In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

85 T he arrival of the first steam engine in Lamy, just outside Santa Fe, in 1880, not only opened up markets in the Midwest and East to the delivery of livestock from New Mexico but also brought an eventual influx of Anglo-Americans to the territory. Land values shot up dramatically ; land speculation became rampant; and gradually, through fraudulent, deceitful, or legitimate means, Anglos acquired many of the old Spanish and Mexican land grants or at least portions of them. Part of the problem was that few Hispanic citizens possessed the kind of documentation that would easily stand the test of Anglo-American courts, a fact that placed those individuals and their communities at a considerable disadvantage in contests over land tenure. Yet the grants included some of the best land and offered the choicest grazing anywhere in the territory. Down in Lincoln County, which at the time covered nearly one-fifth of the entire territory and was the largest county in the United States, the Lincoln County War was in full swing. This three-and-a-half-year conflict had begun in 1878 as a range war between two competing factions of cattle barons. The war, despite its colorful participants, including Billy the Kid, epitomized the lawless climate of the times, when rangeland speculation was rampant. Speculators, Lawyers, and Politicians One Anglo speculator in particular, attorney Thomas B. Catron, who was appointed attorney general for the territory in 1869, became an expert on land grants and soon became the most notorious of all the land grant speculators . Using all the tools of legal chicanery, Catron gained an interest in or clear title to thirty-four different land grants totaling three million acres, making him the largest individual landholder in the history of the Closing Out the Century chapter nine 86 • Chapter Nine United States. Catron represented clients in at least sixty-three land grant cases with holdings comprising even more acreage. When his own holdings are included, he was involved in litigation over more land than any other lawyer in New Mexico’s history.1 He became the virtual dictator of the ruling Republican Party and was the most prominent member of a group of power brokers known as the Santa Fe Ring—a loose-knit alliance that included nearly every governor of New Mexico from the late 1860s to 1885. Like several other members of the Ring, this most powerful man in the territory had a major behind-the-scenes stake in the scandal-filled Lincoln County War.2 More than one politician-turned-rancher ended up becoming a leading cattle baron.3 Stephen Dorsey, a former U.S. senator from Arkansas who abandoned national politics after he was implicated in a scandal involving post office contracts, moved to New Mexico, where he had previously acquired land in Colfax County. By 1886 he was considered one of the principal cattlemen of the territory.4 Cattle kings abounded during this period. In Grant County, which had reported only 4,188 head of cattle (and about the same number of citizens) in the 1880 census, the LC (Lyons and Campbell) Ranch alone was running tens of thousands of cattle during the 1890s. By that time Thomas Lyons had become a legend in southwestern New Mexico. In fact, the cattle boom had proliferated in this part of the territory during the 1880s with massive operations in Sierra and Socorro counties, as well as in Grant County. The largest operator may have been John Grayson, who owned a range covering around a million acres in Socorro County and ran some forty thousand head of stock on it.5 Just as John Chisum was cattle king of the Pecos in the 1870s, Dorsey held that distinction a decade later, and Thomas Lyons followed in the 1890s—a triumvirate that represented three different stages in the evolution of the open-range era. Not all cattle barons were full-fledged citizens, however. Wilson Waddingham, who arrived on the scene in 1870, was characterized by one newspaper as “an English Lord without a title.” Waddingham, however, was actually a colorful, peripatetic Canadian who was lured west by the California gold rush and later profited immensely from one capital investment scheme after another. Employing the legal talents of his Santa Fe Ring friend Thomas Catron, Waddingham bought up portions of several land grants along the Canadian River in San Miguel County. By the end of 1872 he controlled probably the largest and finest chunk of open...

Share