Edmund G. Ross: Soldier, Senator, Abolitionist

19: Understanding New Mexico

226 Chap ter ninete en Understanding New Mexico Out of such consideration, I could have done no more than to have exiled myself to this kingdom, at the ends of the earth and remote beyond compare. —Don Diego de Vargas to his son-in-law, April 9, 1692| Two centuries after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the land that Don Diego de Vargas reconquered could still be considered “remote.”1 But with the railroad reaching New Mexico in the first few years of the 1880s, the territory rapidly emerged from its isolated past. Historian Howard R. Lamar described New Mexico as “dramatically behind the rest of the country in income, education, population, economic opportunity, and political standards.” The reformers that Grover Cleveland brought into his administration in 1885 believed New Mexico was badly in need of “a radical reconstruction of its economy and politics.”2 Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War, ran on a platform of reform, and to that end—given Edmund G. Ross’s exceptionally strong support from the Albuquerque business community—he appointed Ross to serve as territorial governor. At the same time Cleveland appointed George Washington Julian as surveyor general of New Mexico. Both men had been active in the abolitionist movement and were equally determined to bring change to New Mexico and to purge its government of corrupt officials.3 The story of Edmund G. Ross’s tenure as territorial governor cannot be properly told without some knowledge of why New Mexico was unique and seriously lagging behind much of the country. Indeed, picking up on Understanding New Mexico = 227 any aspect of New Mexico history in the late nineteenth century, without a basic understanding for its very old past, would offer only a fragmentary understanding of the land and peoples of New Mexico. Among the territories , New Mexico was unique mainly because it evolved in isolation not just from the United States but even from Spain and Mexico in previous decades and centuries. The first permanent European settlers to join the aboriginal people of the area came in 1598, led by the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate. Settlers were led to believe that life, in reasonable time, could be fashioned into something akin to life in the better social stratum of New Spain (Mexico). Grants of land were an incentive, along with the promise of good conditions for farming, with natives to do much of the work, and access to untapped mineral wealth. Spanish titles, coveted by men of that era, occasionally were given as an inducement. It was assumed that what could not readily be provided in New Mexico would be brought in by wagon train from New Spain. However, life was not nearly so easy; the distance for traders and government supply trains was great and the travel dangerous. Because New Mexico was found to have so little to offer in the way of resources or products and no navigable rivers or seaports, the settlers were poorly and infrequently supported by the viceroyalty. New Mexico’s Spanish settlers, those who managed to survive the early years, did so partly by their wits and with the help of the Pueblo Indians whose communities and farms, mostly along the banks of the Rio Grande and its tributaries, were established even centuries before the Spanish arrived. When the settlers did not easily adapt to their new and often harsh circumstances, they demanded much of the Pueblo people including their labor, their food, and other essentials. Franciscan friars who came with the settlers had the mission of converting the natives to Christianity. In the process they too demanded much of the Puebloans to help support their daily needs and to build their churches. In time the difficulty of living in semi-arid New Mexico became something of an equalizer. The Spanish settlers had to do without much they formerly took for granted. They learned to live without milled lumber, and the windows of their modest homes were left unglazed. As clothing wore out, buckskin became a common substitute for cloth. Tools of any kind were hard to come by and sometimes were fashioned from otherwise useless armor. Anything made of metal was worth its weight in gold. Adobe and some stone were pretty much the only building materials. Although 228 < chapter nineteen shortages of nearly everything were a reality, perhaps the most serious shortage of all was knowledge of life outside New Mexico’s ill-defined borders . Schools and libraries did not exist. There was little regular contact with the rest of the world. Communities, when established in California and Texas, were hundreds of miles away, difficult to reach across the vast and arid terrain controlled by hostile nomadic tribes. As generations folded one into another, traditions, language, and even the Catholic religion evolved uniquely, or in some respects did not evolve much at all, while the rest of the world did.4 Among the earliest buildings was an impressive two-story adobe structure in Santa Fe, New Mexico’s only city for more than a hundred years. The building housed the central government of the northern province of New Spain. Construction began on the building in 1610, making it what is believed to be the oldest public building in the United States. The building would become known as the Palace of the Governors, the home of nearly all future governors including Edmund Ross.5 By 1798 Spanish settlers, still in essential isolation, could look back on two hundred years of history in New Mexico largely unaware of the establishment and early decades of development of the United States far to the east. New Mexico continued to be a Spanish colony until 1821, when Mexico declared its independence from Spain. But even under Mexican rule, New Mexico remained little more than a remote province of minor importance. Simultaneously with Mexican independence, the Santa Fe Trail got its start initiating trade between the United States and Mexico. For the first time, wagon trains of goods reached Santa Fe after two months or more of arduous travel from St. Louis. By the 1840s the trips were more common and the goods flowing into New Mexico more plentiful, but the amount was still slight compared with what the railroad would eventually bring. In the summer of 1846, with the United States flexing its doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and in the midst of war with Mexico, the U.S. Army of the West made its way across the Santa Fe Trail to claim New Mexico as a possession of the United States. General Stephen Kearny made promises to the citizens of New Mexico, beginning in the town of Las Vegas, where he stood on a rooftop next to the plaza to speak to the people gathered. Of the promises, three were most important: The United States would not interfere with long-established property rights granted under Spanish and Mexican rule. Religious practices , whatever they might be, were the right of citizens. And Kearny’s army Understanding New Mexico = 229 was there to provide protection from Indian raids on communities, farms, and ranches. “The Apaches and Navajos come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep, and even your women whenever they please. My government will correct all this. It will keep off the Indians, protect you and your persons and property: and I repeat again, will protect you in your religion.”6 A few days later, with the Army of the West occupying Santa Fe, Kearny, at the Palace of the Governors, presented Juan Bautista Vigil y Alarid, representing the people of New Mexico, with a formal proclamation announcing that New Mexican people were no longer citizens of Mexico.7 The flag of the United States was raised over the plaza for the first time. American newcomers, who began to arrive in greater numbers after the Kearny conquest, and especially after 1850, when New Mexico officially was made a United States territory, were astonished by what they experienced . Life in New Mexico was vastly different from any other place they had known, and it was often perceived as primitive. Books, articles, government reports, memoirs, and stories of life in New Mexico were carried back to the states by travelers whose accounts created a lasting and mostly negative impression of a strange and remote territory. W. W. H. Davis, who was sent to New Mexico to be the United States attorney for the territory, kept a journal of his experiences during the three years he was there. He published his observations in a book, El Gringo: New Mexico and Her People, in 1857. Davis reported that education in New Mexico was “at a very low ebb,” with illiteracy a more serious problem than in any other American territory, and declared that the “fearful amount of ignorance among the people is enough to make us question the propriety of intrusting them with the power to make their own laws.”8 Because the book was widely distributed, and his reputation respected, it contributed to the poor reputation of New Mexico in the states and in Congress. Thirty years after the publication of El Gringo, during Edmund Ross’s third year as territorial governor, Davis’s book was quoted verbatim by members of the House Committee on Territories who were arguing against New Mexico statehood. “The standard of female chastity is deplorably low . . . prostitution is carried on to a fearful extent, and it is quite common for parents to sell their own daughters to gratify the lust of the purchasers, thus making a profit from their own and their children’s shame. . . . It is the custom of married men to support a wife and mistress at the same time, and but too frequently the wife has also her male friend. . . . Such 230 < chapter nineteen practices are indulged by three-fourths of the married population. . . . The people of New Mexico are extremely superstitious, and which prevails to a greater or lesser degree among all classes, the intelligent as well as the most ignorant.”9 Ross was astonished by the use of the Davis quotations by House members nearly thirty years after publication. To counter what he considered shocking ignorance, he prepared a memorial to be read at an open session of Congress on March 27, 1888. Ross believed the findings were pure prejudice and a gross exaggeration of conditions in New Mexico. He believed that the Davis quotations were practically the only reason New Mexico was denied statehood. Ross may have convincingly defended New Mexico in regard to these prejudicial statements, but what he could not deny was the failure of the people to establish schools even when every territorial governor had encouraged every legislature to do so. The best he could do was cite a statistic that purported to show that illiteracy in New Mexico had declined by 20 percent in recent years. Ross’s efforts notwithstanding, New Mexico had to wait another twenty-four years before achieving statehood in 1912. Davis’s book is important but should be read with the writer’s biases in mind. Davis did correctly observe that isolation is what caused New Mexico to be the impoverished place it was in the 1850s. “There is no country protected by our flag and subject to our laws so little known to the people of the United States as the territory of New Mexico. Its very position precludes an intimate intercourse with other sections of the Union, and serves to lock up knowledge of the country within its own limits.”10 There is more to add to the statehood story. The subcommittee considering New Mexico statehood also considered the annual reports of former governors Lew Wallace and Lionel Sheldon, both of whom had commented on the primitive state of agriculture in New Mexico. Ironically, given that Ross badly wanted statehood during his watch, the subcommittee also considered Ross’s report of corruption in the legislative assembly and included the negative observations of all three governors in making their recommendation to deny statehood.11 Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner began his tour of duty as commander of the army in New Mexico in July 1851. For a time Sumner also administered civilian affairs when James S. Calhoun, New Mexico’s first territorial governor , became seriously ill and left the territory in May 1852. On May 27 Sumner wrote a long letter to the secretary of war expressing his honest Understanding New Mexico = 231 belief that the United States should give New Mexico back to the “Mexicans and Indians”: “With all the economy that can be used, and exertions in agriculture and the like, so long as we hold this country, as we do now, it must be a very heavy burden to us; and there never can be the slightest return for all this outlay—not even in meliorating the condition of the people; for this distribution of public money makes them more idle and worthless. There is no possibility of any change for the better. Twenty—fifty years hence— this territory will be precisely the same as it is now. There can never be an inducement for any class of our people to come here whose example would improve this people. Speculators, adventurers, and the like, are all that will come, and their example is pernicious rather than beneficial.”12 Sumner did not seem to understand why New Mexico was lagging in development compared with other parts of the country. He apparently believed New Mexicans were hopelessly lazy and ignorant; it was their own fault they lived as they did. But like Davis’s memoirs, Sumner’s words should not be discounted completely. He did foresee the negative effect to be brought by speculators, a self-serving breed of people whose influence and actions would play an important role in New Mexico history in the not-so-distant future. What Sumner did not and likely could not see was the impact that the railroad would have. Beginning in 1879, the rail lines would bring to New Mexico the very class of people he did not think could ever be induced to come, people like Edmund Ross. They came by the thousands . They were people who had, or planned to have, families. They were community builders who wanted the towns they settled in to be at least as livable as the towns they left behind. They were concerned about politics and the elected officials who affected their lives. For Ross the newcomers comprised a true constituency of citizens who supported him and opposed the self-serving powerbrokers in Santa Fe. Historian Thomas E. Chávez commented on the difference in cultural influence between the newcomers from the East and the people of New Mexico. American roots were English, God fearing, and Protestant with a strong Puritan ethic. Their mindset was steeped in individualism, with the belief that hard work and dedication to a moral goal would lead one to the good life, which might even include material success. New Mexicans, by contrast, were a product of Catholic Spain with a strong measure of Native American influence. Chávez sees them as “less individualistic and more inclusive.” Morality did not lead to material rewards. The reward for leading a good life was eternal.13 The perceptions of newcomers, like Davis and 232 < chapter nineteen Sumner, were influenced by their world, which included a belief in Manifest Destiny and often an insensitivity to other cultures. To be sure, Edmund Ross was a man who emerged from the American Protestant ethic, but rooted deep within him was also an abolitionist view of life. He had a built-in compassion for people who were poor, ill educated, and victimized by those who would rationalize their right to take advantage of the less privileged. Ross would see the likes of Samuel Pomeroy over and over again in the speculators who dominated politics in New Mexico, wealthy men who probably believed that they were being rightfully rewarded for their initiative. Property ownership for both New Mexicans and the new settlers from the Midwest and the East was important, but the concept of land ownership was different for the two groups. New Mexicans generally prized property for its usefulness, for farming or livestock grazing, and as their principal form of wealth to be passed on to future generations. To Americans, land was often no more than a commodity, a way of acquiring wealth. In early 1880, three Albuquerque men—Franz Huning, William Hazeldine, and Elias Stover—bought up a sizeable acreage of land, long held by local families , east of the town plaza. The land was quietly purchased on behalf of the Santa Fe Railroad at a “modest” price, in advance of the railroad actually reaching the area, and probably for no more than a few dollars per acre.14 About half of the land was used for the railroad yards, while the other half was subdivided into hundreds of future town lots and sold off at huge profits both for the railroad and for Huning, Hazeldine, and Stover. The land is now downtown Albuquerque. The most serious land grabbing by newcomers would come from the settlement of land grants under United States law. New Mexicans had been promised continued ownership of their property both in the declaration of General Kearny in 1846 and in the formal treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. However, New Mexicans would find that attaining fulfillment of the promise required considerable effort on their part. In addition to at least some fluency in English and written proof of ownership, which they often did not have, a knowledge of the American system of land patents was needed, a concept totally foreign to New Mexicans. A lawyer to plead their case was always necessary, and that, of course, took money—or, in lieu of money, giving up some of their land, sometimes as much as half, in payment for legal services. Understanding New Mexico = 233 By the time Edmund Ross became governor, the lawyers and the businessmen associated with them, men who coveted huge tracts of land, would dominate business, ranching, mining, and government throughout the territory. Their massive landholdings, one close to 2 million acres, were acquired through manipulations of the law that were at the very least questionable. These were the speculators that Colonel Sumner had warned would soon come to the territory. There is a poignant footnote to the 1888 story of Ross’s hopes for New Mexico statehood. Twice before, in 1874 and 1876, New Mexico had narrowly missed becoming a state. In 1888 more than a decade had passed; New Mexico’s population had dramatically increased, and the two rail lines that now traversed the territory had put an emphatic end to New Mexico’s isolation. To Ross, the chance that New Mexico would “make it” this time was very good indeed. Ross had a vision for New Mexico which he repeated often during his tenure in office but never with greater enthusiasm than in a letter to H. C. Burnett, director of immigration for New Mexico, on February 24. Ross was in Washington, D.C., at the time and had learned that day that New Mexico was to be nominated for possible statehood. He believed that statehood would bring the entrepreneurs who could not fail to see the great potential in the new state. Statehood in Ross’s words would “put the new state on the high road to prosperity.”15 Ross could foresee that statehood would also bring the funds necessary to control devastating floods in the valleys by storing irrigation water from mountain runoff in reservoirs to be available for future irrigation needs. Ross had been raised in a farming family and believed farming would always be the backbone of the economy in New Mexico. He was sure farming could flourish as never before with statehood. But it was not to be, not in 1888 at least. As disappointed as Ross was about the failure of statehood, it was only the first of two devastating blows. The next would be the defeat of his plan to deal with New Mexico’s land grant problems. ...