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Kearny and his troops encountered no Mexican forces when they arrived on August Kearny declared himself the military governor of the New Mexico Territory on August 18 and established a civilian government. He then took the remainder of his army west to Alta California. The New Mexicans put up no organized resistance until the Taos Revolt in early Mexican American War.

Colonial Wars American Wars Pequot War. King Philip's War. Pueblo Rebellion. King William's War. Queen Anne's War. Tuscarora War. Dummer's War. Even though others had blazed their route up the Pecos, 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.

Among them, inevitably, came the lawless preying on the settlers in the mining camps, railroad towns, and cattle ranches. The Colfax County War — , 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.

The bloody disorders in southern New Mexico that came to be known as the Lincoln County War — attracted even greater attention. There, within the 27, 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 William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. By the summer of the Lincoln County War was burning itself out. Vaughan Privately printed, Las Cruces, Even in the midst of civil strife and political storms, New Mexico was edging toward a social and cultural transformation. 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 Hispanic population. In the other borderland provinces acquired from Mexico in , Texas, Arizona, and California, the original inhabitants, by contrast, had quickly been swamped by incoming Anglo-Americans and their Hispanic culture was either buried or relegated to small, isolated islands within the new English-speaking society.

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. 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.

Some Americans remained skeptical that New Mexicans were loyal and worthy American citizens. Otero, Jr. Otero, the first Hispanic governor of the territory, knew he was on the spot.

The response from both Hispanics 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. In Congress passed the Fergusson Act providing for the foundation of a public school system in the territory. It 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, , New Mexico became the forty-seventh state in the Union.

Many newcomers found that millions of acres of the best land for farming, ranching, and logging lay beyond their grasp. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo had promised to protect the ownership rights of the heirs of land grants.

The difficulty of fulfilling that promise became apparent only later, as differences in Spanish and Anglo concepts of law and land tenure began to raise complex legal questions. The most flammable of these involved the old community land grants, which had been made by Spain and Mexico. Originally, under terms of such grants, settlers had received individual title to the small amount of farmland available along the irrigation ditches, while the remainder of the grant was held in common for purposes of grazing and wood gathering.

The boundaries of the community holdings, in the absence of surveyors, were inexactly delineated, using such natural landmarks as large rocks, prominent trees, springs and arroyos. Within a short time after establishment of the American legal system, complications arising from these Hispanic practices produced a tangled web of claims and counterclaims and opened the way for speculators to obtain, often through deceit and fraud, a controlling interest in some of the most valuable grants.

Congress took a sidelong look at the problem and handed it to the Office of the Surveyor-General, which was created in for the specific purpose of adjudicating Spanish and Mexican land titles.

At the time, New Mexico had more than one thousand claims awaiting settlement, some of them dealing with the community grants and others with large private grants that had once been allotted to individual Spanish families.

The first surveys showed that many of the old boundaries could no longer be accurately defined and that often the grants had overlapping claims. Legitimate descendants of grantees seldom possessed their original papers, and some of those who did, through fear or distrust of the alien legal procedures now imposed upon them, failed to bring the documents forward to receive new patents for their lands. In the forefront of those who profited from such a situation were the lawyers — the class of men who Father Martinez had predicted in the s would supplant priests as the real power in New Mexico.

For clearing titles, they exacted huge fees. These fees were usually paid in land from that held in common, so that, within time, as seemingly endless litigation over titles continued, sharp-eyed American lawyers and their associates acquired possession of prodigious sections of the Spanish grants. One Santa Fe attorney, for example, was reported by a local newspaper in to have an interest in seventy-five grants and to own outright nearly two million acres.

Although that body succeeded in adjudicating all claims by , it sowed the seeds of future discord by accepting and continuing a precedent regarding community grants that had been laid down by earlier courts.

Unfamiliar with Spanish law protecting and preserving village commons, American judges had ruled that the ancient common lands could be partitioned and divided among the numerous grant-claimants.

That meant that vast areas of upland pastures and mountain woods, of which villagers had made free use for generations, were now allotted to individuals who could put them up for sale if they chose.

Not surprisingly, surrounding lands soon slipped from the grasp of community members and passed to the control of outsiders, often cattlemen from Texas, or into the public domain, where much of it was placed under the National Forest Service. A similar pattern of land loss was experienced by a number of American Indian tribes in the twentieth century, when by Congressional Act their reservations were broken up and the land granted in severalty, thereby destroying the common-property base of community existence.

Government had generally ignored the Pueblo peoples. In , however, the U. Supreme Court handed down a decision that eventually threatened Pueblo lands. In reaching the conclusion that the Pueblo peoples were more advanced culturally than other Indian groups, the court declared that they were not dependents of the federal government and therefore had the authority to handle their own lands as they saw fit.

Then, in , the high court again spoke on the issue of Pueblo lands by reversing its earlier decision and declaring that the Pueblo peoples were indeed dependents of the federal government and that non-Indian claims to Pueblo lands were consequently illegal.

This new ruling created the immediate problem of what to do about the three thousand non-Indians who owned Pueblo land, especially since some of those families had lived on this land for two or more generations. In Albert Fall, as Secretary of the Interior, sought a solution to the problem by asking his successor in the U. Senate, Holm O. Bursum, to draft an Indian land bill. If it had passed, this bill would have spelled disaster for the Pueblo peoples because it would have meant the permanent loss of some of their best, irrigated land.

Support for the Pueblo cause in response to the Bursum Bill came from a group of artists and writers who had settled in Taos. John Collier, the young poet invited to New Mexico by Mable Dodge Luhan, took it upon himself to travel with Tony Luhan from pueblo to pueblo to let the Indians leaders know what was being proposed for them. When the Indians learned of the contents of the bill, they were stunned. No federal or state leader had even informed them that an Indian land bill was being considered.

Pueblo leaders traveled to Washington, D. Widespread support for the Pueblo cause drew national attention, and the immediate result was the defeat of the Bursum Bill. The attention aroused by the furor over the Bursum Bill also brought improvements in federal Indian policy.

In Congress passed the Pueblo Lands Act, which recognized once and for all the land rights of the Pueblo peoples and provided compensation for the property, which under the law, non-Indians were to give up to the Pueblos.

In the same year, Congress passed a second act that addressed the rights of Indians; this law provided American citizenship for Indians born in the United States.

Arizona and New Mexico, however, did not allow Indians to vote in national and state elections until , when a federal court ruled that all states had to give Indian peoples the right to vote. As part of the last wave of the western movement, they were seeking free land at a time when most of the prime land had already been claimed. The Prathers were stockmen, and as they rode, they looked with admiration upon the grassy plains of southeastern New Mexico.

Having no desire to compete with either the established ranchers or the encroaching sodbusters, they kept moving. Beyond the Pecos, they followed a pass through a ridge of mountains and emerged upon the western slope to see, dipping before them, the shimmering expanse of the Tularosa Basin and the distant dark ridge of the San Andres Range.

What they had entered, after their trip over the plains and through the cool mountain forest, was a different world — a kingdom whose pebbly soil could support only a thin mantle of grass and scattered clumps of yucca and greasewood. The White Sands, a lake of shifting, glittering gypsum dunes, reached fifty miles north and south down the center of the basin and served as a playground for little whirlwinds, called dust devils, whose antics could be followed by anyone with a perch in the mountains fifty miles away.

Such hard, inhospitable country — much of it then in Lincoln County — attracted a certain breed of men. In those early days, almost everyone else was prepared to leave the Tularosa kingdom to the Apaches and the jackrabbits; and they joked, after seeing natives grubbing roots for fuel and bringing water on burros from the mountains, that this was the only place on the continent where men, reversing the usual order of things, dug for firewood and climbed for water.

But is was here that John Prather, after some shifting about, settled on a spot with fair grass below the Sacramento Mountains and went to raising cattle. Owen, nearby, began developing a sheep ranch.

Decades crept by, wars and depression bedeviled the outside world, and all the while under the flaming New Mexican sun, John Prather worked his stock and continued to improve his property of some four thousand deeded acres and an additional twenty thousand acres leased from the government.

Indeed, many individuals who had become familiar with the Trail through their part in the war effort would later come back as traders. Resistance to U. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in signaled the end of the war, but only the beginning of expanding trade. Three thousand wagons, 12, people, and 50, head of livestock were estimated to have moved over the Trail in the summer of At Big Timbers between and , the increase in traffic along the Santa Fe Trail meant that the habitat and hunting of game had been disrupted, the water had been polluted, and trees had been cut down indiscriminately.

As a result of such incursions, 47 Trail travelers were killed, wagons were destroyed, and 6, animals were stolen. In September , a battalion of troops was assigned to guard the wagon trains. Roving columns of soldiers ready to participate in battle were employed initially; however, this mobile police force proved to be ineffective due to the length of the corridor that had to be patrolled.

The Texas Annexation of and the Mexican Cession of provided for the creation of California, the Utah Territory, New Mexico Territory, and Texas, with the remainder comprising the unorganized territory. Despite the U. The method of supplying the army demonstrated a lack of deliberation in that provisions reached the military outposts faster than wagons could become available for their distribution.