Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico by Malcolm Ebright, Rick Hendricks, Richard W. Hughes (review)

One of the testimonial blurbs printed on the dust jacket of Four Square Leagues calls the book “an authoritative masterpiece,” which suits only chapter 8. But that single chapter is worth the whole book.

Following U.S. annexation of Nuevo México, Congress created the Office of the Surveyor General of New Mexico, which was charged with investigating Spanish and Mexican land grant claims in the territory and recommending congressional approval or rejection of such claims. That mandate applied to indigenous communities, as well as private citizens. William Pelham, the first surveyor general, soon received documents presented by various Indian pueblos purporting to be authentic grant instruments dating from 1689 and authorized by then governor Domingo Jironza Petríz de Cruzate. Pelham accepted those supposed grant documents and recommended to Congress that the territories described in them be formally approved and patented to the individual tribes, which in due time they were.

It was not until almost fifty years later, in 1893, that a man named Will Tipton, working as a translator for the Court of Private Land Claims, pronounced the “Cruzate grants” to be frauds. He pointed out oddities in the handwriting and spelling in the documents, including misspelling the governor’s own name, which undermined any possibility that the grants dated from the seventeenth century as claimed. Subsequent research by historians has shown that the paper on which the Cruzate grants were written probably dates to the nineteenth century. As a result, the grants have been thoroughly discredited, although the patents based on them and issued under congressional authority remain valid.

Beginning at least as early as the 1980s, some historians began to wonder if the Cruzate grants were in fact copied from authentic originals. Ebright, Hendricks, and Hughes take the most comprehensive look at the “Cruzate grants” to date, concluding, “The only explanation that seems moderately plausible is that these documents were at least partially based on authentic documents in which, at least to some extent, the events recounted in the extant Cruzate documents were set forth” (234). Even so, who the makers of the nineteenth-century partial copies were and why the copies were made remain, despite Ebright, Hendricks, and Hughes’s impressive research, a confounding mystery of New Mexican and southwestern history.

Much of the rest of Four Square Leagues suffers some of the worst defects of multi-authored works: temporal sequences are obliterated by an editorial process that resembles the work of a food blender, and protagonists suddenly appear or reappear without introductions in the multiple, complex stories of centuries-long Pueblo defense of their lands. Four Square Leagues contains a raft of valuable information in the form of case studies of non-native encroachment on and Pueblo strategies for protection of tribal land. But the repeatedly flawed presentation makes that information virtually inaccessible except to dedicated specialists in the history and legalities of Pueblo land rights. There are moments of incredible drama, such as the Pueblo of Santa Ana’s purchase of the Rancho Viejo in May 1753, when “The people of Santa Ana did not have 739 pesos to pay for the land, so members lined up and proffered livestock and other personal property, each item of which was assigned a value, until the full purchase price was collected” (59). Throughout most of the book, though, such human moments are submerged in a confused whirlwind of institutional intricacies.