among them … or more desirous of seeing in their own idiom the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Among them I have met men of incorruptible integrity, of honor, refinement, intelligence and information.2
Sweet words, those, and all the more welcome to New Mexican ears because they were so rare.
The Anglo-Americans entering New Mexico in the late 1840s and 1850s were small in numbers but large in influence. New merchants came, as establishment of regular stagecoach and freight service with the East led to stimulation of business. The ranks of the military swelled with the construction of forts on the Indian frontier—such posts as Fort Union (1851) and Fort Stanton (1855) on the east; Fort Fillmore (1851) and Fort Craig (1854) south of the main settlements on the Rio Grande; Fort Defiance (1851) guarding the western Navajo country; and Cantonment Burgwin (1852) in the north, a short distance from Taos.
Then, besides the merchants and soldiers, there were the lawyers in frock coats and bat-wing collars. They descended in swarms, after the conquest, eager to their shoe-soles for political power and a slice of New Mexico’s vast real estate, which represented the country’s most visible wealth. The influential Padre Antonio José Martínez of Taos, a man of great intellectual gifts and social consciousness, likened the hastily contrived American government in New Mexico to a burro, adding ruefully that “on this burro lawyers will ride, not priests.”3
The state of New Mexican politics in the period following the Mexican War was ready-made for lawyers and opportunists of all sorts to jockey for advantage. The assassination of Governor Charles Bent and the collapse in 1847 of the civil government created by Kearny left the area under virtual military rule. That situation continued over the next several years, while Congress debated New Mexico’s future political status. In the meanwhile, persons on the Rio Grande broke into two opposing camps: the supporters of a territorial form of government and the advocates of immediate statehood. In the main, Anglo-Americans, being in the minority, favored the former system. If New Mexico stayed a territory, its principal officials would be appointed in Washington. For that reason, the Hispano majority tended to lean toward statehood; with the right to elect their own officials, they could easily put native New Mexicans into the highest offices.
This political issue, which had become involved with the national question of extending slavery into the Mexican borderlands, was temporarily resolved by the Compromise of 1850. Congress, among other things, admitted California as a free state and provided for the organization of New Mexico as a territory, leaving her inhabitants at liberty to decide the future status of slavery. It was a stop-gap measure, to be sure, for many New Mexicans would continue to press for statehood, but at least for the time being it gave the region an orderly civil government.
The Compromise of 1850 also resolved another complicated matter—an old claim by Texas to that portion of New Mexico lying east of the Rio Grande. For ten million dollars’ compensation provided by the United States government, Texas relinquished her claim, thus paving the way for establishment of a permanent boundary with New Mexico. The Territory, as organized in 1850, then, included the New Mexico and Arizona of later years and a part of southern Colorado.
On the south, New Mexico’s border with Mexico was less easily settled. In accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, a joint boundary commission was organized and began (in July 1849) the task of surveying a dividing line between the two nations. The United States surveyors working with the commission also had instructions to look for a practical railroad route to the Pacific, close to the boundary, and to ascertain the agricultural possibilities of the new country. In the course of the work, it was discovered that the map used to establish the original treaty line eight miles above El Paso had been inaccurate and that the border would in fact have to be placed thirty miles farther north. That slip meant withdrawing five or six thousand square miles from the United States and losing a potentially rich farming district in the Mesilla valley.
Before a serious dispute could develop, the American minister to Mexico, James Gadsden, negotiated in 1853 the treaty that bears his name, providing for the purchase of a large tract of desert land in southern New Mexico. The area offered an advantageous route for a transcontinental railway entirely on American soil, and its acquisition concluded the final adjustment of our border with Mexico. The new terrain bought by Gadsden was added to New Mexico’s Doña Ana County, one of nine counties carved out by the first territorial legislature. Large enough to be a state in its own right, the land purchased stretched from present eastern New Mexico across modern Arizona to the Colorado River at Yuma. Other counties showed a similar westward sprawl, for the time was still several years away when Congress would lop off half of New Mexico to form the Arizona Territory.
The far-seeing statesmen at Washington who pushed the Gadsden Purchase hoped that work would begin as soon as possible on a transcontinental railroad through the area. Since the gold rush of ’49, a flourishing center of American enterprise had grown up on the west coast and with it a need for better communication. But the dream of seeing iron rails laid across the windy wastes of southern New Mexico to California was not to materialize for a generation. Dissension over slavery and the ravages of civil war were to retard economic growth even in this remote corner of the country.
In the meantime, with no trains yet crossing the Southwest, new stagecoach companies moved to fill the transportation gap. One of the most successful was John Butterfield’s Overland Mail, which inaugurated twice-weekly stage service between St. Louis and San Francisco in 1858. To avoid severe winter weather, the company marked a route for its coaches along a broad southern parabola running through Fort Smith, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory, across the plains of Texas to El Paso, thence forty miles up the Rio Grande to Mesilla, and from there over the lower reaches of New Mexico to Tucson and beyond. For its time, Butterfield’s line was the longest in the world.
New Mexico’s fertile Mesilla Valley, which had remained unsettled through the Spanish period, was beginning to blossom in the 1850s as the principal agricultural and population center in the southern part of the territory. When the Overland Mail coaches initially passed through the town of Mesilla, there were already more than three thousand inhabitants to cheer them on their way. Waterman L. Ormsby, a twenty-three-year-old correspondent for the New York Herald and a passenger on the first westbound stage, saw “irrigated fields groaning with the weight of heavy crops,” but any favorable impression that view might have inspired quickly took flight when the refined young man gazed upon Mesilla itself. To him, the low-built adobe houses looked like “miserable dog kennels,” and “the people seemed … to bask in the sun with the complacency of overfed animals.”4
With all the presumptuousness of youth, Ormsby speculated upon how much more productive this rich valley would prove if it were in the hands of industrious and steady eastern farmers, instead of the “lazy and indolent people” who then occupied it. Each generation of Americans, it seemed, had to learn anew what the Spaniards had discovered long before: in New Mexico, men could not recreate a life and society they had known elsewhere. Here, the wide and strange land shaped and reshaped human institutions to its own purposes, and one either learned to live with the blazing sun, the scarcity of water, the dust and interminable distances, and the whispering quiet of empty canyons and mesas, or he admitted failure and moved elsewhere.
While southern New Mexico in the decade of the 1850s was undergoing its first serious development, adventuresome souls three hundred miles to the north were pushing out from the old villages of Taos and Abiquiu to plant settlements, or plazas, in what is now lower Colorado. The first brave settlers began building homes in the high, cold San Luís Valley as early as 1853. The next year, fifty families of New Mexicans and Americans, led by Major Lafayette Head, took up land on the Conejos River, not far from the spot where Zebulon Pike had been arrested by Spanish soldiers a half-century before. And in 1859, the same year prospectors discovered gold in the Pike’s Peak region, Manuel Lucero with a small band of relatives and friends founded Lucero Plaza far along the upper reaches of the Rio Grande.
These tiny communities, and others that soon arose, were challenged in their first years by wandering parties of Utes who claimed ownership of the intermontane valleys and the majestic peaks surrounding them. Fort Garland, established under the long shadow of the Sierra Blanca in 1858, helped hold the Indians in check, as did periodic military expeditions launched from the south. But in the main, as happened all along the vast and open southwestern frontier, the pioneers themselves had to assume the major burden of defense.
The gold rush to the Rockies and the ensuing boom in population led to the formation of the Colorado Territory in 1861. As a result, New Mexico lost ground, for its northern boundary was pulled back to the parallel of 37°. The reduction meant the territory was deprived of a valuable coal-mining area around Trinidad and of jurisdiction over those outermost settlements in the upper San Luís valley created by New Mexicans in the previous decade.
In these early years of adjusting to its new place in the Union, New Mexico absorbed a respectable quota of adventurers, gamblers, speculators, and renegade whiskey-peddlers—off-scourings from the eastern states—but it also got a share of those solid, upright, intelligent citizens representing the glue that held a democratic society together and gave it its strength. Among the latter appeared a fair sampling of persons dedicated to “cultured activity” and to the transplantation of American civilization to the distinctive landscape of the Southwest.
Of several breezy newspapers that shortly began printing in the territory, one, the Weekly Gazette, called attention in 1856 to the newly formed Santa Fe Literary Club (whose president, interestingly, was a native New Mexican, Nicholás Quintana) dedicated to the expansion of knowledge and the holding of debates on burning questions of the day. Even more lustrous was the Historical Society of New Mexico, founded in 1859, probably the first such scholarly body to appear anywhere in the Far West.
One of the guiding spirits behind the launching of the Historical Society was New Mexico’s first resident bishop (later archbishop), Jean B. Lamy, a Frenchman by birth and a zealot when it came to charitable works and the mission of the Catholic Church. He was a strange man, Lamy, at least to the New Mexicans, who were unaccustomed to sober-minded clerics with a puritanical streak.
The new bishop, after his arrival in 1851, began a campaign to impose religious discipline upon the native clergy, whose lighthearted style of living caused him personal pain and scandalized the Americans. Lamy’s reform measures met with fierce opposition, particularly from the redoubtable Padre Martínez of Taos, and his disdain for local custom caused despair among those determined to preserve Hispanic Catholicism. But Lamy did manage to begin a new era in the moral and spiritual life of New Mexico. Working with the energy of a whirlwind, he built in succeeding years forty-five new churches and a string of parochial schools, among them St. Michael’s College at Santa Fe. Since public schools capable of teaching basic English were still decades away, Bishop Lamy’s pioneer classrooms offered the first formal introduction many young New Mexicans had to the language and culture of the American nation.
Before education or the natural process of assimilation could make much headway, however, the people of the Southwest were caught up in the momentous and ugly events attending the great controversy over slavery. It was an issue in which the New Mexicans had small stake (in all the territory, there were only twenty-one black slaves in 1861), but it was, as the down-hill course of circumstances soon proved, a problem impossible to sidestep.
The overriding question in national politics and the one that dominated debate in Congress during the 1850s centered upon expansion of slavery to the western territories—especially to New Mexico Territory. Abolitionists had viewed the Mexican War as a plot by Southerners to extend slavery’s realm, and so, after the war, they waged a bitter campaign to exclude the hateful institution from the newly acquired borderlands. Actually, many statesmen in Washington had long recognized New Mexico as a land unsuitable for slavery because her agriculture was small in scale and native labor was both plentiful and cheap. Territorial citizens themselves had approved antislavery resolutions in 1848 and 1850. But a seeming reversal in sentiment came in 1859, with adoption of a slavery code engineered by Miguel A. Otero, the New Mexican delegate to Congress. The code, designed to protect slaveowners in their property, was more an expression of Otero’s own pro-Southern sympathies than it was a sign of any fundamental shift in attitude among territorial residents. The people, above all else, desired to be left alone, for they saw little to be gained by joining in the great political arguments between North and South over slavery and the legality of secession.
When the differences became unreconcilable and the storm broke, splitting the country in halves, New Mexico unexpectedly found herself part of the theater of conflict. From the outset, the newly formed Confederacy cast covetous eyes west-ward, where it dreamed of creating an empire that would reach to the Pacific. The benefits to be gained by spanning the continent were enormous: the gold fields, particularly those of Colorado and California, could help the South finance the war; seaports on the West Coast might open the possibility for an Asiatic trade, and they would certainly diminish the Union’s capacity to maintain an effective blockade; and of diplomatic significance, the Confederate States, enlarged to take in the Pacific Slope, would attain immense prestige, perhaps enough to tip the balance and bring recognition from European nations.
Winning the West, then, just might be a crucial step toward winning the war. But nothing could be won without a grand strategy; and when one was developed by Southern leaders, it showed plainly that as a first step toward westward expansion, New Mexico must be brought securely into the Confederate camp.
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a sweeping glance at affairs on the upper Rio Grande made it appear that the Confederate annexation of New Mexico could be accomplished with relative ease. For one thing, in the lower part of the territory there existed a hard core of Southern sympathizers—mainly ranchers out of Texas, who had settled recently in the Mesilla district, plus a flock of miners working new mineral discoveries around Tucson. For another thing, most of the ranking officers serving in the military Department of New Mexico defected to the South, bringing with them precious information on war matériel stored at several territorial forts. Then, indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, Confederate leaders imagined that they perceived a growing sentiment in favor of secession among native New Mexicans. Added to those considerations, the territory’s long eastern border with Texas clearly dictated an inevitable union with the Southern cause; equally clearly, the vast distances separating her from the northern states would prevent help from arriving should she try to avoid the inevitable.
The offensive was taken almost at once by Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor of the Confederate Army, who, in the summer of 1861, gathered 350 recruits into a regiment called the Texas Mounted Volunteers. With these hard-bitten men, accustomed all to handling arms and sleeping on the ground in every sort of weather, Baylor marched to El Paso, where he occupied Fort Bliss and prepared to march up the Rio Grande to begin the conquest of New Mexico. A man of vindictive nature, with a sinister look about him, the colonel was, nevertheless, a decisive and forceful leader. With his war-hungry Texans, he made a swift move against Federal troops stationed at Fort Fillmore near Mesilla and pursued them in earnest as they fled eastward toward Fort Stanton.
Near the Organ Pass above present Las Cruces, Baylor managed to bag the whole lot, forcing the Union commander, Major Isaac Lynde, of Vermont, to surrender. Back in Mesilla, he took stock of his gains and the political situation in the territory.
For several years, southern New Mexicans, including those in the settlements south of the Gila River, had been discontented because of neglect by officials in faraway Santa Fe. In fact, they had held conventions at Mesilla in 1859 and at Tucson in 1860 to assemble plans for organizing a separate territory, to be called either Pimería, Gadsonia, or Arizona. But the war had intervened, and the planning ceased. Yet Baylor was aware of the strong movement for separation, as well as the Southern leanings of much of the population, so he moved to capitalize on the disquiet and out of it to gain a foothold in the West on behalf of the Confederate States of America. On August 1, he proclaimed all of New Mexico south of the 34th parallel (that is, the lower half of the territory) to be the new Territory of Arizona, with Mesilla as the capital and himself as provisional governor. That was sufficient for the moment, he decided, until the Confederate government had a chance to approve his actions and to say what the next step should be.
Preparations for taking that step were already under way in the Confederacy’s capital of Richmond, where President Jefferson Davis had lent a willing ear to proposals put forth by Henry H. Sibley. A native of Louisiana, a West Pointer, and lately a U.S. Army major serving in New Mexico, Sibley came offering both his services and a plan to capture the southwestern territories. If given the authority, he would raise an army of Texas backwoodsmen and set out northward from El Paso and Mesilla to take the Union-held forts in upper New Mexico and the gold fields of Colorado. That done, he would turn west and, with ranks swelled by volunteers he expected to rally to the South’s call, seize California.
President Davis was enchanted by the bright prospect. Mississippi-born Davis had served as U.S. Secretary of War, beginning in 1853, and in that capacity had come to appreciate the value of the desert borderlands acquired from Mexico. Indeed, he had been a key figure in the maneuvering that led to the Gadsden Purchase and was one of those most vocal in arguing for speedy construction of a transcontinental railroad through the Southwest. Thus Sibley’s talk impressed him favorably, and he gave Sibley the authority sought, along with the rank of brigadier general. The South’s dream of a dazzling empire stretching from sea to sea appeared about to be realized.
But all this while, loyal Union men had been rallying in northern New Mexico. Governor Henry Connelly at Santa Fe, one of the old-guard traders and anti-Confederate to the core, issued a call for the formation of militia companies to defend the territory. Word went also to pro-Union partisans in Colorado and California: if the disturbing rumors of an invasion from Texas by General Sibley were true, here in New Mexico was the proper place to confront the enemy.
To Colonel Edward R. S. Canby, commander of Federal forces in New Mexico, fell the task of preserving the upper Rio Grande from the Confederate threat. In a day when most men went bearded, Canby remained clean-shaven, his solid jaw and square chin giving him the look of a kind but forceful schoolmaster. His planning of strategy, too, was more academic than military—slow and methodical, rather than bold and aggressive. Canby believed in consolidating his troops, the regular soldiers and the native New Mexican militia, and holding a secure defensive position. That he elected to do at Fort Craig, a strong post situated on the west bank of the Rio Grande a few miles below Socorro and just inside the 34th parallel that Baylor was claiming as the northern border of his Confederate Territory of Arizona.
General Sibley meantime had scoured the Texas frontier and put together three regiments totaling twenty-six hundred men. They were a coarse lot, much given to raucous laughter and the playing of practical jokes, but they knew how to fight. And few as they were, they stood ready to march all the way to the Pacific if Hell-for-leather Sibley in his stiff gray uniform would lead them. So up the Rio Grande from El Paso and Mesilla they came, in February 1862, intending to dispose of Fort Craig with a slashing blow and then afterward take Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and, beyond that, Fort Union, with its valuable store of military supplies. They rode with dash and confidence, and there was a noticeable spring in the trot of their range-bred, grass-fed Texas horses, for, with this slim army, as they well knew, went Confederate hopes in the West.
Strenuous marching brought Sibley’s gray column of Texan stalwarts to a point on the east bank of the Rio Grande opposite Fort Craig. From there, they could gaze across the roily waters to dove-colored adobe walls, pierced at intervals by embrasures for artillery, and beyond to the far-rising ramparts of the San Mateo Mountains. On the face of it, the Confederates had a tough chore ahead of them if they planned to take the fort by storm. But a hasty assessment convinced Sibley that an assault could not succeed. Hence he tried several maneuvers to draw the Federals into the open, away from their protective battlements. Canby, however, proved a model of caution and refused to take the bait. He had upward of thirty-eight hundred men, but many of them were grass-green militia and native volunteers, in whom he placed small confidence.
The Rebels went into camp, and a brisk night breeze carried the muffled sound of their activity across the Rio Grande to the watchful men in the fort. There, one of the officers walking the walls and contemplating the flickering pinpoints of the enemy’s campfires suddenly conceived a masterful piece of strategy. Hurrying to Colonel Canby, he quickly won approval for his plan. With three men, he loaded a dozen howitzer shells into wooden crates and lashed them to the backs of a pair of decrepit old mules. With his assistants, he then set out for the Confederate camp, crossing the river under cover of darkness. Close to Sibley’s line, they ignited the fuses, lashed the mules forward, and commenced a swift retreat.
The tactic, so brilliantly executed, might have brought destruction and chaos to the Confederate ranks, but for one trifling fact neglected by the Union officer and his men: mules possess a strong homing instinct, and this incendiary pair, once becoming aware that they were abandoned, turned tail and went pelting over their back trail. The escort wheeled about and beheld with horror two shadows trotting companionably behind, under a sputter of sparks. With a shout, the riders spurred their horses and raced for the shelter of the fort. The ensuing boom rocked the valley and shook awake every man, blue and gray, trying to sleep there. In the report of the incident delivered to Canby, total casualties were listed as two mules.
If that can be considered a lighter moment of the Civil War in New Mexico, then it was one of the very few. Shortly there would be only the suffering, devastation, and death that are the hallmarks of all armed conflict. And it began just above Fort Craig on February 21, with the first major battle fought between Union and Confederate troops in the Far Southwest.
On that day, General Sibley moved his army six miles up the Rio Grande to the Valverde Ford. If anything could draw Canby’s forces out into the open, he reckoned, it would be a threat by the Confederates to cross to the west bank of the river. Nor was he wrong in his guessing. When the Union commander perceived the intention of the enemy, he plucked up courage and ordered out his troops to defend the Valverde crossing.
The Rio Grande, for centuries the scene of fierce struggles between Spaniards and Indians, was now invaded by the din and violence of another sort of contest—a fratricidal one, between Northerners and Southerners. The Battle of Valverde involved the bloodiest kind of tough, stand-up fighting—“terrific beyond description,” one Rebel lad recalled it later.5 The Texans, screaming like maddened cougars, made a savage charge armed with pistols, double-barrelled shotguns, and bowie knives. Some of the New Mexican militia broke and retreated, but others, particularly those under Colonel Kit Carson, who had come down from his home in the north to support the Union cause, held their ground. A battery of Federal artillery, which had been conveyed to the east shore, was overrun, but not before every man defending it had died, including its gallant officer, Captain Alexander McRae, who fell at his post “pierced with many bullets.” As the day rounded to a close, Canby’s men fell back toward the fort, leaving the waters of Valverde Ford tinctured with the blood of their dead and wounded. “We made the Yankees dance to our music!” the jubilant Confederates shouted to one another, and in their enthusiasm they claimed a victory.6
The laurels, however, were anything but clearly won. Sibley’s brigade held the ford and that, together with a lift in morale, was about all that had been gained. In the debit column, Canby still occupied a strong position inside Fort Craig; and the Rebels, with only a few days’ rations left in their knapsacks, could not even consider a siege.
General Sibley, therefore, found himself obliged to violate one of those age-old principles of war known to every military commander: never bypass and leave an enemy on your rear. Sibley would press rapidly on to Albuquerque in search of supplies and hope that Canby’s force stayed holed up, licking its Valverde wounds. If northern New Mexico fell as planned, then the Confederates could return and deal with Fort Craig at leisure.
As it happened, several circumstances intervened to frustrate that simple scheme. First, Federal troops guarding the supply depot at Albuquerque got word of the Rebel advance in time to load many of their military stores on wagons and hurry them north. What they couldn’t carry, they burned. Sibley’s hungry boys laboring up the sandy, brown valley of the Rio Grande saw the telltale column of black smoke and were crestfallen. Without rations and ammunition, their invasion must inevitably grind to a halt. It would probably have done just that had not the Confederates managed to seize the small military post of Cubero west of Albuquerque on the Navajo frontier. There, enough arms, food, and medical supplies to fill twenty-five wagons had been assembled earlier for an intended Indian campaign. Captured, that equipment went to sustain the Rebel drive northward.
Whatever more Sibley needed to feed his men and horses he hoped to purchase from the New Mexicans, now that he had reached the populous sections of the territory. But in his failure to accomplish that can be found the second reason why his larger strategy soon derailed. All along, the Confederates had counted on winning over the Hispano population, but they had failed to reckon with the New Mexicans’ antipathy toward Texans—an outgrowth, in part, of the Texas invasion of 1841 and more recent boundary disputes—or their unwillingness to accept Southern currency as payment for their foodstuffs. On the contrary, many of the local people had answered Governor Henry Connelly’s call for volunteers, and others brought in money, mules, and provisions, placing them at the disposal of the Federal army.
Third, General Sibley seriously miscalculated the strength of Union arms opposing him in the north. On February 22, the day after the Battle of Valverde, a regiment of Colorado Volunteers with two batteries of artillery had left Denver as snow tumbled from a slate-gray sky. Plowing through heavy weather, the men crossed over Raton Pass during the first week of March and were soon billeted in Fort Union on the Santa Fe Trail. From all the feverish news that came to their ears then, it was apparent that the Coloradans would shortly be in the thick of a fight.
The Civil War in the Southwest was indeed moving toward a climax. From Albuquerque, Sibley had set half his army on the road to Santa Fe, supported by what supplies he could muster. In a close squeak, Governor Connelly, other territorial officials, and the small garrison at Fort Marcy managed to escape eastward by caravan to the relative safety of Las Vegas and Fort Union beyond the mountains. At that point, Loyalist fortunes in New Mexico appeared to be at their lowest ebb.
The Confederates, however, still lacked a decisive victory; mainly, they needed to grab the Federal arsenal at Fort Union, to resupply their ranks and to prevent their invasion from running out of steam. The issue was decided, not at the fort, but in Glorieta Pass located above the mouth of Apache Canyon, fifteen miles east of Santa Fe—the same area Governor Manuel Armijo had refused to defend when Kearny approached, back in 1846.
On March 27 and 28, 1862, regular troops from Fort Union, supported by the Colorado Volunteers, met the Rebels at Glorieta, in what would become known as the Gettysburg of the West. The first day of sharp combat ended in a draw, but the second indisputably went to the men in gray, who won control of the canyon. Nevertheless, final victory was snatched from their hands when Major John M. Chivington of the Volunteers delivered a wholly unexpected thunderbolt. Two years later, Chivington would lead a hideous massacre of peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek, Colorado; but at this juncture, he was the Union’s man of the hour.
Taking a detachment of Coloradans and guided by Colonel Manuel Chaves of the New Mexico Volunteers, Chivington followed a difficult mountain trail that carried him behind the battle in the pass. Discovering the Confederate supply train, which had been left weakly defended at the rear, he drove off the guard, bayoneted eleven hundred mules, and burned sixty-four wagons. Chivington’s successful foray, it soon became apparent, completely reversed the fortunes of war in New Mexico.
For Sibley’s Texans, the loss of their field supplies at Apache Canyon was a first-class disaster, forcing them to abandon all consideration of an assault on Fort Union. Indeed, the Confederate command realized that the roof had collapsed on their ambitious plan to turn New Mexico into a launching ground for Southern expansionism in the West. Like a good soldier, General Sibley thought first of the safety of his army. With provisions unavailable and with the Colorado Volunteers and well-fed Federal troops arrayed against him, he began to withdraw down the Rio Grande.
At Peralta, a few miles below Albuquerque, the Rebels encountered Canby and his soldiers, who had at last ventured forth from the security of Fort Craig, looking for a scrap. Here was fought the third and last battle of the Civil War in New Mexico—really little more than a skirmish and a reminder to Sibley that by heading south toward El Paso he was going in the right direction. Canby followed the retreating Texans for a time, but it was clear to him that in their present destitute condition they no longer offered a threat to the territory. Lean as greyhounds, hungry as December wolves, and clad in tattered butternut uniforms, the downcast and defeated invaders formed as ragtag an army as the New Mexican sun ever blistered. A fitting epitaph for the entire painful campaign was uttered not long after its close by one of the survivors, who wrote, upon his return to Texas, “[No more for us] throwing our lives away in endeavoring to obtain possession of a country which is not worth the life of one good man, of the many who have breathed their last upon its arid sands.”7
Defeat of the Sibley Brigade meant also the demise of the rump government at Mesilla and dissolution of the Confederate Territory of Arizona. The end was assured when California Volunteers under Colonel James H. Carlton occupied Tucson in June of 1862 and then advanced on the Rio Grande. Just a few months before, when the Rebels were riding the crest of their wave in New Mexico, Confederate Governor Baylor had boasted, “So far Mr. Lincoln is not making much headway in suppressing the rebellion. He has got himself thrashed at every fight from Manassas to Mesilla, and today we dare them to attack us at any point.”8 But by early summer, Baylor was no longer making dares, for, with other pro-Southern men, he was in full flight and glad for the chance to get out of New Mexico with his shirttail intact. The debacle at Glorieta and the retreat to Texas scuttled for all time Confederate hopes for an empire in western America.
One consequence of the Civil War in the Southwest was that the U.S. Congress finally turned its attention to the creating of another territory here. From the western half of New Mexico, Arizona was carved in 1863 and launched on the political sea. Officials in Santa Fe showed little reluctance at the reduction in size of their jurisdiction, for what they lost was at that time too remote and too thinly populated to be of much economic significance. Moreover, they could draw an easy breath that the fruitful Mesilla valley by this arrangement would remain with New Mexico.
Another and more sanguinary result of the war was that it left the frontier open to attack by hostile Indians. Tribes seeking plunder or bearing old grudges were quick to note that the white men were fighting among themselves, abandoning forts, and withdrawing troops for service in the East. For many, the opportunity to step up their raids was too enticing to be ignored. The ensuing bloodshed brought nightmare days to New Mexico and other western territories.
When James Carlton, having been promoted to brigadier general, reached the Rio Grande with his Union army of Californians, he assumed command of the Military Department of New Mexico, replacing Canby. Since the flight of the Confederates removed all promise of formal battle, Carlton turned his attention to the Indians pillaging the border settlements. He had several thousand troops ready for action and certain fixed notions about how to deal with raiders. The program he presented to Governor Connelly, Chief Justice Kirby Benedict, and other territorial officials was direct and harsh: wage merciless war against all hostile tribes, force them to their knees, and then confine them on reservations where they could be Christianized and instructed in agriculture. Manifestly, it was a policy designed to bring quick results.
The Mescalero Apaches of southern New Mexico were first to feel the effects of Carlton’s strategy. Placing Militia Colonel Kit Carson in charge of troops in the field, the general sent his men to harry the tribe into submission. By March 1863, the campaign was completed, and Carson brought four hundred warriors with their families to the new Bosque Redondo Reservation on the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico. Here Fort Sumner, constructed by Carlton, stood guard.
Next it was the turn of the Navajo, a people numbering at that time some ten thousand and inhabiting the crumpled and rock-strewn lands of western New Mexico. They lived by herding huge flocks of sheep, tending small gardens and orchards, and by plundering the New Mexican settlements. For years, Spanish and Mexican expeditions had tried to bring them to bay, but the Navajo proved too nimble, fading into the remote canyonlands whenever their enemies gave chase. Kearny’s subordinate, Colonel Alexander Doniphan, had arranged a peace treaty with Chief Zarcillos Largos in 1846, but that document had become a dead issue within a year. As General Carlton saw it in the spring of 1863, nothing but total war could cause the Navajo to capitulate.
Again, he handed the job to Kit Carson, a man who knew the country and the habits of the Indians. Recent critics have condemned Carson for his conduct in the campaign that followed, charging that his tactics were unnecessarily brutal and that his actions showed him to be an oppressor of the Indians. But that view, under scrutiny, fails to hold water.
Colonel Carson, in point of fact, had no desire to be in charge of a campaign to crush the Navajo, and he asked several times to be relieved of the task. But Carlton, who knew the right man for a job when he saw one, was persistent, and Carson’s sense of duty would not let him refuse. His reluctance stemmed from the military’s avowed intention of forcing the Indians to choose between unconditional surrender or extermination, a policy originally formulated by Canby. That appeared to leave no room for compromise, but Carson felt that, in the end, his participation might act as a moderating influence.
During the last half of 1863, government troops marched and countermarched through Navajoland, destroying crops and orchards and capturing livestock. They fought no major battles, but their campaigning left the Indian economy in ruins. In January of 1864, Kit Carson led his men into the depths of Canyon de Chelly, where, for the first time, he encountered a large body of Navajo. They were exhausted and starving, and at that point disposed to listen to a man who was known to be trustworthy. The tribe would have to emigrate to a government reservation at Bosque Redondo, Carson told them, but that was preferable to annihilation. Under the circumstances, the majority of the Indians agreed, and they surrendered.
Over the succeeding months, other destitute bands gave up and were conducted eastward on a dolorous journey to their new reservation along the Pecos River. That trip into exile, remembered in Navajo tribal history as the “Long Walk,” had a parallel in the tragic Trail of Tears, when Indians in the southeastern United States during the 1830s were obliged to give up their homes and move west of the Mississippi.
General Carlton was now hailed by the territorial press as the savior of New Mexico. He felt pleased that his strategy had helped reduce the danger from Indian raids, and he was eager to prove that confining the Navajo and Mescalero Apache at Bosque Redondo was the best way to keep the peace. But his reservation experiment did not pan out.
The barren land in the Pecos valley could not support the nine thousand Indians crowded there, most of whom were not interested in farming, anyway. The drinking water turned out to be disagreeably rich in alkali, having a stronger effect on the stomach than castor oil, as a soldier stationed at Fort Sumner wrote his wife. The federal government failed to provide adequate supplies to support the Indians during the period that they were getting established. And putting the Mescalero and Navajo—traditional enemies—together on the same reservation was soon recognized as a colossal blunder. When Bishop Jean Lamy came down from Santa Fe to check on possibilities for developing a mission school, he was appalled by the misery he found among the captive people.
The Mescaleros, being in the minority and suffering the most, soon kicked over the traces and melted into the mountains and plains of the south, where they resumed the old pattern of raiding. Not until the 1870s were they finally defeated and confined to a new reservation in the Sacramento Mountains.
The agony of the Navajo at Bosque Redondo lasted until 1868, at which time they were allowed to return to their beloved homeland in the west. Retracing the trail made five years before on their “Long Walk,” many of the Indians were overcome by emotion as they caught a first glimpse of their familiar mesas and smoke-colored mountains beyond Albuquerque. Their war days over forever, they resolved now to adapt to changed circumstances and rebuild the traditional pattern of life disrupted by their enforced exile on the Pecos.
With the end of the Civil War in the East in April 1865, regular troops were again available in large numbers for service on the western frontier. By late 1866, General James Carlton had given up command of New Mexico, and his California Volunteers, who had enlisted to oppose the Confederates—and ended up fighting Indians—were disbanded. But the war on hostile tribes was still far from over.
On the eastern plains, Comanches and Kiowas, occasionally abetted by far-ranging Cheyenne and Arapaho war parties, threatened New Mexico’s vital supply line, the Santa Fe Trail. Military patrols from Fort Union worked feverishly to provide protection for caravans and travelers, but in spite of their valiant efforts, Anglo-Americans venturing forth in the decade after the Civil War did so at considerable risk to their lives and property.
It was a different story for the Pueblos and Hispanos, who, in the midst of this flurry, continued to hunt buffalo and trade on the plains as they had always done. The reason, of course, was that the all-powerful Comanche remained their friends, a legacy of Governor Juan Bautista de Anza’s peace treaty made back in 1786. In one notable case, hostile Kiowas surrounded a roaming party of cíboleros (New Mexican buffalo hunters—picturesque types, armed with lances, dressed in leather suits, and wearing peaked caps topped with a feather) and prepared to massacre them to a man. But a band of Comanches happened upon the scene at this critical moment, rescued the New Mexicans, and escorted them to safety.
The Plains tribes held their ground until the early 1870s, when the full pressure of United States military might was brought against them. In the Red River War of 1874, cavalry units, including troops from Fort Union and Fort Bascom, north of modern Tucumcari, converged on the forbidding reaches of the Texas Panhandle. There the red men were hounded from one hiding place to another, until their spirit was broken, and they agreed to accept reservations in the Indian Territory. With the end of hostilities and the virtual extermination of the buffalo, which quickly followed, the vast grasslands of eastern New Mexico were suddenly thrown open for settlement.
That left only some stray Apache bands in southwestern New Mexico to be dealt with, but defeating them proved to be the most difficult chore of all. In 1879, Chief Victorio and some of his warriors bolted from their reservation and cut a bloody path across the Rio Grande and into Arizona. Their rampage lasted until Victorio’s death in 1881. His son-in-law, Nana, half-blind and crippled by rheumatism, but still capable of riding seventy miles a day, then took up the hatchet and continued the war. Nana fought eight battles against the Americans and won them all, before coming into the San Carlos Reservation in eastern Arizona.
In 1885, Nana broke out with Geronimo and raided until the final Apache surrender the following year. The most troublesome Indians were placed on a train at that time to be sent to Fort Marion, Florida, as prisoners of war. At Deming, cowboys stormed the train, intending to drag the Apaches onto the platform for a lynching. But soldiers poured from the cars to defend the captives, and a tragedy was averted. A mournful blast from the engine’s whistle cleared the tracks, and at the same time put a period to the last chapter in the long history of New Mexico’s Indian wars.
While the nomad tribes were suffering defeat and confinement on reservations, the Pueblo people were preoccupied with adjusting to life under American rule. Soon after Kearny’s conquest in 1846, the Pueblo village governors had visited Santa Fe to swear fealty to the new regime and learn the nature of its policies. What they found out was not altogether reassuring. Mexico had recognized them as citizens and had provided special attorneys to protect their property rights, but it appeared now that the United States was unprepared to grant them these privileges or to make any legal distinction between Pueblos and the warlike nomads. Anglo-American thinking, firmly wedded to stereotypes drawn from contact with Indians in the eastern woodlands and the Mississippi valley, tended to resist any policy that looked toward the elevation of the native people to full rights of citizenship.
New Mexico’s first Indian agent, James S. Calhoun, recognized the special problem as early as 1849. He informed Washington that the industrious Pueblos were model subjects and urged that they be extended voting rights and that their land grants given by Spain be protected. The last point was particularly important, because the Indians, holding some of the best irrigated agricultural lands in the territory, were constantly bothered by trespassers and squatters. The U.S. Surveyor General did confirm original Pueblo grants after 1854, a ruling reaffirmed by the Congress. But the duty of the federal government to intervene actively to protect Pueblo Indian lands from encroachment—the policy Spain had pursued—would not be recognized until 1913.
Through most of the late nineteenth century, the Pueblos suffered unconscionable neglect. One observer after another reported their great need and desire for formal education, but illiteracy remained the rule. Special Agent William F. Arny told the Interior Secretary in 1870 that several villages had scraped together enough pennies to hire inept teachers, and others had offered to donate land and build a school if they could obtain some assistance from the government. But thus far their initiative had brought no response from small-minded officials.
Part of the problem was that the Pueblos, along with those Indians recently conquered and shoved onto reservations, were the hapless prey of disinterested or dishonest agents, corrupt territorial officials, and thieving supply contractors. One rare, unprejudiced Indian agent, taking a candid look at some of the ills, placed blame on congressmen and the public. “The American people,” he declared bitingly, “like humbug as a duck does water. They won’t believe the truth. There is so much interest used in Washington to get big appropriations, and the estimates needed are greatly exaggerated … And meanwhile the Indian school business and all is mere humbug; to use money for other purposes than that designed.”9 The agent’s complaint, made in 1884, has a distinctly modern ring.
By and large, the Pueblos had to wait until the opening decades of the twentieth century before much notice was taken of them, but one small gesture acknowledging their existence was offered in 1863—by Abraham Lincoln. As early as 1620, the Spanish government had presented silver-tipped canes, or staffs of justice, to the Pueblo Indian governors as a symbol of authority. The canes, carefully preserved, continued to be passed down from one official to another long after Spain had given up her hold on New Mexico. President Lincoln, hearing of the custom and wishing to honor the Pueblos for remaining neutral during the Civil War, prepared a new set of canes, each with a silver crown upon which was engraved the name of the pueblo, the date of 1863, and the signature A. Lincoln. Presented to the villagers by Indian Superintendent Michael Steck, these gifts were honored alongside the original Spanish staffs, and today, when the Pueblos inaugurate their governors each January 1, the canes—one given by a king and the other by a U.S. president—are ceremoniously conveyed to the new officials.
Once the slavery issue was resolved beyond the borders of New Mexico, the maturing American nation found itself confronting other unsettling problems: what to do about reconstruction? How to bring the freed Negroes into society? Where to put the remnants of western Indians as they were crowded off their hunting range? How to regulate predatory businessmen—the empire builders and the moguls of the outspreading railroads? But most of all, there remained the questions of how to relieve the great pain left by the Civil War and how to restore unity and national spirit.
For New Mexico and other western territories, just beginning an unprecedented period of development and growth, memory of the tragic conflict faded quickly and was replaced by a boisterous enthusiasm generating a conviction that prosperity lay right over the next mountain. Throughout the Southwest, railroad promotion was in the air, and in New Mexico’s scarped and rock-ribbed mountain ranges, prospectors with picks and hammers were beginning to uncover deposits of gold, silver, copper, and other minerals. The ancient dream of Coronado and Oñate of finding El Dorado on the Rio Grande arose phoenixlike to animate a new generation of fortune seekers. And for those men for whom railroading or mining held little attraction, the territory’s plains and basins, from which the last hostile Indians were then being cleared, provided abundant room for staking out a princely sheep or cattle ranch.
In 1868, the year the telegraph reached Santa Fe, the New Mexico Territory had a population of twelve thousand to fifteen thousand Anglo-Americans. With their bustle and ambition, they sparkplugged the new economic boom, but enterprising Hispanos were soon catching the spirit and seizing opportunities for personal enrichment. From their old settlements in the Rio Grande and Upper Pecos valleys, native New Mexicans fanned out eastward, crossed the Canadian River, and planted tiny communities and sheep camps as far as the Staked Plains of Texas. Others trickled into the southeastern part of the territory, and by the late 1860s had built adobe homes along the Rio Hondo, an affluent of the Pecos. Another wave of Hispanic pioneers moved westward—from Socorro to the gemlike valley of the Rio San Francisco close to the Arizona boundary; and from the old villages in the Chama valley to the San Juan Basin in the Four Corners. Finally, a few of the more venturesome drove seed flocks northward in the 1870s, stocking the emerald-green ranges of the Rocky Mountain states with New Mexican sheep.
The expansion of the sheepmen had not progressed far before cattle ranchers, mostly from Texas, began to drift into the territory and compete for the choicer pasture lands. As early as 1865, beef contractors for the Bosque Redondo Reservation were encouraging stockmen to drive cattle from the plains of west Texas up the valley of the Pecos River to feed the captive Navajo. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, among the early participants in that activity, took their first herd of longhorns to New Mexico in the summer of 1866. Even though their route up the Pecos had been blazed by others, it soon became known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and when in succeeding years it was extended to Colorado and beyond, it came to rank with the Sedalia and the Chisholm trails as one of the great cattle thoroughfares of the American West.
Conspicuous among the pioneer stockmen was John S. Chisum, an early associate of Goodnight, who in 1873 began building a ranch of baronial dimensions along the middle Pecos River. From his headquarters near modern Roswell, Chisum sent out a hundred cowboys to tend some eighty thousand head of cattle grazing on ranges that extended, according to one local newspaper, “as far as a man can travel, on a good horse, during a summer.”10 The massive size of the operation soon earned Chisum the title “Cow King of New Mexico,” and for a time in the late 1870s, he was probably the largest cattle raiser in the United States.
The demand for beef at Bosque Redondo and other Indian reservations had first drawn ranchers to New Mexico, but it was not long before boomtowns in newly opened mining districts throughout the territory offered even more promising markets. The sudden stampede of people to out-of-the-way mountain valleys, where most of the mineral discoveries occurred, created unparalleled opportunities for a cattleman to trail in a small herd and sell it at a considerable profit.
New Mexico at that time already possessed one of the oldest mining industries in America. In the Cerrillos Hills south of Santa Fe, Pueblo Indians for centuries had worked open-pit turquoise mines, removing some one hundred thousand tons of waste rock, with nothing more than muscle and primitive tools. The Spaniards showed little interest in turquoise, but they did extract lead, coal, and considerable copper from the Santa Rita del Cobre Mines near Silver City. During the Mexican period, a short-lived gold rush drew fortune seekers to the Ortiz Mountains south of the Galisteo Basin, but the finding of spectacular bonanzas awaited the influx of prospectors that occurred at the end of the Civil War.
Many of General James Carlton’s California boys, once they had finished with Indian fighting and been mustered out of service, decided to stay in New Mexico. Some of them, familiar with the gold fields and mining methods in their home state, took up pans and picks and began prospecting in the more secluded valleys and sierras of the territory. That vanguard was soon joined by new ranks of hopeful men, fresh from the overcrowded diggings in Colorado.
The late 1860s witnessed important gold strikes at Pinos Altos, below the Mogollon Range, and in the nearby Pyramid Mountains, and at Elizabethtown, situated high on the western slope of Baldy Mountain in the Sangre de Cristos. In the following decade, dramatic gold and silver discoveries created a minor frenzy among promoters and investors and gave swift birth to such new towns as Hillsboro, Chloride, Georgetown, and White Oaks. One of the richest finds was made in 1878, not far south of Hillsboro, at Lake Valley—a vaulted cavern of horn silver so pure that miners sawed and cut the ore into blocks, instead of blasting it free.
The crescendo of New Mexico’s mining boom had passed by the early 1890s, but while it was in its noisy prime, it pumped much-needed wealth into the territorial economy. It also lent credence to those wispy legends of colonial days, now a part of American folklore, that suggested that the wind-battered mesas and mountains of New Mexico were storehouses of treasure. The wealth proved real enough—just not large enough to fulfill the extravagant dreams of those who pegged their hopes on a never-ending supply of precious metal. In the wake of the bust, the high country was left littered with ghost towns and abandoned tunnels whose only occupants were swarms of shrieking bats.
Coinciding with the peak of the mining excitement, railroads had thrust across New Mexico, finally tying the lower half of the nation together. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, besting its rival, the Denver and Rio Grande Western, for possession of Raton Pass, became the first to lay rails into New Mexico from the east. Following the heavy ruts of the Santa Fe Trail, it reached Las Vegas early in 1879. Continuing westward, the railroad bypassed Santa Fe with its main line and curved down the Rio Grande valley to Albuquerque. Thence it reached south to a division point at Rincon. There, one branch was extended to El Paso, while the other ran to Deming, where, in 1881, it forged a transcontinental link with the Southern Pacific that was building eastward from California. Soon other major railroads, short lines, and spurs spread a vast web of track across the territory to serve the newly prosperous farming, ranching, and mining interests.
A surveyor, helping to lay out a rail bed in western New Mexico had exclaimed with vehemence to his tent-mates one evening in 1880 that surely “This was God’s country because no one else would have it.”11 He was wrong, of course, for with improved communication and promotion of New Mexico’s bountiful resources, more and more people from the far corners of the nation began arriving to stake out and claim a piece of the territory for their own.
Among them, inevitably, were those who came because the palmy days of the mining camps, the railroad towns, and the cattle ranches promised easy picking for any ruthless and violent gent willing to prey on his neighbors. It was a time—from the end of the Civil War to the end of the century—when most men wore a gun belted to the waist and when dance hall keepers installed signs that read, “Don’t shoot the musicians, they are doing the best they can.” The New Mexico Territory was an outlaw haven, and, in the phrasing of Emerson Hough, a popular writer of the day, “was without doubt, as dangerous a country as ever lay out of doors.”12
Political corruption, range wars, feuds, land frauds, and cattle rustling—the assembly of irritants that plagued America’s western frontier from beginning to end—brought their full measure of grief to New Mexico’s citizenry. The Colfax County War (1875–1878), one of the more prominent disturbances, pitted claimants of the nearly two-million-acre Maxwell Land Grant against squatters who had settled on what they regarded as public domain. At the center of the tumult, which included a string of shootings and several hangings by enraged vigilantes, rode the notorious Texas gunman, Clay Allison. The Santa Fe Ring, a Republican political machine that dominated territorial affairs from the late 1860s to the mid-1880s, also had a hand in the Colfax affair, as did Governor Samuel B. Axtell.
The bloody disorders in southern New Mexico that came to be known as the Lincoln County War (1878–1881) attracted even greater attention. There, within the 27,000 square miles embracing the largest county in the United States, rival factions composed of merchants and cattlemen fell to feuding. Complete lawlessness soon reigned, as rustlers and gunfighters arrived from all parts of the Southwest to take advantage of the turmoil. Among them was the young firebrand William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid.
In the fall of 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes declared Lincoln County in a state of insurrection, and a federal investigator, Frank W. Angell, was sent to inquire into the sources of the hostilities. He found territorial affairs a shambles, with officials including the United States Attorney, the Surveyor General, and Governor Axtell deeply embroiled in Lincoln’s troubles. Even the courts were in disarray. Numerous murder cases, for example, never reached trial, for preliminary hearings resulted in a stock verdict: “The deceased came to his death accidentally after having given due provocation.”13
Angell’s report to the president led to the removal of Governor Axtell and the resignation of other territorial officials, most of them members of the scandalous Santa Fe Ring. General Lew Wallace of Indiana was then appointed as governor to clean up New Mexico and bring peace to Lincoln County. Wallace, a veteran of the 1862 Battle of Shiloh and at one time the youngest major general in the Union army, was a sensitive man of artistic temperament who had a fondness for painting and for writing novels. In Santa Fe, he discovered a congenial climate for both of those pursuits (parts of his classic work Ben Hur were composed in the old adobe Governors Palace). But in the matter of politics and reform, the atmosphere proved highly combustible and unfavorable to the task of restoring stability.
For three years Governor Wallace worked to suppress violence, disperse the bands of desperadoes, and root out corrupt politicians. Not only did he have little to show for his efforts, he lived under constant threat of harm. Billy the Kid, for one, openly boasted, “I mean to ride into the plaza at Santa Fe, hitch my horse in front of the palace, and put a bullet through Lew Wallace.”14 Perhaps with that threat in mind, the governor’s wife, Susan, wrote to their son in 1879: “My Dear—General Sherman was right. We should have another war with Old Mexico to make her take back New Mexico.”15
Burdened by the day-to-day frets of his job, Wallace resigned in 1881 to take an assignment more suited to his nature, that of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. By the time he left, the Lincoln County War was burning itself out, and during the summer of that year the last phase came to an end when Sheriff Pat Garrett shot down Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner. But the imposition of order throughout New Mexico was far from complete.
Ahead lay a series of blood-stained episodes fated to keep the land on edge for another full generation: a cattlemen’s war around Farmington in San Juan County; a gunfight in which Deputy Sheriff Elfego Baca alone stood off eighty cowboys for thirty-six hours in the village of Frisco; reigns of terror by such merciless bandit leaders as Mariano Leiba of Bernalillo and Vicente Silva of Las Vegas; raids by the Gorras Blancas (White Caps), a secret Hispano group in northeastern New Mexico, organized to protect communal lands from encroachment by Anglo ranchers; the murder of a controversial political figure, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain of Las Cruces, and his young son as they were crossing the empty wastes of the White Sands; and in the next century an attack by the Mexican revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa, on the border town of Columbus during March 1916. With experiences like those, and others equally racking, it is apparent that New Mexico’s road to maturity was a long and painful one.
Even in the midst of civil strife and political storms, New Mexico was edging toward a social and cultural transformation. But the changes beginning to take place and the society that was emerging showed only marginal similarities with the developments then going on in other areas of America’s West. New Mexico, despite immigration from the eastern United States, steady economic growth, and a gradual increase in educational institutions—all of which drew the territory closer to the mainstream of national life—still remained a land apart.
Much of the reason resided in the continuing dominance of the Hispano population. Throughout territorial days, and indeed until the 1940s, descendants of the colonial Spaniards constituted a majority of New Mexico’s people. In the other borderland provinces acquired from Mexico in 1848—Texas, Arizona, and California—the original inhabitants, by contrast, had quickly been swamped by incoming Anglo-Americans and their Hispanic culture either buried or relegated to small, isolated islands within the new English-speaking society.
In the eastern United States, where the rise of industry lured wave after wave of European immigrants, it had become fashionable and appropriate to speak, by the 1880s, of the national melting pot. Accurate as the metaphor may have been for most of the country, it just did not apply to the sons of the conquistadors on the upper Rio Grande. Simply put, the New Mexicans refused to melt; and at every turn, they repulsed attempts to make them give up their language, their folkways, and their traditional style of life.
Gradually, of course, by a process of accretion, American ways made inroads. Yet the framework of Hispanic culture was kept intact and continued to serve as the principal point of reference by which the people viewed their past and measured the future. It was a situation similar to that experienced by the Pueblos subjected to Spanish rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Indians, when under pressure, had taken up certain external features of the new alien culture, but at the same time they held fast to those ancient practices that were the heartbeat and pulse of their traditional world.
For a long time in the nineteenth century, New Mexicans were allowed to move along at an unhurried pace, and to follow their Old World customs without interference because other Americans were hardly aware of their existence. The desert Southwest was a land virtually unknown to New Englanders, southerners, or mid westerners. Indeed, many labored under the assumption that that part of it known as New Mexico belonged to a foreign country.
It was a curious, peripatetic New Englander named Charles F. Lummis who was the first to tell easterners something about the strange and virtually unknown corner of their country that had been settled three centuries before by the Spaniards. Lummis initially passed through New Mexico in 1884 on his way from one newspaper job in Ohio to another in Los Angeles. Young and of a romantic frame of mind, he quickly fell victim to a spell cast by the colorful land and its exotic people. In more than a dozen subsequent books, he glorified the Hispano and Indian cultures of the Southwest, extolled them as valuable adjuncts to American civilization, and chided his fellow countrymen for paying more attention to decadent Europe than to some of the bright and unusual places in their own nation.
Hammering away at his theme, Lummis coined the expression “See America First,” by which he meant New Mexico and the Greater Southwest. The Santa Fe Railroad, eager for passengers on its new track through the territory, picked up the phrase and used it, along with Lummis’s books, in a promotional campaign to attract permanent settlers as well as tourists. Plainly, the day had passed when any American could speak, as General Sherman had, of New Mexico’s worthlessness and recommend that it be given away.
One testing still remained to confirm Americans in the belief that New Mexicans were loyal and worthy sons of the republic. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, President William McKinley sent a telegram to Governor Miguel A. Otero, Jr., at Santa Fe, asking him to assist in recruiting stalwart young men who were good shots and good riders. Otero, the first Hispano to serve as governor of the territory, knew he was on the spot. “Many newspapers in the East,” he later told an interviewer, “were dubious about our loyalty we having such a large Mexican population.”16 Some of these papers published inflammatory statements, claiming that New Mexico was filled with Spanish sympathizers and that one group of partisans had raised the flag of Spain over a church north of Santa Fe.
Hoping to lay suspicions to rest, Governor Otero issued a call to every town and ranch in the territory for volunteers and offered his own services, if needed. The response from both His-panos and Anglos was so generous that afterward Theodore Roosevelt would claim that half the officers and men of his famous Rough Riders Regiment came from New Mexico. One of note was young Captain Maximiliano Luna, among the first to plant the guidon of his company upon the summit of Cuba’s San Juan Hill. He was later killed while serving in the Philippines.
The patriotism of New Mexicans was reaffirmed during World War I. On the bloody fields of France, Hispanos and Indians formed a third of New Mexico’s contribution to the great army that stopped the German spring drive of 1918. But by that time, the people of the Southwest had already won the ultimate recognition that made them full participants in the American political system: in 1912, both New Mexico and Arizona achieved statehood, as the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states, respectively.
For New Mexico, the event marked the end of sixty-two years of territorial status and the successful conclusion of a long and hard-fought campaign by a small group of statehood advocates. The delay, in part, had been caused by many New Mexicans themselves who, over the years, had protested that the people were too poor to bear the taxes needed to support a state government. Conservative businessmen also lined up with the opposition—not out of consideration for the poor, but because they felt that federal control from Washington was preferable to “home rule” by unscrupulous politicians. Then there was the fear and some prejudice on the part of eastern congressmen who believed that until English had been made the language of the courts and schools, New Mexico would not be ready for democracy. That obstacle began to dissolve in 1898, after Congress passed the Fergusson Act providing for the foundation of a public school system in the territory.
The active and vocal minority supporting statehood included politicians aspiring to one of the two Senate seats that would be created; owners of large land holdings who hoped that admission would lure investors and boom the value of real estate; and those progressive citizens who believed that New Mexico, with its large population (327,301 in 1910) was honor bound to accept her responsibilities and become a state.
When the matter could no longer be evaded, Congress passed the Enabling Act, signed by President William Howard Taft on June 20, 1910, which provided for the calling of a constitutional convention in New Mexico. The conservative document that body drafted was ratified by voters early the following year, and on January 6, 1912, New Mexico formally became a state in the Union. William C. McDonald, a rancher from Carrizozo, was elected governor. The Senate seats went to Thomas Benton Catron, once a power in the old Santa Fe Ring, and to Albert Bacon Fall, who nine years later, as U.S. Secretary of the Interior and the first New Mexican to achieve cabinet rank, would suffer disgrace in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal.
At the White House ceremony for the signing of the statehood bill, President Taft, after laying down his pen, said to the small group of New Mexican dignitaries ringing his desk, “Well, it is all over. I am glad to give you life. I hope you will be healthy.”17 The same hope was with the people of the new state. As the word was flashed by telegraph to Santa Fe, citizens assembled in the plaza facing the old Governors Palace and on the same spot where Spaniards and Indians had fought in 1680, where Mexicans celebrated their independence in 1821, and where ranks of Confederate soldiers rode in 1862, they set up a chorus of rousing cheers for the just-born state of New Mexico.