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47 CHAPTER TWO “Under the Malign Influence of Land-Stealing Experts” IN THE SUMMER OF 1866, a twenty-two-year-old Irish immigrant named Thomas Burns rode a mule from Colorado to Abiquiú and then north to Tierra Amarilla. It was the end of a long journey for Burns, who had come to the United States as a child with his family and settled initially in Wisconsin. He left Wisconsin at sixteen and slowly worked his way west to Colorado peddling pamphlets and begging rides; he arrived in 1860 at the beginning of the gold rush. Though the southern San Juan Mountains were in a frenzy of gold fever, Burns was an immediate and total failure as a gold miner, lasting less than a day. One failed scheme followed another, and without the money to return to Wisconsin, Burns spent the early 1860s bouncing around Colorado working in trading houses and mercantile posts, losing what money he had on cattle speculation and failed military contracts. He drifted south and arrived in New Mexico in the mid-1860s as a bankrupt speculator and out-of-work military sutler. When he reached Tierra Amarilla, a group of Capote Utes stole his mule. Burns’s bad luck, however, would soon change. Escalating conflict with the Utes spurred the construction of Camp Plummer on the Tierra Amarilla land grant soon after his arrival. The camp offered commercial opportunities for merchants and military suppliers. Burns seized the opportunity. He brushed up on his Spanish, studied local property relations, organized militias, exaggerated his expertise at military supply, and married Josefa Gallegos, the daughter of a wealthy Abiquiú family. His transformation from migrant to merchant was swift. Tax records from 1872 listed his total commercial wealth at $200,000. Burns was not alone. A surge of Anglo newcomers descended on Tierra Amarilla in the 1870s looking for easy money through land acquisition and resource extraction. Most failed miserably, some spectacularly. Among them was a man named Thomas Benton Catron. Catron, who eventually partnered with Burns in a shared quest to seize control of the Tierra Amarilla grant, was named after Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. The senator was an architect of westward expansion, and his namesake Catron eventually made a name 48 • chapter two for himself in the newly opened West. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catron was one of the largest landowners in the United States. His rise to political prominence and wealth was as rapid as Burns’s. After serving as an officer in the Confederate Army in the 1860s, he migrated west to New Mexico, where he learned Spanish and was accepted to the New Mexico Bar in 1866. By 1867 he was a local district attorney and by 1869 New Mexico’s attorney general, a position in which he quickly learned to parlay his political connections into investment opportunities. Catron was among the most prolific speculators in land grants, claiming at one time to own an interest in the Mora, Beck, Espiritu Santo, Tecolote, Juana Lopez, Piedra Lumbre, Gabaldon, and Baca grants as well as nearly ten thousand acres in patented homestead claims. One historian has concluded that Catron owned all or an interest in thirty-four land grants. But whether it was nine or thirty-four, Catron was to the territory what Burns was to Tierra Amarilla: both maintained huge property holdings, dictated the terms of commercial exchange, and fiercely controlled local politics. Between 1874 and 1893 Catron relied on Burns’s political power in Tierra Amarilla to acquire a controlling interest in the Tierra Amarilla land grant. While Catron consolidated titles, Burns tightened his grip on local sheep production. While Catron set up land and cattle corporations, mining companies, and oil businesses, Burns moved into timber production and commercial sheep production on land leased from Catron. Catron relied on the income from leases on the grant to prove claims in the courts and market the property to investors worldwide. By the early 1890s Burns was the most powerful merchant in Tierra Amarilla, and Catron was the largest landowner in New Mexico. Burns owned scores of small property claims throughout the land grant, and his sheep flocks numbered in the tens of thousands. Catron’s property claims extended from the vast open plains of eastcentral New Mexico to the rugged mountains of its far northwest, with holdings in excess of three million acres. Their land acquisition efforts in Tierra Amarilla were made possible by the cooperation and collusion of the...

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