Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854-1920 9783839437902

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Torsten Kathke Wires That Bind

American Culture Studies | Volume 20

Torsten Kathke is a lecturer at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and an adjunct lecturer in the department of history at the University of Cologne. He is an associated member of the research group “Economization of the Social” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Torsten Kathke

Wires That Bind Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854–1920

An earlier draft of this book was accepted as a doctoral dissertation at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich in 2012.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Railroad Crossing, Torsten Kathke (2008) Copy editing: Carrie Andrews Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3790-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3790-2

Contents

Acknowledgments | 7 Introduction | 11 1. Into the Fray | 23 2. The Perennial Periphery | 51

Defining a Region | 60 El Norte and the Southwest | 64 Territories | 67 Peripheries | 75 3. Communication Nation | 83

Government by Mail | 84 Newspapers and Editors | 92 Telegraphy, Power, and Social Capital | 98 Organizations and Institutions | 113 4. Transitions | 131

At All Odds: The Hispano and Anglo-Hispano Mesilla | 132 Anglo-Hispano to Anglo-Federal | 147 5. Places | 161

Yuma: Internal and External Borders | 163 Tucson: Hub of a Waning Anglo-Hispano Elite | 177 Deming: Hopes of a “New Chicago” Disappointed | 200 6. Laws of the Land | 209

The Somewhat Wild West | 210 From the Tigris to Tubac: Spanish and US Land Law | 217 The Pseudo-Hispanic Legacy of Southwestern Water Law | 224 The Meaning of Mining | 242 Conclusion | 247 Bibliography & Sources | 257

Acknowledgments

This is a book about people and places. It owes its existence to people and places as well. First and foremost, the LMU Munich’s Amerika-Institut provided all the nurture an alma mater possibly could. Its genius loci and its people carried me through the writing of this manuscript in many ways. There, I shared an office first with Sonja Teine, then with Martin Lüthe. They sat across from me while I wrote most of this book. I am grateful for their wit, help, encouragement, and insights throughout. Sonja also deserves special thanks for reading and commenting on several chapters. Christof Mauch put me in that office to begin with. He pushed me further towards cultural history in the design of this book. For this, as well as for his continued support and advice, I am very thankful. One door down, Michael Hochgeschwender suggested I set off towards the nineteenth-century Southwest in the first place. As my primary advisor he, more than anyone, has guided me expertly across the mesas, through the valleys and away from the sandstorms during my trek through this project. His knowledge and incisiveness are equaled only by his willingness to listen and to share. I owe him a debt of gratitude. His weekly colloquium also provided intellectual stimulation and community. I am happy to have had the opportunity to share my project there several times and thank all its members and guests through the years. Down the corridors, Anna Flügge, Bärbel Harju, Peter Just, Ariane Leendertz, Angelika Möller, Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Anke Ortlepp, Sascha Pöhlmann, Ursula Prutsch, and Anita Vržina could always be relied upon for academic or not-so academic conversations which spurred me on. Charlotte Lerg provided companionship and highly valuable feedback on parts of this manuscript. I also thank the participants of the LMU–Northwestern University transatlantic doctoral workshop, especially Bettina Hessler and Michael Allen for comments on my project.

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The Heidelberg Center for American Studies’s Spring Academy enabled me to present and discuss my project early on. I am thankful to its organizers, especially Elena Matveeva, Sophie Lorenz, and Philipp Gassert, and to all discussants. At Transcript in Bielefeld, Annika Linnemann has made this book flow effortlessly through its production stages, which is no small feat and deserves my gratitude. Elsewhere in Germany, I thank Elisa Edwards and Silvan Eppinger for reading and commenting on drafts of chapters. Simone M. Müller shared her research and ideas with me. Her friendship and her can-do spirit have supported me numerous times along the way. The places described in this book were also places that shaped it. In Tucson, the Arizona Historical Society (AHS) provided both a fellowship grant for me to do research there and a wonderfully productive environment to get research done. Its archivists and librarians were unfailingly helpful and their response times to requests for archival records are unparalleled anywhere. I especially thank Kate Reeve and Jill McCleary for helping me find obscure references and pointing me toward overlooked materials. Kate also could not have been a better and more accommodating host during my longest research stay in Tucson. At the University of Arizona, Katherine Morrissey welcomed me and connected me to like-minded scholars. Marcus Burtner, Stephanie Capaldo and Rocio Gomez all shared valuable insights into aspects of Southwestern history. Amy Elizabeth Grey commented on aspects of this book relating to education in Tucson. I am grateful to them all. I am also thankful to the archivists at the University of Arizona Special Collections, to Carol Brooks at the AHS’s Rio Colorado Division Archives in Yuma, to Lynn La Brie at Arizona Western College, and to the Sulphur River Valley Historical Society in Willcox, Arizona. In New Mexico, my research relied on Sylvia Ligocky of the Luna County Historical Society in Deming, Tomas Jaehn at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library in Santa Fe, and Chris Geherin at the Center for Southwest Research in Albuquerque, as well as the archivists at the New Mexico State University Library in Las Cruces. In California, Jennifer Albin at the National Archives at Riverside helped me make sense of relevant record groups. At the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, I would like to thank Juan Gomez for making me feel welcome and helping me navigate the archives. I thank Leonard Singbiel for graciously hosting me during my time at the Huntington. In and around Washington, DC, Sandi Conklin-Campbell and Christopher Campbell were always my first stop on the way to the Southwest. They have shared their home with me repeatedly and were always genial and welcoming hosts.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

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The librarians at the Library of Congress and the archivists at the National Archives, both in Washington and in College Park, always found the right records for me and helped me better understand the machinery of research. All of these places and people made this book possible. To all of them, and to many others behind the scenes who contributed in many ways to the completion of this book, I owe my thanks. There is, however, no place like home. At home, my parents, Tellervo Kathke-Nieminen and Harald Kathke, supported me in myriad ways obvious and non-obvious, and for that I am immensely thankful. Finally, no one has been as indispensable and tireless in the making of this book as Carrie Andrews. She has been invaluable to this whole undertaking as an insightful editor, thorough reader, and constant encourager. In both my life and my language, she is a font of clarity. She has my love and my unceasing gratitude.

Introduction

Looking west on Congress Street, then as now the main thoroughfare of Tucson, Arizona’s downtown business district, one today is hard-pressed to find traces of the dusty, remote desert town that stood here a century earlier. Bland, medium-high office buildings dominate the view. Most of these were built in the mid-1970s, cutoff skyscrapers of the kind developers once haphazardly dropped anywhere in the United States, whether Los Angeles or Cincinnati, Macon or Portland. I-10, Arizona’s principal west–east connector, a good part of which follows the old Butterfield Stage line, separates downtown from communities of spread out, suburban condominium developments. To the east, the tracks of the erstwhile Southern Pacific Railroad lie beside the eminent Hotel Congress. Built in 1919, the hotel saw the arrest of infamous Depression-Era Public Enemy John Dillinger and his companions in 1934. It now more frequently sees tourists and performances of alternative musicians, the latter of which find a vibrant scene in the desert, as multicultural as the city’s roots would suggest. Tucson is constantly under construction. A modern streetcar line, the first the town has seen in a century, opened to traffic in 2014. There is commercial as well as residential development, aimed at the ever-increasing student population of the University of Arizona, Tucson’s land-grant college turned academic powerhouse. An underpass beneath the railroad tracks allows passengers traveling on the streetcar to make their way towards the university district by way of the city’s alternative shopping and entertainment mile, 4th Avenue. A grand opening for the underpass was held on August 20, 2009, decreed the 234th anniversary of Tucson’s founding, though due to the city’s several beginnings (Native American settlement, Spanish mission, military fort, Mexican town, American incorporated city) many alternative dates have just as much right to that honor. Tucson is aware of its history as often as it is oblivious to it. It is also still a place where an underpass is news. Despite such occasional small-town antics, Tucson has long surpassed small-town

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dimensions. The largest city in the Gadsden Purchase territory at the time of the purchase, and still today at 526,000 inhabitants (almost twice that number in the metro area), it now sits comfortably among the mid-sized cities of the United States. The rise of the American Southwest as an industrial force and population center in the twentieth century – most pronounced during the Sunbelt years immediately following World War II – is a story of remarkable development. But it is not what gave the region the characteristics that set it apart from other parts of the United States today. Another story, more obscure and buried under the myth of the American West, emerges when one travels back in time further, to the latter half of the nineteenth century. Between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of World War I, Tucson, and the region that surrounds it, experienced a change not only unparalleled in the United States, but singular within a global context as well. Although the forces that shaped today’s US Southwest were much the same that changed the face of the world during the nineteenth century, here they played out in ways not seen elsewhere.1 All over the nineteenth-century United States, modern communications technology met established, yet adapting societal structures. In Southern Arizona and New Mexico, however, these structures were in flux. An Anglo-Mexican elite, cooperating and intermarrying by necessity, had formed in this transborder region after the 1854 Gadsden Purchase prompted Anglo-Americans to move into the region, as yet in small numbers. An Anglo, national-minded elite then replaced this bicultural one in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the United States, processes of racial, cultural, and gender inclusion in and exclusion from the circles of elites were constant during the roughly halfcentury from the late 1860s to the 1910s. Yet, nowhere else on the continent did American national and business interests, framed in expansionist policy and the overarching reverberations of Manifest Destiny, encounter a setting so fraught with seemingly pre-programmed conflict. In the place where, as New Western historian Patricia Nelson Limerick cheerfully put it, “Anglo America ran into Hispanic America,” European-descended people who considered themselves the rightful heirs to their corner of the world had to contend with Anglo interlopers exhibiting varying degrees of helpfulness and willingness to cooperate.2 Native Americans, in turn, had fought, welcomed, unwelcomed, tolerated, or grudgingly accepted the presence of the Spanish for four centuries. They were now

1

As collected in the magisterial, complementary syntheses of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. The German-language original version is: Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt.

2

Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 222.

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faced with yet another faction of white men intent on either reforming or eliminating them. None of these groups was uniform, which created further potential for confusion, contention, and violence. Out of all this conflict arose Anglo-dominated, yet clearly Hispano-infused, culturally hybrid societies and polities; two US territories that became states atypically late by any measure of comparison. The reasons for this were manifold. They were national as well as local, based in racial constructions as well as in politics. Figure 1: Arizona and New Mexico

Map of Arizona and New Mexico Territories. Samuel Augustus Mitchell, 1867. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Although similar in many ways, Arizona and New Mexico also differed in important aspects. These differences, starkly obvious even today, are ultimately grounded in the divergent Hispanic histories of the land which the two modern states comprise. While Arizona Territory in its first census in 1870 had only 9,658 inhabitants (including the Native American population residing in European settlements), New Mexico during the same year boasted 91,874 people. New Mexico’s

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population had roughly tripled to 327,301 in 1910, while Arizona’s by that year had increased to twenty times the 1870 number at 204,354.3 Such divergent growth, in relative as well as absolute figures, naturally led to divergent development, making the half-century or so beginning in the 1870s a most interesting period in the history of the region. That region and time period are the focus of this study. It centers on three communities: Yuma and Tucson, Arizona, and Deming, New Mexico, all located in the parts of these two Southwestern states that make up the territory last added to the contiguous United States in the Gadsden Purchase.4 During the period surveyed, the American Southwest was not a straightforward place, and it does not lend itself to a straightforward narrative. Rather, an approach that takes into account fits and starts, complications and the coexistence of seemingly incongruent phenomena is required. Therefore, this book will emphasize the inherent hybridity of cultures and social interactions which the region and the specific places within it produced. This does not mean that I propose a non-narrative history in which the pieces have no relation to a larger story.5 The fact that these diverse pieces exist instead is the story. This story – the nationalization of a borderland – was always also that of its opposite. Resistance to the encroaching national state was just as common as the acceptance of its premacy where this seemed prudent. Local contexts continued to coexist with and contradict national, transnational, as well as larger regional ones. To produce a balanced image, personal, governmental, economic, legal and social developments and their intersections must all be allowed to at times be in sharp focus, and at others to fade into the blurred background. As in the swirling visuals produced by a kaleidoscope, the colors do not necessarily match, but they do complement each other. I will first introduce the three principal locations selected for the study and explain why they were chosen. Following that, I will elaborate on my primary goals in pursuing this study, and its theoretical and methodical underpinnings. I contextualize it within several fields of the historiography of the United States, and especially that of the American West and Southwest, with a secondary focus on borderlands history.

3

Gibson and Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, tables 17 and 46.

4

The transfer of land was only formally completed in 1854, and even later in practice, with the exit of Mexican troops in 1856. Sonnichsen, Tucson, 40; Schmidt, “Manifest Opportunity,” 245.

5

“Narrative,” as David Carr writes, “lies in the objects of historical research, not merely in its own manner of writing about these objects.” It can therefore not easily be escaped. Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 177.

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Although my main time frame of interest is the half-century from 1870 to 1920, it is necessary to go back at least to the formal founding of Tucson, the “Old Pueblo,” in the center of Southern Arizona, in 1775. Tucson is the oldest of the three communities and the only city in today’s Arizona that could be considered a substantial settlement at the time of the Gadsden Purchase. Yuma, established by the mid-nineteenth century as a steamboating community and military fort on the border to California, lies roughly 350 km (220 miles) west of Tucson, and is still very much a border town. It is close to Mexico, to a string of settlements locally often referred to as Los Algodones as well as just across the Colorado River from California, on the road that on its way west crosses the massively irrigated Imperial Valley and winds through the San Diego Mountains to the west. Deming, named for the wife of railroad magnate Charles Crocker, at 300 km (185 miles) to the east of Tucson, is just slightly closer to Tucson than Yuma. Located in New Mexico, it lies about 100 km (60 miles) to the east of Arizona’s border with that state.6 Although the location of Deming had enjoyed brief prominence as an important port of entry into the United States from Mexico before the Gadsden Purchase, the actual town was not founded until 1881, when the railroad connection made it viable. The fact that these three communities all lie along the Southern Pacific route, and were all established for different purposes at various times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, will allow for a variegated picture to emerge: Tucson, which had already served as a base of operations for many businessmen and roving Mexican and Anglo elites before the railroad reached it in 1880, changing the composition of its bicultural and bilingual society for good, will play an especially important role in this context. It was the only major settlement of the Spanish and Mexican eras in the Mesilla, as the region purchased by the US in 1854 is also known. Located on the farthest northern reaches of the Spanish empire, it was the proverbial oasis in the desert manned by a ragtag assortment of Spanish nobles and imperial foot soldiers, held in an impossible balance. It received enough money from the crown to build a fort and send people there, but never enough to sustain them. Even during the few periods of relative lucre, an effective protective force was hard to maintain. Desertions were common, and would have been even more common if it had not been for the distances involved. While Albuquerque and Santa Fe were already considered to be in the imperial boondocks, the latter was the origin of, or destination for most trade in the Hispanic Southwest, and the former at

6

Figures in km and miles may vary slightly, as they are approximate and rounded up or down to the nearest 5. I will follow this policy throughout, except where more exact numbers are warranted for comprehension, or where numbers are direct quotes.

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least lay on the Santa Fe Trail. Even more than these settlements, Tucson was a forgotten part of the Spanish Empire, (un)defended by the underfunded.7 This uninterrupted Hispanic presence and its location always on the margins of empires and nations, makes it an especially fascinating case for historical investigation. Of the three places studied, the town is undoubtedly the primus inter pares. Yuma, for its part, has a shorter, but arguably livelier history. While interactions between the Spanish and Native Americans played some role at the Yuma Crossing as well, it remained mostly unimportant to the Spanish into the nineteenth century, with only occasional visits, forays, and attempts at conquest upsetting the balance of power among the Yuma and Yaqui Indians already present. Yuma gained in importance from the 1840s onward, when it became a way station on the trail toward California. Supplied by several generations of increasingly powerful riverboats, and settled chiefly on what was to become the Arizona side of the Colorado, Yuma was a place everyone traveled through, and few purposely traveled to. Its prominence rose with the increasing importance of riverboating on the Colorado, and went into a slow but decisive decline once the railroad had not only connected Yuma to San Diego and Los Angeles, but also had connected Tucson and points farther east to those metropolitan centers. Yuma is defined by three borders; the natural one of the Colorado river, which also became the Arizona-California state line – the second border. The third, as elsewhere in the Mesilla, is the US-Mexican national border. In Yuma, it is significantly closer than even in Tucson, comparable only to true border towns such as San Diego, or Nogales. Deming again shows a different point of view on the Mesilla. The town represents the new kind of settlements that sprung up after the railroads arrived, and its beginnings were similar to those of many other Anglo railroad towns. Although located on land which was much earlier within the Spanish line of settlement (part of the so-called “Hispanic Southwest” around the Santa Fe Trail towns), the spot of Deming itself was not settled until the late nineteenth century. By the 1840s a custom house had been established that functioned as a major port of entry into the United States. It fulfilled this role until the Gadsden Purchase moved the border 60 km (35 miles) farther south. Like Yuma, Deming was a border town, traveled through, but not to. Except for a US Army fort, built near the future townsite in 1863 and manned until the end of the Indian Wars in 1886, little else in the way of Anglo or Hispano settlement stirred in Deming for a while. The actual town was finally incorporated in 1881, when the Southern Pacific designated it a depot and railroad maintenance and refueling station.8

7

See various places in Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, esp. ch. IV, V, and VII.

8

Though it does not show up in New Mexico business listings until later. Not even the 1882/83 Kenney’s business directory has any mention of Deming, or New Chicago.

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As the Mesilla slid from Mexico’s authority after the Gadsden Treaty in 1854, and was not yet bound tightly to the American nation through telegraph and railroads, the power vacuum was filled by a bicultural Anglo-Mexican elite of traders, ranchers, and entrepreneurs. This first transitional elite moved easily in both nations, but owed little allegiance to either.9 Their world, by necessity, was a hybrid one. In it, the new American nation was asserting itself. It had to contend for mindspace with the former Mexican one, however, as well as with much more pertinent cultural attachments to the transnational region, and to roots in other countries; many of the regional elite were one or two generations removed from European homelands and carried the cultural baggage of their forebears. This was a familiar refrain in other parts of the United States as well, but nowhere else were so many rivaling identifications and identities in flux at the same time. The Hispano residents of the Mesilla interpreted US and Mexican themes of national importance in the context of local and regional concerns.10 They created new cultural and social environments, while old ones continued to thrive for a while, then withered. Sonoran social gatherings, many constructed around religious observances pursuant to the Northern Mexican variant of South American Catholicism, remained a fact of life in the Mesilla for decades, but were ultimately doomed. Racial fault lines were not yet rigidly drawn. Anglos included some Mexicans into their racial category of “white.”11 Mexicans saw the new arrivals from both the US North and South as partners in trade, and as co-pioneers on what

Deming does, however, fill half a page in the 1888/89 edition. Vertical files, ephemera. Chávez Library. 9

I take my use of the term transitional elite from Attila Ágh, who applied it to emerging political elites in east-central Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. Although the situations are naturally very different, many attributes of the transitional elites he describes can also be applied to the group I focus on. Most importantly, they came to power suddenly, and lacked professionalism. Ágh’s definition applies both to the Mexican-Anglo elite that held the reins until the 1870s, and the Anglo elite that had replaced it by the late 1880s. Cf. Ágh, “From Nomenclatura to Clientura,” 45–46, 54.

10 Linda Gordon points out that many Mexicans, even decades on, “lived in a border culture […]; they were not so much binational as they were border people, as if border itself were their nationality.” Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 59. Andrés Reséndez makes the point that identity choices follow a mostly situational logic. This means that often, context defined identity. Reséndez, Changing National Identities, 3. 11 For a discussion of the construction of race in post-Civil War America, see Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 92–132.

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was at the same time a Mexican northern and American southwestern periphery.12 The region that was to become southern Arizona and New Mexico in the 1850s reflected the volatility of a middle ground, with actors from a wide variety of backgrounds coming together to form an in-group, excluding Native Americans as a unifying “other”.13 This emerging Mexican-Anglo border elite sought out any chance to improve infrastructure in the region, as it benefited their business and personal lives. Unlike previous inhabitants of the Southwest, the center of their world was not primarily defined by the region’s geographic features, but by the national and global forces that surrounded them, even if these were remote. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, for example, changed the routes of world trade by connecting Europe to Asia and points farther east, such as the American West. This, in conjunction with increasing railroad trackage throughout the United States, allowed for the opening of Arizona to large-scale mining in what Thomas Sheridan calls its “extractive” phase of development late in the nineteenth century.14 Just as changes in modes of transportation and geopolitics allowed for this first elite to develop, they also unmade it a generation later.15 Starting in 1880, the elite’s grasp of important local and regional political offices began to erode significantly. They lost more and more political incumbencies to newly arrived Anglos. Unlike the first generation of Anglo settlers, who had been assimilated into Mexican culture and not vice versa, the second wave transported their systems of value and civilization to the Southwest.16 Since that Southwest had already become much more “civilized” according to the newcomers’ Victorian sensibilities, it was much easier to apply these without much alteration. The reason for

12 Reséndez has shown these forces at work in the region for the half-century from 1800 to 1850. In many ways, his arguments – that “contentious frontier situations” arise when markets and the state are at odds with each other, complicating the creation of national identities and authority – are reflected here, too. What is today Arizona experienced the pushes and pulls of nationhood and industrialization later than the states to its east and west, beginning only in the 1850s. Cf. Résendez, passim, but esp. 5; see also Lamar, The Far Southwest, 372. 13 The New Western history has concerned itself extensively with the interactions in the region. The various works of Richard White, William Cronon, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, among others, are all situated in the context of interaction still often popularly referred to as the frontier. Cf. e.g. Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, Under an Open Sky. 14 Sheridan, Arizona, 103–230. 15 This argument is made chiefly in Chapter 4, extracts of which have been published in modified form as: Kathke, “Power Lines.” 16 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 187.

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this gradual Victorianization, ironically, had been the efforts of the first generation of arrivals that now found themselves, and their bicultural achievements, left by the wayside. In that sense, some of the noticeable hybridity that had defined the transitional Mesilla region was subsumed into conformity with the dominant culture. This does not contradict the continued existence of strands of hybridity in Southwestern culture. Their overall importance, however, gradually diminished with the Anglo takeover at the end of the nineteenth century. Still, it is a mistake to regard the initial moving in of Anglo capital and population as a driving out of Hispanic culture and people. On the contrary, often the capital and thus business opportunities (be they trade for the elites, or wage labor for the middle and lower classes) allowed Spanish Americans to continue the expansion of their culture and their frontier, just as it enabled the expansion of the Anglo frontier.17 The major difference was legal, and thus at first hardly felt despite its ultimately grave effects: it was Anglo-controlled land that Hispanos expanded onto, and adapting to Anglo modes of life, such as homesteading, required them to give up aspects of their own culture.18 The success of wage labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Southwest must be seen as both the attempt of Eastern capital to exploit cheap labor, as well as Hispanic Americans’ realization that this was an opportunity to profit both from Anglo modes of economy, such as homesteading, which required a half-year residence on the homestead, and relatively well-paid labor.19 The arrival of the railroad in the territory during the early 1880s brought ever more migrants. The once close personal and even familial ties that had bound a smaller Anglo population to a quasi-Mexican society in the 1850s and 1860s started to fade.20 A nationalizing, imperial-minded, white male elite now oriented itself to California and the East, places where they themselves, in many cases, had been born, or had at least lived for several years. This second transitional elite marked a new stage in Arizona’s move from forgotten outpost to integral part of an industrial system. Like their Anglo-Mexican predecessors, the new Anglo arrivals were at home not only in Arizona, but also across the border, in Sonora. Yet, their approach was distinct for two reasons. For one they invested heavily in Mexican as well as American southwestern mining, and the industries it brought with it. Also, their identity was firmly American, national, and increasingly tied to Arizona in its new shape, and in opposition to New Mexico.

17 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 34. 18 Ibid., 31. 19 Wage labor paid substantially more than shepherding, for example. Ibid., 29–30. 20 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 29–58.

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When Arizona’s capital moved away from Tucson to Prescott, more than 320 km (200 miles) to the northwest, in 1879, and was permanently installed in central Arizonan Phoenix in 1889, this marked a symbolic end to the Anglo-Mexican landholding elite’s dominance in the territory.21 During much of their struggle for recognition as states, parts of Arizona and New Mexico remained predominantly Mexican both culturally and in population, especially in the swath of land bordering Mexico purchased by the United States in the Gadsden Treaty of 1853. This meant that the identity which the new Anglo arrivals, who gradually came to dominate Arizona politics, carved out for themselves and their territory was an uneasy amalgam in unabating transition. On the one hand, they could not ignore the centuries of Spanish and Mexican dominance that had left indelible cultural marks.22 On the other hand, modernization and civilization in the conception of the age meant increasingly conforming to Victorian models of behavior and thought, and hardening dichotomous national standards concerning race and gender roles. Structure of the Project To tie together several levels – local, regional, state, national, transnational – of a narrative as far-reaching and oftentimes murky to begin with as this is a challenging proposition. Many particular stories could be told within the framework of this book. The choice of which to pursue and which to ignore follows a pragmatic approach: I have selected amongst those that can be gainfully reconstructed from the source material available. Taken together, they create a multicolored wide-angle picture. The goal and structure of this book are to take deep dives into various topics relevant to that picture. Read separately, they illuminate various aspects of the history of the Mesilla at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Put together, they present a larger mosaic of life in the region. After an overview of methodological and theoretical approaches in Chapter 1, the book follows the trajectory of a regional and political history in Chapter 2. In Chapters 3 through 6, it then concentrates on the national connections that were

21 Tucson had unceremoniously dropped out of the running four years earlier. A good summation on the machinations behind the move can be found in: Ehrlich, “Arizona’s Territorial Capital Moves to Phoenix,” 231–242. 22 I focus here on interactions between Anglos and Mexicans. Anglo interactions with Native Americans, while undoubtedly important, resembled patterns seen elsewhere in the Western United States during the “Greater Reconstruction,” a useful term coined by Elliott West to differentiate post-Civil War developments of attempting to integrate freed slaves in the East from Indian Wars fought to integrate and “civilize” the remaining tribes in the West. West, The Last Indian War, xvi–xix, 59, 151, 292, 318–319.

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made possible by technology and industry, and pushed forward under the rubric of Manifest Destiny and America’s expansionist policies in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 will set the stage by describing the region, and its political constituent parts, and further elucidates some theoretical points pertaining to my understanding of the meaning of periphery – using, but also critiquing, world-systems theory. In Chapter 3, case studies of actors will be intertwined with those of the institutions contributing to the creation of local, regional, and (trans-)national identities, and with the technologies that they employed, controlled, or were subject to. Each person discussed was chosen because they best represent certain aspects of the influence of an institution or organization. Where necessary, an institution will be represented by several people, and where a single person’s presence and influence extend to more than one institution, that person will appear more than once, though naturally in different lights, examined under different aspects. This enables a largerpicture view on the networks that best represent the people described in the source materials, their behaviors, and the reasons for their actions, as informed by culture and context, nation and necessity. Chapter 3 also focuses on the technological aspect of the changes wrought on the Mesilla territory during the half century beginning after the Civil War. In it, I will follow the lead of Brian Balogh in pushing the hypothesis that the postal service not only fulfilled an important role in nationalizing the American West, but that it also did so in a way that on the one hand increased the power of what Balogh, consonant with the parlance of the age, calls the “General Government,” i.e. the complex of politicians, regulators, and nationally-minded industrialists that it is easy to mistake for a coordinated and sustained policy over time. This will be followed by an analysis of where telegraph lines were built, by whom they were established, used, and operated, and how their presence changed communication patterns across the territory. The power relations encapsulated in telegraphic communication deserve special emphasis here. They help explain the specfic social role of telegrams. The uniqueness of receiving a telegram influenced how especially people without means to regularly send telegrams themselves reacted to telegraphic communications. Chapter 4 will focus on the two transitions in power that occurred during the time from the Gadsden Purchase through the 1920s; the first from a quasi-Mexican society to an Anglo-Mexican one, often with Anglos and Hispanos cooperating, but also with underlying conflicts; the second, from such a mixed Anglo-Hispano territory to one dominated by Anglos, even those who were nowhere near Arizona, through the power of the federal government. Chapter 5 will tie persons to places by looking at Yuma, Tucson, and Deming as locales first, and then to tie them to people who frequented these places. The structure of the towns’ societies will be discussed in terms of population numbers and spatial arrangements.

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Chapter 6 digs deeper into the meaning of American national presence and its effects on the Mesilla by example of the coming of a new and meaningfully different legal system to the region. It discusses the impact that legal battles over land and land use had, and how precedents in water rights were established, re-established, and conveniently ignored by courts pushing agendas of national or local control. It argues that, although the Anglo land grab is commonly believed to be the defining factor in driving out Hispanic influence in the Southwest, at least in parts of the region it occurred predominantly on the national-legal level against the express wishes and recommendations of Anglos tasked with overseeing it on the local and territorial levels. Finally, the conclusion places the developments described in this book in a larger context within global, North American, and US history. It makes the argument that the special case of Southern Arizona and New Mexico helps explain changes in the status of peripheries in other parts of the world. The American Southwest is not only a vital part of American Western history, but also an exemplar of the vital and complex role of border regions during the era of high nationalism and high imperialism at the turn of the century.

1. Into the Fray

This book brings the history of the very small – the local, the personal – into accordance with the history of larger constructs, such as a transnationally imagined region, or political entities like state or territory. Above this meso level, the national level, existing within a global and transnational context, also matters greatly. In the specific case of Southern Arizona and New Mexico presented here, taking into account these different levels means firmly rooting my project within borderlands studies. Borderlands studies denotes an approach to studying the American Southwest as part of a larger borderlands region, not merely as a specific place by itself. It is at the juncture of borderlands studies with more global histories that I situate this project. My canvas encompasses the local, as well as the regional, national, and supra (or trans) national. This includes taking into account the important contributions that both borderlands studies and the idea of transnationalism have made to the study of the region. These terms, and the several schools of thought that use them without much agreement, do carry some unavoidable ballast. Before I venture further into the fray they, along with some other fundamental theoretical concepts and methodological choices, must be explained. Borderlands and the Frontier From the middle of the 1990s on – with antecedents reaching back into the 1980s – a new type of conversation emerged within the sphere of Southwestern history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It transcends the boundaries of traditional history, and even that of the New Western History of which it is in many ways a part, taking hints and whole concepts from disciplines such as sociology, (cultural) anthropology, political science, and archaeology. With the appearance of borderlands studies, the field of Western History was yanked forcefully into the present. A framework appeared in which the West was thought of as a place, rather than as the process of an ever-moving frontier. Patricia Nelson Limerick’s seminal The Legacy of Conquest catapulted this way of concep-

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tualizing Western History into the mainstream in 1987, and her non-manifesto manifesto on Western History, “What on Earth Is the New Western History,” further clarified her perspective.1 Limerick’s recommendation to decouple the history of the American West as a geographical region from a national narrative of pioneering a frontier, spurred Western Historians to embrace a new perspective, to tell “A Longer, Grimmer, But More Interesting Story.”2 Western History had become less and less relevant within American History and lost footing in the national conversation because of an insistence on not simply still using the theoretical framework of Frederick Jackson Turner, but also contenting itself with taking just his earliest, most provocative publication on the idea of the frontier, and skipping over more tentative and complicated thoughts in his later works.3 Limerick’s book caused the mainstream, and the rest of the American academy, to take notice. Its broad reception enabled other historians working on similar issues to contextualize these within what quickly, and against Limerick’s hopes, became a newly found dogma, that of the New Western History. Christened and canonized in the late 1980s despite its quasi-originator’s qualms, it became de rigueur in any discussion of the American West. Only very recently has it been suggested that it is giving way to a perhaps unpreventably so named New New Western History, which “takes as its starting point the intersections of gender, race, and class.”4 This “next western history, [.] builds, through deep archival research and cross-disciplinary analysis, on new western history’s insights to reveal how people found work and made homes on the western landscape.” This book, rooted in American studies and its emphasis on the troika of race, class, and gender, then, can genuinely be considered a work of the New New Western History.5 At least when it comes to the gender aspect, follow-through on this promise is sometimes doubtful, however. Margaret Jacobs emphasized as late as 2011 that the inclusion of women in Western History “is minimal, (often just a few sentences), tokenistic, or uninformed by the most recent scholarship.” She decries that “[d]espite good intentions, most […] authors portray women as passive victims or as fulfilling unchanging roles in the domestic realm.”6 In part, this is certainly due

1

Limerick, “What on Earth Is the New Western History?”; Wrobel, “Introduction,” 437– 438.

2

Elliott West quoted in Ibid., 438.

3

Which, in effect, brought him quite close to the Boltonian approach. See: Hurtado, “Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands,” 150, 163–165.

4

Or, in less of a tongue-twister, but causing no less confusion, a “Next Western History.” Montoya, “Onward to the Next Western History,” 272.

5

Restated in Andersen and Collins, Race, Class, & Gender.

6

Jacobs, “Western History: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?,” 298.

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to the availability of sources. Western History of people’s everyday lives suffers from a dearth of relevant source material at times. What the family of a deceased nineteenth-century Westerner considered important for posterity and what archivists considered relevant to keep was always subject to their own cultural biases.7 Archives, furthermore, often group women’s contributions to the written record in collections of husbands’ or fathers’ papers, to be discovered only accidentally.8 Partially it is a question of numbers. Significantly fewer women than men lived in the West of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Because of this alone, fewer records were produced that could survive. Yet there is also confirmation bias at work. Those who want to find evidence of women’s secondary role find it. As Jacobs observes, in Pekka Hämäläinen’s celebrated and controversial The Comanche Empire, the author seeks to “recover the full dimension of Indian agency in early American history” but subtly de-emphasizes female agency, and foregrounds that of men at the expense of women.9 The New New Western History is older than might be surmised. First, because it adds a wish list to what should be emphasized in the history of the West – namely race, class, and gender – to the New Western History, and secondly because even the New Western History cannot be considered to be entirely new itself. As Walter Nugent noted as early as 1994, “a glance of the WHA programs as well as the Western Historical Quarterly, several years before Legacy of Conquest appeared, reveals that sessions (for example) on Native Americans, Black cowboys, western women, Hispanics, and twentieth-century topics were there all along.”10 So were alternatives to Turner, beginning with Earl Pomeroy’s “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment” in 1955.11 This is not to say that the New Western History has not been influential. It has provided a useful framework, most evidently in the four pillars it is built on, laid out by Limerick in her 1989 non-manifesto.12 But it was a synthetic analysis based

7

Moseley, “Women in Archives,” 215–216.

8

A case in point are the Wiley Box Papers held at the Arizona Historical Society which I use in Chapter 5. They contain almost as much material pertaining to Wiley’s wife, Hannah, but one would never know from their title. Wiley Box Papers, 1837–1913, MS 977, AHS.

9

Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 7; Jacobs, “Western History: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?,” 300.

10 Nugent, “Western History, New and Not so New,” 8. 11 Ibid., 9; Pomeroy, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History.” 12 They are: 1) the West as a region should be the focus for historical inquiry, not the frontier as a process; 2) what occurred in this place, where several cultures and peoples met and interacted is what is important to Western History; 3) interaction has not ceased, but

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on earlier work (which must, if the New Western History is new, have been based in the old tradition) that powered the large-scale rephrasing of questions pertaining to the American West in Limerick’s seminal book. Limerick built on the work of many others and brilliantly synthesized it, finding that it was less Turnerian than could be expected. The paradigm had already begun to shift around her. Even so, as much as Limerick, and the other members of New Western History’s “Gang of Four,” or “Wild Bunch”13 – William Cronon, Walter Nugent and Richard White – put Western American History back on track, shoved it into the national limelight, and rescued it from being, in Nugent’s own words “an antiquarian funhouse not to be taken very seriously” filled with “cowboys and Indians, ‘pardners’ and ‘cayuses,’”14 they could not help but be complicit in accepting almost as a matter of course that its focus would remain national. Despite all talk of borderlands and the economic significance of rural hinterlands, theoretically opening up large swaths of the continent for co-interpretation to help explain phenomena occurring in and affecting all of North America, this was still United States New Western History. It was done by Americans mostly, and, more importantly, done within the confines of the American academy. Further, the West had been such an important component of the American psyche to begin with, and especially since Turner’s turn-of-the-century emphasis on its Americanizing powers, that bringing it back into relevance was giving back some of that relevance to the national ideas embodied within it as well; whether this was wanted, or not. To overcome this, it is necessary to un-think the nation to re-think it. Not necessarily from a postcolonial point of view, which may or may not be useful analytically with an eye toward the Southwest, but primarily from a standpoint of frameworks. Any national history is itself a narrative told by, and itself influencing, those taking part in the constant dialogue of nation-building and nation-being. Much can be gained from uncoupling interpretations of the national in the nineteenth century from those still mired in its traditions in the twenty-first. This, in part, is my purpose in this book.

is ongoing, and the twentieth-century West is as relevant as that of earlier centuries; and 4) the story of the West is not one of settlers overcoming adversity, or reversely, not one of subjugation of Indians by whites. Rather, it is a messy story in which “heroism and villainy, virtue and vice, and nobility and shoddiness” always coexisted. Nugent, “Western History, New and Not so New,” 6; Limerick, “What on Earth Is the New Western History?,” 85. 13 As Wrobel notes, not altogether a fitting moniker. Like many others of that kind, it stuck. Wrobel, “Introduction,” 437. 14 Nugent, “Western History, New and Not so New,” 5.

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Figure 2: Gadsden Purchase Area and Northern Mexico

Map of the Gadsden Purchase, Sonora, and Portions of New Mexico, Chihuaua & California. Middleton, Strobridge & Co., 1858. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

My study inherits from any study of the Southwest the inexact nature of the regional definition. The fact that the Mesilla region where I situate my study – commensurate with the territory of the 1854 Gadsden Purchase – is always unwaveringly included in definitions of the US-Mexican borderlands, as it is in those of the US Southwest, does not make the issue less intractable. James W. Byrkit, after much deliberation, arrived at a Southwest of which “[t]he coordinates 104°–117° West Longitude and 29°–39° North Latitude constitute the boundaries.”15 This includes all of the places that this book concerns itself

15 Byrkit, “Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined,” 366.

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with, and it is based in culture as much as it is in history, in climate and geography as much as in the reach of business. Yet, as any such definition, this is not a definite one. The borders of the borderlands are the pliant limits of an imagined network of people, trade, and ideas. And borderlands too always have their centers and peripheries. This is easily forgotten when they are put into a larger context, as then they invariably end up on the periphery of something larger – be it nations, frontiers, or world-systems. These centers, for the most part, matched the few urban settlements in the region, such as Santa Fe, Tucson, and La Mesilla on the American side. In Mexico, Hermosillo and the port city of Guaymas on the Gulf of California were important regional centers.16 Aside from Arizona and New Mexico, Utah and Colorado are sometimes also a part of these borderlands, because of their importance for streams of migration and re-migration, and partially as a common Anglo and Hispanic frontier. Overall, the borderlands idea is anything but new. It was vague to begin with when it was first so articulated by Herbert E. Bolton in 1911. He later reiterated it time and again in various books and articles.17 Writing in the year before Arizona and New Mexico statehood, when they finally left territorial status behind to fully join the United States politically, Bolton’s idea seemed to be, much like Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier, something that could only be discovered intellectually once it had been fully absorbed and, in Victorian parlance, civilized.18 Bolton himself relied on ideas by Hubert Howe Bancroft. The proposition to think of the American Southwest as a specific, if altogether vague regional entity, therefore is

16 La Mesilla famously moved across the border to Chihuaha almost intact as a community. See part 3 of Hernández, Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century, 163–232. 17 D. W. Caughey credits Herbert E. Bolton with both the concept and the term, and gives a prime early example of the vagueness of the “borderlands” moniker. Bolton, according to Caughey “is to be credited with effective discovery of the Spanish borderlands as a field for historical research. The name is his. It refers to what was the northern fringe of the Spanish empire in America, from Florida and Georgia on the Atlantic to the Californias on the Pacific” quoted in Noggle, “Anglo Observers of the Southwest Borderlands,” 107. Burl Noggle, in a 1959 essay traced the then-already confusingly manifold mentions and definitions of the “Spanish borderlands.” According to Noggle, the earliest mention is in 1911, with another following on its heels in 1912, and then various times again throughout Bolton’s career. Ibid., 106–107. 18 It is interesting to note that the year of Arizona and New Mexico statehood is considered, even by Limerick, one of the possible points in time at which the end of the frontier might be declared from the point of view of political history. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 25.

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firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.19 Bancroft, however, “considered the Southwest to be without boundaries,” and was too much of a universalist-nationalist historian to come up with, or support, Bolton’s idea of the borderlands as a meeting place of peoples.20 Stanley T. Williams argued in 1955 that although Bolton might be faulted for being too general, “we cannot approach the study of […] the borderlands without him.”21 Bolton’s early twentieth century conceptions of the heroic West, and the Southwest as a meeting ground of, primarily, a white Anglo-Saxon-Protestant, male-dominated culture with others – cultures which are implied to be, if never outright derided as, inferior – now seem outdated. Yet, I believe that this is mainly a question of what he, and other Boltonians after him, analyzed. They concentrated on white men exploring, settling, trading, farming, or warring That this scope needed to be broadened is something thoroughly addressed by trends in historiography since the 1960s. That women and people of color were not included as active participants in the narrative before is not a failing inherent in Bolton’s borderlands idea. A vagueness in the meaning of the term can in part be interpreted as a result of its popularity. It has acquired a plethora of meanings in different corners of different academic fields. A veritable explosion can be attested to its use since the late 1980s. Categories of borderlands have been established in the social sciences and, in addition to Western history, in global history, European history (especially concerning Eastern Europe), and in other regional or national histories, spurred on by the postcolonial turn and its effects. Borderlands reliably always house the subaltern. The term has also made a career in transfer; there is a wholly different category of borderlands of other nations and regions, in which the concept is taken and applied to each specific situation.22 During the past decade or so, some historians have begun using “frontier” once again in the sense that it was defined in 1978 by Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff. Baretta and Markoff considered frontier as a region where no one power

19 Noggle, “Anglo Observers of the Southwest Borderlands,” 107. 20 Noggle finds more diplomatic words, stating that “Bancroft, of course, was no more than Bolton a historian of the Southwest per se; the outlook of both men transcended any one region.” Ibid. 21 Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature, 162. Qtd. in Noggle, “Anglo Observers of the Southwest Borderlands,” 107. 22 See, for example, a collection of articles dealing with the Franco-German and PolishGerman borders: François, Seifarth, and Struck, eds., Die Grenze als Raum, Erfahrung und Konstruktion.

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had “an enduring monopoly on violence.”23 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron have also noted this in their fundamental essay defining the “borderlands,” attesting the frontier “a new historiographic lease of life” in the sense of “an intercultural zone of penetration.”24 Adelman and Aron sought to disentangle “borderlands” as an imperial zone of contact from “frontier,” as “a meeting place of peoples in which geographical and cultural borders were not clearly defined.”25 While there is certainly merit to this approach, even their best efforts cannot fully disentangle “frontier” from the multitude of meanings and myths that have been ascribed to it over a long century since Turner. Except in specialized cases, there is also little to be gained from separating imperial and national borders from cultural frontiers. If frontiers are in fact defined as regions where no one national entity has a monopoly on power, then that naturally also means that it has no power to force cultural borders. As such, the distinction made by “frontier” vs. “borderlands” in these contexts is one without a difference. I will therefore use “frontier” only in the sense of a historic category of self-description by residents of the Southwest, and not as an analytical category, even one delineated clearly from Turner’s westward-pushing definition. Region, and even the umbrella “West” describe more accurately what I am after. In the Southwest, interestingly, “borderlands” is sometimes used synonymously with the Spanish “la frontera,” which literally translates to “the frontier.”26 For Spanish-language scholars, then, senses of the frontier either as a “regular” border in the European sense or as the American moving frontier, and also Adelman and Aron’s two competing concepts, are contained in the term. This is an important linguistic distinction. For someone versed in both languages and traditions, the connection between the frontier and the borderlands becomes obvious, while the English “borderlands” in modern historiography contains an express distancing from the frontier myth and terminology. “Frontier” is tainted in its American usage by Turner’s all-encompassing 1893 thesis. When used in the non-Turnerian sense, it is distinct from the “borderlands” as an imperial construct.

23 Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff quoted in Truett, “The Ghosts of Frontiers Past,” 310. This builds on Max Weber's classic definition of a state. See also Chapter 6. 24 Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders,” 814. 25 Ibid., 815. 26 It is used in that double sense, for example, in queer and Chicana theory scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, a book of poems exploring her bicultural identities that has been highly influential in reviving the idea of borderlands studies and of borderlands-based identities. See: Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.

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Transnationalism as Transregionalism While the main conundrum with the term borderlands is one of geographic definitions and the power of the Western myth, the problem of defining transnationalism is an analytical one. Caustically true to its name, definitions of transnationalism are all over the map. Whether it is regarded as a method or as an analytical category, no two scholars seem able to substantively agree on its meaning. Some use the term very loosely – as in something that happens, or affects, more than one nation. This is a loose definition best suited for small, microhistoric studies. Others work with catalogues of preconditions and exclude phenomena that in someone else’s catalogue might well have qualified as transnational. Within American Studies, two large currents exist, with the requisite myriad trickles and substreams.27 The older of the two is the concept of transnationalism traceable to the New History, as well as to the idea of a histoire croisée, both originating in the 1960s and 1970s. Having grown out of a need to analyze national histories within the context of a globally interconnected world, it is the variant practiced by most historians working in the field today. For the time period discussed here, Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 and Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World are two influential examples of magisterial synthetic works of such transnationalism. Their usage of the term is pragmatically defined. It rests on both a critique and rethinking of network theory and the world-systems approach, as well as on cultural history and the comparative history of regions. The subtitle of Bayly’s 2004 book, Global Connections and Comparisons makes plain the agenda, and the book succeeds impressively. Osterhammel’s Transformation, written by a specialist of China, as opposed to Bayly’s expertise in Indian history, attempts to fill in the gaps. Osterhammel does not set out to write “an anti-Bayly,” as he makes clear. Rather, he comes at the period from a different angle, one that both by academic rearing and specialization, puts him outside of the Anglo-American view which has heretofore dominated the debate.28 The second concept of transnationalism is the one that has been receiving much more attention lately. It is the transnationalism of literary and cultural studies, and it takes its cues from genre theory.29 The checklists are there as well, but they are less

27 For an entrance into the discussion in the field of American Studies see: Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures,” 17–57; Hornung, “Transnational American Studies,” 67–73; Hebel, Transnational American Studies; Fishkin, “Envisioning Transnational American Studies,” 1–12. 28 Osterhammel, Transformation, xvii. 29 Paul Jay is among those who have acknowledged that while “nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism,” that transnationalism

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rigid. A work of culture is considered transnational when a sufficient amount of criteria are met. This concept further informs my thinking about transnationalism. As this book is a book of history, however, my overall take on transnationalism is closer to the version prevalent in history. My take on transnationalism conforms to variants present in historical thought and writings since the 1960s, reiterated in a more systematic way since the late twentieth century. The term itself appeared much earlier even than that. The first reference to transnationalism in something akin to its modern meaning, or at least one of them, can be found in an Atlantic Monthly article by Randolph Bourne. Obviously influenced by the decidedly national conflicts of World War I at the time of Bourne’s writing in 1916, this “Trans-National America,” to which Bourne attributes “the failure of the ‘melting-pot,’” was supposed to be a cooperative enterprise, made up of all its constituent ethnic and cultural minorities.30 Bourne was not looking to introduce a concept into academic discourse. His patriotically charged and exceptionalism-infused idea of said “trans-national America” as a place destined for greatness because of its virile rooting in its many groups, reads quaint now. Nonetheless, he already pointed out the most important tenets of what would be the defining element that even today unites all versions of transnationalism: that it is about people crossing borders and thereby influencing the society, or societies, that they live in. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ian Tyrrell’s influential “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” pointed out the single most important recurring problem that has especially plagued American writers of American history: “In an era of unprecedented internationalization in historiography, the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism still haunt the study of American history.” While a German-style national history had taken fast roots in many countries during the long twentieth century, “nowhere has a nation-centered historical tradition been more resilient than in the United States. There, modern historicism, with its emphasis on the uniqueness of all national traditions, was grafted onto an existing tradition

has “its roots in political movements outside of the academy and theoretical developments within that run back to the early 1960s.” Jay, Global Matters, 1. 30 Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 86. That Bourne was naturally rooted within his time is plain to see in this text. Although he acknowledges that “[t]he early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of ‘giving themselves without reservation’ to the new country,” his terminology shows a clear slant towards accepting the newly-constituted American civilization as superior: “[l]et us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior civilizations.” Ibid., 87–88.

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of exceptionalism.”31 Tyrrell’s lament has lost little of its currency. American history is still overwhelmingly national in focus. It remains so despite constant and fashionable lip service to transnationalism, the borderlands, hybridity of several kinds and understandings, and the Baylyean “global connections and comparisons.” Tyrrell also points to the genesis of transnational history, the earliest rumblings of which he dates to 1989.32 Tyrrell, in his 1991 essay, in his contribution to the 1992 follow-up special issue of the Journal of American Studies, and repeatedly since, has argued that transnational history grew out of work in American history specifically. As he put it in a 2007 address: Its vogue in the 1990s is closely associated with work in American history. Transnational history as defined and advocated by David Thelen, Thomas Bender, and others concerns the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across national boundaries. It applies to the period since the emergence of nation states as important phenomena in world history. [...] It is principally used to describe histories of the period since the so-called age of the democratic revolutions, when the birth of the American nation occurs.33

This kind of transnationalism and its research agenda seems well thought-out. But it remains only one of several understandings of the term. To achieve somewhat sharper borders for the term, it is necessary to put it into context among several varieties of transnationalism which have recently proliferated. I follow Steven Vertovec in locating several categories of transnationalism, each with a different theoretical background and a different practical use to scholars. Vertovec defines transnationalism in the humanities broadly as “refer[ing] to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states.”34 This is relatively similar to the definition given by Thelen, Bender, and Tyrrell. Tyrrell defined transnational history as “the movement of peoples, ide-

31 Both quotes from: Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” 1031. While Tyrrell can be accused of hyping “transnational history” and claiming, as he did as late as 2007, that “[t]he term is relatively new,” he remains the most fastidious and judicious thinker in the historical camp of transnationalism’s defenders. He is also correct in that “transnational history” is a terminus technicus that found its way into the historical vernacular only in the 1990s, although “transnational” as a term had existed for some eight decades before that. Tyrrell, “What Is Transnational History?” 32 “It was in 1989–1991 that the idea of a self-conscious agenda called transnational history first came into being, linked to a specific research program.” Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” 1.

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as, technologies and institutions across national boundaries.”35 Vertovec puts less focus on the important nexus of technologies – the ones that move across borders, as well as those that move people, institutions, and ideas, which I take from Tyrrell – but his categorization is helpful. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel likewise consider transnational “relations and constellations, which transcend national boundaries.” Their definition is more comprehensive, and thus has more possibilities for connecting to others outside the fold of the historical humanities. They emphasize its ties to the postcolonial approach, without neglecting that postcolonialism requires already established tools from the shed of the sociology of governance in order to be a useful frame for historical analysis.36 Given that straightforward definition, transnationalism as a frame would allow for various methods to be used on a host of phenomena that, though different, all have in common such across-border connections. We should be so lucky for it to be that simple, though. As Vertovec points out, the existing work using the term refers to quite variegated phenomena. We have seen increasing numbers of studies on ‘transnational...’ communities, capital flows, trade, citizenship, corporations, inter-governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, politics, services, social movements, social networks, families, migration circuits, identities, public spaces, public cultures. These are obviously phenomena of very different natures, requiring research and theorization on different scales and levels of abstraction.37

The problem is clear: “In the excited rush to address an interesting area of global activity and theoretical development, there is not surprisingly much conceptual muddling.”38 Vertovec then goes on to diligently dissect the various strands of transnationalism, separating them into “transnationalism as a social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of ‘place’ or locality.”39 Such a definition smartly avoids becoming entangled in the web of conceptual battles fought in many corners of the academic disciplines that avail themselves of the approach. It instead offers a sensible, though necessarily tentative categorization as a means of disentanglement. This book sits squarely between several of these

35 Tyrrell, Transnational Nation, 3. 36 Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 14. The translation is Konrad Jarausch’s: Jarausch, “Reflections on Transnational History.” 37 Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” 2. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 1.

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transnationalisms. It is especially the last two definitions, however, that will matter most. By regarding a transnational region such as the Arizona/Sonora borderlands as a common site of political engagement and as a constructed space, it becomes possible to see it as one region influenced by nationalisms rising around it. These nationalisms enter the region through myriad inlets: people, technologies, and institutions. This approach is different than viewing both sides as parts of their respective national histories, even if they are seen as influenced by the other nation. The transnationalism that I find to be useful for this project is thus, on the one hand, a framing device within which several methods can be used – from the historical as well as from the sociological spectrum. It is also always a regionalism. Emphasizing the differences even within the region spanning the international border which matter to this book, it is perhaps best cast as a trans-regionalism. Even though there appears to be a clear hierarchy between the nation and a somewhat less clearly defined region, and small town or village communities, for the personal construction of one’s identity this pecking order mattered little. Certainly, the mid-nineteenth century saw the idea of the nation establishing itself as the powerful institution it was to become by the early twentieth century. Yet for decades it was just as salient to consider oneself a Tucsonan, an Arizonan, a Westerner, or a telegraph operator, as it was to consider oneself an American. While these identities naturally would compete for mindshare – when which one was most important was dictated by the current context, which increasingly had become national – they existed on a relatively plain level in the minds of people. In everyday life, it was just as important to be a member of the Freemasons as it was to be an American, if not at times more so. Identity Much like “transnationalism,” the terms “identity” and “identification” have many meanings and uses. For the purposes of this study, identity refers to a complex of values, practices, laws, and socio-cultural factors that is considered to exist mainly independent from the actual personal application, i.e. identification. Identities have always allowed other identities to be born because such new identities could make use of the same patterns of thought and commonality. Considering oneself an Arizonan, that is someone from Arizona Territory, for example, would have meant little without there being preexisting notions of state identities and of national identity which fed off of each other. Each complicated the other, but also established a certain rigidity and dependability. An identity tied to a place or larger region had certain components, which were readily found in all regions. One

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part of the Southern Arizonan identity was the desert landscape of the Mesilla, among other geographic and cultural modes of identification that combined to create it. But on another, much more fundamental level, it was also part of the nascent state’s identity that there was such a thing as state identities. While a place like Minnesota had few cactuses and even less desert, tying landscape and an experienced environment to a subnational political identity already had a template in conceptions of state identity. As the American national idea grew, so grew identification with certain traits of the individual states’ identities. The two could only grow together. The process of identification for the individual, in this case, as in any, was never just “the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy,” but “the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image.”40 Multiple identities exist at any one time and in any one place. Group identities frequently exist in opposition to others, and in a complicated way may inscribe themselves upon other identities. They may, however, also remain mostly separated from these. Their making and unmaking is constant. Once created and accepted, though, they are remarkably resilient to major changes.41 American national identity can be seen as such a complex. So can regional Western, local Tucsonan, religious, gender, ethnic, or racial identity. In that, identity resembles the idea of a Foucauldian apparatus or dispositif. And indeed, both have been used in history and sociology to describe and explain the same things occurring in the nineteenth century: the creation of the nation-state in idea and practice, the interrelation of complexes of ideas and groups of people vying for power in that state, and, most gainfully, overlapping opportunities of self-description for individuals in the context of the nation and its institutions, both governmental and private. The creation of such identities is tied to communication. For Benedict Anderson, the creation of national identity and in fact the emergence of the nation as the defining locus of identification for a majority of its citizens, came about through increased standardization and frequency of communication utilizing printed language.42 Anderson’s conclusions, though once so provocative, have long become the accepted orthodoxy.43 Yet what has often been overlooked is that these very

40 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 64. 41 As national identities have proven over and over again. Greenfeld, “Modernity and Nationalism,” 163–164. 42 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44–46. 43 Though, naturally, they are also not without their detractors. Liah Greenfeld has criticized Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner for a quasi-biologistic determinism. Ibid., 159. Her own definition of nationalism, in turn, has also long been attacked by critics such as Brandon O’Leary as being too inclusive. O’Leary, “On the Nature of Nationalism,” 207.

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same processes were at work also in the creation of other identities. They created identities that were often compatible with that of the national citizen, but also identities that openly competed with it and, not infrequently, subdued it in its allencompassing importance. The Andersonian model posits a unifying force in the nation. The national imagined community is formed by the transmission of markers of identity from “lower” levels to that of the nation, which presents itself as the highest level of personal identification to the individual. In the case of regional identity in the Southwest, however, there is no smaller identity that is chiefly abandoned for one at the level just above it, not a local identity sacrificed on the regional altar, so to speak. Instead, Southwestern local and regional identities came about not in the increased communication of Southwesterners among each other, but through communication they had with each other as well as with representations of the nation state. These representations could be the various governmental agencies that they had contact with, such as the military, the post office, or the land office. But they also came in the guise of the companies that did business in the West – especially when these, like the railroads, were imbued with the notion of national importance. Identification, unlike identity, is a deliberate act. Identity is therefore constructed out of many deliberate acts of identification with something.44 Put simply, identification is the act of applying an identity, or identities, to oneself contextually. This application might be conscious or unconscious, but it always grows out of a set of circumstances, convictions, and experiences that make a certain identification useful in a certain situation. If, for example, one’s object is to increase personal wealth, or develop a local economy, then applying to local, regional, and national persons and organizational bodies of influence for aid are all valid options. Each will be taken up to achieve the same end, but all require at least slightly different identifications. When living within the territory of the United States, even if one does not consider oneself an American, then still some small level of identification with it and its institutions is necessary in order to make use of them. Race, Class, and Gender My thoughts on the construction of race in the nineteenth-century Southwest owe much to Andrew Jolivétte’s work on creoles in contemporary Louisiana. Jolivétte builds on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Circe Sturm, essentially arguing that racial formation is not, as it is for example in the works of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory, something that is hegemonially done, a

44 Ibrahim, “Identity or Identification?,” 742.

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pattern established for individuals or groups then to fill. Where Omi and Winant claim that racial formation is “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings,”45 Jolivétte disagrees. For him, Circe Sturm’s criticism of Omi and Winant’s ideas is essential: Sturm argues that Omi and Winant’s (1994) theory of racial formation, while important in mapping the creation and transformation of racialization through racial projects, misses the complex, often contested nature of hegemony in making this process possible.

This hegemony, Jolivétte holds, [i]nvolves either the coercion (direct force) or consent (uncritical absorption and the surrendering of agency) of individuals and groups to a ruling class elite who create racial categories around an “us” or “them” dichotomy.46

His argument, and, by extension, mine in this context is that “contradictory consciousness” matters. Jolivétte makes clear that “[Creoles] have actively contested and re-articulated the lived experience and shared cultural reality of their people.”47 Race, for them, then, is something that cannot just be forced upon people, or consented to, but instead something that can be taken on, rejected, or navigated. Such navigations need not be general, they can be contextual, and find their most resounding expression when they are strategically so. Jolivétte argues that Creoles of Color should be seen as Creole in social, cultural, and legal contexts, as well as American Indians, in social and cultural – but importantly, not legal contexts.48 In the case of racial constructions in the American Southwest, this idea is expressed mainly in three separate but connected ways. For one thing, individuals and groups took up existing definitions of race, used them, changed them, and, significantly, applied them purposely to their advantage against racial constructions of a more and more powerful Anglo elite. Second, even when the hegemony became almost overwhelmingly strong, as was the case in the Southwest beginning in the early twentieth century, racial self-

45 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 61. 46 Jolivétte, Louisiana Creoles, 5. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid.

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fashioning continued to be contextual and frequently ran counter to standardizing expectations on the micro level.49 Third, the whole idea of a standard-setting elite, itself implicitly “othered” by those scholars unjudiciously applying the concept, is inherently flawed. This is made clear already by the simple reason that in small communities such as the ones surveyed in this book, the elite cannot easily be separated from the population as a whole. Even if it could be, however, such a concept would make it impossible to understand how racial formation would have worked within such an elite. It assumes that the elite constructs and then applies, rather than is involved in a backand-forth process of negotiation. Such a process, however, must be assumed in the case of constant contact among the groups, and a mobile society such as the American West. Additionally, changes in this process matter as well. When the Southwest became more connected to the centers of the American nation, and decentered from Mexico, as well as Hispano cultural ideas, prevalent constructions of race necessarily changed. These notions had come into contact with the standardized binary of race dominant in Post-Civil War America. While they were not, as has been the standard assumption, simply replaced by it, they were importantly influenced by this binary. Other important concepts are important as background information for my study. They cannot, however, be usefully applied to most of the sources I analyze without being contextualized within the above model. Intersectionality is a useful theoretical concept for example, in that it restates and recombines preexisting approaches of analyzing race, class, and gender. Its basic idea is as simple as it is powerful: that diversified categories of one kind (such as the gender categories that have proliferated since the 1970s) created, or at least implied, homogenous categories of another (such as race). If intersectionality is defined as “a theory to analyse how social and cultural categories intertwine” in which “the relationships between gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class and nationality are examined,” then it sums up neatly the tasks to be undertaken in analyzing the many facets of interaction in the American Southwest. Leslie McCall’s textbook definition of intersectionality as “relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations” makes plain the concept’s usefulness.50 Following these definitions, the term intersectionality and its implications are adaptable to a wide range of sociological and historical studies. It is clear enough to not fray too much at the edges and open enough to be applied to race, class, gender, sexuality, and other categories as needed. In this, however, there is a potential

49 The racial categorizations by census workers and army draft registration officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century West are instructive here. See Chapter 5. 50 McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” 1771.

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drawback: a growing number of contexts and identities only serve to complicate the matrix of possibilities of oppression and subordination – or, seen more positively, of active expression and constitution of the subject through a knowledge of difference from the “mythical norm.”51 Dorthe Staunæs has pointed out that: Especially in an American context, the concept of intersectionality is often used to cover the interconnections between the classical background categories of gender, ethnicity, race, age, sexuality, and class. The concept of intersectionality can be a useful analytical tool in tracing how certain people get positioned as not just different, but also troubled and in some instances, marginalized. However, the concept does not include a consideration of how these categories work and intersect in the lived experiences of concrete subjects.52

Intersectionality, however, cannot be the only, if multifocal, lens through which relationships and power relations in the region are seen. Instead, it serves its purpose best in connection with other theoretical constructs. These help explain the connections and relations between people and political entities. World Systems Following Thomas D. Hall’s fruitful application of world-systems theory to the borderlands, I use it to determine some economic connections, national and especially transnational, that affected the Mesilla region. Immanuel Wallerstein’s approach, especially as adapted by Hall for the Southwest, despite many problems remains a useful one.53 The basic definition of the world-systems approach as put forth by Wallerstein in 1974 warrants re-reading: A world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage.54

Coherence is the problematic term here, as it can be argued to have variously been achieved or not achieved merely depending on differing definitions. According to

51 See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex.” 52 Staunæs, “Where Have All the Subjects Gone?,” 101. 53 Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 8–32. 54 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 229.

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Wallerstein, a social system is characterized by “the fact that life within it is largely self-contained, and that the dynamics of its development are largely internal.”55 Many of Wallerstein’s critics have noted that this definition, with little or no change to the wording, might define pretty clearly the characteristics of a nationstate. Nations, too, can be defined as entities with member groups, structures (both bureaucratic and social, it could hardly function without them), rules of legitimation (democracy and the rule of the governed in many modern nation-states, or rule of force or supernatural justification in others), coherence, and boundaries. While coherence is as vague a term for the social system as it is for the nation, boundaries are much more clearly delineated for the latter. Benedict Anderson and his epigones have dominated the nationalism debate for over three decades now, so it is just as well to use his words: The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.56

Wallerstein’s answer avant la parole rings somewhat hollow: [I]t is contended here that most entities usually described as social systems – “tribes,” communities, nation-states – are not in fact total systems. Indeed, on the contrary, we are arguing that the only real social systems are, on the one hand, those relatively small, highly autonomous subsistence economies not part of some regular tribute-demanding system and, on the other hand, world-systems. These latter are to be sure distinguished from the former because they are relatively large; that is, they are in common parlance “worlds.”57

One other issue with world-systems theory as an approach is contained in its very premise. Its single-minded focus on systems much below, or much above the level of the nation-state, although usually tempered by its practitioners, is a theoretical problem that must be addressed. This goes beyond the problem that a “social system” as softly defined by Wallerstein, might well be a nation-state. When taken as a category of analysis, the world-systems approach must answer to questions of why it is more useful than the statist approach – i.e. regarding the nation-state as the foremost point of reference. Wallerstein’s conceptions, of course, feed into a preexisting bias of history as a field: if something can be gainfully analyzed, it must be either fairly small (as in microhistory), or fairly large (as in

55 Ibid. 56 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 57 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 229.

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attempts to contextualize developments in national or world history). The middle ground is all too often a tertium non datur.58 Existing Research This book avails itself of several strands of literature. To provide some context on these, I include a short overview here. Relevant existing research can be roughly divided into six categories: First, research of the larger region, i.e. the American West, especially what has become known as the New Western History since the 1980s. Naturally, this includes a well-known canon, comprised of the works of the New Western History’s “gang of four,” Patricia Nelson-Limerick, William Cronon, Donald Worster, and Richard White.59 Second, research concerning itself with either only the states of Arizona or New Mexico, or specific parts thereof, or only the state of Sonora. Included here are, for want of a better place to put them, also books written by amateur historians, or written by historians for lay audiences.60 Considering the dearth of secondary literature on some aspects of the history of the region, I have had to sometimes rely on selfpublished, or limited-run books and pamphlets, such as Robert Woznicki’s The History of Yuma and the Territorial Prison. Where appropriate, I have also included some of the books in this category as primary sources, as in the case of autobiographical accounts of life in Arizona, including Henry Fountain Ashurst’s grandly named diary A Many-Colored Toga.61 The magazine Arizona Highways is a treasure trove for nuggets of Arizona history, many aspects of which have been compiled in two historiographical articles by Thomas Cooper.62 Third, research on the American Southwest as a coherent region. This usually includes, at least tentatively, northern Mexico. This is the most problematic to categorize, as the diversity across the region is very high. There is much that is similar across state lines, but there are also many dissimilarities. Here I follow Tomas

58 Brewer, “Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life.” 59 The literature in which the “gang of four” had a hand is extensive. Among the most prominent examples are: Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”; Worster, Under Western Skies. 60 Such as Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses; Sonnichsen, Tucson; Southwestern Mission Research Center, Tucson. 61 Ashurst, A Many-Colored Toga. 62 Cooper, “Arizona History in ‘Arizona Highways’: (Part I)”; Cooper, “Arizona History in ‘Arizona Highways’: (Part II)”; Woznicki, The History of Yuma.

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Jaehn’s model in Germans in the Southwest that deals almost exclusively with New Mexico, yet by implication and title sets out to yield insight also for the behavior of that ethnic group in Arizona.63 This includes research that foregrounds the borderland within the region, such as Katherine Benton-Cohen’s Borderline Americans, Rachel St. John’s study of the US-Mexico border, Line in the Sand, Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes, Miguel Tinker Salas’s In the Shadow of the Eagles and, emphasizing its dual interest in both local and national developments, Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.64 Fourth, research concerning either nationalism and national identity in general, or in the United States or Mexico specifically. This category especially will overlap with some of the bibliography for methods and theories. It also includes research on the Reconstruction-Era and Progressive-Era United States and on Mexico in between the War of the Reform and the end of the Porfiriato. Works included here comprise histories of national ideas, industrialization, and so on. Fifth, microhistoric studies that may or may not concern themselves with the region I survey and that give insights into the development of regional and local identities, often because of shared theoretical preconceptions or historical methodologies. A prominent example here is Daniel Emmons’s The Butte Irish, which follows the interactions of a regionalized ethnic group with the specific place in which they found themselves.65 And sixth, global histories that set the backdrop for the age, such as Bayly’s and Osterhammel’s.66 These tend to trace larger developments in global connection, trade, and cultural interaction, identifying a critical junction and deriving their periodizations from the various regions covered. In the case of Bayly and Osterhammel, the Hobsbawmian “long nineteenth century” is seen as disruptive, game-changing, and fundamentally different from what came before.67

63 In Jaehn’s case, at least, the author contends, this is because of a misunderstanding. Jaehn’s study concerns the Hispanic Southwest, therefore concentrating on the parts of present-day America that were actually settled by the Spanish. This was mainly New Mexico, with the notable exception of Tucson. Jaehn, Germans in the Southwest. 64 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes; Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles; Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction; St. John, Line in the Sand. 65 Emmons, The Butte Irish. 66 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. 67 Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange.

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Questions and Theses My central thesis in this work is that Southern Arizona (and, to a lesser degree, the New Mexican part of the Gadsden Purchase), because of its long isolation and its initially small number of Mexican settlers, developed in a fundamentally different way than either its neighboring US or Mexican states. In the Gadsden Purchase area, an Anglo-Hispanic elite developed quickly and lost power slowly around the turn of the century. I also seek to substantiate a host of further theses connected to this main one. For one, I argue Mexicans became increasingly disadvantaged by a more and more assertive Anglo legal system defining ownership of land, as well as customs of marriage, property, and labor. This system was specifically not local but national. Local Anglos were sometimes allied with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as part of the Anglo-Hispanic elite, and at odds with the national laws. Another smaller point is that local, regional, and state-level identities both supported and detracted from an Andersonian national imagined community that was firmly taking hold in the Post-Civil War Southwest. This had occurred earlier in different parts of the United States, but the comparably late entry of the Southwest into the national orbit changed patterns of connectivity in several important and often incongruent ways. Daniel Rodgers begins his Atlantic Crossings describing the United States as an “outpost nation,” that is to say one that grew out of colonial foundings, and later became independent. Arizona, then, is an outpost of that outpost nation.68 In contrast, however, Arizona did not separate but integrate. Nonetheless, some of the dynamics are the same. The development of a common identity in the Mesilla began with the Gadsden Purchase, and continued throughout the decades from the 1850s through 1920. In this respect, the story parallels that of the mother country. Much thorough and initially provocative work has been done on the idea that the American West was a colony of the United States, predicated on the idea that events there paralleled those in outright European and American colonies elsewhere.69 While this idea provides important insights without which the history of the region is bound to be misunderstood, it alone cannot explain what happened in the Southwest from the Civil War Era through World War I. This can only be achieved by putting the colonial aspects in tandem with the fact that, at the same time the West was exploited in a colonial, almost mercantilist manner, it was also integrated into the nation to which it was always connected geographically and more and more in mind and matter, through rail, news, and telegraphy.

68 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 1. 69 Such as Robbins, Colony and Empire.

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A concept that I apply throughout is that of the elite. Elites existed, sometimes happily, sometimes not, in an in-between state: elites in the West were masters of their own destiny to a degree, but in many respects, they were also played for profit by Eastern business and politics. Those not in the elite had only limited say in decisions affecting them. Yet, at least indirectly, they, too, were at times heard. That Arizona’s Mexican heritage survived at all is not only a function of its expediency for elites, but also testament to how deeply it was rooted in the communities of common people. The Hispanic elite in Southern Arizona lost power only gradually, and in certain pockets continued to be important for local, as well as regional politics far into the twentieth century. Though at times obvious and directed, the move towards replacing them with “Americans” was much more of a haphazard process than it is often taken to be. This process, as will be shown in Chapter 6, was frequently directed also against the express wishes of local Anglos. This bears emphasizing. Race and racism were “under construction” in Arizona at the turn of the century. Both the Hispanic elites and the Anglos that had arrived before 1880 drew a distinction between Hispanos and “Mexicans.” The latter were recent immigrants, mostly of lower class status and usually of mixed race. Hispanos, in contrast, had mainly descended from white Europeans. Some of these, in turn, had only migrated to Sonora and Chihuahua from Europe during the previous few decades.70 To understand the structural differences in elites in the two Southwestern territories, some definitions of who belonged to the elite and by what measure are necessary. First, one must distinguish between two competing, but not altogether incompatible conceptions of those in power. The one that matters immediately for decision-making at the local, territorial, and national levels, is that of the power elite. The men who comprise it, in the words of its main proponent, sociologist C. Wright Mills,71 are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.72

70 Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 24. 71 The gender was true in 1956, when Mills proposed his idea and also applied to the nineteenth century West. This was despite the fact that the West at least in theory offered more opportunities to women, who could hold a larger number of occupations than in the centers of the East. 72 Mills, The Power Elite, 4.

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While this view is undoubtedly from the twentieth century – both concepts of celebrity and military establishment would have been very different in the nineteenth – it can still be applied to the decision-makers of the Gilded Age. There is, of course a difference between a national power elite in this industrial-political sense, surely in existence by the turn of the century, and the local territorial power elite. Only a few members of that regional elite were part of the national conversation. Yet, since members of the territorial elite were in communication with each other, all were part of elite discourses of what was proper and necessary for the territory, even if not all agreed on what exactly that was. In this, too, Mills’ model holds, for it states that below the national power elite sit “the new and old upper classes of town and city and region.”73 The Hispanos among those elites in nineteenth-century New Mexico are the people for whom, according to Margaret Mitchell, “a general consensus has emerged among historians” that there were never more than ten percent of them among the Hispano population.74 The power elite must be distinguished from what Mills calls the “ruling class.”75 It shares membership with this class, but unlike it, consists of a broader base of people of means who own most of the real estate and financial capital. In a Marxist sense, the ruling class owns the modes of production. This however, does not automatically give each member equal say in policymaking. The power elite, on the other hand, is made up of those members of the ruling class that hold the most power in society. The power elite thus is in a similar position to the ruling class as the ruling class is to non-members of this class. In my terminology, this ruling class belonged squarely in the category of “secondary elite.” The difference is that the secondary elite also has members that would not belong to Mills’ ruling class. It therefore includes women, and members of minority groups, who have certain amounts of say in the decisions that the power elite eventually makes that will affect them, but considerably less so than they would if they were male, or part of the dominant racial group. The one glaring exception to membership in this group is of course Native Americans, who were usually not regarded as members of a Euro-American dominated Southwestern society, but as an outside force, and a threat to it. I believe that this distinction of two rungs of elite better helps explain the dynamics of elite relations, as well as constructions of race, gender, and nation in the Mesilla, than do assumed dichotomies of Anglo vs. Hispano, which continued to be

73 Ibid. 74 Mitchell, “The Founding of the University of Arizona,” 12. 75 I will apply the term power elite to local and territorial elites. The term is adapted slightly from Mills’s idea of the power elite. His conception, strictly speaking, is national and subordinates local elites.

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in a state of flux everywhere through at least the 1890s and in some places until the 1920s.76 The first rung was what could be termed a local power elite, comprised exclusively of Anglo and Hispano men who shared a certain outlook that included the importance of entrepreneurship, romantic ideas of rugged individualism, and an implicit assumption of patriarchy, whiteness, and the concept of separate spheres. Then, there was a secondary elite of businesspeople, some of whom were Anglo, some Hispano. Their ranks also included prominent minorities and women who had contact with the primary elite, but were precluded from participation in it. The ruling class on the other hand included some wives and children of the men in the power elite. Therefore, a count of male heads of household and their estate value, as in the censuses of 1870 and 1880 shows, on the one hand, the members of the power elite, and on the other those of the ruling class, i.e. their dependent wives and children. The secondary elite, in contrast, was made up of less wealthy male heads of household, wealthy widows, and well-off members of minorities. What mattered most in the struggle for domination of the region – between Hispanos and Anglos mostly, but in different ways also between these groups and Native Americans – was something basic yet often neglected in the historiography of the region: the legal system. The American common law legal system had a profound and lasting influence on developments in the region. It was an essential basis of security in life, trade, and property. The wires that bound together the itinerant elites were strings of copper, mined chiefly in Arizona. They then were processed and, in an almost mercantilist way, sent East for further manufacturing, only to emerge and be brought back as household and machine shop manufactures, and importantly, as telegraph wires. They were also the beams of metal held together by wooden sleepers on which the territory’s Sons of Tell rode to Tucson on time.77 More prosaically, it was this combination of communication and transportation which enabled elites to follow up wired messages with eye-to-eye conversations in important trading places and in the national decision-making centers of the East.

76 The Alianza Hispano-Americana, founded in 1894 as a Mexican-American fraternal and insurance organization, began advocating the use of the vote to fight legal discrimination of Hispanos in the 1920s. This indicates that by the decade from the end of World War I on the racial othering of Hispanos had become so established in Anglo society that it needed to be challenged whole, not only on an individual basis. Meier and Gutiérrez, Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 7. 77 With apologies to Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, Walden, 57.

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A Note on Terminology Names have many meanings in the region this project deals with. Many are contested, and most cannot be separated from the political or academic leanings of those that employ them. Scholars have adapted various terms to refer to the multitude of ethnic and cultural groups, as well as localities and geographic features of the region. I will follow much of recent scholarship of the Southwest by employing the most often-used terms. It remains necessary still to explain some of my choices. The Europeans who first came to today’s Southern Arizona and New Mexico, and to Sonora and Chihuahua, are typically considered to be “the Spanish” or “Spaniards” today. While this held true for most of the military men, typically peninsulares born in Spain, the waters were more muddied when it came to the mission priests. These men of the cloth, mostly Jesuits, are also commonly called “Spanish,” even though many of them, including Francisco Kino, most well-known among them, were from other parts of Europe. Kino was born in South Tyrol. Following convention, I will still refer to the missionaries as “Spanish.” The Native Americans the Europeans encountered were no congruent group. While the moniker “American Indians” is therefore not an analytically sharp distinction in every context, it is a useful shorthand in some. In this case, I will employ both “American Indian” and “Native American.” The latter has fallen somewhat into disuse because it is not always clear whether it refers to American Indians or to anyone born in the United States, and therefore native to the country. As there appears to be no clear consensus among those concerned which term should be used, I will use both. As do most current scholars of the Southwest, I will refer to American Indian bands by the names they have chosen for themselves. These will be written in their most common latinizations and without special characters. I will indicate former or still common outside appellations for convenience, such as in: Nnee (Apache). Where there are sub-groups who use specific names, such as the two O’odham bands, the Tohono O’odham and the Akimel O’odham, I will use these as appropriate, but also sometimes conflate them into O’odham when this will suffice. Hispanic Americans are another group for which many overlapping designations exist. For the most part, I will refer to the larger ethnic group as Hispano. In the Mexican borderlands, the distinction between Hispanos in general and Mexicans specifically is also important and will be noted. Those who lived in Sonora, Chihuahua and the Pimería Alta, are commonly called Norteños in Mexico, to distinguish them from central and southern Mexicans, as there are cultural and geographical differences. Norteños, who make up the bulk of the Hispanic elite that will be discussed in this project, were just as often descended directly from European immigrants to the Northern borderlands of Mexico as they were descend-

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ed from Mexicans from other parts of the country. This makes a racial distinction with Anglos, the term commonly used in Southwestern history for those Europeans and European-descended people, but also for some African-Americans, who are associated with the United States’ entry into the region, hard. For them, I will mostly use the term “Anglos,” as it has been established in literature. I have opted to not use the term “white” frequently. Geraldo Cadava, in his study on the Arizona-Sonora borderlands since 1940, uses “white” in order to denote “certain racial and power dynamics that have characterized the relationship between these individuals and people of Mexican birth or heritage.” As my interest is in changing power dynamics, this would infuse the analysis with a retroactive determinism which did not exist during portions of the time period surveyed. I define Anglos as US Americans of all European origins, as well as African Americans. Cadava also follows David Gutiérrez in using “ethnic Mexican” as an umbrella term to mean “Mexican Americans regardless of birthplace.” I have opted not to use this term because it is most clearly associated with ethnic struggles beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. “Chicana” and “Chicano” are not used for similar reasons. “Latina” and “Latino” refer more specifically to people with origins in the countries of Latin America, namely Central and South America. I do employ the term “Hispano” as an umbrella term, similar to “Hispanic,” for both Arizona and New Mexico, although during the period surveyed, its usage was mostly limited to New Mexico. “Hispano” and “Hispanic” are used interchangeably, with a preference for Hispano because it is the more common term in the relevant literature.78 Finally, I follow Cadava and Thomas Sheridan in using the term Tucsonenses to mean “ethnic Mexicans from Tucson – or those who identify Tucson as their hometown, either in a literal or experiential sense.”79 The word “Tucsonans,” as well as other similar terms for inhabitants of a town or place, are used to include all inhabitants, regardless of race or ethnic identity. Where necessary, these will be clarified, e.g. “Anglo Yumans.” Nuevomexicanos is another word sometimes used by scholars to refer to Hispano New Mexicans. I will not use it here because it would potentially create confusion with the English “New Mexicans.” Where geographic regions, cities, towns, villages, or geographic features are concerned, I will use the most commonly applied designations still in wide use today. Even though these names are frequently associated in problematic ways with the Anglo conquest of the Southwest, they are also part of that story.

78 The US Census Bureau uses Hispano/Hispana and Latino/Latina interchangeably. I have decided against this for the reasons outlined above. Ramirez, We the People, 2. 79 All quotes from Cadava, “Corridor of Exchange” 1, 4.

2. The Perennial Periphery

The American Southwest has meant many things to many people. To the first Paleo-Indian settlers to find their way here, it was home – a forbidding, hot and dry, at times unforgiving landscape, but the center of their world. To their descendants and both Athapaskan (Nnee, commonly known as Apache) and Spanish, later Mexican newcomers, it was a contested middle ground of trade, warfare, raiding, and agriculture. In the minds of mid and late nineteenth-century Hispanic and Anglo settlers, it was a frontier. First, a farming frontier, home of self-described rugged individualists and rugged individuals by any description. It was, to them, a place to be defended against marauding Apaches, a landscape to be wrested from the sparse waters of arid plains, to be homesteaded and civilized. Then it became an industrial frontier, where corporations did the wresting, mostly of ores, from the ground beneath. From the fifteenth through the nineteenth century, what is today Arizona and New Mexico and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua lay on the northernmost fringes of Spanish America. The region was in Randall McGuire’s words, the “periphery of the periphery,” or the “hinterland of a periphery.” It had been that way since prehistoric times.1 What is known today as the American Southwest has changed hands, shapes, and identities several times over the past five hundred years of documented history, and presumably several times before.2 Various American Indians have called it their

1

Thomas Hall observes this as well. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 46. McGuire originated both terms in connection with the Pre-Columbian societies in the region. See, in order: McGuire, “Prestige Economies in the Prehistoric Southwestern Periphery,” 5. McGuire, “Economies and Modes of Production in the Prehistoric Southwestern Periphery,” vii, ix, 113.

2

Because of this, appellations for the geographical region, or parts of it, have also been much varied. To limit confusion, I will use the modern catchall “Southwest,” vague as it is even in that usage, to apply to all of what is today the American Southwest, even for

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home over the centuries. Today’s largest group, the Navajo, or Diné, along with the various Apache bands for which the Southwest is known in Western lore, are relative newcomers. The Akimel O’odham – “River People” – referred to by the Anglos as Pimas, and the Tohono O’odham – “Desert People,” unfortunately in colloquial usage still known as Papagos, a derogatory term meaning “bean eaters” – represent a more ancient presence. Resident today chiefly in Southern Arizona, both groups are closely related. They are thought to have descended from the now-extinct Hohokam civilization.3 The Hohokam were one of four older cultures whose descendants were present in the Southwest at the time of European first contact (the others being the Anasazi, the Mogollon, and the Patayan).4 There are many possible divisions and subdivisions of these cultures, but most archaeologists accept some generalizations.5 In terms of a general geographical division, the Patayan occupied the western part of what was to become the Gadsden Purchase area, the Hohokam lived in the center, and the Mogollon could be found in the east. The Anasazi lived mostly north of the area, and would have rarely ventured so far south. They are, however, important because of their prominence within the greater region, and their cultural effects on their immediate neighbors.

times when this is not strictly historically true. This means Arizona and New Mexico, and in some contexts other Western states or parts of states, and Mexican border regions. 3

Befitting that status, their name is an Akimel O’odham word meaning “all used up,” more commonly translated in context as “those who have gone before,” “those who are gone,” “vanished ones,” or “ancient ones.” Cf. Joseph, Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America, 220; Haury, The Hohokam, 296; Waldman, Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, 279; Thomas, Exploring Ancient Native America, 109. While the Anasazi homeland spanned four modern US states, that of the Mogollon covered parts of Sonora, New Mexico and Arizona, as well as almost all of Chihuahua, and the Patayan held half of Arizona and more, the Hohokam occupied an area only about half as large as that of any of their neighboring cultures. That area is today central and southern Arizona, as well as, at least by some estimations, a good part of northern Sonora. Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 24.

4

Johansen and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of American Indian History, 433.

5

As with all the groupings of native peoples, there is a good amount of arbitrariness to each division. Because modern Indian tribes often based conceptions of their own community and identity on these divisions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and do so now, it remains an important issue. However, given that this is a discussion most relevant to the field of Southwestern archaeology, I will not delve into these intricacies any further.

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The Patayan – “the old people” in Quechan or Hualapai (both are part of the Yuma language family) – or Hakataya culture were identified as a distinct entity only in 1945. They could be found both in the southeast of modern California and in Baja California, at the Arizona-Sonora border, and in the Gila and Lower Colorado River valleys. Their territory stretched from Yuma north toward the Grand Canyon area, occupying roughly the western half of Arizona.6 While all Southwestern cultures had to deal with harsh environmental conditions, the Patayan lived in some of the most challenging surroundings on the continent. Only about 100mm of rain falls in a typical year, concentrated in just a few “monsoon” storms in late summer. Peter N. Peregrine and Melvin Ember colorfully relate that the landscape has been called “lunar.”7 The Patayan remained nomadic until the time of European contact.8 The Hohokam had emerged around the year 100 and thrived until roughly the beginning of the fourteenth century.9 Central Arizona was the Hohokam homeland. They hand-dug an impressive network of agricultural irrigation canals. The Hohokam were adept and far-roving traders, connected by commerce to the Pacific Northwest and the Gulf of Mexico.10 Their largest settlement, near modern-day Phoenix, sustained a population of around 600 people at its peak between about 975 to 1150. It was strategically located at the Gila and Salt River confluence. This was clearly an environmental advantage in a region that, despite significant yearly rainfalls during the “monsoon” season, was and is relatively dry.11 The Mogollon culture concentrated mostly around the modern Arizona and New Mexico border, stretching north to meet the Anasazi in the north of both states. The

6

Griffin-Pierce, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest, 16, 184–185; Peregrine and Ember, Encyclopedia of Prehistory, 408–409; White, “Transportation, Integration, Facilitation,” 44–47; Griffin-Pierce, Native Peoples of the Southwest, 15; Reid and Whittlesey, “The Patayan,” 111–130.

7

Peregrine and Ember, Encyclopedia of Prehistory, 408.

8

Peregrine and Ember give the timeframe of 1600–500 BP in their 2001 publication, i.e. from ca. 400 to 1501 CE.

9

Given the nature of archaeological chronologies, all dates given will be imprecise. Sometimes vast discrepancies exist between the earliest and latest time during which a group is said to first have existed in a place. This is contingent on not only which archaeological evidence is accepted, but also on how groups are classified. The above dates are, however, approximately agreed upon by several authoritative sources. See, for example Zeman, Chronology of the American West, 18–21, 23-26; Thomas, Exploring Ancient Native America, 96–118; Waldman, Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, 278–279.

10 Griffin-Pierce, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest, 184. 11 Ibid.

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Mogollon homelands ranged just as far into Sonora and Chihuahua below the Gadsden Purchase area. All in all, their ancient area of settlement makes up roughly the eastern half of the Mesilla. They roved across this vast territory seasonally for the first several centuries of their existence as a distinctive culture. In the Gadsden Purchase area, the Mogollon were chiefly represented by their Mimbres subculture, centered in the valley of the same name.12 The Mogollon made the best of the sparseness of the land, subsisting on a mixture of agriculture and hunting-gathering. As was true for many Native American groups, Mogollon family and societal structures were, by necessity, flexible. Such structures aided them in continuously adapting to their changing and challenging environment.13 In the Four Corners region near the the modern Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico borders, lived the Anasazi. They are visible in the archeological record from about 100 BCE on.14 Following several distinct evolutionary stages of the so-called Basketmaker Period, the Anasazi transitioned into their Pueblo Period starting around 750.15 During the former, they had elevated basket weaving to an art

12 Houk, Mogollon, 7–10. For more on the distinct phases of Mimbres culture see: Hegmon and Kulow, “Painting as Agency, Style as Structure,”; Shafer and Brewington, “Microstylistic Changes in Mimbres Black-on-White Pottery,” 5–29, table 1; Hegmon, “Recent Issues in the Archaeology of the Mimbres Region,” 307–357, esp. fig. 2. 13 Griffin-Pierce, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest, 11, 122, 139, 150, 184. 14 Anasazi means “ancient ones who are not among us” or “enemy ancestors” in the Diné language, and is thus one of the many descriptors referring to a group in the history of the Southwest not originated by that group, but by their enemies. Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 25. Most authors agree that they were established in the region by the first century CE. Although the Anasazi homelands never reached as far as southern Arizona and New Mexico, the geographic regions that this dissertation concerns itself with, they have been included for the sake of completeness, and because they significantly influenced their neighbors. 15 Despite problems with its applicability to the Southwest as a region in general, archaeologists still rely on the so-called Pecos Classification when it comes to periodizing Anasazi culture and its sites. This system of dating was originally devised by a 1927 conference organized and masterminded by Alfred J. Kidder at Pecos, New Mexico. See: Wilcox and Fowler, “The Beginnings of Anthropological Archaeology in the North American Southwest,” 182–191; Ramenofsky and Steffen, Unit Issues in Archaeology, 41–50; Graves, “The History of Method and Theory in the Study of Prehistoric Puebloan Pottery Style in the American Southwest,” 313–317; Cordell and Gumerman, Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory, 3–4. It has subsequently been significantly modified, especially in the wake of the New Archaeology movement since the 1960s, but is still referred to by

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form, but built few permanent structures. The Pueblo period found them creating stone structures on a large scale, as well as taking up agriculture as their primary means of subsistence.16 In the centuries up to 1300, Pueblo Anasazi culture reached its peak in the Chaco Civilization, centered around Chaco Canyon in northeastern New Mexico. Anasazi descendants, such as the Zuni and Hopi, still live near the Four Corners, mostly in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, as did their ancestors.17 All the above mentioned prehistoric groups currently enjoy prominent status in archaeology, as well as in popular culture, certainly in part because they are the ancestors of important contemporary Indian tribes. This, however, obscures the simple fact that, despite their impressive achievements, especially in regard to the local realities they faced, they were all relatively small and unimportant civilizations once put into perspective with their continental neighbors. All were peripheral to both the Central American Maya and Aztecs, and few in numbers even when compared to many less complex societies. Unlike heavily linked and trading cultures of the Western seaboard and Pacific Northwest, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Eastern United States, Southwestern native cultures produced food at the subsistence level or barely above, as well as some artisanal trade goods, but little else. Trade, although far-reaching, was never high-volume. In these terms, the four Southwestern cultures were impeded by climate, distance, and geography. For those who followed them in

its original name. Similarly, the Hohokam culture is dated based on a system of periods devised by Winifred and Harold Gladwin in 1934 as a reaction to failings of the Pecos classification. It has also since been regularly modified and updated. Griffin-Pierce, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest, 184–193. Most of the recent survey works and dictionaries of Southwestern history and prehistory, such as Zeman, Chronology of the American West; Waldman, Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes; Griffin-Pierce, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southwest, 184; and Peregrine and Ember, Encyclopedia of Prehistory, 118–119, ultimately cite Emil W. Haury as a baseline for dates that vary slightly by time of publication, personal preference, and disciplinary affinities. Among those most quoted are Haury, The Hohokam; Haury, Reid, and Doyel, Prehistory of the American Southwest; and Haury, Mogollon Culture in the Forestdale Valley. On Haury as an authority in Southwestern archaeology, see: Raymond H. Thompson, “Emil W. Haury and the Definition of Southwestern Archaeology”. Further classifications exist for the Chaco Anasazi archaeological sites culture. Lynne Sebastian, The Chaco Anasazi, 22–24. 16 Reed, Foundations of Anasazi Culture, 5–13. 17 Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 25–27; White, American Indian Chronology, 6–7.

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seeking to make the Southwest their home, this would be a recurring theme, well into the twentieth century. That Pre-Columbian native trade networks, even if more trickle than stream, existed at all in the Southwest, however, would soon help speed the demise of those who once profited from them. While illnesses caused by foreign viruses and bacteria decimated their numbers, European customs and imports from the sixteenth century on inalterably changed their culture. Contact with the Old World, in John E. Kicza’s stark words, made it possible for diseases and manufactured goods (the latter by 1533) [to flow] into northern Mexico and the American Southwest along trade routes that had connected these regions with the civilizations of central Mexico for some two thousand years.18

People followed the goods and the germs, bringing along more of both. Spanish conquistadors first came to the region in 1540, during Coronado’s famed-andinfamous journey. But not until the latter half of the century would they establish permanent, or at least semi-permanent, settlements. Spanish missionaries accompanied the Oñate expedition of 1598 – or rather, missionaries sent by the Franciscan and Jesuit orders under the protection of the Spanish Crown did. Many of them were born in Central Europe, into families who spoke Italian, French, German, or any combination of the three. Other European states were also represented. Franciscan friar Father Alonso de Benavides, who alone founded ten missions during the 1620s, Tordesillas be damned, was born on San Miguel, and was therefore Portuguese.19 It was not until the 1680s, however that mission colonization would receive its defining impulse and most important push forward. Perhaps the most influential of the Jesuits, Eusebio Francisco Kino is certainly the best remembered today. Born Eusebius Kühn20 in Nonsberg, Val di Non in 1644 or ’45, he added the saint’s name Franz – Francisco – to his own during a course of studies at religious seminaries and universities in what is now Austria and Germany.21 Applying to the Jesuit order for missionary work from 1672 on, Kino in 1676 even refused a call to become pro-

18 Kicza, “First Contacts,” 31. 19 The Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal in 1494, giving Spain the bulk of the land, while leaving only the easternmost part of South America to Portugal. On Benavides, see: Weddle, “Benavides, Alonso de.” 20 His name is also variously given as Kühn, Kühne, Chini, Chino or Quino, or Latinized as Chinus. The spelling common today follows Kino’s own Hispanicized usage. 21 Thiel, “Eusebius Franz Kühn ‘Padre Kino’”; Dörflinger, “Beiträge österreichischer Jesuitenmissionare zur kartographischen Erschliessung Amerikas,” 3–6.

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fessor of mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt, then a center of the Jesuit order and the counter-reformation. Instead of his desired goal, China, Kino ended up being assigned to Spanish North America in 1678. It was the result of what he related as a “pious lottery.” Kino had gambled with another Jesuit which one of them would go to America and which one would head to the Philippines.22 In a way this halting decision prefigured the shape of things to come. In spirit, it would be one repeated over and over again by many of those who settled in the Southwest. The Mesilla seldom was their ultimate goal. Many simply stopped on the way to, or back from California; before they could make their fortune on the West Coast, or after they had tried and failed, and were on their way back East. Others came from more southern parts, searching for opportunity on the Santa Fe Trail, but finding that making inroads into that trade network could be a daunting proposition. As a general rule, those who found a better life in California and the Oregon Territory had usually set out to go there. Those who “made it” in Southern Arizona and New Mexico had settled there as much by happenstance as by anything else. The Southwest was always a waystation more than it was a destination; during the Gold Rush and on the East-West Butterfield Stage Line, just as much as on the North-South Santa Fe Trail. It could be the fulfillment of hope, but it was hardly ever the object of hope itself, obligatory boosterism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries notwithstanding. In 1681, Kino made his way to the Iberian peninsula, then departed Castile for America. He arrived in New Spain’s Las Californias province in 1683. Near today’s Loreto in Baja California Sur, he and his fellow Jesuits founded a mission, San Bruno. Forced to abandon San Bruno because of supply problems and a drought, Kino went to the Pimería Alta. He spent his remaining life traveling tirelessly across the vast expanse of what would later be known as the Sonoran desert. Along the way, he founded, by one count, twenty-four missions or visitas, many of which grew into prominent cities in Sonora and Arizona. Kino’s career was variegated, colorful, and nothing if not impressive. In addition to his founding frenzy, he is credited for being the first Westerner to travel to the mouth of the Rio Grande, for providing proof to European cartographers that Baja California is not an island, for introducing cattle to the Southwest, and for planting the first figs and Zinfandel grapes in that part of North America.23 Kino died at one of “his” Sonoran missions, Santa María Magdalena de Buquivaba in 1711. After wavering about its name for centuries, in 1966 the city would rename itself Magdalena de Kino in his honor.24

22 Bolton, “Introduction,” 30–31; Smith, Kessell, and Fox, Father Kino in Arizona, 103. 23 Sellés-Ferrando, Spanisches Österreich, 243. 24 Bolton and Bannon, The Padre on Horseback, 77; Bolton, Rim of Christendom, xv; Yetman, Sonora, xiv.

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Apart from the Jesuit missionaries’ efforts, the Spanish colonial bureaucracy paid little attention to the Pimería Alta, the area of the Viceroyalty of New Spain which included parts of today’s southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Unlike the rich lands of Central and South America, it had precious little of anything considered precious by the Spanish. The political problems of Spain caused an era of salutary neglect from 1693 to the time of the Bourbon reforms, which took effect in New Mexico by 1765.25 For the Southwest this did not mean, however, that the region, like the British colonies of the Eastern seaboard at the same time, could develop a strong regional identity and cohesion. Too complicated was the power structure, too infrequent contact or communication. The Spanish neglect made the region more dependent, not more independent.26 It was the beginning of a cycle of endemic warfare, tempered only by short periods of relatively peaceful coexistence. Again and again, these were replaced by more warfare when empires or nations, without fail, experienced periods of decreasing interest in the region. Less attention to the region meant less money, and thus a reduced capacity of militia or military to defend the encroachers’ settlements with any convincing force. This frequently encouraged American Indians to resume raiding, even if they had given up the practice earlier in order to become trading partners or recipients of government-supplied food. Raiding then led to local posses avenging the loss of property and life, which prompted, predictably, the response of warfare on the part of the Indians.27 It is important to note that for the Native American groups in the region, raiding and warfare were fundamentally different activities. Raiding was akin to hunting, a way to seek out sources of food away from home. Raiding was not seen as war. It could lead to the deaths of those who refused to give up their livestock or supplies, but although calculated, such deaths were considered accidental – the cost of doing business, just as deaths in hunting. They were not imbued with the spiritual weight that deaths in war were. The Nnee called war, quite on point, “taking death from an enemy.” This was in clear distinction to raiding, which was very likely not even considered theft ini-

25 Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 76. 26 Cf. Thomas Hall’s description of the period from the 1500s through the eighteenth century, Ibid., 50–110. 27 Hall’s detailed description of the conflicts emphasizes their cyclical nature. His narrative is imbued with a sense of overpowering inevitability. Ibid. More recently, Karl Jacoby has demonstrated that the intricacies of various interests between groups of actors, and even among them, and simple, but never-questioned cultural misunderstandings led to some of the most egregious massacres and assaults of that centuries-long strife. Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn.

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tially, since no conception existed of animals as being private property.28 Only with time did the Nnee come to see raiding as an activity in between hunting-gathering and warfare, and came to name it “to search out enemy property.”29 They did so because of the violent Spanish response to their raids, which necessitated a new way of thinking about them. In doing so, they acknowledged that their neighbors and sometimes-enemies, sometimes-allies, saw what they did as an attack on their property. Nnee raiding parties must have realized over time that they were provoking warlike responses in the Spanish. Alternatives to this measure were not easy to come by, however. The situation that made it imperative for the Nnee to open up new sources of food supply was largely a European creation. When governments paid less attention and less money to the frontier, it also meant that no superregional power was there to give out gifts or food rations, welcome in the arid climate during repeated droughts. It also led to decreased trade and to a diminished capacity of Native Americans to sustain themselves on the second-rate farming and hunting land that they still controlled. There is no small irony in what this would cause: more Native American raiding, out of sheer necessity. This created a vicious circle so perfect and inescapable that it was repeated time and again, seemingly without either side learning from the consequences. It continued until the end of the nineteenth century, when increased US military presence, owing to a Civil War won, forced an end to American Indian raiding. This military presence also precluded the possibility of Indian self-rule after their own models of societal organization once and for all. It forced Native Americans onto reservations far removed from their ancestral lands. Many of these today still punctuate, or even dominate, as they do in the Four Corners region, the Southwestern landscape.30

28 Ibid., 149–151. 29 Ibid., 149. 30 It bears repeating that these ancestral lands were in cases, such as with the Nnee, relatively recently so. The Nnee had occupied them in the Pre-Columbian era, but their presence in the Southwest was decades old, not centuries. This, however, should not detract from the fact that they were forcibly removed from arable, productive land to places undesirable not only to Anglos, but also to the Indians, who had no strategies to extract sustenance from it and were dependent on US support. Such support was not always forthcoming. The cliché of the Indian agent lining his own pockets instead of providing the necessities of life to the reservations is not always far off the mark. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 50–110; Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 115–218.

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D EFINING

A

R EGION

When Western historian Walter Nugent sent out a survey to the members of the Western History Association, to those of the Western Writers Association, and select journalists from major American newspapers in 1991, asking just where they thought the West was, the answers were varied. For some, the American West was all the land in the United States that lay west of the Mississippi, or west of the 98th, or the 100th meridian. Even in that definition, the boundaries of the West remained blurry. For others – about one in six – the West was more a landscape of the mind than anything else. On occasion it did or did not exist in one and the same place depending on the context, or began at some point when one drove toward the Pacific Coast across the heartland plains; a soft, pliable borderland perhaps somewhere in Texas or Oklahoma. The definitions ranged from including only whole states to a more fine-tuned approach that broke up states into more general geographical areas. The borders were drawn variously at state or county lines, mountain ranges, and rivers. Alaska and Hawai’i were excluded most of the time, but perhaps surprisingly, in many cases so was California. These states obviously did not “feel” Western enough to the respondents. The people earning their living off the idea of a place, it seemed, collectively had no idea where that place was. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous adage about obscenity goes, you knew it when you saw it. The “unambiguous West,” as Nugent termed it, the parts of the United States that all could agree on were part of the American West, was still a large swath of land. It encompassed all of Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, and parts of neighboring states, such as California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Missouri, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Many took the US border in the North and South for granted. For them, nothing above or below could be considered part of the West, that thoroughly American concept. Yet about a fourth of the Western Writers, and as many historians of the West, included parts of Northern Mexico in their definition, citing the arbitrariness of the dividing line between people and a Southwestern/Northern cultural area that was best thought of as one.31 In cultural terms, though, the larger region of the West should not be treated as one contiguous region, even if that larger region allows for subregions. Rather, it must be seen as two distinct regions: the Anglo West, mostly north of Colorado and Utah, which was dominated by the push of settlers from the East Coast (this in-

31 The resulting essay has become a classic of sorts in Western history literature, having been included in several textbooks and survey classes on the West. Nugent’s survey is now a staple of the academic quiver whenever a definition of the region is attempted. Nugent, “Where Is the American West?,” 4–8.

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cludes the Canadian borderlands states and provinces), and the Anglo-Hispanic West, which, although it shares many qualities of being a common, or middle ground, is different from the Anglo West of the north because of its preexisting European Hispanic settlement, and the endurance of this rivaling settlement into the American-dominated period in the second half of the nineteenth century. What is true for the geography of the American West as a larger region, then is, by extension, also and especially applicable to the Southwest, whether hemmed in by national borders or not: no one knows where it begins and where it ends. Donald Meinig put it best: The Southwest is a distinctive place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps, which is to say that everyone knows that there is a Southwest but there is little agreement as to just where it is. Some would write it so broadly across the continent from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico as to include Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Oklahoma as well as California, Texas, and the states directly between, a full quarter of the entire nation. Others would define it more narrowly, but still with little general agreement as to its proper bounds.32

Meinig’s own definition is based in both geography and culture. It has the benefit of approximating the lived realities. According to Meinig’s extended “nuclear"33 definition, on which he focuses his study, the Southwest essentially covers the modern states of Arizona and New Mexico, with slivers straying into Utah from northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Parts of southwestern Texas, especially the region around El Paso, are also included. Meinig does not include the westernmost part of the state of Arizona, and not all of New Mexico east of the Llano Estacado.34 As far as the expanse of the Southwest is concerned, most sources agree that today’s Arizona and New Mexico are included. Some go beyond that. Southern California and parts of Texas, as well as the whole or parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado are sometimes cited as belonging to the region. The census does not rec-

32 Meinig, Southwest, 3. See also: Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 33. 33 Meinig terms “nuclear” the settlements “served by” the river systems of the Rio Grande in New Mexico and Texas, and the Gila in Arizona. Meinig, Southwest, 7. 34 According to Meinig, “[t]he Southwest thus defined – despite a persistent dualism and more internal diversity and less focus than such a single term suggests, has nevertheless a sufficiently common set of people and problems enmeshed in a common heritage and is sufficiently set apart by physical and cultural differences from its neighbors to make it a reasonable regional unit for the purpose and scale of this interpretation.” Ibid., 7, 4–5.

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ognize the Southwest as a region, but adds its eastern part to the South, and its western part to the West.35 One definition states that the Southwest consists of all of New Mexico and Arizona and nothing else. This is still somewhat problematic. While northern New Mexico (at least as far north as Albuquerque) can, with some caveats, be lumped culturally with the southern portion of the state that is clearly marked by its borderland status, northern Arizona is different. Spanish settlement never reached as far north as Prescott, or Flagstaff. Even Phoenix, centrally located in the state, was a good two or three days’ ride farther north than Tucson as the most extreme northerly outpost of Spanish America in Arizona. Considering the fact that my concern in this project is mainly with Arizona and New Mexico, even more specifically only their southern parts, the question why this discussion matters is valid. Arizona and New Mexico are, by most definitions, part of the Southwest. And even though not all of New Mexico always makes the cut – the part east of the Llano Estacado with its plains geography, does not match the rest of the Southwest in that regard, for example – the Gadsden Purchase area is truly always included in any definition of the Southwest. It is the core area of the region, and it is also definitively part of Nugent’s “unambiguous West.” The Mesilla is Western and Southwestern, no matter who one asks. That, however, creates another problem. The West as a cultural, bureaucratic, or political entity has dimensions indubitably different than those of the Southwest. Yet the Southwest is commonly regarded as a subregion of the West. This outlook has shaped many a work of history dealing with developments in the region. If events in the Southwest are seen as merely part of the narrative of a larger West that is considered at least somehow contiguous and uniform, this will necessarily inform the perspective on these events. This in and of itself is not a problem, but merely a caveat. If, however, such a view becomes dominant, other, more local or more global readings of the same events are relegated to the discursive sidelines. It is doubly an issue when one considers that the larger West itself has been often merged into a national US history that fails to recognize its distinctiveness. During the Civil War and the era of Reconstruction especially, the American West diverged clearly in which issues mattered there and in what influenced its fate. Elliott West has argued to approach the time from 1870 to the early 1900s as not one national story centered on the East, but as two processes occuring at the same time. Both Eastern and Western Reconstruction, as they may be termed, occurred during the same timeframe, each process with its own properties but shaped by the

35 It does subdivide the West into “Mountain” and “Pacific” regions, neither of which matches any of the prevalent definitions of the Southwest. US Census Bureau, “Census Regions and Divisions of the United States.”

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other, and both halves linked in a cross-continental “Greater Reconstruction.”36 This process, according to West, encompassed not only the efforts to pull the South back into the national fold and the ideological battles that followed the real ones in the war. The term is larger geographically, pulling in the land grab of Westward Expansion. It is useful because, if taken literally, it stresses that transforming the nation began with a physical rebuilding, a reconstructive burst of territorial growth that increased the size of the nation by roughly 70 percent.37

It also goes beyond standard accounts of Reconstruction temporally. West proposes to include not only the typical timeframe of 1865–1877, but instead champions an approach that segments off a whole thirty-two years of American history, from 1845–1877, from the end of the Mexican-American War to the end of what has been traditionally accepted as the Reconstruction period. For West, this approach is further based upon two additional premises: Second, this period was defined by two events that together set American history in a new direction. One was the Civil War; the other was the acquisition of the far West that came in three episodes over three years – the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican War (1846– 48), and the acquisition of the Pacific Northwest […] (1846). Third, far western expansion and the Civil War raised similar questions and led to twinned crises. Grappling with those questions and resolving those crises essentially remade the nation, a transformation that was genuinely continental in scope and with implications, including nagging questions, that have rippled ahead to the present day.38

The twin crises of the Civil War and the integration of a territory “half again the size of the Confederacy” would define America’s political landscape for decades to come.39 They led into the Gilded Age, into what Alan Trachtenberg called the Incorporation of America.40 It is the continuing importance of the questions raised during this period that make West’s temporal end point, echoing that of classical Reconstruction in 1877, a somewhat doubtful choice. For one thing, America expe-

36 For a concise presentation of West’s idea of a “Greater Reconstruction,” see: West, The Last Indian War, xvii–xxiii. 37 Ibid., xx. 38 Ibid., xix–xx. 39 Ibid., xx–xxi. 40 Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America.

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rienced not only a war and a period of unparalleled actual growth (i.e. integrating people living in remote areas into the nation, as opposed to the largely theoretical gain of land in the form of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803). The country also was forever changed by another set of dual forces; capitalism and technological industrialization. Both had come of age during the first half of the nineteenth century, and they would reach their most celebrated as well as despised extremes at its close. As Volker Depkat points out, industrial modernity had come to the Eastern states in the 1820s and 1830s. Together with the growing capitalist economy, it was both a trigger and an object of the conflicts of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian push for democratization.41 The years from 1865 to 1920 saw industrial modernity spread across the United States. By the close of World War I, the industrial-capitalist-technological juggernaut, a complex interrelating system of economy and production, as well as communication and transportation, had established itself as a sine qua non of American society. It represented a fundamentally American kind of modernity, intrinsically linked with consumerism, mass production, urban life, and mobility; both across the map and across social strata.42 The case of the Southwest is in some ways similar to that of the larger West. The Southwest is a region complicated by its status as a borderland and a periphery despite its central geographical position in the Americas. Before it ended up on the Mexican and on the US periphery, and after it had been the internal periphery of trading Pre-Columbian cultures, it constituted a periphery of Spanish America.

E L N ORTE

AND THE

S OUTHWEST

Even if some agreement could be reached as to its geographic locus, “Southwest” is, of course, a wholly problematic term for reasons beside its inherent vagueness. It is […] an ethnocentric [term]: what is south and west to the Anglo-American was long the north of the Hispanic-American, and the overlap of the colonizing thrusts of these two continental invaders – the one approaching west from the Atlantic Seaboard, the other north from central Mexico – suggests a first element in the definition of a distinctive cultural border zone.43

41 Depkat, Geschichte Nordamerikas, 7. 42 Ibid., 7, 245–270, esp. 245–262. 43 Meinig, Southwest, 3.

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In other words: both American and Hispanic definitions of the same region are, inherently, ethnocentric. This is important to keep in mind. Introducing ethnocentricity as a category of problematization only for the idea of the “Southwest” as in opposition to an “older,” more “natural” North, is likewise a flawed idea. It ignores regional definitions even longer established, such as those used by American Indians of various cultures. Then again, finding a term that would include all these perceptions would be an impossible and not altogether desirable task. The fact that “El Norte” and “The Southwest” exist, and coexist on much the same territory has informed the history of the region in no small way. Both are seen, by their respective nations, as the ultimate and final frontier of continental expansion. Both carry with them illusions of mastery over the region by one culture. They are both testament to the fact that the Southwest was always a region of meeting, of common ground shared.44 Yet it was certainly not always easily so, as the many conflicts it has witnessed show. Sarah Deutsch called her seminal study of the American Southwest as part of the Spanish North “No Separate Refuge.”45 Although this refuge has many definitions, perhaps not all of them implied or wanted by Deutsch, the description has held accurate. In a place where many cultures met and meet, there was no possibility for any one of them to ignore the others. This is not to say that ignoring other cultures present was not tried. An unsuccessful attempt was that by Mexican pioneers who ventured as far north as Colorado and Utah. Another one has been ongoing. It is the one by AngloAmericans who today claim the Southwest as just that, Anglo-American. They thereby want to do away with a third of its population – in some cases physically but definitely in the imagination. The goal is always to limit other cultures’ influence. All such attempts grow out of a sense of defense of a home that has always been shared, was defined and delineated by nations and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is a place of unceasing negotiation of terms of communication and control in the twenty-first. The Southwest must be thought of not only as the borderland and place of cultural hybridity so fashionable today, but also as the double frontier of Spanish and Anglo settlement. Both Spaniards and Anglos considered themselves frontier

44 Interestingly, this Anglo perspective on the region, by the middle of the twentieth century, had become shared by influential Hispanos. A pamphlet advertising life insurance plans by the Hispanic Alianza Hispano-Americana from 1953 refers to the region as “El Gran Suroeste” under a stylized map depicting California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Of these, only California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas are marked by name. “La Alianza Hispano-Americana.” Alianza Hispano-Americana, MS 597, AHS. 45 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge.

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dwellers. Though “frontier” is no longer the simple analytical category it was in the work of Turnerian Western historians, it is still a necessary historical category of designation, distinct from that of the borderlands, but occupying the same geographic space at times. Ignoring the frontier idea in service of foregrounding the borderlands would be a mistake. In a multicultural meeting ground, “frontier” was in fact the primary appellation for the region by two of the, in Meinig’s words, “peoples” important in shaping its history. “Frontier” is therefore used in the following, not as an analytical category in the writing of history, but as a historic category employed by many of the actors who shaped it.46 That they thought of the region as a frontier mattered to them, and it mattered in the context of the events that occurred. Historically, today’s US Southwest came into being with American westward expansion finding a mid-nineteenth century culmination in the Mexican-American War. That war gave the United States most or all of what is today California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas, as well as parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Significantly, and omitted even in West’s recasting of continental US history, the southernmost portion of today’s Arizona and New Mexico, an area roughly the size of Soctland encompassing 76,800 square kilometers (29,760 square miles), was only added in 1854, after Gadsden’s treaty.47 This region remained de facto, if not de jure, Mexican for the next quarter century, until the arrival of railroads and Anglo mining enterprises marked Arizona’s (and to a lesser degree, New Mexico’s) becoming, in Thomas Sheridan’s words an “extractive colony of the United States.”48 Though Mexican influences became less important beginning with the massive Anglo influx from the 1880s on, they still remain obvious. During the six decades from 1854 to 1914 Anglo-Mexican differences and commonalities were the defining factor in the development of a common Arizonan identity. This identity, asserted by Anglo newcomers in opposition to the federal government and distinct from that of New Mexico, fed off Hispanic cultural heritage while at the same time outwardly denying it. This duplexity can in part explain politics and society in

46 See Chapter 1 for a thorough discussion of differing ideas of “frontier” and “borderlands.” 47 West only allows for “three episodes over three years – the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican War (1846–48), and the acquisition of the Pacific Northwest […] (1846).” West, The Last Indian War, xix–xx. 48 Sheridan, Arizona, 122.

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Arizona today. Anthropologist Thomas Sheridan, one of Arizona’s foremost chroniclers, once felt moved to call the state “a strange and schizophrenic place.”49

T ERRITORIES Congress created New Mexico Territory on September 9, 1850 out of the land Mexico had ceded following the Mexican-American War. The territory encompassed Mexican Cession land west of Texas, east of California, and south of Utah and Colorado Territories. It was a little over twice as large as the modern state of the same name. Another incarnation of New Mexico Territory had existed even earlier. In 1846, Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny decreed a “Bill of Rights for the Territory of New Mexico” regarding territory occupied by US forces during the Mexican– American War. The bill consisted of thirteen points mostly familiar from the US constitution. No doubt this was owed to the circumstances. Kearny had relied on Alexander William Doniphan, an attorney from Missouri, and his assistant Willard Preble Hall, to draft the bill. They had only a few law books with them, but Hall reportedly had exceptional memory. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the resulting “Kearny Code,” of which the bill formed one part, contained provisions from the laws of Texas, Louisiana and Missouri. It also borrowed from the laws of the Republic of Mexico and its constituent state of Coahuila. Kearny was later chastised by Congress for overstepping his bounds. He had effectively countermanded President Polk’s order to keep what native government there was. He had also appointed territorial officials. Most of these had been recruited from among Santa Fe’s Anglo merchants, many from the scheming Republican political machine known as the Santa Fe Ring. The code has since been lauded as, in Roger Launius’s words, “a model of organic law.”50 With the laws for transition into American hands set, Kearny left for California. The legal code named for him, however, would remain until it was replaced with the 1912 New Mexico state constitution. New Mexico Territory continued as an unbroken entity until 1863 when Congress finally gave in to pressure from the territory’s western portion. New Mexico was divided along the line of longitude at 109 degrees west. Union Arizona

49 Ibid., 318. There are, of course, a variety of problems associated with casually applying mental diagnoses to a geographic entity. That Sheridan used the term points to a need to forcefully express the disjunction of the state. 50 Launius, Alexander William Doniphan, 116.

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Territory was markedly different from any other concept of Arizona that had existed before.51 The first geographical entity to bear the name “Arizona” came into being in 1854, when the land the United States had gained in the Gadsden Purchase was added to New Mexico Territory as Arizona County. Ultimately, the origin of the name is unknown. Several competing theories exist. The most popular line of etymology has it coming from the O’odham language, meaning “having a little spring” and referring to sources of water in a silver-mining district across today’s USMexican border, in the modern Mexican state of Sonora. The name stuck and spread as a transfer name as far as Louisiana.52 The primary place it would refer to, however, changed shapes and sizes several times before it settled into the boundaries of the modern state. Confederate Arizona Territory In the Southwest as elsewhere in the United States, the Civil War was a major factor in the development of infrastructure and industry. This despite the fact that the war all but bypassed the region, with only one little skirmish fought in Arizona. Although it is commonly classed as the most westerly battle of the war, the “Battle of Picacho Pass” was nothing more but a volley of shots fired between the California Column of the Union and a Confederate unit marching out of Tucson toward San Diego. Where thousands had died at Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, or Antietam, the 1864 Picacho Peak confrontation amounted to only a handful of deaths, and all in all scarcely a dozen casualties.53 Ignored by the Union as an unimportant backwater, Arizona was not exactly a prime concern for the Confederacy either. While Southern sympathizers – and those intent on territorial development – engineered the territory’s acceptance into the CSA, the secessionist government did

51 The actual location, according to the original decree, set the border at 32 degrees west of Washington, i.e. 109 degrees, 2’ and 59.25” west of Greenwich. This amounts to a difference of roughly 2.5 miles, or 4 km, and while significant, in the sparsely settled region is all but negligible. Modern maps have the border at 109 degrees west, and few but the most devoted geographers or local patriots bother to protest. 52 The town of Arizona in Claiborne county is named for the Western geographic designation. Another possibility for the source of the name Arizona itself is the derivation from the Basque “arizonak,” meaning “good oaks.” Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States, 47. 53 Likely, only five people died, three on the Union, and two on the Confederate side. Corle, The Gila, 232. For the very limited history of the Civil War in Arizona, see also Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue, 261; Masich, The Civil War in Arizona, 5.

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not concern itself much with it. Not one of the telegrams from a four-inch-high pile sent to the command for the “District of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona” during the Civil War came from Tucson or Mesilla, or is even concerned with anything west of Texas. Most were part of a frequent back-and-forth between the command at Houston and Brigadier General Harvey at Galveston. Others stemmed from Huntsville, Sarasota, Shreveport, or Henderson. In fact, none even came from either Arizona or New Mexico during the whole of 1864, indicating that the Confederate army had no one on the ground there to provide information.54 In July of 1861, a group of local settlers met in Tucson.55 They elected Granville Henderson “Grant” Oury to the Confederate Congress for the people of Arizona Territory.56 Arriving in Richmond late the same year, Oury, described by a biographer as “the epitome of a Southern colonel,” negotiated recognition of the territory by the Confederacy. Confederate Arizona, declared by Jefferson Davis in 1862, encompassed today’s Arizona and New Mexico south of the 34th parallel.57 In practice, Confederate Arizona did not last for long. Its government had to evacuate to El Paso in 1863. On paper, the territory continued to exist until the Confederate surrender in 1865. Following the shape of New Mexico’s Arizona County, and thus the Gadsden Purchase, bordered in the east by the New Mexican border, and in the north by the 34th parallel, the creators of the territory naturally picked a north–south division. Stirred into action and helped by the tides of war in the region, the Union created its own competing Arizona Territory in 1863. It chose not the north–south division of Confederate Arizona, but the east–west dividing line we know today. This was in contrast to antebellum conceptions of Arizona that essentially conflated it with the Gadsden Purchase. This now familiar border between the two territories

54 Various Telegrams. War Department Collection of Confederate Records. General Records of the Government of the Confederate States of America. Telegrams Received, District of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, 1861–1865, RG 109, Box 55, NARA, Washington, DC. 55 The Tucson convention – the fifth of its kind in the town – and a parallel one in Mesilla, marked the culmination of a call for territorial recognition that had begun shortly after the Gadsden Purchase. The best summation of both the preceding and following events is Lamar, The Far Southwest, 361–399. 56 C. C. Smith, “Manuscript History of the Oury Family,” Typescript. MS 738, AHS. 57 The authoritative source for all maps pertaining to Arizona until the 1970s is Walker and Bufkin, Historical Atlas of Arizona. The territorial maps discussed here can be found specifically ibid., maps 25, 29. See also Meinig, Southwest, 21, 25; Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories, 199.

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more than anything reflected the wishes of Eastern mining interests.58 It ignored geographic features just as it did centers of population, and did its part in the transition of power in the region away from an Anglo-Mexican elite to a purely Anglo one beholden to Eastern interests.59 What the war had in effect done was to press the point of how the vast New Mexico Territory would be governed, specifically how it would be divided. With Union troops withdrawn from most of the territory – only a small contingent stayed behind in Yuma to protect the crossing and continue the work of the quartermaster’s depot, which was responsible for provisioning all army operations in the West – it did not take long for the Nnee to realize they had once again unopposed dominion over what had become their land in the century prior to Spanish contact.60 As depredations increased notably, Arizona County’s Anglo population became more and more frustrated with a government in Washington that had virtually abandoned them and the fight against the Apache while it was fighting a more important enemy in the East.61 After the Civil War, Howard Lamar notes, while many Arizonans were Southerners and Democrats, territorial officials “began an impressive policy of mollification and compromise” that worked remarkably well.62 The specter of a “Southern” Arizona still informed many debates in Congress and was continuously used by opponents of the territory’s attempts to gain statehood. In this regard, the threat of Arizona emerging as yet another Southern state was second in popularity only to the accusation that both Arizona and New Mexico were too Spanish. Congress was wary of letting into the Union two states dominated by, as they were derogatorily termed, Mexican “greasers” unfit to govern themselves, let alone have influence on national politics. It is true that a good number of prominent Anglo proto-Arizonans were Southerners. They were, however, emphatically not alone in

58 Lamar, “Review of ‘Be It Enacted’,” 370–371. 59 An interesting question for a study in counterfactual history would be to what extent a north–south division would have forced more equal representation of Hispanos and Anglos in either part. In Arizona, the south was considerably more Hispanic than the north, while in New Mexico, with Hispano population centering around Santa Fe, the opposite was true. 60 Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 176–177. 61 Yet another entity bearing that name. Arizona County, already dissolved by 1862 and made part of neighboring Doña Ana County, encompassed today’s Arizona south of the Gila River, minus a 25-mile (40 km) thick slice in its easternmost part that then belonged to Doña Ana County. Its was a about a third the size of present-day Arizona. Thorndale and Dollarhide, Map Guide to the US Federal Censuses, 26. 62 Lamar, “Carpetbaggers Full of Dreams,” 192.

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the Mesilla, and though some might have been powerful, none could claim to exercise the amount of control over others that would have been necessary to drag an unwilling majority into secession. While the Civil War raged in the East and death tolls kept climbing, when the Union army took Tucson in 1862, the Confederates and their true-blue supporters either gave no resistance, or hastily departed. As Ray Charles Colton writes, by June 1862 “[t]he secessionist movement in Arizona [had] almost completely died out.”63 When Confederate Arizona Territory had been declared in 1861, Tucson would have had a population of little over the number given in the 1860 census, 915. This was only slightly more than twice the number from ten years earlier, before the Gadsden Treaty, when Anglos had only begun drifting in and making their home there.64 Supporters of a Confederate Arizona were part of the same Anglo-Hispanic elite that ruled over large swaths of Sonora. The ties that that bound Sonorenses to the central government in Mexico City were just as weak as the ties between the United States and its Arizonan citizens. Approval of the Southern cause, before and after it was a lost one, was certainly a factor. It was, however, not the only one and certainly not the defining factor in the machinations of the Tucson and Mesilla gatherings that argued for what can be thought of more as territorial selfactualization than secession. The fact that never again during the Civil War did secessionists gather in Arizona speaks to this: after the Federal Territory had finally been declared, there was simply no benefit to it anymore, even for former supporters of CSA Arizona. In 1861, before Union rule over Arizona had become an accomplished fact, Southerners like Oury pleaded with the Confederacy for support. Oury himself made his feelings clear in a letter to Confederate Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Smith dated February 14, 1861: We are assured not alone by the signs of the times, but by the avowed sentiments of members of the Confederate Congress, that should offers of a peace treaty be made, conditioned for the surrender of all the Territories by the South the same would be accepted by our Government and we believe that however repugnant the measure might be to the existing powers, the pressure of the people in their great desire for a speedy conclusion of the present war would be such as to override all arguments, and powers of the administration.

63 Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories, 202. 64 Moffat, Population History of Western US Cities and Towns, 16.

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Oury was afraid the Confederacy would abandon the Southwest to the Union: We have no Country, no home but Arizona & New Mexico and if these are given up, we will have fought and many have lost their lives to no purpose. Almost the entire American population of these Territories, are now in the ranks of the Confederate Army and join us in making this last appeal for help.65

Abandoned by the US General Government in the early years of the war, southern Arizonan notables – some ardent Southerners like Oury, others not – in turning towards the Confederate rebels made a play to attach themselves to the only feasible alternative. All the while, their focus was on their immediate circumstances. Mexico was hardly in control of what was left of its Northern territories, and, having lost the Southwest to the United States in the first place, could certainly not be counted on to defend them. The Union had deserted them. The Confederacy was a wild card, but given the circumstances, it was the only one southern Arizonans could play. In a way, the Union itself had seceded from the Southwest when it left it to its own devices by ordering federal troops to the East. In addition to Southern sympathies, the move to establish a Confederate territory was propelled by equal measures of frustration, fear, local political expediencies, and pragmatism. These factors all culminated in a rather opportunistic decision. This interpretation is further made plausible by the fact that many of the proponents of a Confederate Arizona argued for a US territory from practically the moment the Confederacy lost its foothold in the region. Oury himself quietly resigned his Confederate commission on February 24, 1863.66 While such fickle loyalties might point to unscrupulousness on the part of the promoters of territorial recognition, they also reflect on two other, likely more important reasons. First, the Civil War played out differently in the West than it did in the East. Not only because the arid region had few Anglo settlers, and even fewer who would back the Southern or Northern cause with any meaningful vigor. Frontier problems looked for solutions anywhere they might be found, without the luxury of preference or conviction. Therefore, at the same time that in the East the nation was on the verge of tearing itself apart, the Western scene represented a complete opposite, moving towards more central authority, and clamoring for more 65 Letter from Granville Oury to Lieut. Col. Kirby dated February 14, 1861. Oury Family Papers, 1799–1933. Series II: Granville Oury Papers, 1860–1865, AZ 016, Box 1, Folder 8, U of A. 66 Resignation Petition, Confederate States of America dated February 24, 1863. Oury Family Papers, 1799–1933. Series II: Granville Oury Papers, 1860–1865, AZ 016, Box 1, Folder 10, U of A.

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national power. In that, it prefigured the results of the Civil War with its affirmation of federal supremacy. Under such circumstances even the most nationalist representatives of Anglo civilization in the territories cared little who actually provided for their protection. Though enthusiasm for the Union certainly varied, some Mexican-born Arizonans were greater Northern patriots than born and bred Northerners. The case of Estevan Ochoa is instructive. When offered the chance to stay in Tucson after Confederates had taken the town in 1863, he refused, reportedly saying that he had sworn loyalty to the United States and would rather leave than renege on that oath. Ochoa rode out the next morning, spent the rest of the war in Sonora, and returned when Tucson was back in Union hands.67 Union Arizona Territory The creation of Union Arizona Territory came in fits and starts. At first, it was not even clear where it would be located. A first proposal divided New Mexico Territory laterally, leaving all of the Gadsden Purchase land, Tucson, Phoenix, and La Mesilla in Arizona. This mirrored the Confederate division that had existed briefly during the Civil War. When the Northern federal government created its own Arizona territory, it instead chose an east/west division, essentially consonant with the shape of modern Arizona. Arizona Territory (referred to sometimes by its postal abbreviation, AT) was almost the same size as what remained of New Mexico Territory, and after Arizona had received more land from Nevada in a bout of federal reorganizational activity in 1871, all but matched the new smaller New Mexico’s size to a T.68 This once more or less random division was to become more and more salient. Today, Arizona and New Mexico are distinct polities despite their joint past. New Mexico continues to celebrate its Spanish-Mexican heritage. Capital punishment, that form of ultimate state authority closely associated with the frontier and the American West, was abolished in New Mexico in 2009.69 Arizona, meanwhile, holds fast to executions, has loosened gun laws further, and led the charge in intro-

67 Rosales, Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History, 331; Gómez-Quiñones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 250, 268. 68 Another proposal, to annex the so-called “Arizona strip,” the area north of the Grand Canyon that was impractical to govern from the south, to Utah in 1865, was not acted upon. The constant meandering of the Colorado River caused multiple boundary disputes with California, most importantly in the Yuma area. Walker and Bufkin, Historical Atlas of Arizona, map 35. 69 “New Mexico House Bill 0285.”

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ducing restrictive and discriminatory legislation concerning immigration, targeting especially Hispanic Americans already within its borders.70 Considering the remoteness of the territories from centers of political power and industry and the degree to which they both depended on federal subsidies and protection, it is remarkable just to which degree Arizona set out to create a different identity for itself right from the start. This was mostly the work of a few members of the Anglo frontier elite not intrinsically connected to the existing Hispano-Anglo power elite. During the decades from 1854 through the late 1870s, Anglos trickled into the territory, many setting up shop as traders of dry goods and other desirables. Hispanos from other parts of the Hispanic frontier also arrived. Tucson became their base of operations by default. Tucson had been deliberately set up as a way point on the De Anza route to California by the Spanish in the year of US independence, 1776. It only began living up to its promise more than half a century later, when the small town grew modestly because of the 1849 California Gold Rush. The newcomers of the 1850s and 1860s quickly came to dominate business in Arizona. While native Tucsonenses and Sonorenses in general contented themselves with an agricultural existence, growing crops and using long-established methods of water conservation, the new arrivals were in the business of business. While Anglos dominated trade, in part because they quickly married into Hispanic elite families, some Hispano newcomers, like trader and later Arizona territorial representative Estevan Ochoa, also prospered.71 During these transitional decades between Hispano domination and Hispano-Anglo cooperation, the distinguishing factor between the haves and have-nots (or, to perhaps better describe the harsh conditions, have-littles and have-lesses) was, above all, the time of their arrival. This is not overly surprising in the case of the Anglos. The frontier offered riches to few, but comfortable wealth to quite a few more, provided they were willing to rough it for a while, and had their wits about them. Spurred on by Victorian Protestant ideals of hard work and American Manifest Destiny, the cities of the East were sure to produce at least some individuals who would venture to a place that had little appeal besides trading opportunities. Mid nineteenth-century Anglo frontiersmen have been portrayed as hardy, but just as capitalist as their Eastern counterparts. Their success was paralleled by that of migrants from other parts of Hispanic America and by some coming directly from Catholic Spain itself. Traders

70 “Arizona Senate Bill 1070.” 71 Ochoa would partner with Mississippian Pinckney Randolph Tully in 1859, and run a successful trading company until the railroad put them out of business. Sheridan, Arizona, 118; Gonzales, Mexicanos, 95; Meeks, Border Citizens, 27. On Tully, see Diane Tully Tretschek, “Pinckney Randolph Tully and Charles Hoppin Tully, Arizona Pioneers.” Unpublished manuscript of a term paper. AHS.

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like Sonora-born Ochoa remained influential throughout the transitional period. Ochoa even became the only Hispanic mayor Tucson has ever had after it had become American.72

P ERIPHERIES In world-systems theory, periphery has a specific meaning different from that which is assigned to it in colloquial usage. World-systems theory alone is not a sufficient theoretical model to explain the changes wrought on the Southwest.73 Its idea of periphery, however, can gainfully be employed when it is adapted to refer to the integration of the southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico into the American national economic system. It is impossible to conceive of the contemporary United States, those of the historic period surveyed, or of any time, as separate from the continental connections and the world economy in which they were entangled.74 Such a continental approach was already advocated by scholars a century ago, most notably by Herbert Bolton. This approach has recently seen renewed attempts at contrasting and integration with other scholarly modes of analysis. I build on the definition by Peter H. Wood, who applies the continental approach to colonial American history: It is not, first of all, a wholesale substitute for existing models of colonial American history, including the expansive and useful Atlantic formulation. Nor is it in direct conflict or competition with hemispheric or comparative approaches; indeed it is more readily seen as a precursor to such efforts, for future comparisons will differ and grow as we explore more fully all the rooms of our own house.75

To name the continental approach a precursor to more integrative approaches is a somewhat problematic statement. Different yet equally necessary insights are to be gained by looking at different levels; the macro and the micro, the trans and the national, the isolated and the in-between. A continental approach fills the gap between national and even transnational history involving only two countries or imperial en72 Gonzales, Mexicanos, 96; Meeks, Border Citizens, 25. Ochoa was elected in 1875 by an impressive margin, 187:40. Ibid. FairElect.org, “Tucson City Mayors and Council Members.” 73 For more on this, see Chapter 1. 74 As such, it could also be labeled “entangled history.” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra makes the inherent connection between borderlands historiographies and entangled history plain. Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories.” 75 Wood, “From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach,” 280.

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tities. Therefore, it makes sense to see such an approach as one tool in the kit, not as a developmental stage in historiography. Perhaps Wood aims for it to be so, as he also contends that the continental approach can be “an increasingly logical and promising tool as the twenty-first century unfolds.”76 His statement of purpose, contained in the contribution’s title, “From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach” also points in that direction. In this one aspect, though, his words seem to disagree with his overarching idea. One other exclusion is contained in Wood’s definition, namely that his continental approach covers “the vast lands north of the Rio Grande without becoming drawn into tedious turf wars and definitional boundary debates.”77 As Wood makes explicit the connection to Bolton, this appears somewhat peculiar. Still, Wood’s approach has much merit. If one may sway southward and at the same time see the approach as not only a precursor, but as a tool in its own right, a puzzle piece in the arsenal available, it becomes immediately useful for the analysis of the American Southwest. If added to the frameworks provided by world-systems theory, which make it possible to contextualize the region within a world economy ever more integrated as the nineteenth century wore on, the continental approach becomes an exceedingly useful, even necessary complement. World-systems theory – or perhaps better world-systems analysis, as it does not prescribe one theoretical framework, but allows for open-ended contributions – was developed originally by Immanuel Wallerstein as a macro-historic approach to analyze social change. Though it often suffers from an overemphasis of economic concerns, it has been brilliantly applied to the American Southwest by Thomas D. Hall.78 Hall ends his survey in 1880. This leaves four decades of continued and accelerated social change in the region that have not been looked at under these auspices. Additionally, although Hall uses the word “Southwest” continually, he also by dint of his subject matter and historical period, limits this Southwest essentially to what is today New Mexico.79 This makes sense, as the part of the Spanish North that lay in the present-day United States was comprised almost entirely of the strip of land west of the Llano Estacado that reached up from the current US-Mexico border to Albuquerque, and then Santa Fe. In essence, this meant land that lay not too far away from the Santa Fe Trail and could thus profit from its commerce. For the period from 1880 onward especially, though, Southern Arizona is just as important.

76 Ibid., 281. 77 Ibid. 78 See Hall, Social Change in the Southwest. 79 Ibid., passim. He never explicitly excludes Arizona, but the bulk of his analyses throughout the book concern themselves with New Mexico.

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Southern Arizona experienced many of the same developments that New Mexico did, but in the period after 1880 began diverging from the standard example of Southwestern development. It experienced its share of partisan wrangling and Anglo-Hispano conflict, but at least when it came to the political elite, this would not stand in the way of territorial development. As former governor Richard Cunningham McCormick wrote to his designated replacement, Anson Peacely Killen Safford, in 1869: “You will find the people of Arizona much divided upon local questions and you will find some bitter partisans, but there is a large class of reasonable, generous men eager for the development of the Territory and ready to uphold you in your efforts.” McCormick backed up this statement with a list of virtually all influential men in the territory, Anglo and Hispano, Democrat and Republican.80 The whole region, Hall shows, in the Post-Columbian Era had always been entangled in the economies not only of its direct neighbors, but with whatever larger contexts of exchange applied. Whether these neighbors were Spanish or French colonial administrations (or the lack thereof), or later the Mexican and US national powers, they always had a profound influence on how people in the region lived. For Native Americans, more imperial interest in the region was not always necessarily solely negative, despite the fact that this is the common conception for the American Era. Before the Federal Government, coming out of the Civil War, used a massively oversized US military to rid the Southwest of the unwanted interference of American Indians, Spanish, French, and even American administrations had often aided local settlers in trading with the O’odham or Nnee and other Athapaskan groups that lived in the region. To a certain degree, this was beneficial to both sides. Native Americans and Europeans had reliable partners in commerce. For the American Indians, this meant a stable line of supply to essential groceries, such as flour or corn. This meant that there was no need to resort to raiding, which they had done in periods when governmental support was not forthcoming. Declining interest in the region by an imperial or national administration, conversely, began anew the vicious circle of violence and cultural misunderstanding.81 It is important to understand one distinction that Hall makes which is often passed over in common conceptions of a periphery-core dichotomy. “Periphery” in world-systems theory is a specialized term with a fixed meaning. In Hall’s adapted Wallersteinian terminology, it is preceded in integrative intensity to the world economic network by something called “regions of refuge.” These regions are, crucially, not the same as what anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán calls “regions

80 Letter from Richard C. McCormick to A. P. K. Safford dated August 4, 1869. Territorial Papers, ASA. Qtd. in Lamar, “Carpetbaggers Full of Dreams,” 195. 81 Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 115–117, 144, 217.

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of refuge,” or “regiones de refugio.”82 This is an important distinction, as Beltrán’s term is much more current in debates of the contemporary Mexican-American experience, and is applied specifically to the present-day American Southwest. In this context it describes “isolated and frozen semicolonial ecological shelters that are regionally stratified and made up of indigenous populations in the countryside dominated by Ladinos in the cities.”83 Such regions, in Beltrán’s view “are intertwined within a series of caste relations that exercise control over the land, energy, and movement of subordinated Indian populations.”84 They exist in the contemporary Southwest, and overlap with the “colonia” phenomenon in which Mexican-origin85 settlers claim, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, parcels of land to semipermanently settle there.86 Located overwhelmingly in the countryside, these colonias are often abandoned farms or other similar remote areas.87 Hall’s concept, on the other hand, describes a specific state of development in the integration of a region into a larger economic context. Though explicitly historic, the stage of “region of refuge” is not irreversible, and peripheries can easily become regions of refuge once again, if economic and political priorities shift away from them. Hall’s regions of refuge are regions of “enforced stagnation” which is the result of, not evidence of the absence of, a certain amount of incorporation.88 Peripheries, in this view, are more incorporated and connected than regions of refuge. The line, of course, is not easy to draw, and whether a region is at any one time a region of refuge, a periphery, or something else entirely is usually up for debate. What does matter, is that: [s]uch regions preserve older forms of social relations that are no longer found in the central sectors of the supraregional economy. This leads to the formation of a regional elite whose

82 Aguirre Beltrán, Regions of Refuge. For an overview of how Aguirre Beltrán’s concept has since been applied and utilized, and for a concise conceptual overview of the idea, see Vélez-Ibáñez, “Regions of Refuge in the United States.” Sarah Deutsch also implicitly relies on Beltrán’s concept: Deutsch, No Separate Refuge. 83 Vélez-Ibáñez, “Regions of Refuge in the United States,” 1. 84 Ibid. 85 Vélez-Ibáñez uses this term to describe “persons born in both Mexico and the United States” of Mexican origin, as opposed to other persons of Hispanic-origin. Ibid., 18. 86 For an overview of the phenomenon, see Donelson and Esparza, The Colonias Reader. A critique of the term colonia itself and its implications is provided by Mukhija and Monkkonen, “What’s in a Name?” 87 Vélez-Ibáñez describes one colonia in depth, using the example of El Recuerdo, New Mexico. Vélez-Ibáñez, “Regions of Refuge in the United States,” 8–18. 88 Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 17.

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members act as brokers between the region and supraregional sectors. These areas are also preserves in the sense that they maintain state control of the region in expectation of later development.89

This describes accurately the status of the southernmost corner of the American Southwest after the Mexican War and the Gadsden Purchase, up until the time of New Mexican and Arizonan statehood in 1912. In that sense, the Mesilla area was not a national periphery for the first several decades of American ownership. At least until roughly 1880, the date the railroad reached Tucson, it could be considered a definite region of refuge: incorporated into a national economy (or, as might be argued, two; or one transnational one),90 but not sufficiently so as to lose the necessity for brokers. Thomas Sheridan in his Arizona: A History uses the same cutoff. He leads into his chapter on “Extraction” in Arizona Territory with the arrival of the railroad. “Extraction,” in Sheridan’s extremely useful rough chronology, follows “Incorporation,” and precedes the final, “Transformation.”91 The time in which “Extraction” unfolded is the time this study concerns itself with. It is during this phase, I argue, that the need for brokers first began to diminish, and finally disappeared around the time that statehood had been achieved. Statehood marked full national political incorporation. This expressed itself first in the waning influence of an Anglo-Mexican elite, and later in its almost complete replacement by an Anglo one. That new Anglo elite, however, was not comprised of the same people or families who had made up the bicultural elite which existed from the time the United States formally took possession of the Southwest. Relying on the same economic basis for their power as the Hispanos who made up the ruling class with them – agriculture and livestock, small scale mining, and trading – those Anglos who had arrived earlier also were among the losers when cheap and fast communication and transportation destroyed parts of the local economy. Anglo traders, for example, went out of business just as quickly as Hispanic landholders after the railroad shifted power relations in the region.92 The time of transition, however, cannot be pinned down to a few years after the railroad’s arrival, or the beginning of large-scale industrial mining and agriculture. It was not inevitable that the transition to complete Anglo control in the Southwest would happen so quickly, or would happen in much the same manner everywhere in the Southwest. In fact, the massively divergent developments in Arizona and New

89 Ibid. 90 In the sense that Richard White describes the continental, integrated, railroad network of the Canadian, US, and Mexican West. White, Railroaded, 507. 91 Sheridan, Arizona, xiv–xvii. 92 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 104–105.

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Mexico from this time period onward until the present day show that this transition was contingent on a number of complicated interrelated factors. Some of these were dominant party allegiance, personal connections, and type of economy in a subregion or locality (mining vs. trading or agriculture). The most important factor was the number of Hispanos present in the regions that were assigned to one or the other of the two territories. Arizona ended up with only a tenth of the number of all Hispanos present when the two territories were divided. This made later Anglo domination by percentage much quicker and much more complete in a shorter amount of time. That elite Hispanos controlled much of the land in both Arizona and New Mexico does not mean that all Hispanos were well off, despite their large representation in territorial politics. In fact, Elite Hispanos […] never accounted for more than 10 percent of New Mexico’s Hispano population, totaling less than ten thousand people in 1900. According to historian Charles Montgomery, elite Hispanos represented less than 5 percent of New Mexico’s Hispanos.93

This is true for the year 1900. It is misleading for earlier decades. By the turn of the century, migration of lower-class Hispanos from Central and Southern Mexico, mostly employed in agriculture or mining, had already led to their becoming a significant part of the overall Hispano population. In the 1850s, 1860s, and even the first half of the 1870s, in contrast, many more of the old families were present. In New Mexico, this might have made the difference between five or ten percent. Southern Arizona, however, with its much smaller population and many newly forming communities, was different. The circumstances made it easier for people who had come to be well-off to enter the elite, or, at least, the secondary elite. While in New Mexico an established Hispanic elite found itself more and more under attack from a newly forming Anglo one, both Arizona’s Anglos and the Hispanos present were fewer in number and thus were forced to cooperate in order for territorial society to work. In short, compared to the well-documented New Mexican situation, Arizona presented another picture entirely.94 With the closeness of settlement and necessity of cooperation gone, and national ideas of Mexican inferiority surging in the United States, the Anglo-Hispano combined elite would soon be a thing of the past. That it existed at all, however, is yet another indication that the importance of Hispanos and the way in which their power expressed itself differed considerably in New Mexico and Arizona

93 Mitchell, Coyote Nation, 12. 94 See, for example: Alarid, “They Came From the East”; Gonzales-Berry and Maciel, The Contested Homeland; Zeleny, “Relations Between the Spanish-Americans and AngloAmericans in New Mexico”; Mitchell, Coyote Nation.

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territories. After they had held land and power for centuries, Hispano elites would gradually lose both. Around 1870, however, the elite still accounted for a significant number of Hispanos in the territory. From pre-Columbian times until the beginning of the twentieth century, there was one constant in the history of the Southwest; it was always a periphery. The present-day US Southwest had once been a periphery to Mesoamerican native cultures more advanced and powerful than those that eked out a precarious existence in the sparse desert environment. It was also a periphery to the interests of the Spanish crown, and later to Mexico, which ended up giving up much of the Southwest with comparably little protest after the Mexican-American war. To a young nation, still and constantly in turmoil, stuttering from one upheaval to the next, El Norte was not worth raising a fuss about. The region would remain a periphery, albeit a geographically central one in some respects, to the United States, which treated it much like it did its quasicolonial possessions in the Philippines, Cuba, or South America.95 To assume that periphery meant a region cut off and developing separately from the rest of the continent, though, would be to miss an important point: having peripheries was – ironically – central to an economic system that by the end of the nineteenth century otherwise resembled its mercantilist predecessors a little more than some freemarket contemporaries wanted to admit.96 A periphery was a region on its way to

95 A collection of essays on the role of colonialism in the making of American empire makes this point readily apparent. The recurring themes are the same as in the Southwest: the dividing and uniting roles of race and identities; the idea of imperial transitions (evocatively named “Spanish Contraction, British Expansion, and American Irruption” in one essay); the difficulties found in legal systems and laws in transition, and the ambivalent role of the US military. Although the American West is not included specifically in this collection of colonial enterprises, one author still remarks that “[t]he Spanish imperial past became a rich source of images, heroes, and narratives from which Americans could draw their own imperial lineage and justify their colonizing and civilizing mission.” Schmidt-Nowara, “From Columbus to Ponce de León,” 237. Other books foreground the sameness of colonial experiences in the contiguous United States with that of overseas colonies, such as Jeffrey Ostler’s study of the Plains Sioux, Ostler, The Plains Sioux, esp. 2–5. Or, “at the intersections of queer, Native, and settler colonial studies and related fields,” Scott Lauria Morgensen’s theory-heavy analysis of present-day constructions of nativeness and sexuality in the United States as a settler colonial society. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 1, passim. 96 The way the colonial West was thought of in the Eastern financial and capitalist centers is clearly mercantilist, and by the 1880s, neo-mercantilist trade policies dominated international trade. Magnusson, Mercantilism, 30.

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becoming intergrated into the world-system. This intergration had just taken the Southwest longer than most other regions of the United States. Nothing would shape its destiny more than this peripheral status. Joining the Union as a full state in 1912 was a mere formality compared to the palpable changes in Arizona’s role within the United States that World War I would bring. As in other states, the war forever redefined economies and expectations. What was expected of the federal government and what its role would be was only the most obvious of the changes. The term “benevolent assimilation” was often used during that particular war in order to justify American actions in Cuba and the Philippines.97 Somewhat closer to home, it was just as true in terms of what the General Government had in mind.

97 Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 99, 113.

3. Communication Nation

When Benedict Anderson wrote that the nation was an “imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”1 he meant it had sovereignty over a limited territory. The case of southern Arizona and New Mexico shows that it was also decidedly limited in its sovereignty in that territory. In a sense, of course, all governments are. Yet, the case at hand demonstrates that the very ingredients – capitalism, wide distribution of newspapers, overall increased frequency and speed of communication – which during the nineteenth century were slowly stirred into the national stew, created not just one imagined community in America. Here, at the farthest reaches of the United States, Anglo settlers had to contend with the fact that they were not alone. American Indians they could construct into a racial other, a force of nature to be subdued, not part of the nation. But here there existed a wholly different kind of imagined community as well: that of Westerners, pioneers, of a local, regional, or territorial society. Mexican Americans were very much part of this society, if not of the national one.2 The story of how an increasingly complicated network of individuals in a remote area of the United States built understandings of identity and community competing with the national ones, is a fundamentally American one. Yet it is often sidelined by the larger national story. Consider the almost suffocatingly overwhelming importance of the nation-state today and during all of the twentieth century, and such neglect is no wonder. For the time being at least, the national concept, whatever its ultimate definition, has won out. The disregard for the processes of sub-national vergesellschaftung which occurred at the same time that the idea of the nation reared its head is therefore understandable.3 Still, it smacks

1

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.

2

Cf. Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, esp. 18–47, 167–176.

3

Vergesellschaftung is here used in the Simmelian sense of processes which allow communities to form and solidify. English translations have failed to capture the full meaning

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somewhat of victor’s justice. The nation tends to be viewed as more important than region or locality by those living now, in a national age. Yet this does not mean that it had such importance in the past; even at the moment when it constituted itself. Sub-national and sometimes, at the same time, transnational categories of belonging existed and greatly mattered in the nineteenth-century Southwest. Though these may be less pronounced today, they are still an essential part of its fabric and history. The wires of the telegraph bound territorial elites into such regional networks at the same time that they helped further elites’ inclusion. However, this occurred only at the price of excluding some of their number, namely those of Hispanic descent, into the national imagined community. Yet haltingly, tentatively, the process had started well before the first copper spool was strung over a cottonwood pole across the Colorado. Its beginning was in the postal service’s arrival in the Mesilla.

G OVERNMENT

BY

M AIL

Even in the 1850s and 1860s, the rugged individualist of western cliché was a hard person to find in the Southwest. To be sure, ruggedness in some manner of speaking was a required quality for those who ventured into, much less decided to settle in, the region. But individualism could be no one’s priority. New arrivals quickly sought attachment to preexisting communities, or, just as often, government institutions. The government was instrumental at every stage of America’s conquest of the West.4 The Mesilla was no different. In fact, throughout its history of settlement by Europeans, its changeable terrain posed challenges that could only be dealt with through administration backed by a powerful imperial or national entity. Stable governance, or the lack thereof, not only tangentially influenced the history of the region, it virtually controlled every aspect of it.5

of the term. The translators of Simmel’s 2009 English edition of Sociology use “creating society” for one set of meanings of Simmel’s concept. This is the closest meaning to the one I apply here. Simmel, Sociology, xv. 4

Libertarian scholars such as Ryan McMaken and Thomas J. DiLorenzo have criticized the Federal Government’s role in the Southwest as meddlesome and unnecessary. They blame it for inciting violence against Native Americans in an organized fashion against the will of local populations. Chapter 6 will deal directly with their arguments. Even these critics do not doubt that the government was present. They merely doubt that it was necessary.

5

Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 50–134 passim.

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Ironically, this was especially true in places where few Anglo or Hispano settlers even lived. As Southwest historian Howard Lamar succinctly put it, “in a sense, the government had arrived before the people in Arizona.”6 Lamar, even in the original edition of his book in 1966, was on to something that has only recently been more forcefully argued. This argument is set against a tradition in historiography that sees the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “General Government” as toothless at best, corrupt at worst, and, most importantly, in no way able to develop or support an effective bureaucracy on the national level.7 Congress, in this view, is often seen as the only branch of the government that could put claim to any measure of control over large swaths of the West. I argue with several recent works, including those by Stephen J. Rockwell, Daniel Walker Howe, and Brian Balogh, that this misconception needs a thorough and long overdue reassessment. Charles Frank Holt recognized as far back as 1977 that past generations of historians were markedly more interested in direct governmental regulation and control of private economic affairs – the regulatory role of government in the economy – than in the economic conduct of government vis-à-vis the rest of the economy. In other words, seldom in their writings does government emerge as a distinct economic sector.8

He also picks up on Douglass C. North’s 1966 observation in Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History that “an unbiased, systematic examination of the extent to which the activity of government at all levels did, or did not, actually promote economic growth” is still needed. North et al repeated that call in the 1977 and 1983 reeditions of Growth and Welfare, and only the recent years have seen several attempts at answering it; most importantly by Brian Balogh and, limited in the scope of his analysis, though not in its depth, Stephen J. Rockwell.9 Rockwell essentially contemplates the idea of a Congress which dominated governance during the first century of US national existence, and which alone

6

Lamar, The Far Southwest, 380.

7

Cf. Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 13. Balogh uses “General Government,” the preferred contemporary term for the federal government, exclusively throughout his book. I will follow his example for the most part. To emphasize the nature of that government as both federal and national, I will at times also use these modern terms when describing the historical government.

8

Holt, “The Role of State Government in the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” 2.

9

North, Growth and Welfare in the American Past, 100. Qtd. in: Holt, “The Role of State Government in the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” 2.

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“could both pass laws and see to their execution.”10 Arguing the opposite, that Congress was inept during the nineteenth century flows from a political agenda that hinges on embedding the development of New Deal institutions into a narrative of progress: incompetence to competence, bad to better, capital-R-Republican to capital-D-Democrat.11 In Rockwell’s analysis “Lowi’s assertions about the nation’s first century are made in service of a normative argument about the legitimacy of the administrative state. That argument is not supported by the historical record.”12 The administrative state, as vaguely defined by Dwight A. Waldo in his eponymous book and more clearly delineated by John A. Rohr through its “hallmark [of] the expert agency tasked with important governing functions through loosely drawn statutes that empower unelected officials to undertake […] important matters […]” in Rockwell’s view did not emerge during the New Deal, but has been present, in one form or another, throughout all of America’s national existence.13 I will follow his lead here in arguing that, far from the textbook definition of merely affecting citizens “through its help in promoting the economy by developing the frontier,” the nineteenth-century federal government was responsible for much of the economic development in all of the United States – on the frontier, and far from it. Beyond that even, its administrative state was not only one of the most vibrant parts of the American economy, but, as early as 1826, “the largest entrepreneur” within it.14 Though that state, as evident above, functioned through the sometimes more, sometimes less judicious empowerment of unelected specialists, some of whom ended up wielding considerable power, it is important not to lose sight of Congress’s role entirely here. Rockwell’s argument does not excise the House and the Senate from the picture. In this view, too, they are still responsible for enabling the development of the West, and for pushing toward economic development elsewhere, through both lawmaking and outright patronage.15 Another heretofore hardly recognized, but essential player now also makes a memorable appearance: the bureaucracy of governance and government, and those

10 Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 128. Qtd. in: Rockwell, Indian Affairs, 3. Rockwell contextualizes many of the relevant authors, and their views on the bureaucracy, some of which are expounded upon in the following passages. 11 Both Brian Balogh and Stephen J. Rockwell make this argument convincingly. They deconstruct the oft-repeated notion that nineteenth-century federal institutions were simply not equipped to deal with complex tasks, and that they were primitive, simple organizations. Cf. Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 13, passim; Rockwell, Indian Affairs, 2–5. 12 Ibid., 3. 13 Rohr, To Run a Constitution, xi; Rockwell, Indian Affairs, 4. 14 Mauk and Oakland, American Civilization, 143; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 254. 15 Rockwell, Indian Affairs, 3.

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that peopled it. The “General Government” consisted of the legislative branch, democratically legitimated, though not always feeling bound to the maxims of such legitimation; its military; and, significantly, its bureaucracy. The latter emerged quickly after the new nation had been created, and constantly responded to its expanding needs and territory. Territorial expansion was one of the main drivers of bureaucratic expansion. Manifest Destiny manifested itself through the military. The army, though, was never on the forefront of expansionism. Instead, such institutions as the General Land Office, the Post Office, and even the US Corps of Topographical Engineers were present before the first palisades of Western forts had been hammered into the ground.16 In that sense, the Western movies have it right. The cavalry habitually came a-riding to save the day in remote locales. But it did so only after someone else had already gotten there – and, presumably, gotten themselves into trouble. This view directly counteracts more than a century’s worth of older historiography, as well as the mythologization and public perception of American history. It also negates the beliefs of contemporaries in the nineteenth century. Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s famous adage that the westward movement was “not an act of government […] but the act of the people going forward without government aid or countenance” was a fabulous fiction. Coming from a long-serving US Senator, this statement might seem like a strange admission. It was, however, embedded within the context of how American government worked throughout the nineteenth century: it did much, but then denied it. This does not necessarily mean that Benton actively partook in a campaign of disinformation.17 It seems much more likely that he truly believed his role as a public servant to be limited in such a way as a matter of course. He was not alone in this view.18 There were only a few elements of government that were openly welcomed most everywhere in the United States. The postal service was therefore one of the most powerful tools in the nineteenth-century nation-building kit. As far as contemporary mindshare went, it was clearly ahead of every other administrative body. Americans, weary of national government, quite forcefully disagreed with them-

16 Ibid., 326. 17 Benton, Thirty Years’ View, 468–469. Qtd. in: Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 153. Richard White makes the same point, using a mostly identical quotation: White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 57. Considering Benton’s outright sponsorship of son-in-law John C. Frémont’s “pathfinding” expeditions into the West, his undecidedness on the matter is even more pronounced. On Benton and Frémont see, for example Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 76, 83–84; Hine and Faragher, The American West, 190, 195. 18 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, passim, esp. 42.

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selves in this critical aspect. The US Post Office “was widely hailed as one of the most important institutions of the day.”19 Not only that. All over the United States, “the local post office was far more than the place where you went to pick up your mail. It was a favorite gathering place for merchants, tradesmen, and other men of affairs […].”20 Consequently, at a time when the postal system of any nation was not just a marker, but the marker of the nation, the same US citizens who “supposedly feared distant government subsidized a national postal service that dwarfed its European counterparts in its scope and capacity.”21 Crucially, they did so even before the Jacksonian Era. The Age of Jackson’s push for democratization and emphasis on the common man was long thought to have collaterally created American bureaucracy.22 Yet, this bureaucracy was part and parcel of American societal DNA since the Early Republic. So was the way it was set up. As they had at the local and state levels with “mixed enterprises,” the creators and political obstetricians of the postal service turned to public-private partnerships when it came to supplying Tocqueville’s “savage woods” with the “astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers” that became touchstone, prerequisite, and hallmark of American democracy.23 The Southwest was formally brought into the fold of the nation of letters by the somewhat misnamed San Antonio and San Diego Mail-Line (SA&SD) in 1857. It connected San Diego eastward to Indianola, Texas, by way of Fort Yuma, Tucson, Franklin (today El Paso), and San Antonio; all roughly along the 32nd parallel. In Indianola, steamers provided communication with New Orleans, and from there connected to the centers of the East. Referred to also as the “Jackass Mail” for its choice of transport animal on the San Diego–Yuma leg, the bimonthly SA&SD was replaced by the Butterfield, or Southern, Overland Mail, leaving twice a week in either direction.24 Chartered by an act of Congress in 1857, it began operating between St. Louis, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee in September of 1858. The two routes westward – a compromise giving the southern route both a southern and a northern terminus – converged in Fort Smith, Arkansas. From there, it proceeded

19 John, Spreading the News, vii. 20 Ibid., 161. 21 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 13. 22 John, Spreading the News, viii. 23 Tocqueville qtd. in: ibid., 1. Journalist Winifred Gallagher, in an essentially Andersonian take, has recently made the argument that the post office was instrumental in creating the United States to begin with. Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America. 24 Greene, 900 Miles, 232–233.

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southwest as a single route through Arkansas and Texas, to El Paso, from where it followed the SA&SD path west.25 The Butterfield’s longest possible route, San Francisco to St. Louis, at 2,795 miles (4,500 km) was, according to Rupert N. Richardson, “probably the longest route of any system using horse-drawn conveyances in the history of the United States.” The shorter SA&SD, at 1,496 miles (2,400 km) took fifty to sixty days to complete. The Butterfield was allowed only half that time, twenty-five days.26 Mail lines were chartered by Congress, and then given to private contractors. The Butterfield route was initially contracted for six years. Several bidders had competed for it. Post routes frequently changed hands, schedules, and routes according to Congress’s and the Postmaster General’s requirements.27 The General Government was willing to spend the money in subsidies necessary to run mail routes. It saw the need for quick communication (and, incidentally, travel). It did not want to spend more than necessary, however, and would sometimes quickly hand a contract over to a lower bidder, even if the former had fulfilled the stipulations of the line. The San Antonio–Santa Fe mail contract, for example, was given to a new operator when its proprietor, Henry Skillman asked for an increase in subsidies from $12,500 to $50,000 after a three-year run. The subsidies were subsequently increased to more than $50,000, but only after more frequent service had been contracted for.28 The stage trip was not only long, but also dangerous and not free from hardship, even for rough-and-tumble westerners. Not all parts of the journey were made in large travel coaches. Long stretches were covered by much smaller and much more cramped carriages. But even though the 250 Concord coaches that were used along most of the journey were relatively comfortable (one was famously described by Mark Twain as a “cradle on wheels”), they traveled day and night, circumstances

25 Still one of the most sought-after overviews of the service’s history is the original history by Boltonian scholar LeRoy R. Hafen: Hafen, The Overland Mail. Republished in 2004 with a new introduction by David Dary: Hafen and Dary, The Overland Mail. Another authoritative treatment remains: Conkling and Conkling, The Butterfield Overland Mail. Much of the source material for the subject throughout the twentieth century stems from articles by Waterman L. Ormsby for the New York Herald, collected and edited into a volume in 1942: Ormsby, The Butterfield Overland Mail. Greene’s book is the only exhaustive recent treatment. Ralph Moody discusses the stagecoach era as a whole, while Carlos Schwantes concentrates on the stage lines of the northern West. Moody, Stagecoach West; Schwantes, Long Day’s Journey. 26 Richardson, “The Butterfield Overland Mail”; Greene, 900 Miles, 232. 27 Hafen, “Butterfield’s Overland Mail,” 212–216. 28 Greene, 900 Miles, 232.

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permitting, with passengers who chose to stop over losing their seat and risking being stranded for weeks on end. When carriages transported additional sacks of delayed mail or other express goods, space was decidedly at a premium.29 The stage line itself emphasized that travelers brave (or foolhardy) enough to undertake the trip east should bring along One Sharp’s [sic] rifle and a hundred cartridges; a Colts navy revolver and two pounds of balls; a knife and a sheath; a pair of thick boots and woolen pants; half a dozen pairs of thick woolen socks; three woolen overshirts; a wide-awake hat; a cheap sack coat; a soldier’s overcoat; one pair of blankets in summer and two in winter; a piece of India rubber cloth for blankets; a pair of gauntlets, a small bag of needles, pins, a sponge, hair brush, comb, soap, etc., in an oil silk bag; two pairs of thick drawers, and three or four towels.30

All this had to fit within the passengers’ forty-pound free baggage allowance. Despite the half-household worth of travel attire required to make even parts of the trip, the twenty-five days or fewer that the Butterfield Route journey was allowed to take under Congress’s stipulations was significantly less time than communications from coast to coast had taken at any time before it. Previously, mail had taken about half a year by sea from New York to San Francisco. Twenty-five days was not much more time than it had taken to travel only a 470 mile (750 km) stretch on the less well-organized SA&SF immediately prior.31 The Butterfield Coach finally did regularly connect places inaccessible to ocean transport and riverboats, like Tucson and El Paso, to the postal system of the United States. Four years after the Gadsden Purchase had been made they finally saw regular postal delivery and increased options for transportation. It was only after substantial populations had settled in the two towns that the southern route was inaugurated.32 When that route was threatened because of the beginnings of the Civil

29 Twain, Roughing It, 7. 30 Greene, 900 Miles, 10. Greene credits the listing to an unnamed San Diego newspaper. The paper was probably the San Diego Herald, November 21, 1857 which printed the list. It is possible that the Herald simply reprinted recommendations made by the SA&SF. See also: Cleland, A History of California, 145; Hafen and Dary, The Overland Mail, 98. 31 Ibid., 85. 32 Though “substantial” in the early 1850s meant that fewer than 300 people (mostly men, mostly Hispano) lived in Tucson. This was despite the fact that many of the about 50,000 argonauts who had made their way to California on the Southern route in the 1849 gold rush had passed through town. By the end of the decade, the number had actually gone down to about 200, “a dozen” or so of whom were Anglo. Sonnichsen, Tucson, 34, 38,

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War, Arizonans were largely cut off once again, though at the time it is unlikely many people saw that as much of a tragedy. As one woman born in Tucson in the 1820s later recalled, growing up she did not even know about California. She does not appear to have much suffered from the isolation, or from her ignorance of the Golden State in particular.33 Both the Confederate and Union armies attempted to keep at least parts of the line established by Butterfield open during the Civil War, but transmissions were intermittent. To be sure, both Union and Confederate armies had made use of the trail the Butterfield had blazed, and moved not only troops and intelligence across the various mail lines that existed in the territory, but also civilian dispatches. But this did not constitute the “development of increasingly rapid communications,” the time-sensitive movement of news and letters that is necessary for an Andersonian imagined community to take root.34 Both before and after the Civil War stage lines were a government service contracted out to private companies which had much investment and personnel in the region.35 While the US Post Office Department as a whole more than paid for itself, raking in revenues in the vicinity of $1,000,000 already during the first thirty years of its existence, the Western lines always operated at huge losses. By one calculcation, every letter carried on the SA&SD line cost $65 to reach its destination. The rate the post office charged for a typical domestic letter, by comparison, was ¢3 per half-ounce (14g). The rate was slightly higher when letters were sent from coast to coast, but this elevated price did not affect the frequent communications that went from California to the Southwestern interior.36 Letters in the Gadsden Purchase territory could be received with something akin to a reliable frequency from 1857 on. Both frequency and reliability improved

41. This compares to 486 apaches mansos, a contemporary term for Apaches settling in European towns, who could be found around Tucson in 1836, already a reduction of about half from the 1804 number. By 1857, their number had decreased to merely a half dozen or so. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 133; León García and Herrera, Civilizar o Exterminar, 86 quoted in: Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 56. The Butterfield was likely primarily meant for more populous places without connection to the West Coast, such as Franklin, Texas (today’s El Paso). The population, almost exclusively Anglo because of Texas’s settlement history, of El Paso County in 1860 was 4,456. Bryson, “El Paso County.” Tucson and its surroundings would reach a population of 3,224 only ten years later. Gibson and Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, table 3. 33 Safford and Hughes, “The Story of Mariana Díaz.” See also: Sonnichsen, Tucson, 30. 34 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 35 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 227. 36 Moody and Gardner, Stagecoach West, 86; John, Spreading the News, 160.

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markedly in 1858, when the Butterfield Overland Mail brought, in theory at least, semiweekly deliveries. The Butterfield continued for two and a half years, and was even initially refinanced during the early stages of the Civil War. But the realities of the war quickly forced it to close. Another seemingly obvious but often neglected fact that explains the late entry of the Southwest into the US national discourse as an entity that talked, and was not merely talked about, was the prevalence of the Spanish language. Where a vast number of a territory’s inhabitants spoke a different language than much of the rest of the United States, communication would remain slower, and more fraught with problems, even if distance were no object – which it certainly was.37 Because of the language barrier, as well as an infrequent, and often interrupted connection when it came to the exchange of letters and newspapers, the Mesilla did not become a full-fledged part of the United States until decades later. Communication, in the form of the telegraph, and transportation, in the form of the railroads, had to become more frequent for this to occur. The railroads also brought more English-speaking Anglo settlers into the Southwest. This in turn diminished the importance of the second issue. The power elite changed. It now spoke a language the East could understand and lived by cultural norms that Easterners lived by also. While overall the region became more connected, its norteño elites, incompatible with what was now the mainstream – both culturally and because of their mother tongue – as well as increasingly feeling the adverse effects of hardening standards of racism, were unable to hold on to their positions of power.

N EWSPAPERS

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Newspapers on the coasts began professionalizing in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The practice of mixing facts with fiction, reportage with opinion, long a staple of the party papers of the Early Republic, and of the Jacksonian-Era penny press that democratized newspaper distribution, was out. Horace Greeley’s personal journalism, which separated objective news from opinion, was the transitional stage. It would later lead into the New York Times model proselytized by Adolph Ochs, a somewhat more refined, ostensibly even more professional version of the same

37 This again is essentially an Andersonian argument: capitalism standardizes on one lingua franca within a national market, and those who do not succeed in gaining the power of determining this language, are forced to either learn the new standard at considerable mental and monetary cost, or are driven out of power. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44.

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idea.38 That idea, so familiar today, was novel in the 1850s. In that model, opinion was dialed down markedly and relegated to special columns separate from factual reporting. Western newspapermen and women – there was a sizeable contingent of female writers, printers, and owners – did not find this development desirable of emulation, however.39 Instead, they freely expressed themselves, often toeing a party line, either with conviction, or because of monetary incentive, or some measure of both.40 Western newspaper editors had little to gain from following the models of the larger Eastern and California papers. They felt responsible for (and were responsive to) their communities, and tried to form opinion there. At the least, they attempted to pick up on prevailing winds and use public sentiment for personal advancement, or, naturally, to sell more papers. Their most pressing need, according to David Dary, was simple: “survival.”41 The Smalleys: Anglo-Hispano Newspapering Family One survivor, quite literally, of pneumonia, came to Phoenix as a health and adventure seeker in 1896. Born in 1872, George Herbert Smalley, the son of a Minnesota newspaperman, had worked for his father’s paper, the St. Paul Dispatch since age sixteen. He was “engaged in newspaper work, sometimes with his brothers John and Harvey,” in addition to small-scale farming and mining.42

38 For a history of American news media that chronicles this development, though largely focused on the vanguard in the big Eastern cities, see Schudson, Discovering the News. 39 Dary, Red Blood & Black Ink, 67. 40 Ibid., 77. In one typical example, the Democratic Arizona Star of May 3, 1877 wrote of the Republican Yuma Sentinel: “That little paper which emanates once a week from Yuma […] is trying to get up a bark and wants The Star to ‘put up or shut up.’” Corruption was the topic that had enflamed the editor’s opinion. The politician who was defended by the Sentinel is tellingly referred to as “your client” by the Star editor. But he was not content just calling the Sentinel on the infraction at hand, instead launching into a general accusation: “The opinion you express of your friend’s character, we presume is about as correct as your opinion on many other things you are totally ignorant of.” Arizona Star, May 3, 1877. See also: Kathke, “Lightning Messages and Glocal Media,” 214. 41 Dary, Red Blood & Black Ink, 77. 42 “Manuscript Record,” 1. Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 1, Folder 1, AHS.

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While his father had served in the Union Army, Smalley recalled that “Civil War talk was tabooed in our family. Mother was a staunch rebel, loyal to the South.”43 First, Smalley was a mining operator near Phoenix. Then for three years in Phoenix, and from 1900 through 1902 in Tucson, Smalley became first editor, then editor-in-chief (or, put less glamorously, the sole editor) of several Arizona newspapers, including the Arizona Republican and the Tucson Citizen.44 Though the Citizen was a large enough operation for Smalley to have a reporter on staff who wrote columns and not to have to do his own typesetting, there was not much help. There were four female typesetters, and the addition of “tramp printers who stepped off the train for a days’ [sic] work.”45 In a territory of scarcely 100,000 souls “of whom 25,000 or more were Indians,”46 newspapering was not an exceptionally lucrative business. Editors were a close-knit community. Many knew each other, either personally or through their papers and correspondence, and they remained collegial despite political differences.47 Smalley married Lydia Roca, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a tucsonense Chilean-Mexican couple in 1901. During the Smalleys’ courtship George asked his wife-to-be to teach him Spanish, knowledge of which remained a useful skill for a roving Arizona journalist in the 1900s.48 Lydia’s family history reveals the complexity of identity construction in the Mesilla, and how in short order it would be tempered, simplified. Her father was nicknamed “El Chileno orgulloso”; “The Proud Chilean” for his displays of patriotic allegiance to his native Chile, a trait that made him stand out in a mostly norteño Hispanic community in 1890s Tucson.49 Such national-ethnic specificity was lost in the next generation. Smalley himself refers to his wife merely as Latino, her heredity defined through Hispanicness, not the fact that she was half Chilean.

43 “Arizona Pioneers Historical Society Bibliographical Sketch, George H. Smalley.” Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. 44 Ibid. 45 “Newspapers and Early-Day Editors.” 1, 3. Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 4, AHS. 46 “Pioneer Editors.” Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 4, AHS. 47 “Newspapers and Early-Day Editors,” 1, ibid. Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 4, AHS. 48 Although Smalley’s courtship might have been over before he could actually learn the language well. He remarks in a letter written from the road that his wife had to do the talking in Spanish with a Mexican driver. “Fourth Letter. The First Night Out.” Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. Bruening-Lewis, “Yndia Smalley Moore,” 119–121. 49 Smalley, My Adventures in Arizona, xii.

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Their marriage ceremony is powerful evidence of both the role religion and tradition played in transcultural borderlands families, and the accommodations that these were subjected to on account of necessary pragmatism. When Matie, the mother of the bride, demanded a marriage before a Catholic priest, Smalley, raised as an Episcopalian,50 agreed without hesitation. However, “there was no priest in town, so we arranged for a civil ceremony on the date we had set.” No apparent objection to this was raised by the mother-in-law. Smalley’s account of what followed bears recapitulating in full, as it includes an exemplary description of the complicated mixture of tradition and accommodation at play: I was at the Citizen office getting out the paper one evening, when my sweetheart phoned me that Father Girard was in town. I lost no time in mounting my pinto and riding to her home. We walked across the Military Plaza to Father Girard’s quarters where the ceremony was performed, Frecia and Agricol witnessing our marriage.

The juxtaposition of the modern and the traditional – riding the pinto after receiving a phone call – is illustrative of borderlands life at the time. What is more interesting though, is mother Matie’s position on the importance of the religious ceremony. Strangely, considering her former insistence, Matie was not satisfied with merely the church wedding. Smalley states: I returned to the Citizen office to help bed down the evening edition. Later in the evening when I called for my bride, Matie informed me that I could not have her until the ceremony we had planned for May tenth.

The Catholic marriage in front of a priest, then, although at first presented as a conditio sine qua non by a seemingly traditionally religious family, here takes on the air of a necessary bureaucratic act, with the civil ceremony and following festivities constituting the “real” wedding; essentially reversing the more typical order. The extraordinariness of the occurrence stuck with Smalley. In a 1941 biographical sketch for the Arizona Pioneers Historical Association, he reiterates that “[f]or three days mother-in-law would not let me have my bride until May 10th when planned ceremony occurred in presence of invited guests, Judge Purcell officiating.”51

50 Ibid., 5. Various versions of Smalley’s manuscript, written in 1939, exist in his papers at the AHS. Pages refer to the published version. 51 “Arizona Pioneers Historical Society Bibliographical Sketch, George H. Smalley.” Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. George Smalley’s repeated use of the verb “have” in connection with his future wife gives further insight into prevailing constructions of gender roles at the time.

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For Hispano families, both the Catholic marriage and the community celebration were traditional parts of the ceremony. Where both could not be had at the same time, the festivities were preferred to the religious sacrament as a marker of joining two people in wedlock. This is evidence that despite the differences of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States to Central Mexico, Catholicism in the North followed the Mexican model where “the traditional communities themselves provided the daily context for religious observances.”52 The wedding fiesta introduced the newlyweds to the village as a couple. It was needed to make the marriage official in the eyes of the community. On the surface, it is striking that Tucson, as the largest city in Arizona, had no priest present in 1901. This in a state of roughly two-thirds Mexicans among the sizeable foreign-born population, most of whom were Catholic, plus a still overwhelmingly Catholic Hispano Arizona-born population.53 A dearth of clergymen, however, was standard in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century West (and in fact, throughout the United States).54 The priesthood was dangerous, and demanding physically as well as emotionally. The taxing workload was one of the main reasons why few men chose to join seminaries and even fewer became ordained. This led to even more work for a very small number of priests.55 Soon after his memorable marriage, Smalley was tapped to become private secretary for Arizona governor Alexander Oswald Brodie. With his newly established home life in Tucson, he was reluctant to leave for Phoenix, and said as much when Brodie asked him to come. Smalley had speculated on the post of postmaster in Tucson, intending to continue writing there. In his recollection, Brodie’s wife insisted that “the code of the Southwest demanded that when a friend called there was

52 Foster, A Brief History of Mexico, 71. 53 63.3 percent in 1900, 64.1 percent in 1910, but 78.8 percent of “foreign-born whites” in 1920 due to Mexican immigration. Fuller, “Occupations of the Mexican-Born Population of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona,” 64. In general, Hispanics remain overwhelmingly Catholic even in the twenty-first century. A Pew Hispanic Center Report from 2007 puts the percentage of Catholics among Hispanics at 68 percent. “Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion,” 5. For a contextualization of recent developments in US Latino Catholicism, see Matovina, Latino Catholicism. 54 Catholic priests were not the only clergy in want. Various Protestant denominations also had itinerant preachers for long periods all over the trans-Mississippi West. One Presbyterian church in Denver, for example, was without a pastor 40 percent of the time for the first seven years of its existence. The Tucson First Methodist Church had twelve pastors in twenty-four years. Szasz, The Protestant Clergy, 7. 55 Most did not live to age fifty, and hardly any to seventy. Brinkley and Fenster, Parish Priest, 193–194.

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no alternative but to go.”56 The “code of the Southwest” was decidedly lopsided. In no uncertain terms, it meant that those who had favors to dole out could withhold their affections easily if those asked did not respond to their queries. Smalley held the job in Phoenix until 1906. The two families remained close (though, one supposes, not entirely on equal terms) until Brodie’s death in 1918. Smalley’s next station in Arizona Territory was Globe, where he remained as a clerk for the 5th District Court until 1911. He next went back to Phoenix, but then based himself in Tucson again. All the while, he continued holding various offices, both clerical and honorary, such as Tucson City Auditor (1915), Secretary of the Maricopa County Taxpayers’ Association (in 1912), and its Pima County counterpart (1913–1914), Secretary of the State Council of Defense (1917) and Secretary of the US Food Administration for Arizona (1918–1919). An appointment to be US Fair Price Commissioner for Arizona by the US Attorney General in 1920–1921 capped this career. Smalley remained primarily in Tucson until his death in 1961. Initially, he still took frequent trips across Arizona as a freelance journalist. Later, he was a life insurance broker for several companies.57 Smalley represents the second tier of Arizona’s territorial elite after the first transition. No longer was the territory a de facto Mexican place. Instead, the United States had inserted itself into life most anywhere. Anglos like Smalley were itinerant, well-connected, and used to working in networks where favors were the most salient currency. For some in that elite it still paid to learn Spanish and prominent Hispanos still mattered to the politics of the territory. The way Smalley refers to Mariano G. Samaniego, a Sonoran-born territorial political leader, in his memoirs is telling. Samaniego was, Smalley writes, […] born in Sonora in 1844, but moved to Mesilla, New Mexico at the age of six. A graduate of St. Louis University in 1862, he moved to Tucson seven years later where he became prominent as a rancher and freighter. A Democrat, he was a leader in local politics, serving as a legislator and as a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Arizona. He died in 1907.

What mattered to Smalley in describing Samaniego was his party allegiance. His life story makes it clear that Samaniego was Mexican-born, but he is not referred to as a Hispano leader, or, the standby of Anglos describing the few remaining important Latinos at the turn of the century, a “prominent Mexican.” Instead, Smalley calls him “a leading Democrat as well as a wise and efficient political strategist”

56 Smalley, My Adventures in Arizona, 111. 57 “Manuscript Record,” 1. Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 1, Folder 1; “Pioneer Editors,” Smalley Family Papers, Box 2, Folder 4, AHS.

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who had “made Pima County solidly Democratic.”58 Smalley wrote about Samaniego the same way he wrote about prominent Anglos. A transition of power had largely occurred, leaving Hispanos with less and less of it. Yet, in the minds of many in the elite, Mexican-origin leaders were still part of Arizona Territory’s political makeup. Itinerancy was a prominent part of Southwestern life, and Western newspaper editors were no exception. In fact, they could be considered exemplars of that lifestyle, as papers were sold and bought frequently. This often left Democratic editors out of a job at a newly Republican paper and vice versa.59 Newspapering alone also hardly ever paid the bills, so newspaperwomen and men took on various other occupations, odd jobs, and offices wherever possible. This left them vulnerable to paper owners exercising what could politely be described as personal influence in how they told their stories. Smalley was not immune. After intending to write a story about an incident of gunplay involving Charles Hood, a friend of Tucson Citizen owner Herbert Brown, Smalley decided otherwise. It had not been the fact that Hood had made a death threat that changed his mind, but but rather a telegram from Brown. Smalley admitted in his notes that this “was a story the Citizen did not publish.”60

T ELEGRAPHY , P OWER ,

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S OCIAL C APITAL

The postal service’s free exchange of newspapers that the editors profited from, established as early as the Post Office Act of 1792, was in many respects akin to a wire service. It certainly fulfilled the function of disseminating news to other parts of the country. In one respect, however, the US Mail could not compete with actual wire services, which began narrowcasting their news to papers all across the United States from about the time of the Civil War: they were fast.61 This did not immediately affect the speed at which such news was published. During the 1890s, newspapers could still wait for a “devil,” a runner who transported the telegrams from the Associated Press to the newspaper office, to have a beer along the way,

58 Ibid., 93. 59 Unless, as some, like the publisher of the Deming Graphic did, they simply switched party loyalty when that promised gainful employment. Library of Congress, “About Deming Headlight.” 60 Smalley, My Adventures in Arizona, 95. 61 Steffen, “Newspapers for Free,” 419.

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since “patrons expect[ed] the paper any time” and ostensibly did not care much if it arrived at all.62 Not only news traveled across the wires. Most telegraph lines in the West followed the needs of yet another governmental institution of discernible presence: the military. The first military telegraph reached Arizona from San Diego in 1873.63 According to one soldier, it was built from there to Fort Yuma, California, thence to Maricopa Wells, Arizona, where it bifurcated, one line going on to Prescott and Fort Whipple, the other continuing eastward to Tucson, and thence to San Carlos and Camp Apache, or rather to the crossing of the Gila River, fifteen miles from San Carlos.64

The military telegraph had reached Tucson and some other Arizonan towns more than half a decade before the railroads. In addition to military use, it also allowed civilian messages to be transmitted for pay. Telegraphy had become so commonplace during the early 1880s that all kinds of news now came across the wires, not just important international and national events. The Arizona Weekly Star, for example, chose to begin its first issue of the year in 1880 with a news item titled “Fatal Accident to Three Drunken Germans Near Napa, Calif,”65 brilliantly combining the era’s penchant for both ethnic stereotypes and sensationalist reporting. A very different stereotyping of an ethnic group was afoot at the same time. Historian James E. Officer, looking at the Spanish-American experience in late nineteenth-century Arizona, found that Spanish surnames disappeared from the newspaper accounts that described the comings and goings of local elites in the 1880s.66 Also, no longer did Anglos settle among the established community, choosing instead to live apart from it. In existing settlements, this often did not take the shape of creating new neighborhoods. Instead, the new arrivals increasingly took over downtowns, pushing “Mexicans,” as they now derogatorily termed both

62 “Arizona Pioneers Historical Society Bibliographical Sketch, George H. Smalley,” Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. 63 Prescott Miner, September 6, 1873. Qtd. in: Barnes, Arizona Place Names, 161. Much of the network was completed that year, and in 1874 the telegraph network reached across all of Arizona east to west, and as far north as Prescott, as indicated on an official map from 1874. George F. Price and J. W. Ward, “San Diego and Arizona Military Telegraph Line, 1874” Map #271, Map Collection, SHM. 64 The passage is from John G. Bourke’s memoir, excerpted in: Tucker, Arnold, and Wiener, eds., The Encyclopedia of North American Indian Wars, 1188. 65 Arizona Weekly Star, January 8, 1880. 66 Officer qtd. in Sonnichsen, Tucson, 88.

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Spanish-American US citizens and newly arrived migrants from south of the border, to the sidelines.67 The newcomers, members of associations, and brothers in secret and not-sosecret fraternal societies, formed the core of what constituted the influence of the national in “Gilded Age” America. Termed the “associative state” by Brian Balogh and others, this approach to federal authority was a hidden-in-plain-sight kind of governance. It relied on an assertive legal system and on the organization of people in associations and clubs advocating various ends – out of their own volition and with tacit political support from Washington – rather than on an unwanted, visible federal presence.68 The exception was the military, which was both wanted and visible; ostensibly for its protective capabilities, but just as importantly as the largest customer of many traders and farmers. Because telegraphy had come to Arizona through the military, commercial messages traveled across US Signal Service wires until the late nineteenth century. It was not until 1887 that the first commercial telegraph company was even established in the territory.69 This also allowed the military as an institution to become a prolific user of the technology. A telegraph ledger for Southern Arizona containing records for all the messages sent, received, and forwarded by one unnamed post in 1892 and 1893 shows a clear pattern.70 When it came to telegrams charged for, and sent by businessmen or other private users of the network, identified on the top of each page as “commercial business,” the number sent daily in January 1892, for example, ranged from two on January 31 to a maximum of eighteen in two days (for the weekend of January 3 and 4), averaging about twelve a week.71 “Free business,” i.e. military wires, typi-

67 Ibid., 107; Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 21–23. Tucson’s Main Street, center of the former Spanish settlement, at this time became lined with New England style townhouses. The development resembles today’s gentrification in various cities in the United States and around the globe. 68 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 353–378, 380–381. Balogh takes the term from Ellis Hawley’s work on the 1920s. Although he does not say it outright, Balogh most likely refers to Hawley’s essay: Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State’.” 69 “Telegraph Lines in Arizona, 1871–1879.” MS 872, AHS. 70 “Telegraph Ledger.” MS 817, AHS. Judging from the sent and received lists, the post in question was likely Fort Carlos, although no mention is made on the ledger. 71 Ibid. The exact numbers per day are hard to pin down. It appears that the keepers of the ledger habitually lumped together weekends, and often forgot to finish their daily statistics, tallying up instead two, three, and in one case, four full days before restarting their count.

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cally were around twenty-five per week, or twice the number sent on commercial business.72 The length of the telegrams sent and received is also telling. Commercial telegrams were overwhelmingly under a dozen words long. Military communications, however, were hardly ever less than that, often coming in at word counts in the twenties, thirties, and forties, with some outliers going up to nearly 200.73 On average, a military telegram contained more than twenty-eight words, while a commercial or governmental one had fewer than sixteen.74 Commercial messages, then, were not only just about half as frequent as military ones, they were also only about half as long. They did, however, tend to travel further. Business messages went within the territory, but also as far as Boston, Midland, Columbus, or New Orleans. For a fifteen-day sample period from January 1–15, 1892, there were 36 commercial telegrams either sent to or received from points outside of Arizona. At the same time, only twelve military communiqués went outside the territory’s borders. Military messages went typically between forts within the territory. The picture becomes even more skewed when one considers that most of the telegrams which crossed the Arizona line constituted contact with other places in the Southwest – Albuquerque, New Mexico and Los Angeles, California being the only destinations that show up with any regularity – as well as the fact that only two of these were sent from Southern Arizona to points outside the territory. The recipient in both cases is given as the chargé d’affaires in Washington, DC. Both times, Washington chose not to reply, at least not by telegram. Most likely, these were status reports, or standard requests, as the messages repeat monthly with almost clockwork regularity. Three more were sent in

72 This included use by other governmental agencies who received special rates but still had to pay to use the line, as is evidenced by “government rate” telegrams, such as those sent by the surveyor general. Surveyor General of Arizona, Letters Sent, 1879–1895, RG 49, NARA Perris. 73 “Telegraph Ledger.” MS 817, AHS. 74 For a sample taken for January 1–15, 1892, the average word counts, rounded to the second decimal, are 25.69 and 13.24 respectively for free and commercial telegrams sent and 31.08 and 18.27 for those received. It is possible that these lengths differed in part because codes were used. Ciphers certainly were popular among telegraph users, and telegraph codes in the late nineteenth century US varied greatly in length and complexity. The few telegrams that survive from the period in Arizona are mostly unencrypted. John, Network Nation, 29; Larrabee, Charles S. Larrabee’s Cipher; W. G. Press & Co., Telegraphic Cipher; Clauson-Thue, The ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code.

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February, one on March 4 (or 5),75 and others on April 12, May 5, June 9 (or 10), July 3 (or 4), and so on. In contrast to business correspondence, communication among regional military posts was constant, loquacious, and free-wheeling. Some commanders were apparently quite drawn to instant messaging. The scope of content contained in these messages ranged from the essential to the forgettable. That the first message sent over a newly completed line between Yuma and Prescott as early as November 1873 was one congratulating Lieutenant Colonel Crook on his promotion to Brigadier General is telling. As such, it was completely unnecessary for the immediate functioning of the military. Yet it fulfilled perfectly the secondary function of the military telegraphy system: congratulating Crook was good form and therefore social glue.76 These no-holds-barred transmissions allowed those involved in military affairs to stay connected to their colleagues in the territory, however far afield. It allowed also for “secondary” communication; when officers corresponded on behalf of the private persons they and the military did business with, be it contractors or those called upon for provisions. A hard line between matters only of a military nature and those ranging into the personal is hard to draw here. Expensive commercial traffic, on the other hand, was limited not just in numbers, but also in scope, making elaborate conversations nearly impossible. It was limited to orders, responses, and as telegraph operator Merrill P. Freeman related, stock exchange news. The latter he was tempted to make use of, but then reconsidered. Other operators’ conduct was likely not always similarly above board.77 Communication by telegraph provided an important supplement to the more prevalent letter-writing. It was also an instrument of great power. The intimate connection of the telegraph to the military – as one of only three at least somewhat visible institutions of the “General Government” that were both functioning and welcomed in the territory at the end of the nineteenth century – shows the immense advantage that those who were in a position to use it had over those who, by station or tradition, did not.78 The next step in the development of Arizona’s telegraph network would not fundamentally change this dynamic. What it did do was free telegraph construction from the needs and wants of the military. Locals who saw a use for a branch line

75 During times of light traffic the telegraph operators typically combined several days under one heading. “Telegraph Ledger.” MS 817, AHS. 76 “A Report on Arizona’s First Telegraph Lines.” Roscoe Willson Collection, MSS 46, AHF. 77 Merrill P. Freeman, “Early Day Experiences of an Old-Time Telegrapher,” Arizona Daily Star, January 23, 1916. 78 The other two being the ubiquitous postal service and, to a lesser degree, the courts. Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, esp. 220–226, 314–315.

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where the US government had seen none now were poised to fill the gaps. Private companies were formed to build telegraph lines in places where the military had little interest, or where enough traffic across the wires was anticipated to make additional capacity useful. The latter had the added benefit of not interfering with the military’s own use of the telegraph, while the former was not only a way to potentially increase business opportunities by telegraphic connection, but also through the creation of the telegraph company proper. One such company, the Overland Telephone & Telegraph Company, founded in 1908, illustrates the model, familiar to technology startup companies today. The Overland was established by its two incorporators on June 2, 1908. It sold to Mountain States Telegraph & Telephone Company in June of 1912 for a remarkable $432,000.79 During the formative years of both Arizonan territorial identity and the inclusion of the territory into the national fabric of the United States, frequent use of the telegraph set apart the first-tier political elite from everyone else and gave them an undeniable advantage in winning the sovereignty of interpretation over what the state-to-be would look like. While directing to their constituents the various sources of federal funds that even Gilded Age America provided, an itinerant, telegraphically networked elite of politically active citizens constructed from the ground up a territorial identity as salient as, or at times more so than, that of the nation. From them, it would spread, albeit mediated by local considerations, to the bulk of Arizona’s Anglo population. Sending telegrams was not only a matter of practicality, but also a marker of political influence. As elsewhere around the world, it was a day-to-day means of communication for only a select few. For most, it was tied to telegraph news in local papers and ceremonial messages or bad news. Secondary elites received, but did not send, messages – or instructions – this way.80 The following vignettes illustrate the connections that various individuals and groups had to each other, to regional networks, and to national centers. What becomes apparent from these stories is that the telegraphically linked networks of late

79 The Mountain States promptly payed out the Overland’s creditors, among them the John A. Roebling Company of New York, to which it had owed $810.80. “History of the Overland Telephone & Telegraph Company;” Check to John A. Roebling Sons of California. Overland Telephone & Telegraph Company, MSS 89, Box 2, Folder 4, AHF. 80 The cost alone was prohibitive for most people to be able to send telegrams for anything but the most pressing matter. In 1880, for example, a ten-word message from the mining community of Globe in central Arizona to offices in California cost a rich $3.75. “Noted Pioneers Celebrate 56th Wedding Anniversary,” newspaper clipping dated 1936. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS.

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nineteenth-century elites influenced nearly everyone in the Southwestern population; either directly, indirectly, or even through the absence of communication that others enjoyed. These stories also help illustrate that race and gender, in both their contemporary perceptions and their wider cultural meanings, always mattered in Southern Arizona. They were, however, differently constructed in two important ways. For one, the idea of racial difference was different in the Southwest than it was in other parts of the nation, and certainly different than the notions that had been fought over so violently in the East, and that would define the coming decades of the Jim Crow system of oppression in the South. Racial and gender constructions also differed in different places within the Southwest. They were also distinct in a second fashion. Conceptions of race and gender varied across time in the same places in Southern Arizona. The arrival of people, ideas, and technology changed especially racial constructions of Hispanos in the once Hispanic Southwest. The passage of time made these constructions more uniform, more pseudo-scientific, more rigid, and overall more national.81 The way in which businesspeople used telegraphy at the end of the nineteenth century offers a crucial insight into their mindset. They were part of a large regional or even a Western network of traders, but also of an overlapping national one. The territory of Arizona itself seems to have figured for very little in this equation. The military, in contrast, was national in nature, and was required to follow orders from Washington. The main frame of reference of military commanders however, was the Territory of Arizona, as this was the space in which their most immediate hierarchies and cooperations lay. Charles M. Clark: A Telegraph Operator Branching Out Charles McCoy Clark’s early exploits in Arizona Territory were manifold and seemingly unceasing. In fact, long after he had retired to central Arizona, where he

81 Although it would be wrong to say that in this context “national” always equaled a more dichotomous standard of racial construction. Katherine Benton-Cohen’s case studies concerning Benson, a railroad town, and the Bisbee area mining settlements, both in Southern Arizona’s Cochise County, are instructive. They show that local, regional, and national conceptions of race interacted in complex ways reflecting different localities and their economies. In Benson, an economically variegated town built on transportation and trade, increased communication with the coasts meant less rigidity in racial in and out groups. At the same time, the copper mining-dominated Bisbee area, dependent on two absentee corporate mine owners who profited from casting Mexicans as a racial other and paying them less, developed an increasingly hardening dichotomy of white and nonwhite. Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 80–119, 170–176.

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was president of the Arizona Pioneers Association for over a decade, it still took a major force to bring his numerous enterprises to a stop: “Death ends career of Charles M. Clark” his obituary informed readers when Clark had passed away at age 82 in 1937.82 His career was typical of a telegraph operator in Arizona territory during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Charles McCoy Clark had come to Arizona with the telegraph. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1855, he left home and began work as a telegraph messenger boy in Kansas City, Missouri, at age 14. Clark must have proved a quick study and adept at working the technology. Only three years later, in 1872, he was chosen to accompany a party of four other civilian telegraph operators to Arizona.83 They had been hired to instruct military men in using the machinery of telegraphy. They were also needed as experts in the construction, or “reconstruction” as a 1924 newspaper article on Clark puts it, of the military telegraph lines that were being built across the territory at the time.84 The newspaper report on Clark is an interesting insight into how Arizona’s “pioneers” were framed in the public imagination. It begins by linking its subject to the “pioneering traits” of his forebears, “his parents having been of both Revolutionary and Mayflower stock.” No doubt that Clark, who had settled in Phoenix for two years after his resignation from the military telegraph service and had, as the

82 Newspaper clipping. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. The Arizona Pioneers Association, headquartered in Phoenix, was a fraternal society organizing reunions of Arizona “trailblazers.” Despite the closeness in name, it was not identical with the Arizona Pioneers Historical Association. Letter from Charles M. Clark to members dated March 9, 1936. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 2, AHS. 83 An article titled “The Military Telegraph in Arizona,” written by Clark himself, a clipping of which is in his files at the AHS, is more specific. He names Will C. Barden, William E. Child, W. E. Story, and Fred C. Kelly as the other telegraph men in the party. Charles M. Clark, “The Military Telegraph in Arizona,” undated newspaper clipping. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. 84 Newspaper clipping dated April 9, 1924. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. The difference between “construction” and “reconstruction” was often not easy to parse. Early lines were built cheaply and quickly, the establishment of connectivity a priority, and durability only an afterthought. Clark himself recalls that upon his arrival, the entire line from Prescott to Tucson was “supported on cottonwood poles which had been cut at the streams and which for the most part had rotted at the ground line and fallen with the wire to the ground.” It was little wonder that experienced operators and engineers were brought in to fix them only a few years later. Clark, “The Military Telegraph in Arizona,” Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS.

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piece remarks, “acquired considerable property in and about this city,” profited from such an elite upbringing when dealing with self-described Western “capitalists.” Clark was doubly a poster child for the era’s penchant for rugged individualists. He did come from “Mayflower stock,” but he had also proved himself able to survive in the rough-and-tumble West, earning the distinction as a “Westerner.” In the minds of early twentieth century readers at least, this made him even hardier, an even more rugged indidvidualist. He was also, it went without saying, white.85 Likewise, his years as a message man, privy to information contained not only in military communications, but those of the local business community in whichever station he served, helped him put his money in the right tracts of land. In Miami, his later hometown, twenty acres of his landholdings were included in the town limits when the community incoporated. Even public institutions purchased parcels from Clark.86 But before becoming a resident land speculator – an ambiguous role in the American West, but one of great import – Clark was much more mobile. That he had moved up the ranks at the telegraph office so quickly points to his resourcefulness, and also to the scarcity of experts in 1870s Arizona. The four engineers Clark had come to the territory with had by then long fled back, or moved on.87 Clark remained “a permanent resident of Arizona” from then on, ricocheting along a dizzying, but not altogether atypical, range of professions. He first became a telegraph operator himself. Clark was eventually in “charge of several of what were then the most important telegraph offices in this territory.” He also held “the position of chief operator during the administration of General August V. Kautz, commander of the department of Arizona.” After a stint as telegraph operator in Florence, Clark resigned in 1876, in time to set himself up for participation in the mining frenzy that was building up in central Arizona.88 Prospectors there had

85 Frank Van Nuys emphasizes these qualities – Western and white – as decisive factors necessary to be considered a citizen by the “Americanizers” of the early twentieth century in his study of race and citizenship in the American West. Van Nuys, Americanizing the West, see esp. 9–32 for this argument. 86 When the Miami School District bought its land for a school in 1924, Clark’s land was a key expense. Various newspaper clippings. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. 87 Ibid. 88 Charles M. Clark, “Herd of Camels Roamed Desert Land of State In Early Days,” newspaper clipping dated 1929. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS.

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found a globular silver nugget in 1875, which would give the settlement springing up around the vein its name, Globe.89 The discovery of minerals at Leadville, Colorado, prompted Clark to sell all his Phoenix land holdings in 1878. They included a lot “upon which the railroad yards are now located at the south edge of the business district,” which netted him a modest $315, $7,720 in 2015 dollars by a purchasing power calculation.90 Clark’s evermobile lifestyle, therefore, prevented him from making a large profit a decade later, when Phoenix was designated territorial capital.91 Setting out to Leadville, located in central Colorado, Clark and his three partners, however, only made it as far as Payson, still in central Arizona, and less than a seventh of the way. In 1879, he moved on to Globe to partake in the boom that had resulted from the 1875 discovery. Before flexing his mining muscles, however, he first made a name for himself in a somewhat more cerebral line of work. Clark purchased a half interest in the Globe Chronicle newspaper. He published the Chronicle for a year, then “took charge of the Emeline mine before it was sold to Boston people.” In the fall of 1880, he married his wife Dora and opened Globe’s inaugural telegraph office.92 1882 saw Dora and Charles in Clifton, where he held the office of postmaster as well as that of justice of the peace. 1887 saw another move, this time to Yavapai, seat of the eponymous county in northwestern central Arizona. 1892 found Clark serving as Yavapai county’s delegate to the Chicago Columbian Exposition. By that time, he had oriented himself back to Globe. As organizer of a silver development and long-time operator of the Silver Belt Mine, Clark stayed there until 1894. When silver depreciation made mining the metal unprofitable in 1892, he quit, presumably just in time to take on his responsibilities to assemble Yavapai’s mineral exhibit for the World Exposition, and accompany the gems to Chicago. The delegateship was a sign of appreciation by Yavapai County administrators; Clark had been “instrumental in bringing considerable Eastern capital into Yavapai county mine

89 Woody and Schwartz, Globe, Arizona, 11. Woody and Schwartz cover the history of Globe until the 1970s in an anecdotal, but fact-filled style, with much material presented, but deeper analysis often lacking. A serviceable local history of Globe is Bigando, Globe, Arizona. 90 “Noted Pioneers Celebrate 56th Wedding Anniversary,” Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS. 91 Although the fact that the whole of Phoenix’s townsite combined had cost $550 in 1874 still ensured considerable earnings. Barney, Goldwater, and Williams, “Official Site of the City of Phoenix: History.” 92 “Noted Pioneers Celebrate 56th Wedding Anniversary,” Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS.

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developments.” Still, unconvinced of further prospects in mining Globe, Clark relocated to Jerome in 1895, another mining boom town whose ore had been discovered in 1875, but where exploitation was still ongoing.93 Clark, however, apparently missed out on making money in the mines there, and instead went back to his profession as a telegraph operator, supplementing his work at the telegraph office with duty as a customs assayer. Three years later, he went into business as a small merchant, and “experienced the various fires due to lack of water which consumed the town at each occasion.” The combustibility of the place likely made it easy for Clark to move on six years later, back to Globe, where he “worked in the mines for a year or two.”94 Clark busied himself in the higher rungs of mining work, for he afterward “organized the Orphan Copper company, taking over about 100 acres of mineralized ground.”95 The operation proved successful enough for him to take over the neighboring Inspiration Copper company’s property two years later. His years past the age of forty showed a slowdown, but certainly not a cessation of activity in business ventures. This, too was typical; the entrepreneurial game of hopscotch, following hopes of riches from one place to another while attempting to avoid financial ruin for at least long enough to be able to try again, was exhausting. Uncertain fates and less than stellar transportation infrastructure conspired against even the most well-connected and privileged fortune-seekers, and they wore down those of less means even more quickly. His eventual good financial fortune and leisurely retirement (though, one supposes, he never came to a complete rest, continuing to work for the Arizona Pioneers Historical Association in one capacity or the other until close to his death) retroactively imbues Clark’s hodgepodge of a career with a semblance of stringency and consistency that it cannot possibly have had. Considering the wide-reaching occupations Clark held, even that semblance is only skin-deep. The most important factor in his continued career can be found near the end of the 1924 newspaper piece: “With a residence at various times in all portions of Arizona, Mr. Clark’s friendship extends to many of the ‘history makers’ of the state, who were counted among his nearest acquaintances.” This is the reason

93 Ibid. 94

The catchall term “working in the mines” could mean anything from shoveling ore underground to managing a smelter, or overseeing transportation. As Patricia Nelson Limerick points out: “Everyone called himself a miner – prospectors, vestigial placer miners, partners working small claims, mine foremen and managers, small capitalists, bonanza kings, and mine laborers.” Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 107.

95

Newspaper clipping dated April 9, 1924. Charles M. Clark Collection, MS 155, Box 2, Folder 1, AHS.

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why Clark was able to start over time and time again: he was immersed in a territorial network of “history makers,” that is, influential persons in Arizona. At the close of the nineteenth century, being a telegraph operator elsewhere in the world was usually not an undesirable job. Yet it seldom brought lasting contact with a regional or local community. Instead, operators lived their lives and constructed their identities first and foremost as “company men,” as professionals conjoined in a fraternity of techno-artisans. As Simone Müller-Pohl notes, such bonds were even stronger among those telegraph operators that worked for any of the large transoceanic telegraph companies. They rarely mingled with the local community that their station was geographically in, instead modeling their lives and identities on a company-wide standard, based on uniform rules and surroundings. Telegraphic beachheads, the “portals of globalization” were remote, alien structures in the places they were built, yet at the same time well-connected to the centers of the telegraph company’s network. Land-based telegraph lines, in contrast, were more frequently operated by local telegraphers, who were more integrated into their respective communities.96 A variety of the company group mentality existed in Western telegraph offices as well. The circumstances of territorial Arizona and New Mexico importantly altered the template, however. Identification with the military or corporate entity that was in charge of their jobs was never quite complete in Western telegraphers. The operators were not structurally part of the military, and therefore left out of its organizational structure, if not always its social circles. These, by necessity and because of the size of the small communities, contained not only the operators and military officers, but local businessmen, many of whom made their living on military contracts, as well. Like many other Westerners, telegraph operators were opportunity seekers. If monetary gains presented themselves, they were as quick to reply as anyone – and, as Merrill Freeman’s experiences show, sometimes quicker. For this, they often left safe but low-paying jobs with the telegraph network (first military, then civilian). The fact that few trained professionals were qualified to do their job, and that the constantly

96 Müller-Pohl, “Geographien der Globalisierung,” 51–70. For a history of transoceanic telegraphy in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Müller, Wiring the World. The realm of military/civilian telegraphers in the American West represents a middle ground between these two models. Telegraphers worked for a powerful organization, but they were also part of local communities. Organizationally, the difference was that telegraphers were not wholly part of the military. They followed its orders, but more as employees than as officers or enlisted men. They held no rank, and were always both somewhat inside and outside of the military institutionally. At the same time, their wanderings and meandering careers indicate that they made themselves part of the local community, profiting from the business opportunities it offered.

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rising and decaying settlements of the exploitation-era Southwest meant new lines and new stations were always created allowed them to return if their fortunes turned. For Clark, his sought-after technical skills meant that he had a fallback profession whenever other ventures did not pan out. At the same time, the network of telegraph operators springing up in settlements all across the territory ensured that he was always well connected. Still, membership in such an exclusive fraternity did not ensure riches. What it did was provide a steady source of opportunities. Clark’s extreme itinerancy, a seeming inability to stay in one place for more than a few years, made continuous relationships difficult.97 He consistently moved in influential circles, but never moved up into the highest echelons of the elite. His constant chase for the next, better opportunity – a modus operandi echoed by many Westerners – provided a life of constant comings and goings. It did not, however, lend itself to long-term planning and scheming: Clark’s luck or bad luck was always dependent on his timing. Although never destitute, he was not a “capitalist” of sufficient means to invest in enterprises across the state while retaining a home base and ongoing profession in any one place. For Clark, investments meant moving from one thing to the next. This marks the gambling nature of those in the territory’s secondary, as opposed to its primary elite. Clark’s later interest in both the Arizona Pioneers Association and in the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, as well as the limitations of his moves, all of which occurred within the territory of Arizona, point to a strong identification with Arizona as an entity in which he sought to make his luck. Many of the other telegraph operators spent most of their lives within the territory’s border lines as well, evidence of a kinship between these operators, but also evidence of weaker ties to telegraph men outside of Arizona – even if they were as close as other Southwestern states.98 Joseph Lee Wiley: Gambler and State Sergeant-at-Arms The case of Joseph Lee Wiley, a professional gambler, Southern Pacific worker for sixty years, and one-time Sergeant of Arms of the State Senate, speaks volumes about the importance that those in the second tier attached to telegrams from primary elites. Born in Fairmont, West Virginia in either 1862 or ’63, Wiley arrived in Tucson in 1882 or ’84. He married Irish-born Anna “Annie” O’Sullivan in 1904

97 Though such constant movement is commonly associated with the West as a region, in fact both the movers and those who settled in a place permanently, the “stickers” as Western writer Wallace Stegner termed them, created the structures that were of import to its communities. Hine and Faragher, The American West, 362–363. 98 Merrill P. Freeman later parlayed his connections into a successful banking career. See, for example Huntington Abbott, “Beginnings of Freemasonry in Tucson,” 113.

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and was active in Arizona Democratic (and later Republican) politics. In 1916, he was connected to the killing of one Josephine Welsh Bates, and sentenced to ten to fifteen years in prison for murder in the second degree. Although there are no exact records left of what transpired, it appears that his political connections saved him from ever serving jail time.99 Governor George W. P. Hunt appointed Wiley’s wife Annie a Notary Public in 1919. The couple was even on Hunt’s Christmas card list. Wiley died in Tucson in 1947. Of the four telegrams Wiley kept, two told of the deaths of his mother and father, while two came from important political figures – one from Arizona’s longtime US Senator, Marcus Aurelius Smith: Letter received[.] I rely on your judgment and have done what you think best[.] Will speak Tucson night of election[.]100

Communication from first-tier elites to those in the second row often took the tone of favors asked, or commands issued. The prohibitively high cost of replying in the negative automatically constrained impulses to not act on the impositions of one’s high ranking political friends. This left second-tier elites like Wiley with only the option to follow through on the wishes of senators, congressmen, or the governor if their favor was not to be lost altogether. The second telegram Wiley kept illustrates this well: Am short three hundred names to initiate state reclamation bill[.] Will you not send me twenty names Wednesday evening mail or by some one on train leaving Tucson 1230 pm Thursday[.] Please don’t fail[.]101

The primary elite of politicians (who in many cases did not have to pay for telegrams out of their own pocket) and businessmen (who could afford such costly communication) wielded subtle but real power merely by their ability to communicate. As the increased use of the telegraph coincided with the influx of more and more white settlers, and telegraph lines multiplied in Arizona’s Anglo-dominated north and center, it was possible for a small elite to supplant the existing Mexican

99

Despite this, Wiley seems not to have been the black sheep of the family. He took out an ad in the Arizona Daily Citizen on January 20, 1900 stating, “I warn the public that I will not be responsible for any debts contracted by Roy Wiley, as he is a drunkard and dead beat.” Arizona Daily Citizen, January 20, 1900.

100 Telegram from Marcus Aurelius Smith dated August 29, 1914. Joseph Lee Wiley Papers, MS 863, AHS. 101 Ibid.

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landholding class as the powers-that-be in the territory. In this process, they managed to redefine regional identity as Arizonan and white and in opposition to – names matter – New Mexican, latinized and mixed-race. This is especially remarkable as the division of mixed-race Mexican-American New Mexico Territory into the familiar shapes of today’s Arizona and New Mexico only dated to 1863. A roughly North-South division of Anglo vs. Mexican was reinterpreted as West-East; with Arizona remaining even today the more Anglo state, despite its Southern part’s Hispano-Mexican history.102 Telegrams remained a terse and expensive mode of correspondence into the 1900s, when market inventions like the day and night letter provided room for more frequent and comprehensive, if not immediately more affordable communication.103 In 1866, Western Union charged more than $2 for 10 words sent between New York and Chicago. A typical rate for point-to-point communications within the continental US by 1884 was $1.104 This was still out of the reach of many blue collar workers, as it was a typical day’s pay for miners at the turn of the century.105 By 1905, the price of sending telegrams (notably within Arizona) had decreased further, to significantly under ¢50. With a typical white miner’s daily wage being $4 at that time, this meant more Anglos could theoretically partake in telegraph exchanges. In practice, the remoteness of quickly founded and abandoned mining towns often still constrained communications. Mexicans, who earned only $2.50, of which they typically sent two-fifths home to Mexico, leaving a miner only $1.50 to

102 Culturally, this can be seen in the two states’ wildly differing approaches to Mexican immigration, the teaching of Mexican history in public schools, or their official English policies. These policies differed in territorial times, and continued to deviate with the 1912 ascendance of Arizona and New Mexico to statehood. 103 Downey, Telegraph Messenger Boys, 88, 140. Another invention that made quick – though not instantaneous – communication more affordable was the day or night lettergram (or day/night letters as Western Union called them). These telegrams were low priority, longer form messages, typically passed on during the least busy hours. Introduced in 1909, they could be discounted by as much as 80 percent for a message 50 words or longer. A national telegram cost only ¢30 to send by 1918, plus a ¢5 war tax. By 1919, the rates further dropped, but the night letters were delivered by the US mail from that year on, delaying their delivery to customers to regular mail delivery time, which could be up to half a working day later than earlier messenger delivery. New York Times, February 9, 1919. 104 US Census Bureau, “Historical Statistics of the United States,” 775–810. 105 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 51, 222.

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subsist, suffered from a clear monetary disadvantage.106 They identified primarily with a transnational region, not any specific nation. Culturally, though, they were, to Anglos and many Hispanos alike, clearly Mexican.107 Joseph Lee Wiley clearly had some important connections to Arizonan notables, but he was not well-off enough to make strategic use of the telegraph himself. His good fortune was dependent upon performing tasks for those in the upper echelons of the territory’s social elite. This does not mean he did not also profit from such attachments, as is evident in his career. Wiley theoretically always had the choice to refuse doing favors. Yet the dependence of all early Anglo arrivals in Arizona Territory on local community and regional government, which was also importantly influenced by national movers and shakers, made such refusals not only impractical, but downright dangerous for their ability to earn wages.

O RGANIZATIONS

AND I NSTITUTIONS

Societal cohesion expressed itself in the Mesilla as it did most anywhere and anywhen; through community and associations, especially when circumstances were less than settled. As anthropologist Robert T. Anderson wrote, “[w]here societies today are experiencing rapid social change, voluntary associations are typically found.”108 In late nineteenth century America, associations often took the form of clubs with regulated membership, or of fraternities and sodalities with or without religious overtones, and they were consistently more numerous in the West than elsewhere.109 On the perceived frontier of civilization, formalities such as member lists and minutes kept at meetings not only served the practical purpose of enabling the associations’ immediate business, but also constituted tangible reminders of one’s own civilization and refinedness, reinforcing the mission of the Americanizers. The very existence of associations also had a nationalizing component to it. Johann Neem emphasizes the role that civic associations played in the development of American nationalism, suggesting that “civic organizers constructed national institutions that connected people throughout the Union, giving Americans a sense of membership in the nation.” The Andersonian imagined com-

106 The expenses list for a Memorial Day celebration in Bisbee that year lists the price of several telegrams sent to Phoenix in connection with the festivities as ¢40. Bisbee Memorial Day Celebration, AZ 74, U of A. 107 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 56, 59. 108 Anderson, “Voluntary Associations in History,” 209. 109 Gamm and Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations,” 514–515.

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munity, Neem intimates, was not built primarily top-down by its governmental institutions: “it was not the American state(s) but privately organized voluntary associations that most effectively laid [its] foundations.”110 Clubs, lodges, and other associations had varying levels of officiality. They all had connections to other, similar institutions in other parts of the territories or states they were in. In some cases, such as the Freemasons, the Grand Army of the Republic, or the various other fraternities, such connections followed an established hierarchy that remained intact when new member organizations sprang up in a new locality. A GAR post, for example, knew where to write in order to become formalized. In other cases, organizations which had similar interests, goals, or membership, found themselves naturally gravitating towards umbrella-like organizational superstructures. The 45-member Tucson Woman’s Club, for instance, founded in 1900 and concerning itself with the “Study of American Literature, Parliamentary Practice, Educational and Civic Activities, Traveling Libraries” as well as an “Organized Humane Society” joined the Arizona Federation of Women’s Clubs together with the Yuma Woman’s Club, where “Parliamentary Practice” was not emphasized, but “Study of History and Literature, Domestic Science, Civics” and “Education” were objects. Other women’s organizations were also part of the Federation, such as the Winslow Literary Club, solely interested in “Literary Study,” the Nogales Current Topics Club (which, apart from its name-giving objective, also had interests in “Parliamentary Practice, Civics, Traveling Libraries”) and the Glendale Self Culture Club, objectives “Self Culture, Historical Studies, Social Intercourse.”111 Following Robert T. Anderson, the fact that voluntary associations only began forming in substantial numbers in the Mesilla around the 1880 mark – the year the railroad reached Tucson – points toward an accelerated speed of societal change brought on by the rail connection. The formation of organizations and associations with this increased level of formality coincided with the increasing influence the American nation was gaining in the Southwest. Once Mexican-American mutualistas began developing in order to represent the interests of Hispanos in opposition to a white majority, the transition was complete: where before the Hispano community, representing the majority of a locality’s residents, had informally cared for the interests of its members, it now had to follow the Anglo model of the formalized, state-supported or encouraged voluntary association, a staple of civic life in the nineteenth century, especially during the Progressive Era.

110 Neem, “Civil Society and American Nationalism,” 30. 111 “Year-Book: 1905–1907.” Arizona Federation of Women’s Clubs, MS 605, Box 1, AHS.

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The founding of the Alianza Hispano-Americana in Tucson in 1894 marks the point when the Anglo model of organized community had firmly taken root.112 In the decades before 1880, traditional Hispanic models of producing community, rooted in immediate and extended family – epitomized by the concept and importance of “comadre” relationships113 – had begun to lose cohesion, as village structures of living and government had been superseded by Anglo forms, often introduced in the name of progress in larger settlements. In smaller communities, Hispanic villages continued to exist. In fact, new ones formed throughout the Mesilla during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first several of the twentieth, especially following the “Entrada,” the mass migration of Central and Southern Mexicans to the American Southwest at the beginning of the twentieth century. In relative numbers and political as well as economic importance, though, they were overwhelmed by Anglos.114 But while Hispanic community structures were on the decline in Tucson, Yuma, and other settlements, some of their foundations survived in new, formalized forms, like the Alianza, that were adapted to an increasingly Anglo society. Lodges and Clubs Tucson’s branch of the Grand Army of the Republic, an influential fraternal organization founded by and for former Civil War soldiers in 1866, styled “Negley Post No. 1,” opened in 1881. Thirteen members had assembled for the first “mustering in” on December 12.115 The arrival of a significant number of ex-Union soldiers af-

112 Alianza Hispano Americana Records, 1894–1994, Series III: Administration, MSS 322, Box 115, Folder 1 ASU. On the founding and history of the Alianza, see also Sonnichsen, Tucson, 146–148; Arrieta, “La Alianza Hispano-Americana.” 113 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 49. 114 Ibid., 13–21. 115 The post was named for James S. Negley. Negley had been a Major General in the Union Army, and later served in Congress for his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania district, from 1869–87. For four of these years, he also sat on the board of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, an organization established by Congress in 1865 in analogy to the already established Sailor’s Home in Philadelphia. First named the National Asylum, it was later renamed to set apart the deserving Union veterans from the insane, the poor, and other groups that nineteenth-century America more and more condemned to all kinds of asylums. In David Rothman’s controversial yet ultimately convincing view, this was largely a reaction to the increasing perceived social disorder in a modernizing society since the Jacksonian Era. Grand Army of the Republic, MS 616, Box 4, AHS; Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum.

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ter the railroad connection had been established the year previous justified a chapter of the Northern soldiers’ fraternal organization. Fraternal societies in general were again popular beginning in the late 1870s. The GAR itself, once a much more political and military institution, became infused more and more with the trappings of a fraternal organization beginning in 1878.116 Although only when the numbers both of former soldiers present as well as overall membership in the GAR grew, did the Tucson branch become fully operational. The first Memorial Day celebration that the Tucson GAR put together, with much effort and at the considerable expense of $107.65, was that of May 30th, 1885.117 There never was a GAR chapter in town during the first period of the Grand Army’s existence when the organization was essentially a stand-in for the Republican Party. Given the prevalence of Democrats in Southern Arizona as well as the GAR’s diminished role in the 1870s, this is hardly surprising.118 Although the GAR had become less and less a Republican beachhead, it still retained its core of Republican members in the early 1880s. Running counter to the notion that Arizonans were thoroughly Southerners, or Southern sympathizers, is the fact that many of Tucson’s well-respected citizens were members of the GAR.119 Merchant Sam Hughes, appears on its roster, as do several of the Drachman mercantile family, and L.C. Hughes, later a Democratic Arizona governor. Hughes’s involvement with the GAR shows well the mutability of party allegiance and its connection to certain issues in the nineteenth-century West. A life-long abolitionist, L.C. Hughes was a War Democrat, and remained loyal to his party after the Civil War, attending national conventions, and also taking the governorship as a Democrat, appointed by Grover Cleveland. He had earlier served as territorial attorney general under Republican governor Anson Peacely Killen Safford.120 In the case of Hughes, at least, it

116 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 84–87. 117 Grand Army of the Republic, MS 616, Box 4, AHS. 118 Blight, Race and Reunion, 157–158. 119 Stuart McConnell even goes so far to say that the GAR's Republicanness was no longer the most important factor as early as 1872, and contends that Mary Dearing’s thesis that the GAR was a “Republican club,” cannot entirely be substantiated. Instead “Republican voting was only one of a cluster of behaviors in which GAR members engaged.” McConnell holds that there is no evidence that holding GAR office became a marker of ascendancy in the Republican Party. In 1881, as it entered its period of greatest expansion, the GAR had certainly lost its necessary connection to the Republican Party. O’Leary, To Die For, 37; McConnell, Glorious Contentment, vii, ix, 113. See also Dearing, Veterans in Politics. 120 Another victim of historical sources disagreeing on his name; his middle name is given variously as Peacely, Pacely, or Peasely; and Killen or Keeler.

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seems that his party allegiance was owed more to his involvement with organized labor than his abolitionist world view, which during the Civil War had prompted repeated attempts to join the Union Army despite failing health. Earlier, Hughes had been involved in founding the Ancient Order of United Workmen. War Democrats made up most of the Tucson GAR’s membership. Democrats on the whole dominated the town’s politics. These Democratic loyalties contributed to Tucson’s eventual decline in political clout, as the rest of the territory leaned Republican.121 The GAR was far from the only fraternal organization in 1880s Arizona. By the 1890s, fraternal organizations and voluntary associations were thriving. A comparably late date of establishment was something they all had in common. The Freemasons had tried to establish a lodge in Tucson as early as 1875. It failed to gain traction, and Masons continued to meet informally. A second attempt in 1879 suffered the same fate. Among the group of Masons who attended meetings in Tucson in the late 1870s were future mayor R.N. Leatherwood, banker Barron Jacobs and E. Diaz Peña, a Mexican immigrant from Sinaloa who had decided to ignore the Catholic interdict against joining the Masonic order.122 Thomas R. Sorin, itinerant editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, in town frequently to visit his wife, Sarah Herring Sorin, who in tandem with her father ran a successful lawfirm, also attended Masonic meetings.123 Despite the strong Anti-Catholicism prevalent in Masonry, Tucson’s Masons apparently interpreted their Masonic landmarks, or qualifications for membership, to mean that “an applicant [.] sound of body, loyal to his government, and a believer in a Supreme Being” included Catholics and Jews, but excluded Mormons.124 Their first seven applications for membership in the final and successful attempt to establish a lodge in 1881 were all accepted, with the exception of that of Alexander Levin, a Jewish brewer and owner of a respectable entertainment ground, Levin Park. Despite the theoretical possibility for Jews to join the Tucson lodge, then – several indeed would later join – not every member signed off on such religious tolerance.125 Other associations proved to be more inclusive, accepting not

121 In a fateful twist, if George Smalley’s recollections are correct, Tucson and surrounding Pima county’s Democrat leanings were in no small way thanks to one prominent Hispano, Mariano G. Samaniego. The political decline of Arizona’s Democrats was linked with its constituency and operatives. As Hispanos’ power waned, so did that of the Democrats. “Manuscript Record,” 1. Smalley Family Papers, MS 305, Box 1, Folder 1, AHS; “Pioneer Editors.” Smalley Family Papers, Box 2, Folder 4. 122 Formalized in the papal bull In Eminenti Apostolatus Specula by Pope Clement XII in 1738. 123 Huntington Abbott, “Beginnings of Freemasonry in Tucson,” 109. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., 113.

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only men of all ethnicities and creeds, but also women. Other lodges such as the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, or the Elks were men-only affairs. Having grown out of franchises that accepted only men, they made no attempts to change this. In fact, the emphasis on manhood was in part why many men flocked to lodges.126 Men of influence were sometimes members of more than one fraternity. Selim Maurice Franklin, for example, who worked as a lawyer and corresponded frequently with governors and senators, was a “joiner,” but jumped from one club to the next. He was a Mason from 1894–1895, then joined the Elks in 1898 and stayed on until 1912. His membership in the local Old Pueblo Club, which he had joined in 1911, took precedence thereafter.127 One of the more inclusive organizations, at least in the beginning, was the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society. Today’s Arizona Historical Society grew out of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, established by an act of the territorial legislature in 1884.128 Founded by self-described pioneers, its main purpose from the beginning on was the preservation of what was considered important historical artifacts, namely “all facts relating to the history of this Territory” and ensuring that current events would also be archived.129 During most of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century existence, “all facts” related mostly to the Anglo (and, to a lesser degree, Hispano) elite of the territory, although membership was varied. As Tucson was both the center of territorial commerce, and the place of its foundation, the society’s collections emphasize material from that city over any other. Phoenix, for

126 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 87. 127 “Membership: Tucson Lodge No. 4, F. & A. M. 1894–1895;” “Membership: Tucson Lodge No. 385, Order of Elks. 1898–1912;” “Membership: Old Pueblo Club. 1911– 1924.” Box 7, Folder 14. “Political correspondence: Ashurst, Henry F. 1916–1918;” “Political correspondence: Smith, Mark. 1888–1919;” “Political correspondence: Zulick, C. M. 1893–1894.” Box 8, Folder 1–2. All in: Selim Maurice Franklin Papers, 1873–1931, Series I: Personal and Family Papers, 1881–1927, AZ 336, U of A. 128 James Eoff Officer Papers, MS 1155, Box 48 of 72, Writings on Tucson, AHS. There is considerable confusion concerning the AHS’s beginnings. On its website, it states that it was founded by an Act of the Territorial Legislature on November 7, 1864, but all other references point to a citizen-driven founding of such a society in 1884. I have accepted the 1884 date featured in other academic publications, including Sonnichsen, Tucson and Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn. 129 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 106.

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example, is underrepresented in its holdings, despite that city’s rising importance from the 1880s and especially 1890s on.130 Apart from its official mission, the historical society also provided a context in which “pioneers” could interact, both on a personal and a commercial level. Its early existence much resembled that of other beneficial and fraternal societies; something that is still evident in its logo, used continuously to this day: a stylized capital “A” mirrored horizontally, that could just as well be found in the crests of Greek-letter fraternities and sororities, or the shields of beneficial and fraternal societies, from the Odd Fellows to the Lions Club.131 Membership in the actual society (as opposed to benefiting from its official functions and historical archives) was limited strictly to the “pioneers” in its name. In that it was similar to membership in any of the other exclusive associations, fraternities, or sodalities. The “pioneers,” however, were not necessarily the earliest arrivals still alive in Tucson. According to the society’s foremost historian and longtime archivist, James E. Officer, [w]hen the Arizona Historical Society was founded in 1884, there were still a few old timers within the hispanic population of life in Arizona during the Mexican period; but nobody asked them. The founders of the society, including those of Mexican descent, were mostly newcomers to the community and history, for them, began in 1856.132

Officer’s manuscript itself is telling here; the original version refers to “life in Tucson during the Mexican period.” The city name was then stricken out and replaced with “Arizona.” When it came to the ruling elites, the two were then still largely interchangeable. His observation attests to an overall shift in the composition of Tucson’s ruling class. This shift was not, however, a sharp replacement of one group of influencers by another to the exclusion of the former. On the contrary; for several decades Hispano and Anglo elites did not only cooperate out of neces-

130 Arizona’s most famous representative during the middle of the twentieth century, Barry Goldwater, attempted to rectify this, from his central Arizonan viewpoint, untenable situation, by helping to establish the now defunct Arizona Historical Foundation in Tempe in 1959. “Arizona Historical Foundation Website.” 131 The logo is an alchemical symbol for copper, then Arizona’s most important resource. On fraternal symbols, see e.g.: Dennis, Discovering Friendly and Fraternal Societies, 95; Keister, Stories in Stone, 184, 215. 132 James Eoff Officer Papers, MS 1155, Box 48, Writings on Tucson, AHS. See also: Sonnichsen, Tucson, 106.

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sity, but truly interacted as individuals valuing each other’s input and the possibilities of contact with the other culture.133 Officer’s main point comes down to a change-up in elites that created the AHS. This is not, however, the same shift that took power away from the Hispanic population and deposited it almost exclusively with Anglo newcomers after a massive increase in their number following the railroad’s arrival. It is the first of two power realignments in Arizona that each fused with cultural changes during the halfcentury from 1854 through the early 1900s. In it, the early settlers – mostly Hispanic – were replaced with a group of newcomers, both Hispano and Anglo, that took advantage of the new attachment to the United States. While some of the “old timers” Officer refers to made the transition, many did not. Tucson itself transitioned from a close-knit village-like Mexican community (its mayor operated under the Spanish alcalde system of government until at least 1858, four years after the Gadsden Treaty, and two years after the departure of the Mexican government’s last troops)134 into a more open, business-minded place, resembling more and more Sonoran, and even Texan, port cities, long connected to Europe and copying its fads and styles.135 The second realignment was even more noticeable. It not only meant the replacement of people, but the disappearance of a mindset. Anglo contact with the Hispano population had come to operate in one of two modes. The first was accommodation and cooperation, favored by such Anglo settlers as Charles Debrille Poston, intent on keeping relationships personal, and personally profitable. The second, exemplified by mining entrepreneur Sylvester Mowry, among others, was more in keeping with the tenets of Manifest Destiny; a distaste for all that was Mexican, and the attempt to replace their “lazy” work ethic with the Protestant/Puritan one that, avant la parole Weber, was considered American, white, and superior.136 This was the accumulation of attitudes that would eventually prevail in the official makeup of white Arizona. From the onset of Anglo settlement in Arizona, these two warring mindsets existed. Initially, it seemed that cooperative assimilation and “Mexicanization” would win out. The Southwestern age of extraction, high nationalism, and the global age of imperialism conspired against this. The founding of the Arizona Historical Society in 1884 fell into the middle period when a joint Hispano-Anglo elite had squarely displaced the solely Hispano one, but before the Anglo newcomers had taken over. This is important, as it places

133 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 230. 134 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 41. 135 Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 4–6, 18–19; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 16, 18. 136 Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 96.

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the society’s founding before a new, national-minded group could fully take over. Arizona’s view of its own history hence initially was importantly framed and defined by an Anglo-Hispanic group, in power at the founding of the Society, at a time when historical societies, fraternities, and sodalities were springing up all across the United States.137 Their imprint dominates early files, which do not distinguish between “pioneers” in terms of importance, but instead include anyone who had arrived before the 1856 cutoff date.138 After the work of collecting memories from witnesses and other “old timers” had ceased to be the primary focus of the society, and a new generation of historically interested, but seldom historically trained, locals had taken over, things changed. As the AHS moved towards completing local histories on certain aspects of Arizona’s “Wild West” history, a nationalizing but at the same time regional identity-supporting agenda entered the fray. Sources were overwhelmingly selected from the papers of Anglos. This holds for the time after 1880, as well as for the period before the railroad incision. Local histories are written from the “us” perspective of Anglos, othering Hispanos and other minorities. These histories do this not always by outright exclusion, but by perspective. In the various oral histories that the Arizona Historical Society has collected, as well as the local histories based upon them, for example, the events surrounding the Camp Grant Massacre are framed from the perspective of Anglo participants. In these tellings, it is the Anglos who avail themselves of the help of Hispanos and O’odham. In reality, as Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Karl Jacoby have shown, what transpired was based in a much more complex set of motives among the several groups.139 The Arizona history created by its amateur curators – in the sense that Hayden White has famously argued – was not only informed by the perspective of the vic-

137 Gamm and Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations,” esp. 514–515. Many historical societies connected with ethnic groups, in contrast to the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, only began developing once two generations had fully passed. State historical societies tended not to be established by decree, but rather were founded by interested citizens, who used the model of other existing societies as a template. John J. Appel, Immigrant Historical Societies, 1; Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 151– 170, esp. 152, 155. 138 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 106–107. 139 For a thorough discussion of the events leading up to, and constituting the Camp Grant Massacre, see: Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn. For another, more anthropological perspective, as well as an analysis of the massacre’s remembrance among the various groups involved, see the work of Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh: Colwell-Chanthaphonh, “The Camp Grant Massacre in the Historical Imagination;” Colwell-Chanthaphonh, “Western Apache Oral Histories;” Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant.

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tors over the victims, but it importantly distinguished between the groups of those who committed the massacre.140 Anglos were the driving force, Hispanos were complicit and could be won over to attack the Apaches because of a separate history of warfare between the two groups, and the O’odham, as the Nnee’s “natural enemies,” were the most easily swayed. This history constructs an implicit hierarchy of most active to least active, with Anglos, the writers assumed, naturally leading the way.141 At the same time, Anglos are depicted as the least cruel among the attackers. Some of this can be explained from the way the massacre transpired: the O’odham mostly did the dirty work of murdering and ravaging because Anglos kept as much as possible to safety, perched atop a bluff with guns.142 Mostly, however, such a depiction of the events humanizes the Anglo attackers while dehumanizing not only their victims but also their allies to a degree not justified by the historical evidence. Religion Religion was an important part of Southwestern life. By largely ignoring the role of the Protestant clergy in the settlement of the American West, Ferencz Morton Szasz has written, Western historiography has “neglected a pivotal figure of the transMississippi West.” Preachers, Szasz writes, “performed a variety of far-reaching social roles. Not only did they deliver general public sermons, they also served as librarians, counselors, social workers, educators, book sellers, peacekeepers, reformers, and general purveyors of culture.”143 Although Szasz limits his study to Protestant clergy, the Catholic priests in the Southwest also performed many of the same functions. Yet, where Protestant pastors relied on their wives to teach Sunday School, supervise church organizations, or lead the church choir, the celibate Catholic priests were at a disadvantage. As one Idaho Presbyterian observed, “A man without a wife’s help fails to get with his people at many points.”144 Catholic women religious naturally also had roles in Western society. They performed important functions for the communities in which they settled. As Anne M.

140 White, “The Question of Narrative,” esp. 2–4; White, “Interpretation in History.” As well as, in longform: White, Metahistory. White has been criticized for “reduc[ing] history to a species of poetry or linguistics,” (Leff, “Review of ‘Metahistory’,” 600) but his general idea, emphasizing the importance of narrative in the construction of historical interpretations, remains sound. 141 Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant, 5. 142 Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 140. 143 Szasz, The Protestant Clergy, 8. 144 Ibid., 61.

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Butler writes, “Catholic nuns and sisters influenced community building in the West, and the West energized change in the practice of religious life for Catholic women in America.”145 The organization of the Catholic Church with its requirement of the celibate and its inherent patriarchal organization, however, meant that Catholic women religious’ roles were subject to a different dynamic than those of the wives of Protestant preachers. In Butler’s telling, there was cooperation but also rivalry between nuns and sisters on the one side, and church officials on the other. The limited number of clergy in any denomination resulted in many overworked priests and reverends, while at the same time parishioners might have felt very little of their presence. The situation was somewhat dire for all denominations. While mainline Protestants could switch allegiances back and forth between Methodists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians depending on which congregation was actually present in their home town, Catholics seldom converted just in order to be able to sit in church somewhere. The remoteness of Western life led to a long life for ecumenic ideas. Catholic children could be found in “union” Sunday Schools, a Denver Episcopal priest and his Catholic counterpart teamed up for several decades in their mission to “civilize” the town, and in Boise, Idaho the newspaper observed that the Catholic priest was well qualified to attend to Protestant needs until the new reverend had arrived. Mormons were usually, but not always, cut out from such, at times uneasy, cooperation. One New Mexican church choir, for example, was attended by “two Episcopalians, one Catholic, one Mormon, one Presbyterian, and one Congregationalist.”146 Hispanic religious life, inspired by Mesoamerican practices – a mixture of Catholic faith and Native American beliefs and traditions – had also found another “workaround” to a lack of priests.147 It did not have church services at its center. In a time and age where a small hamlet might be lucky to have a visit from the parish priest once a year, such an interpretation of their faith would have left them constantly frustrated. Hispanic Catholicism instead stressed community, through extended family ties in villages, as well as through religious brotherhoods. The Cofradía del Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, commonly called Los Hermanos Penitentes, or simply penitentes, was especially strong among Hispanos in Arizona and New Mexico.148 Its emphasis on processions and feast days fit well

145 Butler, Across God’s Frontiers, 10. 146 In Utah, with Mormons the bulk of residents, it seemed that all other denominations could agree on one thing: while “the ecumenical position reached epic proportions. It was everyone against the Mormons.” Szasz, The Protestant Clergy, 92–93. 147 Foster, A Brief History of Mexico, 70–71. 148 McKevitt, Brokers of Culture, 196–197.

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with Mexican practices. Though the penitentes, beginning with their common appellation, pointing directly to rituals of penance, are most well-known and were mostly criticized for such practices – “flagellation, carrying heavy crosses, binding the body to a cross, and tying the limbs to hinder the circulation of the blood” – they also fulfilled the important role of organizers of religious celebrations. Before they were ordered to disband by Santa Fe’s Bishop Salpointe (after an only partially successful attempt three decades earlier by his predecessor Jean-Baptiste Lamy), processions featuring penitentes, such as the Good Friday procession important to Hispanic Catholicism, were popular in New Mexico.149 Thereafter the link between the hermanos and the larger community surrounding them was dissolved, as they were forced to continue their now frowned-upon practices in secret.150 This mattered greatly to small communities’ everyday religious observance, as the order had, “in the absence of enough parish or mission priests, often administered services of blessing and prayer, though no sacraments.”151 Salpointe’s ban of the most important brotherhood in the American Southwest constituted a clear blow against Hispanos. It was directed against religious practices not popular among Anglos, and it was done in the spirit of “Americanization.” It was also a sign of the changing times. The disappearance and forcing out of some of the traditional religious practices in a now clearly Anglo-dominated Southwest had begun. The ban weakened patterns of community-based religious observance. It did so mostly in smaller settlements where annual processions were commonly the only large celebrations of religious belief. In larger towns, the influx of Anglos together with the arrival of officials from the American Catholic church had reduced the importance of Mexican-style Catholic feasts long before Salpointe had succeeded in driving the brotherhood underground. In addition to rising numbers of Anglos, the decisive factors in ending the processions were both the increased control and reduced need for religious observances outside of church service that a regular house of worship, complete with a priest, brought. Yuma’s Church of the

149 Espinosa, “Los Hermanos Penitentes,” 636; Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe, 204, 240. 150 The Catholic Encyclopedia states that overt penitente practices had been popular before 1896. Espinosa, “Los Hermanos Penitentes,” 635–636. Espinosa’s encyclopedia entry calls their practices “barbarous.” This view of their practices has persisted even in Paul Horgan’s biography of Lamy first published in 1975, the latest full treatment of the archbishop’s life. Horgan calls attention to the “penitential savageries” while stressing the brotherhood’s importance for Hispano religious life. Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe, 150. 151 Ibid.

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Immaculate Conception began its baptismal register in 1866.152 Tucson’s Catholic cathedral San Agustín, begun in 1863, had a roof and a schoolhouse by 1868. That year, the town was also made a vicariate apostolic, with Jean-Baptise Salpointe, then already in the Southwest, as vicar apostolic.153 Salpointe had moved back to Tucson upon his retirement from the Santa Fe Archdiocese in 1894. In 1897, one year before his death, and no doubt with his approval, the town became a diocese. This completed the outward normalization and Americanization of the Catholic religion there.154 Several processions and fiestas had existed in Tucson throughout the Mexican and early American eras. Tucson’s processions honoring its patron saint, San Agustín in August, and on May 15, honoring San Isidro, patron saint of farmers, had been a major high point in the town’s social life for decades. Both were likely last celebrated around the turn of the century. In smaller communities still remote from church authority, fiestas continued for several decades longer. By the 1930s these too had gone.155 Education Hispanos in the nineteenth-century Mesilla attached a high value to education. They pioneered both public and private schools. Catholic schools were reserved for members of the elite, public schools open to everyone else.156 Many elite Tucsonans refused to send children to public schools even once these had proliferated, and even those who did shied away from sending girls, opting to only let boys attend.157

152 Vol. 12. Catholic Church, Diocese of Tucson Records, 1721–1957, Series II: Vicariate Apostolic of New Mexico, the Vicariate Apostolic of Arizona and the Diocese of Tucson, 1863–1957, MS 296, U of A. 153 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 68. 154 Abstract and Vol. 10. Catholic Church, Diocese of Tucson Records, 1721–1957, Series II: Vicariate Apostolic of New Mexico, the Vicariate Apostolic of Arizona and the Diocese of Tucson, 1863–1957, MS 296, U of A. 155 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 159–163. 156 Ibid., 2. 157 Bernard de Aguirre, “Spanish Trader’s Bride,” 21. Hoping that the state would fund the parochial schools as public schools, many Catholics, not only Hispanos, first opposed public schools, but supported them once it had become clear that state financing for the parochial schools was not forthcoming. Edmund F. Dunne, Irish Catholic Chief Justice of Arizona’s Supreme Court, argued for state financing of the Catholic schools before the Arizona territorial legislature in February 1875. Dunne, Our Public Schools. I am indebted to Amy Elizabeth Grey for background information concerning education in

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Support for a public school system was expedient for those in the elite seeking political patronage as well as business opportunities from Americanizing politicians. This alone does not explain their dedication to establishing a public school system in opposition to other influential members of their social circle. Business-minded Tucsonsenses also cannot be said to have wanted to be fully Americanized in the manner of the oft-quoted mythical melting pot. Instead, they supported public schools as an instrument of continued relevance in an Americanizing society. Learning English and Anglo culture was helpful in interacting with Anglos, not a white flag of surrender towards their dominance. Thus, while arguing vigorously for a public education system, Hispanos also busied themselves establishing or bolstering an existing private Catholic education system. They considered themselves the heirs to a Catholic, European intellectual tradition, one that had been implanted in Latin America long before the Anglos ever reached the New World. The elite considered themselves, not their English-speaking Protestant neighbors, as the true representatives of culture and civilization on the southern Arizona frontier.158

While both Hispano and Anglo elites had high expectations for education, sometimes the establishment of an institution of learning was easier than it was to figure out what it would be there for in practice. Nothing shows this better than the records of the early University of Arizona. The U of A was established by an act of the infamous “Thieving Thirteenth” Arizona Territorial Legislature in 1885. It was not what Tucsonans had wanted. They had wanted the state capital, and, failing that, the state prison as a boost for the town’s economy. They were sorely disappointed in what they got. Local businesses had a hard time coming around to understanding the benefits of an institution of higher education as well. As one bar owner, who may have been in for a bit of a surprise down the road, opined, “What do we want with a university? What good will it do us? Who in hell ever heard of a University Professor buying a drink?”159 The university began operations in 1890, with the first semester starting the following year. For the first two dozen years of its existence, it de facto also functioned as the only high school in Arizona Territory, offering preparatory classes for secondary school students. Because the university offered such preparatory classes, some of its students were relatively young and after passing their preparatory years had no inclination to continue to study. As is the case with matriculation

territorial Southern Arizona and for pointing out Bernard de Aguirre and Dunne’s writings. 158 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 46–47. 159 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 136.

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No. 151, Albert Philip Drachman, who entered the university at age sixteen years four months for two prep years, then withdrew halfway through his freshman year. But there were successes. No. 42, George Hilzinger, was a good student, graduating with a BS in 1897. A large ledger book containing records for all students lists many family names of the Tucson elite.160 Almost from the beginning, women attended classes as well. Compared to their male co-eds, however, women tended to drop out more quickly. Some were either just biding their time at the university or else succumbed to social pressures.161 Most listed in the ledger are Anglos, but some Hispanic Americans were a part of the first class as well. These included Perfecto Elías, son of a prominent Hispano family. Anglos and Hispanos alike often did not finish a degree, dropping out after a year or two. For women who dropped out early there is often a note of name change. They likely had married men they had met at the university. This is corroborated by the fact that for many, the married name matches that of a male coed. As in the case of Mary Osborn, matriculation No. 2, on whose entry a “Mrs. J. L. Hoxie” is listed in parentheses in different ink. She completed all her coursework during the first two years, only some of that for her third year, and had left by her senior year. Lulu Hilzinger, sister of No. 42, George, likewise left schoolwork after her third year and a name change.162 There were, however, exceptions. No. 54, for example, Mrs. Hattie F. Solomon, seems not to have let marriage deter her from finishing her degree, graduating with a BS in 1898. This is especially astounding once one considers the fact that for the first decade, the dropouts so vastly outnumbered the finishers that there were hardly any graduations at all. Students, for one reason or another, dropped out at any time, even as late as their last year. And it was not only women who never finished their course of study. Many men also called it quits. No. 69, Leonel Suarez Carillo took a few freshmen classes, then seems to have just disappeared. “Connections severed” as the ledger remarks. Whether this is due to lacking interest (Carillo’s records show no entry of either passed or failed on any

160 University of Arizona Registration Book, AZ 33, U of A. 161 It must be said that these numbers do not stick out among American colleges of the time. For both men and women, attending a few classes in college was for all intents and purposes almost akin to a college degree, with the added bonus that one was not tainted for the “real world” by sojourning in the ivory tower for too long. The role of the university as an institution for “preprofessional education” was, in the nineteenth century, “largely a fiction.” Geiger, The American College, 152, 272. 162 Likely to “Mrs. Jácome,” the name of a prominent Hispano trading family, though the entry is inconclusive due to hard to decipher handwriting. Ibid. On the Jácomes, see Cadava, Standing on Common Ground.

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of his classes), or because other matters were more pressing is uncertain. His father, Louis Carillo, at first sight seems not to have been a rich man; after all, his occupation is marked as “Garden,” though given the last name a connection to the very successful Tucson elite mingling ground “Carillo’s Garden” appears likely. Other cases are clearer. No. 95, Eugenie Wilkinson, who certainly did not come from a rich background (her father’s occupation is listed as “yard master”) dropped out of preparatory classes in 1897 because of an illness of her mother. All in all, of the first fifty entries, including those in preparatory classes, only five finished their coursework, putting the graduation rate at a dismal ten percent. Since the first classes of the University of Arizona read like a who’s who of Tucson’s elite children, most of whom unceremoniously dropped out, it is fair to assume that the elite, Spanish and Anglo, put value in at least the idea of an education. Follow-up was less enthusiastic. Likely, many of the students were pushed to attend because of parents’ wishes for their future, to give them something to do, or maybe just because it was a fashionable thing to do in certain circles at the turn of the century. In this, Tucson’s movers and shakers resembled Victorian elites in the East and in Great Britain.163 As some of the elite children were “admitted with faculty note,” including Atanasia Hughes, daughter of the governor, and second-year dropout, academic qualification mattered little. The university, then, was one more venue of communication of and by elites. The irregularity of the university’s records seems to point to either a fluctuating student population that was not easy to keep track of, a less than professional record keeping ethos, or both. While the latter reason could certainly be a factor, given the hand-to-mouth beginnings of the U of A, the former seems far more likely given the further academic careers – or lack thereof – of many of the students. That the Anglo-Hispanic elites were losing ground was clearly obvious by January 1916, when the senior class of the university of Arizona featured forty students, only one of whom, Joe de Arozena, had a Hispanic last name. Four more students were likely offspring of Anglo-Hispanic families: Charles Pablo Beach, and three female students, strikingly sharing one first name, Inez Marion Benzie, Inez Katherine Rolph, and Inez Esther Thrift. Twelve students of the class were women, all of whom went for Bachelor of Arts degrees, while men overwhelmingly studied engineering, agriculture, or mining.164

163 Cf. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain, 54–58; Trainor, Black Country Elites. 164 University of Arizona Office of the Registrar, 1916–1923, AZ 318, U of A. It is difficult to ascertain membership of any of these students in a Hispanic or Anglo-Hispanic community. Inez may simply have been a popular name in Tucson during the years of their birth. The name may also have been added by the registrar as a – possibly racist –

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The university, part of the slew of land-grant colleges mushrooming in the United States under the 1862 Land Grant Act, obviously provided something that the territory needed: agricultural education and research. Tuition at the turn of the century was free and “general living expenses” per year amounted to about $200. This meant that it was a relatively affordable option among US colleges of the time, but, like university education generally, was out of the reach of non-elites. The university also had compulsory weekly military drills for all male students by 1898. In that respect, the American nation had been able to expand its sovereignty over a major civic marker of belonging into the Mesilla as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth.165 The following chapter will take a closer look at both of the two major cultural transitions, as well as some other economic ones, that occurred in the Mesilla from the time of the Gadsden Purchase until the beginning of World War I. This will further elucidate how an Arizonan identity was formed in opposition to a New Mexican one, in which contexts it became dominant, and which groups and persons defined it. Further, its interrelations with other identities – local, regional, national, transnational – will be examined.

comment to emphasize the Hispanicness of students whose names did not suggest that they were Hispano. 165 Thomas, Where to Educate, 6. In a calculation into 2015 dollars by historic standard of living, $200 amounted to $5,900. The relative economic power of the amount – which, more than the standard of living calculation, would mark elite or non-elite status in society – was, however, $45,300.

4. Transitions

The American Southwest slowly transitioned from Spanish-Mexican domain, culturally and politically, to a fixed, and in some aspects even central part of the predominantly Anglo United States. It did so not in one fell swoop, but in stages during the long half-century from the end of the Mexican War in 1848 to the beginnings of World War I. These transitional stages did not occur at the same time everywhere in the region, nor did they happen because of the same succession of events in any one place. The change can roughly be divided into two consecutive transitions, or realignments. One from a Mesilla dominated by the interactions between Hispanos and American Indians to one that saw Anglos and Hispanos face off against Indians together; and a second one that saw Anglos assert their dominance in the region over Hispanos, with Native Americans largely having disappeared from the political picture. Many historical contingencies contributed to the way the process as a whole played out. Among them were the late discovery of valuable ores in what had been Northern Mexico only years before, the political and industrial will and technological precepts to build telegraph lines and railroads, and the reverberations of the Civil War. Especially the latter contributed to rapid change in the 1870s and 1880s in a major way. Its end left the Union with a vastly larger military, and both Union and Confederate veterans with changed personal circumstances that in many cases led to their migration westward. The strengthened armed forces, fresh out of a war, were now redirected towards fighting the Indians of the West, and Southern Arizona and New Mexico loomed large in that fight. The end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest by the middle of the 1880s created a large swath of land on both sides of the international border where resources could now be profitably exploited by mining conglomerates, most of them American, and of those almost all Eastern.1

1

Although some Western cities, most notably San Francisco, were also headquarters to influential industrial mining corporations. Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 167–168.

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The end of outright armed Native American resistance also marked the end of a pattern of acculturation, cohabitation, conflict, and trade that had defined the Southwest for more than three centuries. In order to understand what made the two transitions of power possible, it is necessary to first take a closer look at the historical situation before the arrival of the Anglos, and then to present the dramatis perpersonae of groups that interacted in the late nineteenth century.

A T A LL O DDS : T HE H ISPANO AND A NGLO -H ISPANO M ESILLA Endemic warfare dominated the region that encompasses the US Southwest from the Chichimaco wars of the Spanish colonial period on. Applied to the Hispanic and Anglo-Hispanic Southwest by historical sociologist Thomas D. Hall, the term endemic warfare describes a constant regional state of conflict that, once begun, will continue without further outside input. Endemic war, unlike intermittent wars, is not a conflict declared and fought for singular purposes, but instead denotes a continuous low-level state in which violence may occur at all times, but does not necessarily do so.2 The constellations that first established patterns of warfare and then frequently led to the resurgence of war between the various groups that peopled the region are convoluted and many-sided.3 The influx of new powers created these patterns. They were only tempered in periods of sufficient trade and contact. Colonial governments at times cared little about the Southwest because of political factors at play at home. Trade subsequently diminished. This left indigenous groups which had become used to subsisting in partially European ways no alternative but to compete with Europeans for the scant resources of the Mesilla’s harsh climate. Conflict was then inevitable. War between the Apaches and the colonials, be they Spanish, Mexican, or American, however, was only one puzzle piece in a picture of violent conflict that had many reasons and took many shapes. It is hard to conceive of a constellation between several interest groups less amenable to peaceful coexistence than that which existed in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Southern Arizona and New Mexico. Violent standoffs be-

2

Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 66–71, 238. Steven LeBlanc, at the forefront of a number of archaeologists who have recently reassessed the role of conflict in the preHispanic Southwest, even argues that endemic warfare had intermittently existed in the region since prehistoric times. LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare, 166, 168, 173, 176–186; Nichols and Crown, Social Violence, 95, 221; Rice and LeBlanc, Deadly Landscapes, 4, 63.

3

Described in detail by Hall. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 50–74.

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tween Anglo settlers or the US military and Native Americans remain a prominent ingredient of popular culture’s perception of the time and region. They continue to be subsumed simplistically under catchy monikers like “Wild West” or “Old West,” both equally implying a place in time and space where civilization had not yet arrived and law was all but nonexistent. This stands in stark contrast to the actual situation of a complicated middle ground where several cultures met, and for long stretches of time, none dominated.4 To be sure, Anglo and Hispano settlers were notoriously unhappy with the Indians and quick to the draw to resolve what they perceived to be the natives’ intolerable hold on the lands around them. However, the overall situation pitted various groups against each other in complicated, and sometimes downright capricious, constellations that continued to evolve from the middle of the century to its conclusion. Early Anglo settlers arrived in a quasi-Mexican society, where they were Mexicanized by, and to a lesser degree Americanized their counterparts.5 Both groups were adamant in violently defending their settlements against the Apache, and sometimes the Yaqui or other natives. Yet other Native American groups, such as the O’odham, at one time or another both fought the Europeans, and cooperated with them. Individual Nnee, who came to be known as apaches mansos, “tame Apaches,” also named apaches de paz or “peace Apaches,” settled with the newcomers, and sometimes helped them, as scouts or warriors. At other times they changed sides again, and stood beside other Apaches in fights against Anglos and Mexicans, replicating patterns found throughout the history of Native American interactions with Europeans.6 From the get-go, frictions also arose between Mexicans and those Anglos intent on colonizing, not cooperating and making an amiable effort to adapt to the territory’s existing society. Later, established Anglos and Anglos who had arrived on the railroad after 1880 were frequently in disagreement as well. Places in Northern, Central, and Southern Arizona all developed local identities and differing standards of inclusion and exclusion.7

4

On the concept of the middle ground, see White, The Middle Ground, esp. 50–93.

5

Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 147.

6

Kessel and Wooster, Encyclopedia of Native American Wars, 5–14, 17–19, 57, passim; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 31–35. On apaches mansos specifically, see Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 55–61. Borderlands scholars also frequently use the term establecimientos de paz to refer to the settlements of these Indians. This is, however, ahistoric, and of recent coinage. Babcock, “Turning Apaches Into Spaniards”, 6.

7

Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 87–89, 167–176, 265, 274; Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 296.

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Most Anglos from the 1880s on were in agreement that Arizona needed to become a state. They also were not enamored with the thought of state-level control coming from the decidedly more Hispano-infused regional capital of Santa Fe.8 Some must have realized that outside investment and the development of mining regions in the territory hindered this goal just as much as they helped it. Money was needed for infrastructure, and money came from the coasts. But those who provided it were not interested in Arizonan self-determination. On the contrary, investors preferred the territory to develop economically but not politically, lest a strong faction might emerge from it to protest their extractive business practices. Mining contributed to Arizona’s economy in a major way.9 At the same time, it used up land, polluted the environment in the vicinity of mining camps and smelters, and caused seasonal floods to be increasingly devastating.10 Some, but not all of these effects were understood at the time. The influence of polluted soil on flora, for example, had been studied as early as 1818. This research was largely unknown in the mining community or simply ignored until much later.11 What was certain, however, was a linkage between corporate profit and individual wealth in the territory. Those who managed to get themselves appointed to positions in business and administration that touched upon the enterprises’ ventures did well financially. Railroads were especially adept at securing jobs and positions for their “friends.” On a sliding scale of corruption, a road’s “friends” were those who did not need to be bribed, as they reciprocated favors in anticipation of continued sponsorship. This was common. Railroad officials did not consider such quid pro quo bribery, but they nonetheless knew that the public would not make such a distinction, and attempted to keep the practice out of view.12 Cries of foul play and nepotism were often heard but seldom heeded. This was perhaps in part due to the fact that those who uttered them were themselves not indisposed to work for the corporations if tapped to do so. Questionable business practices were a reality at all levels of private enterprise and government. Attorney and banker George Whitwell Parsons wrote in his diary about Tombstone in 1880: “I was never in a place or business be-

8

Lamar, The Far Southwest, 502.

9

It employed 15 percent of its workforce in 1900, compared to only 1 percent nationwide. Milner, O’Connor, and Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West, 434. According to the Arizona Department of Mineral Resources, the state produced 210,228 tons of ore at an overall value of $2,552,405 in 1913. Arizona Dept. of Mineral Resources, The Dependence of Arizona on the Mining Industry, 31.

10 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 238–239. 11 Smith, Mining America, 57. 12 White, Railroaded, 65, 92, 116–117.

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fore where there was so much chenanniging carried on.”13 As they did everywhere in the United States, money, expansionism, and political opportunism on all sides mingled in a plethora of ways from 1853 through 1912.14 Although it is impossible to fully disentangle all of them here, it pays to regard the run of the main fault lines. Once they are put in context, individual events can be more easily shown as either typical or singular occurrences. Arrivals The firstcomers to the region were Southwestern Native Americans, although some of them had themselves been relatively recent arrivals just before the Spanish claimed the Pimería Alta. The Nnee occupied what Anglos and Hispanos called, with equal parts reverence, trepidation, and disdain, the “Apachería” – a region encompassing large swaths of Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, and completely surrounding Tucson. The Nnee made their presence permanent there likely after they had driven away some of the area’s former inhabitants, mostly Pecos Pueblo bands, during prolonged raiding in the 1400s.15 Previously, the Nnee had only cursory contact with either one of the colonizing powers. From the late sixteenth century, they found they were now in competition, as well as forced into accommodation with, the Spanish.16 The mid-nineteenth century saw the first Anglo Americans add their streak of color and complication to the area’s cultural makeup. Some groups, such as the Yaqui (or Yoeme) and Pima, and to a lesser degree the O’odham, were able to use

13 Parsons, Private Journal, entry for March 1880. It is likely Parsons wrote “place of business,” but the WPA edition of his diary transcribed the version quoted above, which has been variously reprinted. It is also quoted in: Lamar, The Far Southwest, 399. There is intriguing evidence that even Governor A. P. K. Safford, himself a “silent partner in a dozen enterprises” was a plant by California railroad magnates. Ibid., 399, 401. 14 For the watershed period of 1877–1920, see “The Mysterious Power of Money” in Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 51–91. 15 Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 43. David R. Wilcox, whose arguments Hall follows, states that while “[t]he entry of Athapaskan speakers into the American Southwest is one of the few cases of undisputed migration in American archeology,” unsurprisingly “[o]pinions differed [.] as to when the nomads arrived.” Wilcox and Masse, The Protohistoric Period, 213–214. 16 On Native–Hispano and Native–Anglo relations in the Southwest and Mexico in general, see Spicer, Cycles of Conquest; Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 76–78; Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 207. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt is perhaps the bestknown conflict during the Spanish era.

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the interlopers for their purposes as much as they were themselves used by the newcomers. South of the US border, the Yaqui were part of an alliance that, from 1867 on, through clever strategy, was able to hold off the Mexican push from the South into Sinaloa and Sonora. Their insurrection came to an end only in 1887, when the Mexican revolutionary and Yaqui leader Cajemé was executed under pretenses that he had tried to escape from Mexican captivity. The Indian Wars with the Nnee on the American side of the border were only over by 1886.17 The Pima and O’odham had felt pressure from Nnee raids since mid-century. After the Civil War, several O’odham bands entered into an alliance with the Americans. This added protection from Nnee encroachment. In a tragic twist, however, it left the O’odham without much reservation territory at the end of the Indian Wars. As they had fought on the side of the Americans, the United States had seen no need to acknowledge O’odham land claims in a peace treaty.18 The Nnee availed themselves freely of O’odham and European contributions to the regional potluck of property and mores. Notably, they saw no foul in stealing horses and cattle from the Hispanos and Anglos. The cultural practices that governed their contact with outside groups were stringently modal. A subgroup’s actions depended on whether they currently considered themselves in a state of war or not.19 Occasional raids and plunders, to this way of thinking, were part of peace. The only goal of such expeditions, after all, was material gain for the survival of the group, not avenging wrongs or seeking out the death of enemies.20 Needless to say, Mexicans and Americans made no such distinctions. They often reacted to even the slightest infractions with all the force they could muster. Anglo-Mexican retaliation against the Nnee tended to be hotheaded and violent. When Apache deaths resulted, actual war, by both sides’ definition, was often the result.21 It is easy to put blame squarely on the Europeans and their inability or unwillingness to understand the Nnee. It must be remembered, however, that these patterns held for three decades; longer in certain cases. This indicates that the Nnee in some cases at least must have chosen to keep on poaching the newly arrived settlers’ livestock despite having repeatedly witnessed the reactions. To them, the Mexican and Anglo encroachers represented another regional group of foreigners,

17 Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 68–71. 18 Ibid., 136. 19 The organization of Native American societies differed widely, even among members of a culture area. See, for example: Béteille, “The Idea of Indigenous People.” 20 Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 149–151. 21 Jacoby brilliantly synthesizes the various groups’ interests and motives in the conflicts into a narrative in which the vastness of the cultural gulf between the Nnee and their European adversaries becomes abundantly clear. Ibid., passim.

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much like the Pima or the Yaqui. And like in relations with those Native American groups, they considered themselves either at war or peace with the Europeans at any given time. War was declared and fought, and it ended in a manner clearly delineated by ritual.22 The Anglo-Mexican population on the other hand, increasingly backed by an influx of miners from Mexico and workers, functionaries, and entrepreneurs from all over the United States, knew they were numerically superior, and felt that culturally they were too. They viewed the Indians as little more than a nuisance, to be dealt with using the vast resources of their rising number. Both views misrepresented the situation, but the Apaches’ idea of what was transpiring led them to continue tactics that would turn out to be ultimately unsustainable, while the Americans’ perception was in line with the march of the economic development of the region, which stopped for no one. Neither side found it in themselves to understand the other’s cultural codes. The Apache were as much perpetrators of random violence as they were victims. They were as much initiators of peace agreements as they were attackers. It all depended on the context, and on the fact that their social structure put the power to make or break peace with small clans or even individuals, not the large tribes that Europeans conveniently thought they were dealing with. Peace agreements in both the Spanish colonial and the Ameri-colonial period were highly localized and personalized, relying on trust.23 Ignoring the Nnee’s adeptness at both combat and diplomacy blocks the view of their very real and very varied acts of both willful and planned resistance for the benefit of perpetuating legends of brash but less goaldirected bravery.24 The first Anglo settlers felt threatened by the Nnee. Anglos were staking out more or less precarious existences on the United States’ western frontier, a concept very much alive in their minds. They constantly clamored for government intervention on their behalf, especially when it came to the “Indian Question.” This they had in common with laborers from Mexico’s south, who, far from being discouraged by the recent change in ownership of their homelands, sometimes outright thrived. Under the protection of US military forts, Mexican villagers created new village settlements in the style of their established communities in Arizona, New Mexico,

22 As it was to the O’odham. Ibid., 21–23, 149–151. For Apache/Nnee war rituals, see also Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant, 50, 54. 23 Yet, the horror stories of white settlers slaughtered were almost always exaggerated and de-contextualized,

if

they

were

not

convenient

fictions

altogether.

Colwell-

Chanthaphonh, “The Camp Grant Massacre in the Historical Imagination,” 355–356; Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 137–140. 24 Ibid., 150–152, 163–168, 159.

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and Colorado. They also benefited from trading opportunities with the Federal outposts.25 Old Spanish elites on both sides of the international border managed to stay invested both politically and monetarily in the fates of the twin territories. Their numbers included second and third-generation Europeans who had made names for themselves as traders, ranchers, and overall business mavens in Sonora during the late Spanish colonial and early Mexican national period.26 These networks of kin and class remained intact throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, even as their relative power shrank. They attempted to monopolize trade and agriculture, succeeding well enough into the 1870s. Thereafter they increasingly lost ground to the railroad. The arrival of the railroad made the transportation of goods through the Sonoran port of Guaymas, or later an American-controlled port at the mouth of the Colorado and up the river to Yuma, less profitable.27 Arriving Anglos equipped with coastal capital and a producerist divide-and-conquer mentality when it came to the potential mineral wealth of the territory further added to the older networks’ slow decline.28 In New Mexico, the large Hispano population meant that groups of strongmen or caudillos could perpetuate their existing networks and incorporate Anglos. In Arizona by contrast, Anglos could quickly rival or take over these networks by strength of numbers.29 In both territories, however, by the 1890s Anglos of old and new stock were able to effortlessly avail themselves of one important national institution that not even the wealthiest Hispanic elites – to say nothing of villagers from a predominantly agricultural background – could ever quite make work for them: the legal system. Chapter 6 will analyze the ramifications of the introduction of the Anglo legal system to the Southwest in depth. The legal system is an important component in understanding the overall narrative of the transition from a Hispano-dominated to an Anglo-controlled territory. As such, it is necessarily part of the developments described in this chapter as well. Land and Water Land ownership on the Hispanic frontier had been largely communal. With the exception of large haciendas and somewhat smaller ranchos, often granted as favors

25 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 17. 26 Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 24–27. 27 Ibid., 114–115. 28 Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 156–157; Dumett, Mining Tycoons, 151–170. 29 Alarid, “They Came From the East.”

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to political allies by Spanish peninsulares and criollo30 elites before Mexican independence, village communities applied the commons principle to grazing rights for sheep and cattle.31 They were more likely to see arable land that exceeded the subsistence need of any one farming family as an extension of resources available to the whole village, rather than as a commodity that could be claimed by individuals.32 It is an irony of this narrative that in this respect, a culture which itself had a long history of appropriating native land it thought to be wasted because of a misunderstanding of native agricultural practices, would fall prey to the same mode of thinking.33 But even land to which Hispanos had clear title overwhelmingly found its way into Anglo hands. According to Carolyn Zeleny’s 1944 study of MexicanAnglo relations in New Mexico, of a total of 35,491,020 acres (143,627.06 square kilometers) in dispute in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, all but a paltry 5.78 percent – 2,051,526 acres or 8,302.23 square kilometers – ended up in Anglo ownership.34 This was despite the fact that Congress had established a special court to finally arbitrate land claims after four decades of bitter acrimony over the matter, an indirect result of the American takeover of Mexican Cession and Mesilla land that had not been reliably surveyed.35 Apart from land, water was the most fought-over commodity. Arizona’s first set of laws, the so-called “Howell Code” adopted by the territorial legislature in 1864, borrowed heavily from the laws of both its neighbors Nevada and California, as well as from the State of New York.36 The code purposely eradicated many legal

30 Spanish-born functionaries in New Spain for whom most influential government positions were usually reserved. They numbered, in 1810, only about 0.3 percent of New Spain’s population. Criollos was the term for white offspring of peninsulares born in Mexico, only about 18 percent of Mexico’s population that year. Foster, A Brief History of Mexico, 92–93. 31 On the monopolization of land by large farms, see Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 50–51; on community ownership, Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 14, 16. 32 Ibid., 15–19. 33 Thomas Sheridan describes land fraud perpetrated by Hispanos: Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud, 10–11, 100–101. 34 Zeleny, “Relations Between the Spanish-Americans and Anglo-Americans in New Mexico,” 154. 35 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 20. 36 Named for Territorial Supreme Court Associate Justice William T. Howell, its main author, the Howell Code was largely the result of three months’ work in the spring of 1864. Howell, who had arrived in Tucson in February of 1864, hashed out the basis for Arizona’s territorial legal system in tandem with his friend Coles Bashford, a Tucson

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concepts and customs of the formerly Spanish-influenced region, and created a governmental and administrative structure modeled on that of the tripartite US constitution. In some areas, such as marriage law and water rights, however, traditional Hispanic legal constructs, already tailored to the needs of the desert region, were recognized to be more than adequate.37 Therefore, in addition to concepts of marital rights not found in English common law, the first Arizona code recognized the idea of prior appropriation and that of community property, ideas largely alien to Anglo law up until that point.38 Water law was one area where Anglo and Mexican interests coincided. Other groups usually subject to discrimination could also profit from the law at times. In one case, Chinese truck farmers ultimately benefited from the Anglo-Hispanic water rights consensus.39 The Chinese were able to claim first use convincingly. However, in the eyes of Anglo and Mexican land holders, who demanded more water for their fields, the truck farmers were using much more than their fair share.

lawyer, later delegate of the Arizona legislature, and disgraced former governor of Wisconsin (he had had to resign because of a bribery scandal). According to historian Jay J. Wagoner, they also consulted heavily with Tucson residents, believing the New Mexico statutes that Arizona had inherited “ill-adapted to our condition,” and wanting to include grass roots concerns. Wagoner, Arizona Territory, 46. Given the makeup of Tucson’s elite at the time, it is likely that these consultations included a number of Hispanics of stature, who argued for the retention of some of the established Mexican enactments; if not in the form of outright law, then in spirit. Cf. Goff, “William T. Howell.” Many legal codes in the Western territories and states were heavily influenced by those of other states. 37 Arizona water law needed to evolve as well. When access to ground water through pumping became more widespread, a different set of rules for below- and above-surface water was enacted in 1919. Water Code of the State of Arizona, Chapter 164, 1. The resultant “mediaeval anachronisms,” such as the legal separation of surface rivers from subsurface aquifers would continue to create problems throughout the twentieth century. See Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud, 90–91. Hiltzik, Colossus has an insightful rundown of the continuing deficiencies of water law and how they affected the damming of the Colorado river, half a century on. 38 Although the simple prior appropriation doctrine, at least in the sense later applied by American courts, was not part of Hispanic law. Instead, it differentiated by necessity, and relied on community arbitration of prior appropriation claims. How Arizona courts specifically created a legal fiction of Hispanic prior appropriation salient to the needs of the age, and further issues pertaining to water law, will be discussed extensively in Chapter 6. 39 Chinese is used here as a designation of place of birth, though the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 makes it likely that it was also the nationality that they retained.

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This was little surprise, as they grew primarily water-hungry crops, like vegetables. Court records are spotty, but since the Chinese remained in business, it is safe to say that the resolution of the trial was not to their disadvantage, and they could continue growing their plants, with only the remaining water flowing down to their detractors’ fields.40 Indians were less fortunate. Some of the Pima downstream farms lay barren as early as 1889, literally bled dry by water diversion for the irrigation of new, larger Anglo fields.41 Conflicts over water rights endured. The last vestiges of the historic water conflict between the United States and Native Americans in the Southwest were only removed in 2004, with the Arizona Water Settlement Act. The act finally granted Arizona’s Gila Indians “‘wet’ water, as opposed to the paper rights to water they have now.”42 Still, water usage remains a controversial topic.43 In the nineteenth century, land and water alone accounted for a large number of all conflicts. Concerns about power and money, tied to economic development and infrastructure, accounted for the bulk of the rest. In the late nineteenth century, it was not only available money and an extractive outlook that distinguished arriving Anglo elites from established ones. Relocation to Arizona in the years before the railroad had meant that one was establishing himself or herself there on a more or less permanent basis.44 This was about to change. Partisans and Politicians Conflicts in the Southwest were never only limited to those between different ethnic and cultural groups. Anglos in southern Arizona were also frequently on the outs with Anglos in central and northern Arizona. While the latter were overwhelmingly recent arrivals, many of the former stemmed from the first generations of

40 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 111–112. 41 Sheridan, Arizona, 349–351. 42 Sen. Jon Kyl (108th Congress, 1st Session, 2003), quoted in: Howe, “Imparting the Waters”, 18. 43 While Phoenix places few restrictions on water usage by individuals and businesses, Tucson, in an even drier spot, regulates watering of gardens and yards. As both cities are known for golf courses, much of the current acrimony lies there. One round of golf played on any of the courses, according to journalist Charles Fishman (who uses the example of Las Vegas, Nevada, another desert city), uses 2,507 gallons of water, about five to six times the amount a typical US household needs per day. Fishman, The Big Thirst, 67. Stagner, Tucson Water. Logan, Desert Cities, 3. 44 Hine and Faragher, The American West, 362–363. Mabry, Ayres, and Chapin-Pyritz, Tucson at the Turn of the Century, 18; Orsi, Sunset Limited, 22, 137.

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immigrants to the territory, more attuned to coexistence, and more often than not, cohabitation, with the pre-Gadsden Purchase inhabitants of the Mesilla. As more Anglos arrived by rail from 1880 on, the dynamics in Southern Arizona again were complicated. New settlers did not only arrive for good. The daily train services on the main routes and a generous travel budget allowed some well-heeled elites from the coasts to make the Mesilla only a temporary home. If a budget was even necessary, that is. Train tickets and telegram vouchers were frequently doled out by railroad and telegraph company officials to politicians and other notables simply on request, or as an unsolicited favor. Gilded Age public servants seldom saw a potential violation of their independence in regard to decisions affecting these businesses in such perks. E. L. Bartlett, Attorney General for New Mexico and later New Mexico’s governor, for example, was the lucky recipient of “a book of complimentary franks to cover your family and social messages for the current year” in 1903. Western Union Superintendent C. B. Horton had made sure Bartlett had the book in hand by the end of February of that year. Bartlett that year also received “transportation for the various parties you ask for, except for the two or three therein mentioned which would conflict with the new inter-state law, about which I wrote you recently,” from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. That a law interdicting free private interstate transportation, the Elkins AntiTrust Bill, was effective only starting in 1903 points clearly to the fact that such transportation had been going on frequently. The fact that territorial elites could now only receive free transportation within their respective territories strengthened both business dealings and identification with these territories. Bartlett for his part did not give up, and another letter from the Denver & Rio Grande, dated April 7, 1903, takes a decidedly more annoyed tone: “the statement you make as to the policy of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe in scattering passes ad libitum among the Territorial, court and county officers is wholly incorrect.” The matter was, however, eventually resolved in Bartlett’s interest; the Denver & Rio Grande found a loophole which allowed the company’s directors to travel for free. Since there was no law forbidding Bartlett to be a territorial official and a company director, the Denver & Rio Grande’s legal department issued him one share of stock in the company, and Bartlett was free to travel on all its lines gratis.45 Such graft, of course, was regularly a point of contention.

45 Telegram from C. B. Horton, dated February 27, 1903; Letter from Denver & Rio Grande Railroad dated March 20, 1903; Letter from Denver & Rio Grande Railroad dated April 7, 1903; Letter from Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Legal Department dated April 22, 1903. Governor Edward G. Bartlett Papers, MSS 153 BC, Box 1, UNM.

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Contention showed itself in politics especially. Par for the course in American politics elsewhere, party loyalty was a major dividing line. While many new arrivals in the territory identified as Republicans, the South was solidly Democratic. Tucson’s palpably diminishing importance in Arizona after the 1880s (1880 being the first year the Republican Party identified itself as such on the ballot) reflects this growing split. The city sent the only three Democrats to the Arizona constitutional convention in Phoenix in 1911, including the only Mexican American in that body of deliberation, Carlos Corella Jácome. Seated in a dead corner of the convention room in the capitol building, they had as much input as any three delegates, but stood no chance on votes along party lines.46 The self-perceived Anglo pioneers initially remained in power, and left a legacy of halting but still significant collaboration with the Mexican residents, at least in Tucson. The newcomers cared little for such accommodation. For them, it was neither necessary nor desirable. On the contrary, they had a decidedly national outlook. This became apparent not only when it came to establishing Victorian standards of race, racism, and moral decency in the region, but also and especially where questions of territorial identity, and by extension, conceptions of democratic self-actualization of the territory were concerned. For many newcomers, this as a matter of course meant full-throated support for a state of Arizona. Though old stock Anglos, too, had an exceedingly good reason to support statehood. While Arizona territorial political preferences were staunchly Democratic throughout the Gilded Age, its governors were subject to the tides of Washington politics. As for all territories, they were appointed by the sitting president. For almost half a century, from 1863 when Abraham Lincoln created the territory until statehood in 1912, the president was almost always a Republican. The only exceptions were Andrew Johnson who served from 1865 to 1869, and Grover Cleveland, who famously served two non-consecutive terms in the 1880s and 1890s. This meant that, for thirty-seven out of Arizona’s forty-nine years as a territory, its governor was not only an appointee, but one who had incurred favors with a party that many Anglo settlers in the south did not favor. What was more, no governor until 1882 had even lived within the territory at the time of his appointment. Many had everything but the interest of the territory on their minds, and even when they did, they tended to conflate it with their own. So did investors. Frank Morrill Murphy, for example, a born Mainer who came to Arizona in 1877 and would become a mining tycoon with holdings in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Sonora, and Chihuahua, had mining claims at the same

46 The original state capitol has been preserved, with name tags on tables denoting the names of delegates to the convention applied by the office of the state historian.

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time he was active in lobbying for infrastructure and investment in order to make mineral exploitation in Arizona more feasible.47 When territorial governors were not following schemes for personal enrichment in Arizona, they were frequently absent from the territory. A poster child for both these propensities was John C. Frémont, former Democratic Senator for California, two time Republican presidential candidate with indisputable anti-slavery credentials, and son-in-law to expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton.48 Best known as the “Pathfinder” because of his military, geographical and botanical expeditions throughout the American West, Frémont was appointed to the Arizona governorship by Rutherford B. Hayes in June of 1878, following his own request for a job in the West. Frémont would not even set foot into Arizona until five months later, an impressive delay even with the lack of a direct railroad connection at the time.49 This did not bode well for Frémont, who had replaced the relatively popular John P. Hoyt.50 As Frémont had previously lost his family fortune, he was highly incentivized to develop his own mining claims. The governor busied himself with putting together the publication of The Resources of Arizona and with lobbying for investment in the territory back on the East Coast.51 His sojourns in the territorial capital were few. They always had the air of being stopovers to get the necessary business over with in the most efficient fashion possible. Frémont came, saw, and left again.

47 Spude, “Frank Morrill Murphy”, 152–155. 48 Frémont was the first Republican presidential candidate ever to run. In an impressive debut for his party, Frémont placed second right off the bat, but his campaign under the pithy slogan of “Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont” was soundly defeated in 1856 by that of Democrat James Buchanan. Buchanan ran on a pro-slavery platform, and was championed by, among others, Thomas Hart Benton, Frémont’s usually more supportive fatherin-law. Selcer, Civil War America. For more on Frémont, see also: Frémont, Memoirs; Nevins, Frémont; Chaffin, Pathfinder. 49 This was partially due to personal reasons, as Frémont’s son’s wife had just prematurely born a child who died soon thereafter. Spence, “Introduction”, 3. The Frémonts (John, his wife Jessie, and their adult daughter Lily had moved to Arizona) did not intend to permanently stay in the territory from early on. On June 8, 1879, just a little over half a year into their sojourn in Arizona, Lily Frémont confided to her diary that “Mother & I spent the day mostly planning our future home in Washington, as we have decided we like life there better than in any other American town.” Frémont, The Arizona Diary, 80. 50 Wagoner, Arizona Territory, 163. 51 Later completed by Patrick Hamilton. Frémont and Hamilton, The Resources of Arizona.

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By 1881, John Gosper, Frémont’s Secretary of the Territory, was essentially in charge of daily affairs. Gosper had political designs of his own, and submitted a plea to succeed Frémont to President Chester A. Arthur that year.52 When it fell on deaf ears, he insisted that Frémont either return to the then-capital Prescott to take up his duties in person, or resign. In October 1881, in a move replicated before and after by many a gung-ho governor in creative avoidance of an office grown tiresome, Frémont, instead of arranging for travel, chose the latter and sent his letter of resignation to Arthur.53 He never set foot into the territory again. This left Arizona temporarily without a governor. Gosper filled the role for the remainder of 1881, doubtless with continuing aspirations to soon enough be rightfully appointed to the job he was already doing. The hopeful Gosper, however, was passed over for the governorship yet again. The appointment instead went to Frederick Tritle in 1882. Tritle lived in Phoenix. He was aware of local grumblings about past gubernatorial absences and made a point of not leaving Arizona except on vacations. Frémont was far from the only controversial holder of the highest office in Arizona during its history as a territory. By all accounts, Conrad Meyer Zulick, who succeeded Tritle in 1885, learned of his appointment to the governorship after having been broken out of the Nacozari, Sonora jail and smuggled across the border by freshly appointed US Marshal M.T. “Doc” Donovan.54 Zulick, it must be said, was not entirely to blame for his south-of-the-border predicament. He had traveled to Nacozari in order to assist clients with their mining claims, and was promptly incarcerated under a Mexican law that allowed management to be held until workers’ pay could be secured. As is often true for such lore, the versions of the story of Zulick’s escape differ. The cloak-and-dagger version remains the most popular. It tells of Zulick’s breaking out of a Mexican jail with the aid of a former scout in the Indian Wars, and his consequently being smuggled across the Mexican-American border. It is likely, however, that it is at least somewhat apocryphal, as arrangements were made to pay the debts that had caused Zulick’s predicament. The ultimate veracity of the details of this feat notwithstanding, Zulick’s reception in Arizona was warm. He was a Democrat, the first to become governor of Arizona. Arizonans’ feelings for him soon turned sour, though. Born, bred, and educated in New Jersey, where he had earned a law degree, his Eastern sensibilities towards the Apaches immediately put him at odds with his most influential supporter, John Marion, a Prescott journalist and rabid anti-Republican, who also happened to be rabidly anti-Indian.

52 Wagoner, Arizona Territory, 158–159. 53 Goff, Arizona Territorial Officials: The Governors, 96–97. 54 Ibid.

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Appointees, including those to the highest territorial office, always had to tread lightly within a social minefield of overlapping arguments involving portions of their constituency, or, more frequently, influential persons in the territory. Two Frontiers in the Borderlands For much of the time that the Southwest was an Anglo frontier, it also was a Hispanic one. Considering the geographic foci of both Mexican and American national history, and the movement away from considering the West in the context of the “frontier” term at all since the advent of the New Western History, this important tenet of identity construction for Hispanos is easily neglected. The Hispanic frontier had existed before the Anglo one, and up until about 1880, they hardly were at odds with each other. Too sparse was settlement, and too great were distances. If conflicts existed, they were more of a personal nature than the openly racial ones that arose later in the century.55 For the time being, the Sonorans who ventured north into Arizona saw themselves as still part of their Mexican homeland and culture, and could do so relatively unquestioned and unopposed. Things began to change at about the time the railroad reached Tucson, and not by coincidence. As Sarah Deutsch points out, by 1880 the Hispanic frontier and the Anglo one interlocked rather than merely met. It was at this joint frontier that the Anglos arrived in force in the 1880s, with railroads, lumber mills, coal mines, and commercial agriculture and stock enterprises.56

This meant not only more points of contact and conflict, but also the need for both sides to develop new strategies for, in Deutsch’s words, “survival and power.” These strategies would form the basis on which Anglos and Hispanos met in the Southwest for the next several decades. Anglos were poised to take over. Still some time would pass until this had fully happened. Almost as much time was to pass before Anglos had come to realize this themselves. At the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, they still considered themselves the invaders, conquerors of an alien region. By 1920, however, it was the Anglos, firmly established, who were articulating fears of alien invasion.57

55 Cf. Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 19. 56 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 13–14. 57 Ibid., 121.

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The Southwest, and especially southern Arizona, witnessed two distinct periods during which larger transitions of power coincided with transitions of regional cultural values during the period from 1854 through 1920. Each of these culminated in the replacement of a majority of influencers, but not of all. Each also partially replaced ruling patterns in the cultural construction of community, society, place, and region. The first transition, importantly, did not change much in terms of people’s national affiliation and affection. Mexicans tended to continue to consider themselves as such, and Anglos overwhelmingly saw themselves as Americans, though not all did so reliably, and some even followed their cultural assimilation into an Anglo-Mexican elite with allegiance to Sonora, if not Mexico.58 The second, in addition, also inscribed the primacy of the American nation onto the territory. Both changes of the guard were gradual, though only the first was halting. At the time it occurred, it might still have seemed reversible, certainly shapeable by those Mexicans who had called the Mesilla their home before American annexation occurred. It never took on the air of an invasion. That is not to say that no concerns about the increasing trickle of Anglos were raised. Racial othering was always in the offing, and open violence erupted occasionally, fueled by two frontier cultures that dealt in such violence as a matter of course. Yet, in a sparsely settled region, population numbers mattered. They made the difference between occasional clashes of a nature that was personal as often as it was racial, full-out discrimination, or quick accommodation. The numbers were not increasing by much, for the the Civil War, too, offered the region some reprieve from a massive California gold rush style torrent of Anglo settlers. With the official mail and transportation lines closed, and most troops engaged elsewhere, travel was even more dangerous and incalcula-

58 Though there were certainly variations in where Sonorans’ allegiances lay. While fiercely independent on the surface, most still felt some fealty to the Mexican nation. Parades were held, and flags flown. Miguel Tinker Salas argues that this is overall evidence of strong Mexican nationalism at the border: “Many cultural events popular throughout Mexico found expression in Sonora. Residents of the state commemorated traditional Mexican political and religious celebrations as well as many specific regional holidays.” Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 31. To some degree this appears conclusive. In the American Southwest, aware of their outpost position, citizens also often organized national festivities. At least on one occasion in 1877, Tucson flew both Mexican and American flags at a celebration of Mexican Independence Day. There is, however, also another reason behind high attendance at national feast days: they were celebrated at the same time, or at least in the same fashion as the popular religious holidays, which were central to Northern Mexican social life. Ibid., 116, 118.

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ble than it had already been in a region populated by decidedly unhappy Athapaskans. As elsewhere in the United States, immigrants continued to arrive in the territory even during the war, though their numbers were limited.59 Population Growth and the Making of “Mexican” The second transition was industrial in scale, as well as in purpose. This had become abundantly clear by the early 1880s. This transition too, though, did not seem inevitable at first.60 The Salt River Valley became home to a small settlement in 1868, named at first Swillings Mill, then Helling Mill, then Mill City. By June 15, when the US Postal Service opened its first branch there, it had become known by its permanent name, Phoenix. Although Phoenix, and surrounding Maricopa County, created in 1871, and in fact all of Central Arizona, were consistently more Anglo than the South dominated by Tucson, the 1870 US census for all of the Salt River Valley, including Phoenix, counted 124 “Mexicans” and only 116 Anglos.61 Pima County, where Tucson is located, in comparison had a total population of 5,716, with 3,224 in Tucson itself. Yuma (then still named Arizona City) had 1,144 inhabitants.62 While these numbers are useful for getting a general idea of the composition of Arizona’s inhabitants, they are not always reliable. For all these numbers, it is safe to assume that there was no clear rule by which the definition of “Mexican” was arrived at. The census does list birth places for all persons included in it, and in 1870 the overwhelming number of Arizona’s inhabitants were born in Sonora, Mexico. One straightforward interpretation here is obviously that all those that are listed as born in Sonora were born in what was Sonora in 1870, and moved to Arizona at some later point in their life. There is, however, a problem with this view. Governmental officials were reliable only in their unpredictability when it came to filling the categories in forms dictated to them by a government that had not taken into account the special situation of the Gadsden Purchase territory. Those born in Tucson before 1854 were

59 For some ethnic groups, the war was in fact no great hindrance. While 951,667 Germans (36.6 percent of total immigration) immigrated from 1851–1860, the number dropped, but amounted to a still impressive 787,468 (or 34 percent of all immigrants) during the following decade. Total immigration dropped from 2,598,214 in the former decade to 2,314,824 during the latter. Daniels, Coming to America, 124, 146, 270. 60 Cf. Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 13. 61 US Census, 1870. Cf. Rowe, Early Maricopa County, 8. 62 The number of African Americans in all of Arizona in the 1870 count was twenty-six. Rose and Eichholz, Black Genesis, 63.

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in fact born in Sonora, Mexico. As instructions, the census form specified only “Place of Birth, meaning State or Territory of US; or the Country, if foreign birth.” It appears that some census takers in Arizona – such as Charles A. Shibell in Tucson – added “Sonora” to “Mexicans” from that state, under the problems outlined above, and wrote only “Mexico” for Mexicans from other states. It is likely that these were the more recent, lower class, comers, and that they were considered more “foreign.”63 Consequently, if the census-taker asked about a person’s place of birth, the result listed on the census form depended on several factors: whether the census taker considered those born in the Gadsden Purchase area before 1854 as foreign born or not, whether he expressed that distinction clearly, whether the interviewee went along with the conception of the census taker, and finally whether the census taker accepted the information given by individuals at face value, or if he attempted to make it fit with other information already collected. The example of the Sotela family of Tucson shows that “foreign born” was also not a clear indicator of someone belonging within Mexican social structures or not. Tibursio Sotela, a laborer, was sixty years old in 1870, had real estate valued at $150 and assets of $100. His wife Manuella was fifty and occupied in “keeping house.” Both had two foreign-born parents and were listed as themselves born in Arizona. Their son José, also a laborer, was twenty-two. His birthplace is indicated as Arizona as well, but, since his parents were born there, the census did not consider him of foreign parentage. As census forms were standardized all across the United States, this is not by default a problem of inaccuracy. Immigration literature has long both relied on and problematized these concepts for other states.64 In the case of the Mesilla, however, this does add another dimension of uncertainty. One final factor also contributes to the impossibility of getting clear numbers. Not all those who were, even by a strict definition, Mexican citizens, had Mexican surnames. As Eveline Dürr notes in her study of Hispanos in Albuquerque, some names that sounded Anglo, such as Michelbach and McGuiness, were generally recognized as Hispanic names by local Hispanos.65

63 US Census 1870, Arizona, Pima County. Sheet 41a, NARA Washington, DC. 64 See, for example: Yans-McLaughlin, Immigration Reconsidered, 66, 144, 215; Gabaccia, Immigration and American Diversity, 130, 132, 189, 211; Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 50–51, 62, 75, 104, 188. 65 Dürr, Identitäten und Sinnbezüge, 66. Tinker Salas also notes that, “a significant number of French, British, Germans, and Americans settled in Sonora. […] It was not unusual to find a substantial number of influential Sonorans with such last names as Camou, Hugues, Hoffer, Barnett, Müller, Spence, Ronstadt, Johnson, or Robinson.” Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 51.

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The Arrows family, likely one such example, had eleven members in Pima county. They were between six and forty years of age. Their names, Carmel, Carmila, Elaria, Francisca, Francisco, Jesus, Jesus Marie, Marianna, Nicolas, Tomas, and Trancalina are certainly Spanish, and since many have no direct English-language equivalent, are not likely to have been Hispanicized. All are listed as having been born in Sonora. Likely, they were recent European immigrants to Sonora, and had moved to Tucson in search of business opportunities within the networks of Sonoran elites. It is therefore hard to say whether Anglos would have considered them Mexican or European, especially if the family’s pater familias was a direct European migrant. In other cases, no additional information such as first names exists in the census. We cannot be sure what to make of the Averish family, for example. Ten people of that last name, ages four to forty-seven, lived in Yavapai county in 1870. Eight of them were born in Mexico, one, among the youngest, in Arizona. One of the two eldest was born in Pennsylvania, and one thirty-three year old member of the family was born in New York. None is listed with their full name, only initials, and none is identified by sex. Did an Anglo man from Pennsylvania come to Mexico around the time of the Gadsden Purchase, where he married a Mexican woman two years his senior, and founded a family, some of which were born in Mexico, and one of which was born in Arizona? Are the records even about the same family? And, if there were two branches of the same family, as the census seems to indicate, were they all classified as born in Mexico on the same grounds, or was there a variation? T. D. Casanega of Tubac, whose few papers are held at the Arizona Historical Society, is another case where names can be deceiving. The name could be a bowdlerized variant on the Spanish “Casanegra,” but T. D. (likely “Thomas”) claimed that he had been born in Yugoslavia.66 That there was a misunderstanding by an archivist who put together the records is possible. Misattributions of this kind occurred frequently in the filing of such sources.67 Since Yugoslavia is an unlikely place for someone with a Spanish-sounding name to have originated from, it seems more plausible that the place of birth is correct, precisely because it would have raised eyebrows and prompted further questioning. There is a distinct possibility that Casanega, after having come to Arizona during the 1870s, hispanicized his name to fit in with the locals. He went on to be a Tubac “pioneer,” deputy sheriff,

66 T. D. Casanega Papers, MS 137, AHS. For his first name, and other details on Casanega, see: AZ920 L81p – 17, ASA; as well as Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud, 187; Casanega, Casanega Reminiscences; Lamberton, Dry River, 99. 67 See Chapter 5 for further examples.

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and one of the many victims of a series of machinations responsible for also decimating the territory of the O’odham, and collectively known as the “Baca Float.”68 In most researchers’ statistics, Casanega, and others who went through the same Hispanicization process as him, would invariably be listed as Hispano. Hispanic surnames are the only viable, yet as we have seen, highly problematic predictor of such cultural origin in the Southwest. While a few outliers like these might not negate the overall reliability of all census data used throughout the literature on the American Southwest, they can make it hard to sustain certain arguments about the construction of society in the Mesilla during the period from 1854 until the arrival of the railroad. The notion that there was generalized racial othering rings somewhat hollow when contextualized within Arizona’s and New Mexico’s racial microclimates. Anglos did not see all “Mexicans” alike, and neither did Hispanos view Anglos as part of a unitary group. When the individual was more important than the individual’s race, as it often was, no generalized racial clashes occurred. If violence erupted, it was personal, not general.69 Most often, it occurred not in the form of Anglo-Hispanic tiffs, but in that of Hispanos and Anglos working together, sometimes with the help of groups of O’odham, against the Apaches, perceived to be a major threat by all groups.70 It is also not altogether clear how much Anglo-Hispano violence was solely racially motivated. Religion was another dividing line along which conflicts erupted. Specifically, the anti-Catholic nativism seen elsewhere in the United States at various times throughout the nineteenth century was also a factor in the Southwest: As hostility increased, even the mission of San Xavier del Bac became the butt of “antiCatholic frontiersmen.” Some Anglo-Americans used the statues which adorned the entrance of the mission for target practice. In southern Arizona, several different worldviews clashed as traditional Mexican and indigenous customs confronted a new Anglo-American system of conduct.71

68 For a detailed account, see: Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud. 69 The reasons for conflict were decidedly practical, and rooted in immediate necessities and the use of resources. In Katherine Benton-Cohen’s words, “nary a flicker of antagonism that could be characterized as racial” arose in over four hundred pages of court testimony in one Anglo-Hispano water dispute in Arizona’s Cochise County. Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 19. 70 Conflicts between Hispanos and Anglos did happen, however, and could be violent. Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 166–169. 71 Ibid., 95.

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While the combination of race and (also racially connoted) religion might have been quite a combustible one, it is almost impossible to say for certain how much which reason contributed to violence and discrimination. Tinker Salas, unlike most Anglo authors, stresses race as a cause for the hostilities.72 Race was always a factor for certain Anglo individuals in the territory, but not so much for others. Without exception, the race of all Spanish Americans in the 1870 Arizona census is listed as white. Even after racial boundaries had hardened in the rest of the United States, many persons with Hispanic surnames continued to be listed as white in official documents in the Southwest. As late as the mid-1910s, at the height of scientific racism in the United States, World War I draft records for Tucson and Yuma show that the vast majority of officials reliably checkmarked “white” as the racial category of people with Spanish last names. The personal preferences of the officials responsible played a large role in how Hispanos were countcounted. At times, the records processed by one or two officials in a town had the category of “Mexican” added by hand, while the pre-printed forms clearly only allowed for “White,” and while other officials in the same place also saw no need to put Hispanos in a special category.73 Such almost haphazard assignment of race points to a larger problem with all statistics in which race plays a role, including census numbers. Even if we accept the often employed, but inherently flawed method which assumed that all with Spanish-sounding surnames belonged to the Hispano cultural community and were therefore “Mexican,” there is still considerable uncertainty attached to this category

72 “American managers and political leaders grudgingly promoted good relations with their new neighbors and, at times, fended off racist attacks against Mexicans. Moreover, with the help of Tucson’s small Mexican elite, they attempted to establish a working rapport with notables in Sonora. Northern Mexican notables likewise sought to prosper from new commercial ties with the Americans. Since American mine operators needed their labor, Mexicans had some latitude to negotiate their social position. Not all Americans approved of this policy, and racially inspired clashes occurred frequently. Confronted with severe hardships and overt racism, Mexicans fought back against injustices and committed atrocities of their own. Racist attitudes slowly hardened on both sides.” Ibid., 87–88. It is hard, however, to ultimately judge the violence occurring between Sonorans and Arizonans as qualitatively different than what had already existed in northern Sonora before the Mesilla treaty. 73 In Yuma, this is especially striking; all draft cards for men with Hispanic surnames processed by Frank L. Weimer have “Mex” scrawled onto them in addition to a checkmark for “White,” while those processed by Frank Luck, the other official responsible, do not. World War I Draft Registration Cards. M1509, Microfilm. Rolls AZ13, NM7, NARA Washington, DC.

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in the census records. Frequent intermarriages of Anglo men and Hispano women, in combination with the common practice of anglicizing or hispanicizing given names contextually, further muddies the waters. It is important to remember these factors in analyses of how race affected behavior of individuals and groups in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mesilla. These problems of categorization and the fact that overall, the resultant categories have seldom been disputed, raise questions about any simplistic arguments of racially motivated discrimination or violence. Katherine Benton-Cohen writes that “[i]n Arizona water was worth fighting over – but what about race?”74 The question, answered in the negative in the specific case she addresses, should be thoroughly considered in others as well. Though it may often be answered emphatically in the affirmative, viewing race as the sole dynamic at play rules out the possible importance of other factors. Personal enmity, religion, class, local, national or regional identity and its contextual salience all played into the complicated interactions of humans from multiple backgrounds in a challenging environment. Nature of the Second Transition The second transition began either immediately after the first had been completed, or in some places while it was still going on. It would be a lasting one, not only because of the replacement of the power elite, but also because the power center moved away from the South. When Arizona’s capital was relocated from Tucson to Prescott, more than 200 miles (320 km) to the northwest, in 1879 and was then permanently installed in central Arizonan Phoenix in 1889, this marked not only a symbolic end to an Anglo-Mexican landholding elite’s dominance in the territory, but also a regional shift in power.75 Creations and fortifications of regional, state, or territorial identity had occurred elsewhere in the United States during much of the nineteenth century. They always depended on economic and settlement patterns. The question of how very distinct yet intertwined regional identities came into being in Arizona and New Mexico during their territorial periods is tied closely to both territories’ ethno-racial composition and dominant economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New Mexico remained comparatively more agricultural and its Hispanic population – larger in numbers than Arizona’s by a factor of at least two – could

74 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 19. 75 Tucson had unceremoniously dropped out of the running four years earlier. Ehrlich, “Arizona’s Territorial Capital Moves to Phoenix,” 233. Ehrlich’s article provides a good summation on the machinations behind the move, including the dates and events laid out below.

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retain cultural as well as political influence. In contrast, Arizona was dominated by the extractive economy of mining, directed by nationally acting capitalists.76 As shown above, the data is not easy to parse. The US Census did not distinguish between Hispanics and Anglos at the time, lumping all in the same “white” category. The earliest somewhat reliable Census data stems from 1940, when a 5 percent sample of respondents was put into either the “Hispanic” or “White” categories. This is clearly indicative of changing constructions of race. Even if one considers that official statistics and designations lag behind common usage by several years, 1940 remains a relatively late date for such a distinction.77 It is plausible that, while Eastern notions of race had traveled to the Southwest by the early twentieth century, their local and regional applications in the Southwest did not travel back to Washington and were not taken up by the census bureau and its census bureaucrats until significantly later. Considering Mexicans not only a national and cultural, but also a racial other had firmly sunk in nationally by the 1930s, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a federal agency specifically targeted “Mexicans” for deportation, because of, as Vicky Ruiz puts it, “the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios.”78 This was a clear departure from the “passing” for Anglo that recent European immigrants could still attempt two decades earlier. Part of the reason could be traced back to the 1880s and the end of the Apache threat to Hispanos and Anglos alike. During times of warfare, all ethnicities and classes had grouped together in compact settlements in order to be able to defend themselves. With the surrender of Geronimo and Cajeme, this ceased to be necessary and was quickly recognized as impractical to economic development. Elites, who had until then shared the urban spaces of the Southwest with all other residents, began living in separate neighborhoods. Racial and cultural clustering began.79

76 Although mining dominated in New Mexico’s southwestern parts, close to Arizona, and in the northeast. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 165, 171; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes, 55–77. 77 In Arizona, the percentage of Hispanos for that year is 20.4, New Mexico’s more than double that at 41.7. Raw population numbers, however, allow some conclusions for earlier years as well. While in 1870 Arizona had a total population of 9,658, New Mexico the same year had 91,874. As the railroad arrived in the region only at the end of that decade, most of the white inhabitants must have been from Hispano families. New Mexico’s population roughly tripled to 327,301 in 1910, while Arizona’s by that year had increased to 204,354, twenty times the 1870 number. Gibson and Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, table 17. 78 Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows, 29. 79 Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 25.

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While nativist rhetoric had already heated up in the years before, it was the Great Depression that tipped the scales in favor of open xenophobia. Signed by President Hoover, the so-called “Repatriation” program in theory targeted only Mexican citizens, but in practice that distinction was hardly made. Many dependent children of Mexicans who had been born on US soil and were therefore clearly US citizens, were also deported. In fact, the majority of those “repatriated” were citizens of the United States. “Repatriation” all told expelled about a third of the Mexican-American population in the United States at the time, about half a million people. The numbers, which seem staggering enough already on their own, become even more so when applied to the Southwest. As George Sánchez points out, in southern California alone, seventy-five thousand people were deported, a fourth of all Mexican-Americans living there. By 1932, “almost every Mexican family in southern California confronted in one way or another the decision of returning or staying.”80 “Repatriation” is a misnomer, then. It points clearly to a definition of Mexican otherness that was now connected to race, not nationality. What occurred amounted to the large scale expatriation of American citizens for reasons of perceived disloyalty and cultural incompatibility. The deportations were a typical reaction to economic hard times, a pattern of exclusion or restriction repeated in various forms throughout American history.81 As was the counterreaction, when the pendulum of economic necessity swung back. In 1942, the bracero (strong arm) program was initiated, bringing thousands of Mexicans, mostly menial laborers, into the United States to work for the war effort and later the boom in American production of goods and agriculture following World War II. Mexicans were invited in at the same time that Japanese internment rounded up and internally excluded yet another racially different group. Mexicans had become constructed as a different race, yet there were still gradations of racism, and at least on a federal level, anti-Mexican fear was never on the same plane as anti-Japanese feelings were. This was despite the fact that Mexico’s role in World War I had never been that of an ally and at times fear of a Mexican invasion, as implausible as it might have been, was widespread.82 The demise of the Anglo-Mexican elite and the rise of the Anglo-Federal one was, in essence, the replacement of a system of authority rooted in a kin-based network and the importance of local land ownership by a nationally and transnationally

80 Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, quoted in: Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows, 29. 81 Notably in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, or the treatment of Mexican Americans in the West later in the twentieth century. Daniels, Coming to America, 270–272, 315–317. 82 The infamous Zimmermann telegram remains the most public harbinger of a growing fear of Mexicans in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stacy, Mexico and the United States, 883; Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram.

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acting business network. This story played itself out in many parts of the world during the nineteenth century.83 The American Southwest offers an illustrative example of how such transitions were achieved both at the local level, but also through intervention at the federal level. Anglo elites were poised to take over Arizona Territory by sheer numbers alone. Yet the Federal Government’s crucial deviation from established local convention of how racial lines would be drawn sped up the process considerably. This in turn bolstered the preeminence of Anglos in Arizona at a time when such racial fault lines were still malleable. Soon, Mexicans were not a majority, or even still a large minority that had to be at least considered in a vision of white Arizona. As a numerical minority they were that much easier to ignore. Confederal Opportunities When Granville Oury was eventually elected Arizona Territory’s representative to the House in 1880, he had already spent almost two decades in and out of public office. He was the Arizona House’s first Speaker in 1866, and the territory’s Attorney General from 1869 on. More remarkably, he had been Confederate Arizona Territory’s delegate to the Southern Provisional Congress. In 1862, his machinations and negotiations in Richmond had made Confederate Arizona a legal reality in the first place.84 Despite his Southern roots, Oury apparently had a change of heart that appears typical of Arizona’s elites at the end of the Civil War. This, while reflecting the nature of opportunism at the frontier of US expansionism, had little to do with evolving positions on the contentious topics of slavery and secession. Rather, the attempt to draw Southern Arizona into the Confederacy to begin with reflected the frontier residents’ desire for more federal investment. Arizonans had been ignored by the Union, both for irrelevance in numbers and the fear of upsetting the antebellum slave/free state ratio in Congress. They perceived themselves on the edge of western civilization, under constant attack from Indians, and with little or no opportunity to further the development of the remote region. Men like Oury represented the quick switch that had marked the Southwestern US in the years of Reconstruction and beyond. Unlike in the Deep South, the Lost Cause never gained too much ground in Arizona and New Mexico. Though most American settlers favored the Southern view when it came to the question of slavery, this was a moot point in practice.85 Few black inhabitants lived even in Tucson,

83 Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 163, 328, 777, 925, 1031; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 59–64, 128–132. 84 C. C. Smith, “Manuscript History of the Oury Family.” Typescript. MS 738, AHS; Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories, 10. 85 Lamar, The Far Southwest, 171.

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the territory’s main hub in the 1860s and 1870s. In Arizona’s then still malleable racial categories, African-Americans sometimes even conceived of themselves as white in opposition to the Hispanos who still made up the majority of the territory’s inhabitants.86 That Oury and scores of others like him found it relatively uncomplicated to move from Confederate sympathizer to US functionary strikingly shows that the Southwest, and especially southern Arizona and New Mexico, the area of would-be Confederate Arizona, took up a unique position in Civil War and Reconstruction Era America.87 On the face of it, the declaration of a territory to be incorporated into the Confederate States would seem to indicate a deep-seated preference for the South. Yet, the creation of Confederate Arizona Territory was not originally born out of an ideological or secessionist impulse, although those came to play roles, but out of a desire for more and stronger ties to a – or any – federal superstructure. That secession was more of a political maneuver toward rather than away from something, is plain in the 1861 secession order of Arizona Territory itself:88 Resolved, That our feelings and interests are with the Southern States, and that although we deplore the division of the Union, yet we cordially indorse the course pursued by the seceded Southern States. Resolved, That geographically and naturally we are bound to the South, and to her we look for protection; and as the Southern States have formed a Confederacy, it is our earnest desire to be attached to that Confederacy as a Territory. Resolved, That we do not desire to be attached as a Territory to any State seceding separately from the Union, but to and under the protection of a Confederacy of the Southern States.89

The first resolution preserved an underlying connection to the Union, while the second emphasized a geographical and “natural” connection to the South. The third

86 Rockfellow, Diary of an Arizona Trail Blazer, 52–53, quoted in: Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 104. 87 Commensurate with the idea of a “Greater Reconstruction” as put forward by Elliott West in West, The Last Indian War, xx–xxiii. 88 Which had emerged out of the Mesilla convention on March 13 of that year, and was then again ratified by a similar body in Tucson on March 28. Sacks, “The Creation of the Territory of Arizona,” 30–34. 89 “Arizona Ordinance of Secession.” Reprinted in: Hart and Channing, Ordinances of Secession. The declaration originally appeared in the Mesilla Times, but no complete issue survives. Hall, “The Mesilla Times,” 347.

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added what had really been on the delegates’ minds since the 1850s. Rhetorically, the secessionist proclamation was hedging its bets, alienating neither Union nor Confederacy completely, all the while pressing for their actual goal, territorial independence under the aegis of an accommodating federation.90 Territorial Identity and Race One important distinction between the discourse that dominated Sonoran-Arizonan and Sonoran-New Mexican relations in the 1870s and early 1880s and the one that had established itself by the second decade of the 1900s, and which influenced the birth of the states of Arizona and New Mexico out of their respective territories, was a changing notion not only of the importance of race, but also of its meaning as a category. At least, this was true in the discourse involving racial differences between Hispanos and Anglos; Native Americans were easily racially othered and could usually be agreed upon by both groups to be inferior.91 White Americans, including recent immigrants from Europe, before the turn of the century habitually spoke of Hispanos, whether they had been born in Arizona, Sonora, or elsewhere in Mexico, as “Mexicans.” By the 1920s, this had clearly racist connotations, most clearly seen in the conflation of national and ethno-racial categories to justify deporting Hispanos to Mexico. Yet in the 1880s, and depending on the locality, sometimes well into the 1890s, race was not necessarily always at the forefront of people’s thinking about the differences between Hispano and Anglo, Mexican and American. In Katherine Benton-Cohen’s words, “race was not the border’s dominant discourse – at least applied to Sonorans.”92 The dominant discourse, instead, was one of nationality and, to some degree, party loyalty.93 During the early 1870s, Mexican rebels had raided north in Arizona,

90 This was not true of the editors of the Mesilla Times, Bredett C. Murray and Frank Higgins. Both were dyed-in-the-wool Confederate sympathizers. While the Anglo settlers of the Mesilla region were overwhelmingly pro-Southern, Hispanos, who had no such sympathies, supported secession likely for just these pragmatic reasons of governmental attachment. They supported the pro-secession Times as well. Editor Murray declined a request to print the paper half in Spanish, but only for reasons of space in the small rag of merely four pages. He offered Hispanos who wanted to publish Spanish-language editions the use of the Times office and equipment for free. Ibid., 342–344. 91 Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant, 54–55. 92 Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 174; Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 61. 93 Parties remained a somewhat alien construct to Arizonans. Perhaps fearing backlash from former Southerners, the Republicans did not even use that name until the 1880 elections. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 399.

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prompting outrage and the usual cries for federal aid from Americans. With the ascent of the Porfiriato in 1876, relative stability returned to Sonora. “By the end of the decade,” writes Benton-Cohen, “Mexico began protesting against the Cowboys’ ‘acts of lawlessness’ in Sonora.”94 The capital-C “Cowboys” referred to were most often poor Anglo men, typically Democrats, who did not own land and who did not find favor with territorial administrative officers. The territorial authorities’ solution to the problem reflected a measured, tried-and-true approach that had proved as effective as it had proved locally consensus-building: they complained about their problems to the Federal Government.95 As statehood moved closer to becoming a reality, Arizonans sought to carve out their own identity as both Arizonans and part of the US at the same time. Had a territorial identity come to pass before the Civil War, it might well have included its Spanish-Mexican heritage to a larger degree. It also might have turned out decidedly more Southern. As the territory’s identity came into being during the ReconReconstruction years and beyond, however, “Arizonan” was a decidedly Anglo, but just as much Southern as Northern mode of identification. It was never really possible to extricate being an Arizonan from being an English-speaking AngloAmerican. This is especially interesting if Arizona is considered in conjunction with its sister territory and later state, New Mexico. In New Mexico, during the Reconstruction Era the state legislature even paid for translators to accommodate a substantial number of delegates whose primary language was Spanish, and public schools habitually used interpreters.96 By the beginning of the twentieth century it had become unthinkable for Arizonans to reunite with their neighbors to the east, even if that would have meant statehood. In 1906, the state legislature opposed a joint statehood bill for the two territories because it “would subject us to the domination of another commonwealth of different traditions, customs and aspirations.”97 Arizona’s tireless man in Washington, Marcus Aurelius Smith, contended that his constituents would rather remain a territory for another fifty years than join the Union as one political unit with New Mexico.98

94 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 59. 95 Ibid., 59–63. 96 Crawford, Language Loyalties, 61. New Mexico, unlike Arizona, is today de facto bilingual. 97 Berman, Arizona Politics & Government, 30; Crawford, Language Loyalties, 59. 98 Braeman, “Albert J. Beveridge and Statehood for the Southwest,” 322. Smith’s hyperbole was likely also self-serving, as New Mexicans still outnumbered Arizonans two to one in 1910.

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Such a stance complicates the standard Andersonian model of nationalization, which explains the Anglo settlement of the American West as an expansion of a preexisting Eastern nationalism.99 In part, the aversion to New Mexico partially stemmed from that territory’s greater comparable importance and influence. As Arizona’s manufacturing and mineral production star began to rise, however, this became less important. In time, calcifying standards of race and racism that had made their way inwards from the coasts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a convenient way to exclude a now-minority Hispanic population from the Anglo majority’s vision for a future white, “civilized” state. That state’s eventual shape, identity, and dominant ethnic makeup was not a foregone conclusion. The pushes and pulls of local politics, governmental interference, and business interest could have brought it forth only at a specific historic moment in a specific place. The Southwest in the latter half of the nineteenth century was a most volatile landscape. Here, interests and groups divided by evershifting lines of ethnicity, culture, nation, kinship, politics, and belonging all competed in an environment of unforgiving sparseness. As elsewhere in the American West, this frequently resulted in shifting alliances and occasioned vague power structures that needed to be negotiated with knowledge and finesse on all sides. Those who lived in the Mesilla from the end of the Mexican–American War through the beginning of World War I experienced intersecting and cumulative change that was unparalleled elsewhere in the contemporary United States. They dealt with this change in myriad ways. Some demonstrated a capacity for remarkable agency, some resisted steadfastly the whirls of the world around them. Others merely kept doing what they needed to do in order to survive. All were indelibly marked by the violence, cooperation, and cultures that defined the Mesilla from the 1840s to the beginning of the twentieth century.

99 Cf. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 64.

5. Places

The Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in the Mesilla from the West Coast. It was the first railroad that directly connected the region. This chapter will examine three very different places of settlement in the order that it reached them. The railroad arrived at all three in different years and affected them all in different ways. Yuma began its life as Fort Yuma on the California side of the Colorado River. After the railroad came, it lost its importance as an inland harbor. Tucson had already been one of the most important centers of the Pimería Alta region under Spanish and Mexican rule. It gained connection to the coasts and to the nation, and the railroad forever altered its demographics. Deming was a white railroad town in a predominantly Hispanic territory. Its coming into existence was bound up with the railroad in significant ways. The three settlements stand pars pro toto for the workings of connections, cooperation, and conflict in the Mesilla region and in the larger Southwest. Mining camps, though dotting the Southwestern landscape en masse, never developed the kinds of elites and circles of influencers as did towns and cities. They are therefore not examined in depth here. The camps were purpose-built. They were controlled and peopled initially by roving prospectors, some on their way to fortune, some on their way to political influence, some on their way to neither. Later, during the high industrial phase of extraction, one or two major companies often controlled them. Mining camps’ racial composition was significantly different from that of other settlements. Mexicans who had not lived in the Mesilla at the time of the Gadsden Purchase made up a much larger proportion of mining camps’ population than was the case in more permanent villages and towns. Neither were these people descended from such early comers. Instead, they, like their Anglo (i.e. Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, German, etc.) counterparts had migrated to the Mesilla. Older Hispanic elites considered them interlopers, as did Anglos. These newly

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arrived Mexicans did not acquire significant political power until later in the twentieth century.1 My interest here is chiefly in the change over decades. Structures and groups of elites changed over several generations. I focus on how they came to dominate politics in Arizona and New Mexico, and then were replaced by others. These transitions hold the key to understanding what made Southern Arizona different from other parts of the Southwest. Short-lived and/or tightly controlled places like mining camps therefore provide little in the way of additional elucidation in this regard. Among a dearth of research on the Mesilla in Western history, mining communities are also relatively well-represented. Several book-length studies exist, and mining towns have been analyzed in other contexts as well. They appear in studies on industrialization and the West, and they are part of larger histories of mining, including environmental histories concerned with mining’s impact on the Western landscape.2 Special attention will be paid to connections of identity and space, both in a neighborhood or town, and within such larger entities of possible identification as region, state, or nation. Region is the only level of personal identification that transcends state, or even national borders. The transnational level is an immediate competitor not primarily with the national, but with the local level of belonging. In other words, for the places surveyed, transnationalism, interpreted as transborder regionalism, is often a much more salient category for the construction, or co-

1

Only in the societal turmoil of the “long 1960s” did Mexicans and Latinos in general, this time irrespective of place of birth or citizenship status, make themselves heard once again. The Chicana/Chicano movement for the first time in two generations enabled their political participation. Though only very recently have Hispanos become visible in state and national politics. See: Rosales, Chicano! Yolanda Alaniz and Megan Cornish offer up a Marxist feminist perspective. Alaniz and Cornish, Viva La Raza. Erlinda GonzalesBerry and David Maciel’s collection of essays, The Contested Homeland interprets the history of Hispanos in New Mexico from the beginning of the nineteenth century until today, including a separate chapter on the Chicano Movement’s impact on the state. Gonzales-Berry and Maciel, The Contested Homeland, esp. 269–302. Mario García is among the first to thoroughly study the role of Hispano Catholicism and the influence of its political ideas on the Chicano movement. García, Católicos, esp. 131–140.

2

Book-length studies include Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction and, in a comparative analysis, Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans. A study that makes many similar observations for a mining town in Montana is Emmons, The Butte Irish. Mining in Arizona and New Mexico is also treated in all recent histories of American mining, and included in global mining histories as well. See, e.g. Waszkis, Mining in the Americas, 26–48 (Mexico), 222–251 (United States); Ali, Mining, 142–157.

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construction of geographic identity, than nationalism. In fact, it is likely the default category for such conceptions in most of the relevant contexts for most Southwesterners during the timeframe analyzed. However, this is true only when it is seen as a regionalism that happens to cross borders. In other words, the focus must be primarily on the region, not on national policies and agencies. The following three subchapters concentrate on various details that mattered to groups and individuals in the construction of space, place, and identity as these apply to all three towns surveyed. Natural boundaries, patterns of migration and settlement, fights over the authority to define spaces and over the power to interpret names, as well as quarrels concerning the conventions to be used in both creating and maintaining communities mattered to the development of each place. They made each community unique. Taken together, they tell a larger story about the two transitions of power that occurred in the region over half a century.

Y UMA : I NTERNAL

AND

E XTERNAL B ORDERS

In 1995, Yuma, Arizona took pride in being the “12th best city in the United States.”3 Known once for being the place where, during the Great Depression, those among the destitute not deemed worthy for entry into California got held up and settled, it later became a proto-Las Vegas thanks to Arizona’s then comparably liberal marriage laws. During the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood stars and starlets could cross the Colorado to get hitched without waiting. A one-story building on the corner of Madison Avenue and 1st Street still bears the inscription “Golden Wedding Bell Marriage Chapel” in faded lettering. People came to Yuma not to come to Yuma, but to go somewhere else. This was true both in terms of one’s road through life, and in terms of the road that connects San Diego with Phoenix and points east. In the pungent words of one historian, “[n]obody lingered at Yuma Crossing for their health.”4 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Yuma Crossing had gained substantial significance as a river crossing, and by the 1870s as a stop for steamboats traveling

3

Dedication on p iii in Woznicki, The History of Yuma.

4

Mattes, “Review of ‘Early Yuma’,” 68. The authoritative history of the town is still Robert Woznicki’s The History of Yuma and the Territorial Prison, published originally in 1968 and updated in 1995. There is also Douglas D. Martin’s 1954 Yuma Crossing, a raconteurish account of five centuries’ worth of history at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. Martin, Yuma Crossing. Recent publications on Yuma history are: Trigg Conrad, Yuma Mesa Homesteaders; Nelson, Early Yuma; Sauder, The Yuma Reclamation.

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up and down the Colorado river. Until the railroad’s arrival, the steamers were the only reliable means of transportation serving the western part of what later became Arizona. Yuma’s location on the Colorado was what had made the settlement possible. The river would continue to play a significant role in its development. After Arizona had been carved out of New Mexico, it was the only waterway supplying the new territory directly. Yuma’s history is tied to the Colorado river, and to being the place through which most items meant for markets in Arizona passed until the 1880s. Considering the rapid increase in travel and transportation caused by the connection of the Southern Pacific eastward, the steamboats held on for longer than might have been expected. Part of the reason was that goods delivered directly from Mexico, where north-south rail connections had often not yet been established, could travel up the Gulf of California and up the Colorado cheaply and easily. They would then be transshipped on railroad carriages going to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and points further east; as well as westward to destinations in California.5 In May 1859, according to the Los Angeles Star, the settlement “consist[ed] of one store and a boarding house, with population of 10 or 15 persons.” The paper went on to say that “Colorado City contains one American and about 15 Mexicans.”6 While today Arizona City and Colorado City are both considered to be referring to what became Yuma, it appears that to the Star writer they were separate settlements.7 Given the complicated nature of Yuma’s growth along a meandering Colorado River, and the fact that ferrying across the Colorado was a profitable enterprise, the view probably existed that one was dealing with two competing enterprises, and not with one settlement. Notably, since the store and boarding house were run and populated by Anglos who had arrived there via the West Coast, the ratio of Anglo to Hispano inhabitants in early Yuma was roughly equal. Fort Yuma, the army base on the California side of the Colorado, rated by Ray Brandes, compiler of Arizona army base histories, an “installation of major importance,” however, at times threw off that balance considerably. While the number of soldiers stationed there varied, Fort Yuma – due to its role as a major supply base – housed large numbers of mules and often had “as many as 900 animals in readiness.”8 By 1870, the year when the US census first counted Yumanians, 1,053 people lived there.9 That number had only gone up marginally ten years later, despite the

5

Woznicki, The History of Yuma, 26–28.

6

Los Angeles Star, May 21, 1859.

7

Cf. Martin, Yuma Crossing, 125–137; Bufkin, “Geographic Change at Yuma Crossing”; Hargett, “Pioneering at Yuma Crossing,” 336.

8

Brandes, “A Guide to the History of the US Army Installations in Arizona,” 47.

9

Including Native Americans within city limits, but not those living in the Yuma villages nearby. This is the number arrived at by referring to the original census documents. US

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railroad’s arrival in Yuma and the river crossing’s ample travel connections, to 1,200 in the 1880 census. In 1890, Yuma had 1,773 inhabitants, a healthy increase. The economic troubles of the 1890s led to a decrease of just about 15 percent (to 1,519 residents) by the end of the decade. By 1920, Yuma’s size had, however, rebounded and almost tripled to 4,237. It would only continue to rise from then on.10 As we will see, Arizona City (it would finally become known as Yuma from 1873 on) was socially stratified. Yet it was not a society of extremes, as many of the mining camps in the territory were. Large-scale mining was run by large corporations from the East. These corporations employed Eastern racial ideas. The jobs they offered which were not already taken up by Easterners sent by the corporation were usually low-paying. Still, in mining towns Mexicans were paid far less than their Anglo counterparts. This was a major factor in Anglo-Hispano tensions in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had, however, little bearing on the local society of Arizona City in 1870.11 There were 106 whites – i.e. Anglos and Hispanos – whose net worth was more than $500, either in personal estate, in real estate, or combined.12 Of these, there

Census. Arizona City, Yuma County, Arizona Territory. Microfilm Publication M 593, Roll 46, NARA Washington, DC. Remarkably, it differs from the often-used figure of 1,144 given by Campbell Gibson in a US Census Bureau report. Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States.” 10 Gibson and Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, table 17. 11 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 50, 56–57; Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 8, 269. 12 This $500 cutoff is based on several assumptions. First, that what matters most in gauging elite status for people in the American West should be based on their net worth according to an economic power calculation, one of the three most widely used ways of calculating equivalent historic value. The other two, historic standard of living, and economic status measurements, are based on, respectively, an arbitrary “bundle of goods and services that an average household would buy” and “the relative ‘prestige’ value of an amount of income or wealth […] using the income index of per-capita GDP.” As the “bundle of goods and services” would be much different on the Southwestern periphery, where some goods (i.e. manufactures transported to the frontier) would have been much more expensive than elsewhere, while others would have been much cheaper (such as land, or domestic services), the historic standard of living measurement is flawed in the Mesilla. Economic status for $500 would in 2015 have been $143,000. This is a somewhat more useful measurement. It is based on the same calculations as labor value or inincome value, only specifically applied to income or wealth. Yet, since it measures value “relative to a wage or more general income” on a national basis, the circumstances in a remote region would once again throw the measurement askew. One can assume that a

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were four women heads of household (all with Hispanic surnames) who held that much. Only two “colored” males, William King, a hotel keeper, and Hoph Singh, a laundry owner, both born in Canton, had more than $500.13 No colored women had $500 in net worth.14 Just under 10 percent of the population in Arizona City could be said to belong to the monetary elite. Such a number, of course, is always somewhat arbitrary. Some of the people with a net worth of $500 or more gave occupations such as “laborer” or “laundress,” making their participation in the power elite unlikely. At the same time, sons of wealthy farmers or merchants who worked for their fathers’ businesses were also usually classed as “laborers.” They, however, were certainly part of the social elite. On the other hand, King (age forty-one), as well as Singh (twenty-nine) and his wife Alvena (fifty), although reasonably wealthy, were

reasonable equivalent amount of money to put someone in monetary elite status in the 2010s would be approximately $1,000,000. Today, about 7 million out of 311 million, or about 2.25 percent of US households, for example, have a net worth of $1,000,000 or higher. The actual equivalent for $1,000,000 in 2015 dollars in 1870 would have been $433. Census records are not typically this detailed, rounding values to the nearest $100, so numbers must make do with this built-in inaccuracy of record-keeping. Having $500 in 1870 would, in economic power, have been equivalent to $1,150,000 in 2015. Economic power is a good indicator of actual influence, since it “measures [wealth] against the total output of the economy […]. What is being addressed is the economic power of the person […], the ability to influence the composition or total-amount of production in the economy (GDP).” It is reasonable to assume that the equivalent of a $1,000,000 share in the current US economy would have enabled a relatively comfortable life even given the Southwestern circumstances. Considering further that wealth was concentrated in the urban centers of the East Coast, and to a certain degree, the West Coast, having such an amount of wealth in a remote place of scarcely more than 1,000 inhabitants would have increased the immediate effect that the money would have on the local economy by an incalculable, but considerable factor. All definitions from: Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a US Dollar Amount.” 13 Many Chinese immigrated from the city and its environs. However, since Canton at the time was one of the few urban centers in China, and one of the major seaports for ships to the West Coast, it may also just have been written down as their birthplace upon arrival in California. Fong “Sojourners and Settlers,” 228–229. 14 Henry Fitzgerald, age 24, occupation “Clerk in Store” owned either $1,200 or $12.00 in personal estate. Due to the quality of the census microfilm, this is uncertain. Given his occupation and age, I have opted to excise him from the number of elites. It is possible, however, that he inherited the $1,200, and should be included. As this is the only case in which such uncertainty exists, the number of elites would not deviate much either way.

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barred, the two males by race, and she by gender, from participation in a territorial elite, though not necessarily from the local one. Given their apparent age difference, the arrangement might have been frowned upon by a society in which this was the only case of such glaring discrepancy even if race had not been a factor. Then again, despite its closeness to California, where Chinese racism ran rampant, Yuma, because of its status as a transportation hub on the Colorado river, was more tolerant than could be expected. Katherine BentonCohen points out that Chinese, and even Chinese-Mexican couples could be an accepted part of society in certain localities, such as Benson, which became Arizona’s railroad hub, in a sense replacing Yuma’s function of transshipment center. In Benson, Anglo and Hispano children not only attended the birthday party of the daughter of one Chinese-Mexican couple, the festivity and its attendants were named in the town’s gossip column.15 Further, there were others who either did not state their net value, or did not have money, but whose professions might indicate that they belonged to an elite circle anyway. Still, these occurrences were rare enough not to make the final number deviate too much. There were only three laborers or other menial workers listed with $500, and one “laundress.” One doctor and the town’s only jeweler did not have assets listed at all. All in all, the census lists 349 separate families living in 367 dwellings at the Yuma crossing. Therefore, by a statistical average, just over 30 percent of the population in Arizona City should have belonged to families who had considerable net worth, already a threefold increase over the numbers of the heads of households eligible for the power elite.16 Indeed, 351 people lived in households which had $500 or more net value. The percentage from this is 30.82 percent. It corresponds almost exactly to the expected statistical average. Subtracting from this number forty-one persons who do not share the last name of the head of household and whose occupations are given as, “sailor,” “domestic servant,” “cook,” “clerk in store” or “laborer” leaves 310 members of elite families, or 27.22 percent of Arizona City’s inhabitants in 1870.17 In short, more than a quarter of Arizona City’s inhabitants came from families of considerable means.18

15 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 175. 16 30.64 percent rounded to the second decimal. 17 Also, there were three hotel guests at dwelling 152, William King’s hotel, and three more in Albert Decker’s hotel, dwelling 205, that have been subtracted as well, as it is unlikely they were in town for very long. 18 Given that living arrangements in the West could be quite variable, family names were not always a reliable indicator of family structure. As the census only provided for one “head of household” and net value per dwelling, these numbers are not absolutely relia-

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While several family businesses housed clerks to help out in stores, having servants or other household help was relatively unheard of, and seems to have been practiced only by those people of means who also had strong ties to the East or West Coasts, reflecting Victorian “civilized” sensibilities. Isaac Polhamus’s household staff of three alone accounted for almost a third of all domestic servants in Arizona City. In contrast to established communities in New Mexico, Yuma County’s wealthy also did not have Native American household help. In the Hispanic Southwest, this had long been standard, and slavery-like arrangements involving both Indians and debt peons continued in Northern Mexico decades after the peculiar institution had been abolished in the South.19 The power elite recruited itself out of the male members of the elite. Money, of course, was not the only marker of elite status. Education was also important. But money, and especially real estate holdings, were concentrated among those who had the most political influence and power, and can thus serve as important indicators of elite status. If stricter criteria in terms of financial means are applied, and financial elite status limited to those who had $1000 or more, sixty-seven heads of household were part of that group. What becomes quickly apparent upon closer examination of the census data, is that racial and even cultural categories quickly fall apart. Without further evidence, it is impossible to ascertain to what extent a family which had one Hispano and one Anglo parent and whose children were born in Arizona considered itself Hispano or Anglo. That “Anglo” was a category of identification at all, is unlikely. Since 379 of Arizona City’s females, and 490 of its males, or 86.53 percent of women and 72.38 percent of men, were foreign born, such a category, only slowly gaining salience at the time, would have held little sway. Overall, 591 individuals – just over half, or 51.89 percent of the population – were born in

ble. In one case, for example, a group of five miners, all with different places of birth but all listed under dwelling number 51, together owned $2,000 in assets and another $4,000 in real estate. Dwelling 51 was also the home of members of the crew of the steamship Mohave. It is likely that this was a boarding house, or the ship itself. Yet, unlike the miners, crewmembers are listed with their assets valued separately, in the case of the captain and the chief engineer, or not at all, for all other crewmembers. As with the racial categories, census taker Lindsay adapted the rigid categories of the census as best made sense to him. His numbers are partially the result of personal decisions and hence not easy to parse. The number of servants, cooks, and other domestic employees is therefore based on best estimations. 19 By the 1880s, the state of Sonora was forced to limit the debt that one could be held responsible for to the equivalent of six months labor as employment had become plentiful in agriculture and mining on the Arizona side, and many poor peons had fled north. Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 87, 110.

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Mexico. Mexican-born inhabitants made up two thirds (66.00 percent) of all foreign born individuals in Arizona City. Many of them had children whose place of birth was given as “Arizona,” making a distinction of who was Hispano and who was not even harder. If anything, a distinction could be made of Hispano families where both parents had come from Mexico, Anglo-Hispano families where only one parent had, and Anglo families where both parents had been born either elsewhere in the United States, or in Europe. The men in such families, if belonging to the power elite and cooperating in business and territorial affairs, as well as the women, working together in churches and societies of their own, had constant social contact.20 As in any society, the othering of non-members of a social group certainly existed. Unlike in mining camps, where Latinos were almost without fail lower-paid and less wealthy, the primary differentiating factor in Arizona City, however, was class, not race. At least, this was true for Anglo and Hispano families. The “colored” inhabitants are another matter altogether. With the exception of the above mentioned Chinese business owners, none had significant amounts of money, and none seem to have settled in town with family. All were males. Unlike whites, they never married Hispanic women. Racialist notions among Arizona City’s “whites” were clearly not absent, the dividing lines of who was considered what were simply drawn differently than elsewhere in the United Stats. The Hispanic idea of whiteness likely influenced how Hispano women chose their Anglo mates. Blacks, recognizably non-white in appearance, and seldom with any considerable financial means, fell through the roster of both Anglo visual and Hispano class constructions of whiteness. None of the “colored” inhabitants of Arizona city had any children living with them. Given the dominant ideas of whiteness among Mexican Norteños, it is entirely conceivable that Hispano women would have chosen black Anglos as their mates if these men had been wealthy. Five years after the end of the Civil War, though, black men from Texas such as John Brown, a 25-year-old laborer, had simply not had the opportunity to make a substantial amount of money. Brown, the sole black individual in Arizona City,21 perhaps suffered discrimination in an outright, obvious fashion. What is certainly clear however, is the fact that his former slave status and continuing racial resentment among many Anglos would have precluded him from becoming wealthy. This now led to his being classed as non-white by a predomi-

20 For examples of such societies, sodalities, and clubs, see: Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 136. 21 Not an altogether surprising status. The 1870 Census lists only 26 African Americans in all of Arizona Territory. Cf. Department of the Interior, Census Division, “Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census,” 400–401.

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nantly Hispano society, in which whiteness was, first and foremost, associated with class and status. Of the 310 members of $500-or-higher net worth families, 110 were listed as having been born in Mexico, most in Sonora. Dozens more had Hispano last names. Two dozen or so more were born in the United States (most in Arizona), but likely had at least one Hispano parent.22 Despite the unreliability of some of the numbers, this meant that more than a third, and likely even close to half of all members of these families could be considered Hispano.23 At the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, Hispano elites not only controlled much of the land and the political power in Arizona City. Hispanos were also members of the elite in comparable percentages to Anglos. Further, while the territorial elite, and especially those that were to acquire power from an antiHispanic, anti-Catholic national power structure, skewed towards Anglos, the local elites were intertwined. That fewer of the Hispanic members set out to occupy territorial and national-level offices, was initially a marker of greater familiarity with the American system of government by Anglos that had come from Eastern states. It was not initially a problem of race. It would become one before too long. For the decade from 1870 through 1880, it is problematic to speak of two opposing groups with differing goals when one speaks of Anglo versus Hispano elites. Even in Arizona City, closest to California of all major settlements in Arizona and New Mexico, the racial constructions prevalent on the West Coast scarcely mattered. This is surprising, as the Yuma Crossing was a major point of transshipment, and the major entry point also for goods and people from California via the land route. Also, Fort Yuma was connected to the rest of the territory, and to the nation via the telegraph. Although run by the military, this means of communication was open to be used by civilians as well, as long as they could afford the prices. The Colorado River was, at the same time, the life blood of the community and its biggest hurdle to integration. Arizona City’s entrepreneurs ran ferries across it and earned good money that way. The riverboat trade had also picked up, adding yet more revenue and more jobs to the area. But in a very practical way, the Colorado was also a barrier, an internal border to be dealt with. It was easy enough to cross it if necessary, but given that ferry schedules were limited, dependent on the season and the weather, and costly, few people crossed back and forth on a regular basis. The natural barrier of the river, separating California from Arizona, was

22 On problems of these indicators of Hispanicness see Chapter 4. 23 As it is not certain whether children living with families were always those of the two parents, or might have been either orphaned, or Anglo children brought into a new marriage, this number is even more tentative than others.

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much more of an obstacle at the time than the then still largely unenforced border line between the United States and Mexico. The spatial setup of the settlement both helped it become a major commercial center, and at the very same time impeded its communication with other parts of the United States. It was only when the railroad bridge made easy crossings possible that this changed. The 1880s and 1890s saw Yuma’s population surge, at first modestly, then ever faster. By the mid twentieth century, it had become one of the least Hispanic cities in the Southwest. Even though the percentage had recovered to about 55 percent Latino in Yuma by 2011, Hispanos were now twice as likely as whites to be poor.24 José Redondo: Local Before National José María Redondo had made a name for himself in Yuma even before he played an instrumental role in renaming his place of residence Yuma. He is listed as the delegate from Arizona City on a compilation of delegates to the House of Representatives of Arizona’s first territorial legislature compiled by Edward D. Tuttle, a soldier who had been sent to Yuma by the military.25 Redondo parlayed his forty-eight-year-long life in California, Arizona, and Sonora into several flourishing business ventures, building on some success as a forty-niner, and some remarkable experimentation with irrigation near the Colorado at Yuma Crossing.26 Just two months before his death of small pox on June 18th, the Arizona Sentinel explained just on what scale Redondo and his brother Jésus had

24 US Census Bureau, Arizona 2000, table 3: Race and Hispanic or Latino: 2000; US Census Bureau, “State & County Quick Facts: Yuma County, Arizona”; US Census Bureau, “American Fact Finder.” 25 Tuttle’s note is interesting for several reasons. It listed the delegates with their district, home town, and place of birth. Here, Tuttle typically gave the US state, if known. Many delegates came from the East Coast. The national mode had permeated his thinking far enough to make the distinction between individual American states, but otherwise give general descriptions, such as “Mexico,” “France,” or even “Europe.” Tuttle Collection, HM 26534, Box 1, Folder i, Huntington Library. Tuttle, as Brian Sandwich writes, is not always the most reliable source, as “his memory of dates and facts was occasionally clouded.” Sandwich, The Great Western, 62. Redondo’s membership in the legislature is corroborated by its official journal. See Lamar, The Far Southwest, 381. 26 Woznicki, The History of Yuma, 169.

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implemented irrigation: “We call attention to Redondo’s ranch with its 1,000 acres of grain, besides other crops, and its twenty-seven miles of irrigating ditches.”27 He had arrived at the Yuma crossing in 1859, and struck gold there, first literally, and later figuratively. The output from his placer mine near La Paz immediately made Redondo financially well-situated at a time when investment in the area was beginning to increase.28 His later ventures into growing irrigation crops created an industry in the area. Redondo’s many political functions resulted in his early death. Apart from being a member of four of Arizona’s early territorial legislatures – the first one, and then the seventh through ninth consecutively – in 1878 he became Yuma’s first elected mayor.29 When a small pox epidemic struck Yuma, Redondo sent his family to California, where he had also spent considerable time. He kept up his post in town and exposed himself to the sickness. The Sentinel celebrated his achievements in an obituary full of the flowery language of the era’s newspapers: On the 18th of June, 1878, Jose Maria Redondo passed away, in the prime of life, one of the most prominent pioneers of Arizona and one to whom, perhaps more than to any other, Yuma County is indebted for its present development of mineral wealth, and who has proved that her agriculture is practicable and remunerating.30

Howard Lamar writes that Redondo, along with Francisco S. Leon, was a “leader of the Spanish-American population.”31 This is undoubtedly true, but there is another aspect to his leadership that such classifications miss: Redondo was a leader in the general business community as well. The difference is not merely a slight one. While present-day Anglo-Hispano interactions often follow such a dichotomous model of communities aware of each other’s existence, but very often separate spatially as well as culturally, the early Southwest did not function this way.32

27 Shortly before his death, Redondo had to reduce his land holdings to 640 acres under the Desert Land Act. Ibid., 92; Arizona Sentinel, April 27, 1878. 28 Woznicki, The History of Yuma, 169; Moore, “Find a Grave: Jose Maria Redondo (1830– 1878)” 29 Moore, “Find a Grave: Jose Maria Redondo (1830–1878)”. 30 Arizona Sentinel, June 22, 1878. 31 Lamar, The Far Southwest, 382. For some reason, Lamar in his otherwise thorough listing omits Juan Elías, a prominent Tucsonan Hispano. 32 Sarah Deutsch memorably described this using the example of one colonia in Colorado in the 1980s: “The Spanish Americans tend to keep their distance from the Mexicans, looking down on them, and both groups keep a wary eye on Anglos. Anglos, they say, come only to vandalize or to collect bills.” Deutsch, “Landscape of Enclaves,” 110.

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Interpreting the Spanish Americans as a group is accurate. But they were a group much more in the sense that German Americans or Jewish traders in the West were; a network of kin and culture. To separate them into an Anglo vs. Hispano dichotomy is anachronistic and retroactively applies concepts that at the time were only nascent and still very changeable. The reason why this happens frequently in the literature on the American Southwest is obvious. The region has a clear, visible Hispanic past. This establishes Hispanos as a group that is known to fit obviously in the framework of the West. Usually, the other groups are Anglos and Native Americans. This trifecta, however, has long been exposed as deeply flawed. Much has been made of the ethnocentric and oversimplifying idea of American Indians opposing whites in the conquest of the American West. Anglos themselves have been deconstructed into groups, though they are rather often still seen as at least somewhat monolithic; Lamar’s list of Anglos encompasses all Anglos, no matter where they are originally from. Asian-Americans, many of whom came to Arizona through California or Sonora, further complicate the picture. Naming Redondo a “leader in the Spanish-American community” at a time and place where Anglos and Hispanos generally mixed, at least in the circles from which leaders tended to emerge, is not incorrect. However, at the same time not distinguishing leaders of the Anglo (to be even more exact: German, Italian, or Jewish) community, and instead tacitly accepting that they were just generally leaders of their local communities, implicitly others the Spanish Americans to a degree not supported by their living circumstances in the specific time and place. The 1870 census for Arizona City lists 647 white male inhabitants, 379 white females, seventeen “colored” males and ten “colored” females, an overall population of 1,053, of a total Arizona population of 9,658 in the 1870 census.33 Numbers for “colored” in the understanding of the 1870 census included all non-whites. Hispanos were classed as whites. The categories for non-whites were “Black,” “Mulatto,” “Chinese,” and “Indian.” The total count, done, as all of the census that year by Assistant Marshal Horace E. Lindsay, is somewhat inexact and seems to be misstating the number of colored males present. The addition of all those marked as non-white in the census records brings their number to eighteen. The ten females marked as colored were classed as “Indian.” Of the males, one was marked “Black,” six “Chinese,” and four “Indian.” Furthermore, there were six males with Anglo names in Arizona City counted first as “Indian,” or “Chinese” which was then corrected to “Kanaka” manually in small script over the race tick-

33 US Census. Arizona City, Yuma County, Arizona Territory. Microfilm Publication M 593, Roll 46, NARA Washington, DC; US Census Bureau, “Resident Population and Apportionment of the US House of Representatives.”

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box.34 These were all sailors originally from Hawai‘i. Their place of birth is given as “Sandwich Islands.”35 It seems from the stricken-through original checkmarks that initially some had been categorized as Indian and some as Chinese. Either way, Lindsay saw it necessary to invent a category of his own on the census form to deal with their presence, something he did not think necessary in any other case. It appears that, since they were all sailors and thus not permanently resident in Arizona City, they needed to be classed differently in terms of race than those who made the town their home.36 In the census form, a group of fourteen men, including Thomas Thompson, one of the Sandwich Islanders, is listed together as residing on the “Steam Boat Mohave,” with no other note made of their dwellings. It is safe to assume that the other five were also not permanent residents, as their sailing profession would have required them to spend most of the time on steam boats traveling up and down the Colorado to the Gulf of California. Their status as outsiders made it unlikely that they would have been integrated into the community. Their lower class status (none of them listed any ownership in real estate or personal estate) excluded them from continued contact with the business decision makers anyway. While outsiders were clearly kept away from the stratum of people in Arizona City that had influence over the destiny of the town, Hispanos and Anglos were on a roughly equal footing. This is evidenced by the way in which offspring who had one Native American parent were categorized. Both Anglo and Hispano households had children that were listed as “Indian” on the census form. That children from both groups could be classed in such a manner meant that having an Indian ancestor signified a separate racial status. The families in which this happened were all of lower class Anglo or Hispano backgrounds, as far as this can be ascertained by their head of households’ property and monetary holdings. Class and race were therefore significant markers of difference in Arizona City only in their intersection: higher class meant a more ready inclusion into definitions of whiteness. It does not necessarily follow that “Indian” Anglo and Hispano children were treated differently in Arizona City. Similar situations in other Mesilla communities, however, would indicate this to be true.

34 US Census. Arizona City, Yuma County, Arizona Territory. Microfilm Publication M 593, Roll 46, NARA Washington, DC. 35 Ibid. 36 Lindsay likely consulted someone familiar with the usage of the term in the British colonies or Hawai‘i itself, or have been told by someone who found such racial differentiation necessary. For the usage of “Kanaka” to denote inhabitants of Hawai‘i and other Pacific Islanders, see, for example, Koppel, Kanaka.

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An Anglo and Hispano combined elite of people who were financially well-off held the reins in most important decisions at the Yuma Crossing at the time Redondo became mayor. These members of the local elite interacted by necessity, as they had to work together in order to represent the locality to the outside world, both in business and in politics. The Redondos were an integral part of this elite, as were Anglo-Hispano couples like the Polhamuses. The nuclear Redondo family consisted of José, his wife Piedad (both forty years old in the 1870 census), their two daughters Lucy (fourteen) and Ellen (eight), and their two sons, Francisco (sixteen) and José (twelve). The elder José’s occupation is given as butcher. He owned the Yuma Meat Market with his brother, Jésus, who gave the same occupation. José’s wife is listed as “Keeping House,” son Francisco is a “Laborer,” and the three youngest children are considered to be “At Home.” José Redondo, listed as the head of the household, held $500 in personal estate value, but $5,000 in real estate, due to his large tracts of irrigated, fertile land. Jésus Redondo, married with two children, held $200 and $3,000 respectively. Stephen Redondo, who is identified as a “farmer,” held $5,000 in personal estate and another $5,000 in real estate. The Redondos were among the five richest landholders in Arizona City in 1870. In this they were collectively surpassed only by one person, Barney James, Jr., a thirty-two-year-old wholesale merchant born in New York and likely active in the river trade, who boasted $1,000 in personal wealth as well as a whopping $30,000 in real estate. He is the very first person listed on the Arizona City census. He lived together with Benjamin A. James (forty-two), a “retired merchant,” and William G. James (twenty-one), occupation “porter in store.” It can be assumed that Benjamin was Barney’s brother and that William was Benjamin’s son. It is likely that they had become rich in the gold rush, either as traders in California or at the Yuma Crossing, and that Benjamin had made enough money to retire early, leaving his younger brother to mind their store. New York born Isaac Polhamus also had more wealth and real estate than either one of the Redondos individually, though not more than all of them together. A long time river captain, Polhamus was another forty-niner who had landed in Yuma on his way back from a less than stellar mining career. Apart from his steamboating business, he promoted the introduction of catfish into the river, even pressing Arizona Territory delegate to Congress Marcus Aurelius Smith to assist him to persuade the Federal authorities to that end. That Smith obliged shows Polhamus’ influence in Arizona at the time.37 Polhamus married Sacramento Sambrano and had eleven children with her. At first, Polhamus

37 As the Weekly Yuma Sun noted: “Mr. Smith has been before the fish commissioners with indifferent success, but is still hammering away at the matter.” Weekly Yuma Sun, April 12, 1901.

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spoke no Spanish and Sambrano no English. They had to communicate through a translator.38 Taken together, the holdings of the Redondos were the second most valuable tract of land in Arizona City. Given this, and the fact that of the only two landholders of similar wealth, one was an Anglo who had married a Hispano woman, it is hard to justify keeping the two communities entirely separate. In 1878, Redondo was elected mayor of all of Yuma, which at the time was already significantly Anglo. That a Hispano could no longer be elected to such office there three decades later was due to the culmination of a development which began that same year with the Southern Pacific’s bridging of the Colorado and subsequent buyout of the river transport company in Yuma.39 The bridging of the Colorado also marked the point when Yuma proper, on the Arizona side of the river was connected to the telegraph network. Before that, the only station had been in Fort Yuma on the California side, which was linked through the military telegraph from California. At least on one occasion, during a flood in 1867, this had prompted wagon master Tom Hayes to swim across with his horse to dispatch an important telegram to San Diego.40 Though, one hopes, not everyone who needed to communicate with the world at large was forced to don bathing trunks, the fact that the telegraph office was separated by the Colorado, only accessible by paid ferry, further reduced the number of people who had been able to avail themselves of telegraphic communications. The permanent bridging of the river also brought with it a reorientation in the town: until then, the Colorado had been perceived as the most formidable barrier in the town’s vicinity. It cut off California from Arizona, and its unstable, meandering riverbed loomed large among the reasons why Yuma, though initially registered in San Diego County, became a part of Arizona.41 The bridging was accomplished right at the time when international border enforcement became formalized. The racial and power shift that followed these two connections occurred during the period of extraction. In Yuma, this extraction meant agriculture, and growing irrigated cattle farms on both sides of the US– Mexico border. Increasing enforcement of laws pertaining to ranching and border crossing in two legal systems meant that trans-border ranchers were faced with having to deal with both these legal systems. This meant adaptation and monetary investment. Although as a group, ranchers made that adaptation, the marking and

38 Ibid.; McDaniel, “If Walls Could Talk.” 39 Woznicki, The History of Yuma, 37–38, 83. 40 Ibid., 45. 41 Bufkin, “Geographic Change at Yuma Crossing,” 161–163.

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patrolling of the border in the long run meant that only a few large haciendas could survive. Forbidding legal fees took care of the rest. They gave up or sold out.42 Still, the shift away from an Anglo-Hispanic elite to a solely Anglo one in Yuma, or elsewhere in the Gadsden Purchase area, was not a foregone conclusion. It was hastened along by three concurrent developments: the decreasing friction of interstate travel on the US side, the increasing friction of border crossing, restricted by customs houses and ports of entry, and the onus put on Hispanos by having to navigate two legal systems. In theory, this should have been just as inconvenient for Anglos. But while the Mexican state had much to gain from encouraging Anglo investment, and its courts courted Anglo ranchers and entrepreneurs, American courts in the territorial system were staffed with judges appointed by faraway national officials. With racism on the rise, many among them either openly or behind closed doors thought little of Hispanos, whether American citizens or not. Discriminatory national concepts of race thus permeated local communities that themselves had produced little racial animosity. While locals might treat each other as equals, before the eyes of the law, imposed on them by the nation, they were not. Many small biases added up, although, as Chapter 6 will show, some Anglo appointees played Ariadne to their Hispano allies, going out of their way to help them navigate the labyrinthine rules and regulations.

T UCSON : H UB

OF A

W ANING A NGLO -H ISPANO E LITE

In every respect, Tucson is Arizona’s second city. Phoenix arguably snatched away the prime title from its Southern cousin when it became the location of the territorial capital in 1880, ostensibly on the grounds that it was centrally located in Arizona, unlike southern Tucson, and the other previous capital, Prescott, in the north. In truth this made little sense geographically or in terms of infrastructure. It did make sense politically for the Phoenix boosters who managed the transfer. At some point between 1900 and 1910 Phoenix reported more inhabitants than Tucson for the first time. It has kept its edge until today.43 Pinning down a founding or establishment of Tucson as a community is challenging. The settlement incorporated as a city under Arizona law in 1877, making Tucson certainly the first incorporated city in the territory. Mission San Xavier de Bac near Tucson was founded by the peripatetic Padre Kino in 1699. It is, even after Tucson’s various growth spurts, still located safely beyond city limits today, at a

42 St. John, “Divided Ranges,” 122, 124, 129. 43 Gibson and Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, table 17.

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distance of about ten miles (sixteen kilometers) from the city center.44 The name Tucson first appeared on a map drawn by Kino in 1695.45 Yet the surrounding desert made permanent European settlement on the banks of the – then still intermittently flowing – Santa Cruz river daunting. Despite the available water, travel to and from this northernmost reach of the Spanish empire was prohibitively risky and time-consuming. Moreover, little, it initially seemed, could be gained from a settlement there.46 Only the late eighteenth century would see the next push by the Spanish. Tucson’s self-image as a continuous community rests on its founding in 1775.47 This was the year a Spanish garrison was moved to the present town site, centering on the presidio. Some twenty years earlier, in 1757, Tucson had already gained the status of an independent mission. C. L. Sonnichsen chose 1775 as the beginning of his 1982 history of the community, no doubt purposely narrativizing the founding of his titular “American City” within the larger history of the nation.48 Literature on the “Old Pueblo,” as the city takes pride in calling itself, establishing a temporal, if not political primacy in Arizona, is plentiful.49 1775 represents the beginning of continuous European settlement at the foot of the Santa Catalina mountains. “The Black Hills,” as they are known in the Tohono

44 I use the founding date given by the Catholic Encyclopedia entry, which was written by Arizona bishop Henry Granjon himself. Some sources, most notably the mission website itself, state it to be 1692. Mission San Xavier del Bac, “History.” The Southwestern Mission Research Center’s history of Tucson clarifies that Kino was likely first in the vicinity in 1692. It does not, however, equate this with the founding of a mission or town. Southwestern Mission Research Center, Tucson, 21. Cf. Granjon, “Mission of San Xavier del Bac.” 45 Southwestern Mission Research Center, Tucson, 21. 46 Ibid., 66. 47 A notion that is held onto in public celebrations, most notably the centennial and bicentennial in 1875 and 1975. 48 He strongly tied it in with other historical developments of relevance to the United States: “Four months after Paul Revere mounted his borrowed horse and set out on his famous midnight ride, Tucson, Arizona, was founded.” Sonnichsen, Tucson, 7. 49 Given Tucson’s function as a regional hub and most important Arizonan settlement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is well treated in the larger histories of the state, such as Thomas Sheridan’s Arizona, and Powell, Arizona. See further:, Southwestern Mission Research Center Tucson; Bret Harte, Tucson; Barnes, “Tucson: Development of a Community”; Eppinga, Tucson, Arizona; Brook and Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives, Tucson: The Building of a Jewish Community; Schellie, The Tucson Citizen; Drachman, From Cowtown to Desert Metropolis; Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses; Cummings, Pachucas and Pachucos in Tucson; Woosley and Arizona Historical Society, Early Tucson; Kalt, Tucson Was a Railroad Town; Henry, Another Tucson.

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O’odham language, also gave the settlement its name, albeit via centuries of Spanish and English language speakers’ corruption of “Cuk-son,” likely meaning “At the foot of the Black Hills.”50 The description was geographically correct at the time. Today, Tucson has long spread in all directions, reaching towards mountain ranges on all sides that here limit the view of the West’s iconic wide open spaces. Covering acres upon desert acres with strip-malled, condo-developed, countryclubbed suburbia, it is the result of individual developers throughout the past century buying up cheap land, always on the edge of the many times expanded city. Though mostly indistinguishable, these parts of the town, like tree rings, still show the origin of their onetime raison d’être.51 Following a typical American city grid originally laid out by the initial 1871 survey, here, as in so many other places, numbered Avenues run north–south, and Streets run east–west.52 Thomas Sheridan observes that by 1881, Mexicans and Anglos had clustered in de facto, though never de jure, segregated settlements, the patterns of which were already clearly visible. Sheridan mainly bases his findings on the ninth census, conducted in 1860, as well as the eleventh census from 1880, and the thirteenth, taken in 1900.53 In concert with his analysis, a look at the 1870 census allows an even more detailed picture of the changes. Additionally, since the 1870 census is the first one that reports a significant population in Arizona City/Yuma, it is necessary to look at it to achieve direct comparability between the two settlements.54 In terms of the everyday interactions between Anglos and Hispanos and their communications in terms of the spaces they lived in, 1870 is an important step in

50 While most agree that the bowdlerized town name means “at the foot of the Black Hills,” Charles Polzer, writing the chapter on “Black Robes, Black Springs, and Beyond” in Tucson: A Short History, contends that a “more likely alternative is ‘black spring.’” Southwestern Mission Research Center, Tucson, 22. 51 This sprawl recalls what Thomas Sieverts terms “Zwischenstadt.” See: Vicenzotti, Der ‘Zwischenstadt’-Diskurs, 16, 95; Sieverts, Zwischenstadt. 52 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 91. A Tucson oddity, the “stravenue,” running diagonal to, or curving beside streets and avenues, exists in developments dating from the 1960s and 1970s. 53 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 6. The numbers Sheridan uses stem from the work of the Arizona Heritage Center’s Mexican Heritage Project. He also employs numbers from 1920 and 1940 compiled by the Tucson Research Project at the University of Arizona’s Department of Anthropology. As I have chosen to use the same racial categorizations made by Sheridan and the analysts at the Mexican Heritage Project, I will employ their data throughout. 54 Since Deming was not officially founded until 1881, data is harder to come by on that town. With the well-known absence of most of the data from the 1890 census, there are no population statistics for Deming before 1900, already well into the Anglo takeover.

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between the non-segregated Hispanic town of 1860, and the already visibly segregated American one of 1880. A map of Tucson in 1870 would not have shown a clear distinction between Anglo and Hispano neighborhoods yet. Still, it would have been easily apparent that there were whole city blocks in which no Anglos lived at all and small concentratrions of houses, three or four next to each other, where only Anglos clustered.55 Most strikingly, the 80-page stack of census forms that lists all of Tucson’s 3,215 inhabitants does not feature one person not born either in Arizona, New Mexico, California, or Mexico for the first four pages. On page five, there is only one individual, George Cox (thirty-eight), a US mail carrier originally from New Hampshire. Cox was living together with Isabel Pacheco, born in Sonora. On page six, there is one more, William Sampson, a twenty-four-yearold laborer from Virginia, whose wife Maria was likewise from Sonora. On page seven, there is, in contrast, a cluster of six residences, only one of which was occupied solely by Hispanos. More examples can be found throughout the census document. On page 34, there is a cluster of eight dwellings occupied solely by Anglos. Another such cluster can be found on page 46, where eight residences totaling twenty individuals are exclusively Anglo. The most striking agglomeration of Anglos, however, comes at the end of the Tucson census. Beginning on the bottom of page 79, and occupying all of pages 80 and 81, there is a cluster of twenty-three separate residences, seventy-two people, none of them Hispano, and all male: the US army fort was the most obvious reminder to Sonorenses in town that they lived under a nation that consisted overwhelmingly of people who did not share their culture, language, and beliefs.56 It is obvious from the 1870 census, which was taken on a street-by-street, building-by-building basis, that Hispanos and Anglos were already segregating, even if this had not yet altered the “feel” of the town because of the small number of Anglos present. In itself, this observation does not constitute anything unexpected. Clustering according to cultural familiarity, a shared language, or social connections is a typical feature of immigration and migration in the nineteenth-century United States.57 Yet, there are two salient observations to be made here: For one thing, Tucson, a place usually described as still racially integrated until the 1880s, already showed clear signs of racial segregation in 1870, ten years before the railroad arrived and the influx of Anglos increased. The settlement patterns point to two attitudes among Anglo Tucsonans in the 1870s. Either they were single

55 US Census. Tucson, Pima County, Arizona Territory. Microfilm Publication M 593, Roll 46, NARA Washington, DC. 56 US Census. Tucson, Pima County, Arizona Territory. Microfilm Publication M 593, Roll 46, NARA Washington, DC. 79–81. 57 Daniels, Coming to America, passim.

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men who married into Hispanic families and lived largely as part of Hispano culture, or they had come in groups – as business partners, miners, or families – and tried to find others of their own kind who they settled near. In essence, these are the two different reactions to existing Hispanic society common to Anglos who came to the Mesilla. They either kept their distance from the Hispanos, or attempted to accommodate and fit in. Therefore, one can also hardly speak of a change in attitude among Anglos toward Hispanos in the Gadsden area later on. The two attitudes always coexisted. In the beginning, those who held the latter and attempted to adapt to the culture present, had an advantage over those who attempted to go it on their own. When circumstances changed, the advantage flipped to those who represented national, anti-Hispano attitudes. As the United States approached the nadir of race relations, and racism was a prevailing attitude in its centers of power, this translated into a business advantage, and further attracted those who held such beliefs to the region. Secondly, the comparison with Arizona City’s census for the same year shows that a similar pattern was visible there. Partially because of the newness of the settlement on the banks of the Colorado, different structures had already emerged in Yuma. There was no established Hispanic settlement. There was also no core city around which to build, as there was in Tucson, a town arranged around a military presidio. Yuma’s beginning, the first military installation to bear the name, was a fort on the other side of the river from the later town. The quartermaster depot, which would assure the Yuma Crossing’s economic importance into the mid-1880s, had been established on the Arizona side in 1864, and because of its important role in delivering supplies to Western military installations, dominated commerce in town.58 It was built as close to the river and its port facilities as possible, yet as far away from it as necessary. Arizona City had been almost completely moved to higher ground and reconstructed after a severe flood in 1862. The Hispanos, Anglos, and combined Hispano-Anglo families of Yuma settled wherever they could purchase land, or wherever it was convenient for them. A relatively large upper class, consisting of an elite and secondary elite together accounting for more than a quarter of the town’s inhabitants, and a population concentrated in a small space around the river crossing meant that overall settlement was mixed. There were no clear lower-class or upper-class neighborhoods. Unlike in other Arizonan towns, this cannot fully be explained by a fear of Apache raids. The Nnee occasionally strayed this far west, but mostly kept to the central part of southern Arizona. Instead, the spatial realities of Yuma made such clustering necessary. The Colorado kept changing course, and buildings placed farther afield could easily be swept away. Therefore, residents who were worth thousands of dollars

58 Brandes, “A Guide to the History of the US Army Installations in Arizona,” 47.

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lived next to those who listed no monetary possessions at all in the 1870 census. For reasons of its geography, its settlement history, and the economic opportunities in transportation and irrigation that the lower Colorado provided, Arizona City was free of enclaves. This despite an already much higher number of Anglos present than lived in Tucson, where racial clustering was already beginning. Yet by the turn of the century, three decades later, Yuma was a much more segregated town than Tucson. As the border gained more importance, Yuma was directly exposed to the conflicts that emerged (or re-emerged) because of it. As the Southwest’s own version of Jim Crow took hold, not only did Mexicans become increasingly discriminated against, the Spanish language also took a back seat. As Civil Rights snuck back onto the visible public agenda in the 1950s and 1960s, Spanish returned, though opposed by the conservative political power of what Tucsonans are fond of calling the “State of Maricopa” and the Phoenixdominated state politics. Although by now much decimated in power, Tucson still preserves regional importance. It is the closest major urbanized settlement to the Mexican border in Arizona, about sixty miles (100 km) north of smaller Nogales, a border town of nineteenth-century founding that only grew on the border because there was a border.59 Where Tucson is Arizona’s Old World, Spanish-grown locality, a place that had a distinct local identity as an outpost of the Spanish Empire, before the advent of the nation state, Nogales is its modern day, borderlands-born counterpart; a place that only exists because what had been one contiguous region was, by historical whim, divided into two. The Boxes: African Americans in Multiple Endeavors Wiley Box and Hannah DuPont Box are typically described as the first people of African descent to settle in Tucson.60 Much uncertainty exists, however, whether this is accurate. They are variously said to have arrived between 1850 and 1879. As they are not listed in the territorial census for 1860 or 1864, the earlier dates seem less plausible. Moreover, even though Wiley and Hannah Box were supposedly married in Oklahoma, there is a marriage certificate for Wiley Box and a Priscilla Lewis in Wiley Box’s papers at the the Arizona Historical Society. Its finding aid for the papers states that Wiley probably arrived in Tucson in 1879. The papers themselves consist of only a few calling cards for Priscilla Box, the marriage certificate for Wiley and Priscilla from Robertson County, Texas, dated September 22, 1870, and two letters written by Wiley Box to his son, James Lewis. Written from Tucson, one bears the date of September 2, 1885, the other is dated simply

59 Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 149. 60 Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 14.

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November 1885. The September letter tells of Box’s worries concerning an upcoming trial, while the November letter relates to James that Box was exonerated and about to head to the Mexican border “as I am flat broke.”61 Given that Box apparently got himself into a situation that required the opinion of a jury of his peers, it seems not unthinkable that his marriage to Priscilla was either dissolved, or that he illegally married Hannah DuPont despite still being married to Priscilla. As names were not fixed in the nineteenth-century West, it is also possible that Priscilla Lewis at some point decided to take on the name of Hannah DuPont, either to reemphasize a family connection to French-speaking blacks in Louisiana, or to fictionally introduce such a connection, in the hopes that ideas of class and race prevalent there would work to her advantage.62 Another, perhaps more obvious explanation, is that researchers might have continuously confused two generations of the same family, as Wiley Box and his wife had two daughters, one of them named Anna, a name quite similar to Hannah.63 Two painted portraits of Wiley and Hannah Box offer some support to the hypothesis of an intended racial whitening of the family. This would have built upon established conventions in Mexico, and especially in Norteño society, where gradations of racial belonging existed that were second in complexity on the North American continent only to those found in Louisiana.64 In the Hispanic Southwest the practice, known as “blanquearse,” literally “whitening,” was commonplace. It was always a social process, meaning that it indicated an individual or family had moved into a higher social stratum. This had less to do with skin color, and more with social practice. Whiteness as a value per se was not something alien to the region. While it was compatible with US notions of manifest destiny and the subjugation of a continent, it did not originate with them. The Spanish Southwest

61 Wiley Box Papers, 1837–1913, MS 977, AHS. 62 While racial constructions in Louisiana meant that “[i]n general, Negroes in Louisiana occupied a socially and economically depressed position,” before the advent of Jim Crow, Louisana blacks at that time, as in other parts of the American South “possessed greater political, social, and civil rights […] than at any time thereafter until the 1950’s.” African Americans “exercised considerable political influence by voting, holding state and local offices, receiving Federal and state patronage, and participating in party conventions and councils.” Dethloff and Jones, “Race Relations in Louisiana,” 304. 63 Wiley Box Papers, 1837–1913, MS 977, AHS. 64 The AHS biographical note on Box states that “Box is considered the first AfricanAmerican pioneer in Tucson, but even his racial heritage is uncertain. He was supposedly the son of an English physician and an African-American woman in New Orleans. Ibid.

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had valued whiteness, in connection with the higher class status that it bestowed, and had semi-formal manners of establishing it.65 Figure 3: Hannah DuPont Box and Wiley Box

Tucson Territorial Pioneers Project. Arizona Historical Society.

Both Boxes were portrayed as exceedingly light-skinned. If he looked anything like his painting, Wiley could easily have passed for a white Anglo. Wearing a closefitting dark suit in his portrait, he resembles a stern, younger version of Jules Verne’s fictional hero Captain Nemo as popularly imagined. Displaying a full, wavy beard, light colored hair that might have been an auburn brown, and clear eyes, Wiley Box’s portrait looks almost photorealistic. Hannah DuPont Box cuts a classy figure on her portrait from the Tucson Territorial Pioneers Project files. She is more readily identifiable as African American than her husband, though obviously not of exclusively African descent. Given her maiden name, she likely stemmed from a creole Louisiana family. Wearing a high-collared dark dress with a white blouse that is only visible as a strip of collar, her attire is typically Victorian female, perhaps even a bit more decorous than others depicted in the collection. Her dark, thin, frizzy hair is controlled into a bun. Her face, looking left in a serene half-smile, exudes an expression of stoic confidence. Since light skin color, in the context of Hispanic social “whitening,” for women was associated not only with beauty, but also with chastity and good manners, her attire is telling, pointing to a full identification with Victorian fashion and its under-

65 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 54.

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lying social expectations of female domesticity on the part of either the party commissioning the painting, the painter, or both. Hannah died in 1894. Wiley’s death in 1913 is, depending on the version of the story one trusts, either something of a tragic mishap, or an occurrence of, if not of racial violence directly, then certainly of the effect that the second-classing of African Americans in Arizona had. James Yancy misdates the incident, but otherwise gives the same rundown of it as an Arizona Daily Star article from June 7, 1913; albeit with some key differences. According to the Star, it appears that two white men, Bert Higgins, and a man whose name is given only as “Reisen” wrapped Box’s legs in cloth saturated with kerosene, and set them on fire. The Star calls this a practical joke (although the writer once refers to the men as “jokesters” in quotation marks, indicating that he was perhaps not wholly convinced of this version of the story himself). But even though cruel practical jokes were not infrequent in the turn-of-the-century West,66 in this version there is a lingering suspicion that race played a role in the burning. It is, after all, hard to conceive that someone would cover both a man’s legs in gas-drenched cloth, light them up, and hope for a harmless outcome. What is especially interesting about the article is not the detailed description of the circumstances of Box’s death, but the fact, that he himself is never referred to as a “negro,” even though the incident, as the Star reports, happened on the premises “of what was formerly a negro club” on South Meyer Street (also given as North Court Street further down in the article). This further underlines that even at the height of Jim Crow before World War I, his race was not the most important descriptor applied to Box. The fact that he looks thoroughly Anglo on his studio portrait is significant here. In 1913, Tucson had upward of 13,000 inhabitants, more than quadruple the 1870 number, and almost double that of 1880.67 It was certainly an environment in which many people still knew each other, but also one in which racial clustering had become apparent. A subject interviewed by Harry T. Getty for his Interethnic Relationships in the Community of Tucson, for example, relates that during the first decades of Tucson’s American existence, blacks faced no restrictions in where they were allowed to settle and what establishments they could patronize. Only later did ethnic enclaves develop; likely at the same time that the new, poorer Mexican immigrants began clustering together at the end of the nineteenth century. Tellingly, this split occurred only after the Indian Wars had ended

66 Fisher and Holmes, Gold Rushes and Mining Camps, 172. 67 The 1910 Census gives the number of Tucson’s inhabitants as 13,193. By 1920, it had risen to 20,292. The number for 1870 is 3,224. There were 7,007 inhabitants in 1880, and 5,150 in 1890. The lower number in 1890 is likely due to the fact of a different manner of counting from 1880 on.

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and Native American raids, which had encouraged compact settlements in the name of safety, had ceased to be an important fact of life in the Southwest.68 The Star calls Box merely “the old man,” and mentions that the charge against his killers is increased from mayhem to manslaughter after Box’s recovery seems unlikely, and bail for Higgins is increased from $1,000 to $2,500, certainly a sizable sum.69 Yancy’s somewhat muddled version of the event, on the other hand, refers specifically to “the death of Mr. Box [that] was brought about as the result of a trick played on him by one of his Negro friends.” That friend, we are made believe, meant Box no harm, but intended only to prank him. Yancy’s version tells only of one leg, to which a rag doused with gasoline was attached, rather than both legs, which in the Star’s telling were completely covered with the kerosene cloth.70 Yancy sets the story in the 1880s, and claims that Wiley and Hannah Box stayed together until this event. Overall, the Star’s story seems much more plausible. It provides both names for the perpetrators, and the venue of the event, as well as numbers for the amount of bail, and the specific charges brought against them. What, then, are we to make of Box’s death? Accepting the Star’s depiction, and taking into account the fact that Tucson was, at the time, slowly segregating, the violent demise of Wiley Box needs to be assessed in the light of a rising number of lynchings and other acts of racial violence in the Deep South.71 In a national climate of unparalleled racial hatred, a time period so exceptional that it was termed the “nadir” of US race relations by Rayford Logan, an incident such as this in a Southwestern town must give us pause.72 Race, until the early 1910s, had been a

68 Getty, Interethnic Relationships, 16. 69 Arizona Daily Star, June 7, 1913. In 2015, the value of 1913’s $1,000, by a simple purchasing power calculation, would have been $24,700. While the initial bail was already on the high end of the spectrum, its increase by 150 percent led to a value that in 2015 equaled $61,700. 70 Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 15. 71 Tolnay and Beck, “Racial Violence and Black Migration.” 72 Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought. While the term “nadir,” sometimes called “black nadir” is Logan’s, C. Vann Woodward, with his The Strange Career of Jim Crow, published the following year, drove the debate surrounding it. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This resulted in the “nadir” becoming an accepted part of the historiographical canon. Other historians, notably of the Columbia school, have since contested many of Logan’s and Woodward’s specific claims. The term, however, remains a useful one, and is also employed by modern historians. Cf. Gilmore, “‘Somewhere’ in the Nadir of African American History”; Loewen and Sebesta, The Confederate and NeoConfederate Reader, 277–282; “Black Nadir,” Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, 41– 45; Fulop, “‘The Future Golden Day of the Race’,” 228–256.

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complicated cacophony of theoretically incompatible, but in practice coexisting ideas and categorizations. They varied in combination, depending on the social structure, business opportunities, or even individual likes and dislikes, and therefore were often singular to one town, village, or camp. Linda Gordon, describing the contemporary racial categories of Clifton and Morenci, two adjoining Southern Arizona mining towns close to the Mexican border, picks up on the specificity of racial constructions in turn-of-the-century Arizona: [R]acial categories […] were riddled with exceptions – but then race is like a language, structured out of irregularities as well as rules, the inconsistencies as numerous as those of English grammar. Race has often been supple, mobile, even contradictory, but in small towns in particular, social categories coexisted with singularities, and people got themselves defined as individuals rather than as members of groups. Because of this specificity, racial orders arose as microsystems and, like microclimates, the more remote the area, the more specific the microsystem.73

Gordon’s point on “microclimates” of race constructions is well taken. Racial clustering and a growing national anti-black sentiment alone can perhaps account for most of the change from 1885 to 1913. But why did African Americans in the Southwest begin living in enclaves in the first place? One important factor to be considered is the composition of the African American populace in Tucson itself. Before 1900, African Americans who lived in Southern Arizona had come mostly from Northern and Mid-Atlantic states or from California. After 1900, more and more came from the Deep South, and more and more came altogether. Tucson’s African American population rose by 134 percent during the first three decades of the twentieth century, while its overall population increased by a still impressive, but much lower 60 percent.74 This is undoubtedly a result of blacks leaving the South in the waves of the Great Migration. The mass relocation that is known mostly for redistributing African Americans from the South to the urban and industrial centers of the North, affected all parts of the United States and in a continental context, Canada and Mexico as well. Black migration because of economic factors also often occurred within the South, rather than only from South to North. Even the other great motivator for migration, racial violence, was more prevalent in some parts of the South than others, which meant that going to the North was not always necessary if this was the driving force to pack up and leave one’s situation, county, or state. The Southwest

73 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 97–98. 74 Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 117.

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offered opportunities for economic betterment in addition to being a much safer environment than both the North and the post-Reconstruction South. Coming from the South, this growing number of new desert dwellers would have been exposed to the system of Jim Crow at its height. They had internalized, if not the notion that they were inferior to whites, certainly that they were different from them, and that it was wise to keep a distance from them. This category of recent arrivals likely accounts for the change in settlement patterns. In retreating to neighborhoods of their own, they also copied a strategy pioneered by the Mexican mine workers. Immigrants from Mexico were, throughout the Southwest, considered to be in a different, lower racial category than those who had descended from the original Spanish inhabitants of the region.75 Linda Gordon, in her book on Clifton and Morenci, speaks of a three-tiered racial system, made up of Anglos at the top, “Euro-Latins,” i.e. the light-skinned descendants of Sonoran and Arizonan Spanish elites, in the middle, and the new arrivals, menial mine wage workers, on the bottom. This is the system that, with slight alterations, also existed in Tucson. The town, although the center of the mining industry, was never dominated by it to the exclusion of other lines of business like remote mining towns were. The hardening racial categories in Tucson also still allowed for exceptions in the case of prominent Spanish-descended citizens. Still, that hardening had become palpable. The wage workers, “pioneers” in much the same sense as the Anglos that came at the same time, were primarily from southern Mexican states, and poor. They kept to themselves, aiming to transplant and adapt the village culture they were used to. This also made easier their attempts to better their social situation, on the one hand by relying on mechanisms of survival that had functioned well within that culture and on the other hand by adding new opportunities in wage work.76 Theirs was a migratory existence. Many crossed the international border several times every year. These pioneers abandoned wage work to tend to agriculture in Mexico and then headed back north once the crops had been harvested. Sarah Deutsch makes a varied, and many-sided argument concerning the migratory patterns of Hispanics. She shows that Mexicans established what may be best described as “seedling” settlements of their home villages once those had become too populous to sustain their inhabitants agriculturally. As they moved northward, into Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, the Hispanic and the Anglo frontier increasingly intersected and interacted. Someone who considered himself Mexicano might spend a portion of the year in either a village in Mexico, or a transplanted “Mexican” village in the US Southwest and the rest working in mining

75 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 101. 76 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 13–40, esp. 35, 40.

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or industrial agriculture for an American company on either side of the border.77 The arrangement proved sufficiently useful for both Anglos and Hispanics, despite Mexicans suffering from, and at times vociferously complaining about, earnings that were considerably less than what was paid to Anglos in the same jobs, and despite Anglo company executives grumbling about the ostensibly transient nature of Mexican workers. While it served both sides well enough for a time, this mode of existence had the almost inexorable consequence that neither Anglos nor Hispanics had much interest, need, or incentive to build communities together. The large number of Mexicans already present kept to themselves and so increasingly did the newly arriving African Americans. Owing to a solidifying national system of race construction that increasingly allowed only for two categories, white and nonwhite, they saw themselves either driven into exclusion by the white population, or clustered together for all the benefits of familiarity and kinship that led immigrants from overseas to settle in “Germantowns,” “Little Italies” or “Chinatowns” all across the United States.78 The initial absence of Eastern norms of racial grouping in no way meant the absence of racial categories in Arizona. The trial Wiley Box faced, evidence of which can be found in his letters, is an indication that the treatment of African Americans in Arizona in the 1880s was never entirely equitable. Yet it certainly did not follow the Southern example. Box was put on trial in 1885, but set free when the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. In a small enough community, Box, the individual, was exonerated or condemned in similar ways to an Anglo or Mexican contemporary.79 In contrast, the 1913 incident that led to Box’s death only makes sense when viewed in light of the change over time in Tucson’s racial and social composition. It also necessitates taking into account the loss of immediate networks of people from different backgrounds as the frontier town gave way to the modern city. Something significant changed in Tucson’s racial microclimate from the 1870s and 1880s to the 1910s. While Box was exonerated by a jury despite his race, likely because African Americans were considered community members as much, or

77 Only men, responsible in Southwestern Hispano culture for contacts with the non-village outside world, initially sought wage work. Ibid., 87–106. Mexicano was a self-appellation containing “in considerable part [feelings of] nation and patriotism,” while to Anglos, “Mexican” was an ethnic term. Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 102–103. 78 For an overview of settlement patterns during the two major immigration waves of the nineteenth century, see “The Century of Immigration, 1820–1924” in: Daniels, Coming to America, 121–286. 79 The reason why Box was tried remains unclear. The material in his papers is inconclusive, and it has not been possible to obtain the requisite court records for 1885 to elucidate the nature of his alleged offense.

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nearly as much as representatives of other races, this would not likely have occurred after 1900. Box would have been overwhelmingly judged as an individual in 1885. In 1913, by contrast, the picture had changed to one that consistently saw blacks as a racial other. It does not necessarily follow that Arizona was now completely in the sway of Eastern, or easpecially Southern ideas of race. As late as the 1940s, Tucson had a mixed-race college football team which was not allowed to play in Texas as it was not composed entirely of whites. Whatever degree racial calcification had reached, it had never permeated as deeply as in the Lone Star State.80 One major trend, however, was towards simplification of racial models across the United States. With scientific racism on the rise, impotently protested by some while accepted by most, there was now a seemingly dependable, modern way to distinguish the races.81 While this brought relief from prejudice for those groups which had over the course of the century been accepted into whiteness by managing to redefine the race that had been prescribed upon them into a mere marker of ethnicity, its flip side was, by necessity, an even stronger exclusion of the racial other that remained. This was felt most harshly by African Americans and Chinese Americans. In the Southwest especially, it also affected Hispanos, recent immigrants most of all.82

80 Racism, of course, is still systemic in the social and political culture of the United States, including the Southwest. Yet, what this comparison reveals is that many gradations and at times incompatible notions of inclusion and exclusion continued to exist in different parts of the South and Southwest. C. L. Sonnichsen, “Recollections of a Wayfaring Scholar.” Manuscript. AZ 516, U of A, 215. As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has argued, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement can be found in the 1930s. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1235. 81 This is true for the time of the “nadir,” although some protests, most prominently the actions and writings of Franz Boas, had already set in motion the deconstruction of scientific racism even then. Writing in 1963, Thomas F. Gossett, in his Race: The History of an Idea in America perhaps put it most succinctly: “It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.” Gossett, Race, 418. For a short history of Boas’s involvement with combatting nineteenth century racial ideas, see, for example: ibid., 418–430; Baker, “The Location of Franz Boas within the AfricanAmerican Struggle.” 82 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 98, 104. Gordon also acknowledges that two incompatible systems of white and non-white existed in the US at the turn of the century. She does not, however, bring this fact into communication with the disappearance of the mish-mash of racial ideas current in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its replacement by pseudo-Darwinian scientific racism.

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A discourse that floatingly used “race” for groups such as Irish, Polish, or Hungarian immigrants, was necessarily more open to interpretations of what “race” meant than one that purportedly defined the term through objective, scientific means. This would have had less impact on long-held prejudices in the South, which drew comparably few immigrants and where the one drop rule never allowed complex racial categories and subcategories to develop. In the West, however, it created pockets of admissibility, to the point where some blacks could define themselves as white, while at the same time many poor Hispanos were precluded from doing so.83 The next generation of the Box family offers a glimpse into what had changed in Anglo-Mexican relations over time and what had not. The case of William Neal, who ran various transportation businesses in Southern Arizona in the 1870s and 1880s and later became a hotel proprietor, is instructive. He married Anna Box, daughter of Wiley Box, on January 4, 1892, in St. Augustine’s Cathedral in Tucson. Rev. E. Jerard officiated, Rosario Brena and his wife Maria C. Brena were witnesses. This speaks of close personal relations between ethnic groups even into the late nineteenth century, and perhaps as late as the early twentieth century. In 1911, when Josephine Box married the white Anglo Shadwell Bowyer in a ceremony officiated by Bowyer’s father, Herbert, the witnesses were Richard R. Gross and Maria Munquiera.84 Both marriages tell of the continued existence of an interconnected, multiracial and multicultural group encompassing, or descended from the “pioneer” elite that paid scant heed to the increasingly intruding standards of racial ins and outs. Hispanos remained relatively well-off and powerful well into the twentieth century. Pedro C. Brena, son of Rosario and Maria, who lived from 1885– 1930, is listed as a “broker” in the AHS’s biographical files. He can be assumed to have led a financially sound existence, no doubt helped by his being born into a “pioneer” family.85 At least until 1900, Hispanos in Tucson were still very much part of the town’s middle class. Though “high white collar” workers only made up 1 percent of the Hispanic population, they had not numbered more than 2 percent in 1860. As a ratio, this decline was significant, but if contextualized with a massively expanded

83 Gordon quotes a diary entry by black cowboy James Young: “Si White and I were the first white men in Tombstone after Gird and Schieffelin.” This must be seen as even then an uncommon perception, however. Young could only consider himself white in a place like Tombstone, far removed from the population centers of the East, and only in opposition to a preexisting, Hispanic, racial other. Ibid., 104. 84 “Marriage Certificates, William Neal, Josephine Box.” Wiley Box Papers, 1837–1913, MS 977, AHS. 85 “Brena, Pedro C., 1885–1930.” Biofile. AHS.

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population numbers, it is relatively small. Agricultural workers faced the most rapid decline in numbers, from 11 percent in 1860 to 2 percent in 1900. Throughout four decades, the bulk of Hispanos were unskilled workers. Contrary to what might be expected in a racializing society condemning Hispanic Americans to less desirable jobs, their number in unskilled work actually dropped from 52 percent in 1860 to 40 percent in 1900, with “proprietorial” quadrupling from 4 percent to 16 percent, and “skilled,” “semi-skilled,” “sales/clerical,” and “low white collar” all increasing. The overall percentage of Hispanos in comparison to Anglos dropped significantly, from 70.6 percent to 54.7 percent in four decades. Yet their overall numbers increased – the workforce grew from 232 to 968 employed in Tucson – and its composition resisted a slide toward the lower classes. In other words, almost fifty years after the Gadsden Purchase, the most striking change in occupations among Hispanos was the end of family agriculture, which they had, however, set off with gains as proprietors of businesses.86 At the turn of the century, changes were apparent in the makeup of Tucson’s society. That fewer people were employed in agriculture meant the town had become a decidedly more urban place. This meant a cultural shift away from the once dominant, predominantly Hispanic structures and strictures of a close-knit frontier community. Charley Williams: Race and Regional Pride Charley “Banjo Dick” Williams looks tired, yet resolved, in his studio portrait. He appears somewhat defiant. The photograph was likely taken at some point in the late 1880s or around 1890, since Williams left Tucson for Nogales, on the Mexican border, in 1891.87 An African-American man clearly identifiable as such, Williams’ pose, choice of garb, and hairstyle all seem to indicate a familiarity with the iconic daguerrotype of a young Frederick Douglass, and a conscious choice to emulate the image. There is, of course, room for debate over how much of a studio portrait’s symbolism is by design. If it is, the question remains whether this was the subject’s choice, or that of the photographer. Naturally, it is also dangerous to jump to conclusions based on an image of a nineteenth-century African American resembling one of the most iconic pictures of an African American taken during that century. Yet, in an age when

86 Thomas Sheridan and Norma Cárdenas, “La Familia Tucsonense: Demographic and Economic Change Among Mexican American Households, 1860–1900,” 9. Manuscript. James Eoff Officer Papers, MS 1155, AHS; Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 3. 87 “Charley Williams, 1849–19??,” Tucson Territorial Pioneer Project Photograph Collection.

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photography had become affordable for large numbers of middle class Americans, African Americans chose all kinds of poses, facial expressions, and attire to present themselves in pictures. Figure 4: Charley “Banjo Dick” Williams

Tucson Territorial Pioneers Project. Arizona Historical Society.

While the Frederick Douglass pose was not unique, it also was not commonplace. As such it can be seen as intended to have a very specific effect: that of showing the person photographed to the world as an independent and strong-willed individual, both mindful and proud of their heritage.88 Williams’s unique contribution to the picture is a small, but prominently visible tie tack on the knot of his dark-colored necktie in the form of a two-tone – likely silver rim and black center – swastika. Given the wearer, and considering the prominence of that symbol in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona because of its role in Native American imagery, it is almost certain that its appearance here reflects that local symbolism. The Arizona Department of Transportation, for example, used the symbol freely as a regional identifier on its early highway signs. It replaced the signs after the swastika had become overlaid in people’s minds with the national socialists’ sym-

88 For a survey of African-American portraiture in the nineteenth century, see: Shaw and Shubert, Portraits of a People.

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bol. For various reasons, the swastika here is also unlikely to be used because of its Buddhist or Theosophic meanings.89 Few other male Tucsonan contemporaries displayed ornaments on their ties, and Williams’ swastika is by far the most prominent symbol, judging by the other images in the Tucson Territorial Pioneers Photograph collection. The only other photographs of African Americans in the collection to overtly display such an accessory are those of Charles Clemons, a wagon driver born in Texas, displaying a fleur-de-lis broche, and that of Henry O. Flipper, West Point’s first black graduate, sporting a bayonet pin resembling those on the uniforms of the time. Some Anglos also display pins on their tie knots or collars. None of these, however, are nearly as large, nor as prominently displayed. This points to a fashion, however fleeting or limited, among the African American community especially, to use tie ornaments as symbols of belonging. If worn at all, such pins usually indicated some kinship with a place, tradition, or organization. This gives a first inkling that Williams wanted to express a sense of regional attachment with this choice of symbol. Williams was born in Kentucky in 1849. He is thus likely to have been born a slave. Given his later occupation it seems probable that he was a house slave in some capacity during his youngest years.90 In 1870, he could be found in California, working as a laborer, before traveling to Yuma by riverboat in 1871. He lived in Arizona for most of his adult life, moving to Tucson with the family of a certain L. A. Smith as a domestic servant and “‘all around man’ – raising the children, washing, ironing, and taking care of the livery.” Williams, “[a]s a means of expressing his soul and also as a method of getting a little extra money” played the banjo, often at the favorite late nineteenth-century leisure destination of Tucson’s elite, Levin’s Park. Levin’s Park, which at its height included an archery range, a theater, and a dance pavilion, was the preferred social venue for communal events

89 A 1927 Rand McNally Road Atlas, as well as a 1935 Arizona State Highway Department Map both show the symbol, emblazoned on a symbolic Indian arrowhead. See: “Arizona Roads Website.” In Buddhist imagery, the hands of the swastika usually face left, while in the Navajo version, like the one in Williams’s picture, they face right. The Theosophic movement uses the symbol mainly within its crest, as one of seven elements. Theosophists emphasize that theirs is the left-facing version, not the right-facing one later used by the National Socialists. 90 Kentucky is given as his birthplace in both Hornsby, Black America, 41. and in Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 20. The Arizona Historical Society’s records in the Tucson Territorial Pioneer Project list Virginia. Both places make a history of slavery likely. Though slavery was somewhat less prevalent in Kentucky, it, according to Lowell Hayes Harrison and James T. Klotter’s state history, “inherited the institution [from Virginia] without much dissent.” Harrison and Klotter, A New History of Kentucky, 167.

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in the town.91 Williams continued this side business, which, in connection with his propensity for playing the instrument even when out and about town on errands, earned him the nickname “Banjo Dick.” He moved up from domestic servant to self-employed proprietor of a mine, owning the logically named “Banjo Dick” near Tucson for several years. After that, Williams finally established a shoe-shining parlor in Nogales, where he settled for good.92 The fact that he displayed the swastika pin so proudly during his Tucson photography session, then, points to a sort of regional Southwestern pride. Williams must have felt a connection to the part of the United States where he settled, and where he was able to make a way for himself in the world. This supports the view that, especially for people of color in the Southwest, national identifications might have existed, enhanced also by the national presence of people like Frederick Douglass, but regional identifications were often just as, or more salient. Being African American in the late nineteenth century Southwest was generally a less constrained existence than elsewhere in the United States. Still, it was never as free from prejudice as some authors contend, even in the earliest days. Williams played his music at Levin’s Park, but there is no indication that he partook in any of the entertainment facilities’ many activities as a patron. The arrival of the railroad quickly made Levin’s Park obsolete. Proprietor Alexander Levin’s locally brewed beer could no longer compete with cheap imports arriving by rail, and by 1884 the

91 Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 20–22. Yancy also calls Williams, “[t]he person with the most illustrious career and the Negro who by far stamped his personality upon the pioneer citizenry of Tucson more than any other Negro […]” and claims that “[a]ny of the old settlers of Tucson who are able to recall the reminiscences of the gay seventies and eighties in old Tucson, cannot help but call back to their memories the beautiful strains played on the banjo by this serenader.” Ibid., 20. Flowery language, and an obvious rooting in the racial categories of the time it was written in aside, Yancy’s otherwise methodically sound and rigorous thesis offers a rare look into constructions of race current in the sociology department of the University of Arizona in the early 1930s. One drop rule notwithstanding, Yancy, seemingly influenced by sociologists of the Boas school, followed the self-identification of his interview subjects when it came to categorizing them by race, and excluded from his study “people in Tucson of Negro descent, but who identify themselves with the white race.” Ibid., 5. Levin’s Park was a “three-acre entertainment center [that] eventually included a restaurant, dance pavilion, theater and opera house, riding stables, an archery range and other recreational facilities. During its heyday, it was the site of every important social and communal event in Tucson.” Rochlin, “Brides for Brethren.” 92 Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 22.

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facility had changed hands twice and was “a shell of its former self.”93 Williams left Tucson in 1891, the year Alexander Levin, the venue’s proprietor, died.94 Incidentally, in January of that year the Federal Elections Bill, sponsored by Henry Cabot Lodge and supported by President Benjamin Harrison, had been defeated in the Senate. It was to be the end of the last attempt at national civil rights legislation for three decades.95 “Banjo Dick” remained, in more ways than the literal one, a solo player, unable to make it in an increasingly Anglo Tucson in an increasingly hardening national racial climate. Nogales still offered little respite in the end. When Williams died in the early twentieth century, he was buried in a segregated cemetery there. The grave likely was not well tended from early on. Today, the headstone is tipped over and it is entirely overgrown with shrubbery. Williams never made lasting connections in Nogales and did not establish a family there.96 Racial discrimination of blacks in the Southwest at the turn of the century had increased. But the reality of this change to individuals is still hard to parse. Given the multitude of racial climates in the Southwest, it stands to reason that there were places where blacks lived increasingly more restricted lives, just as there were contexts – geographical, or within networks of “pioneers” – in which they were defined as individuals, not stereotypes. Regional differences appear to have lasted. These regional differences allowed Williams to make a living in Nogales, as close to the Mexican border as possible, while he had to leave an increasingly Anglo Tucson behind. Sarah Herring Sorin: Anglo Lawyer Sarah Inslee Herring Sorin was a woman of firsts. She was the first female lawyer in Tombstone, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in Arizona, and in 1913 the first woman to argue a case before the US Supreme Court unassisted by a male lawyer.97 Incidentally, she also was the first woman to do so and win.

93 Sipos, Brewing Arizona, 14–17. 94 Sipos, Brewing Arizona, 17. 95 The bill’s defeat, according to Richard Welch, “more clearly marked the acceptance of Negro subjugation than the culmination of sectional reconciliation.” Welch, “The Federal Elections Bill of 1890,” 511, 521. 96 Rick Ojeda, who rediscovered the grave confirmed this. Rick Ojeda, e-mail message to author, January 12, 2012. 97 She was not the first woman to appear in front of the country’s highest court; twenty-four others had already argued cases, although with male lawyers by their sides. Crowe and Tod, Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame, 26.

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On a studio portrait taken in Tucson in the early 1890s, Sorin looks off to the left, neither smiling nor frowning, the right side of her face hidden by shadows. Other photographs that show her in her late twenties and early thirties depict her as either almost robotic-looking, prim and trim in top-shelf Victorian dress, blonde locks framing her angular face, the rest of her hair pulled back in strict schoolmarm-manner; or as a finely smiling, non-threatening young woman with carefully arranged coiffure in a high-neck ruff collar. Following typical photographic tropes of the era, the pictures belie her strong-willed independence and extraordinary career.98 Figure 5: Sarah Inslee Herring Sorin

Tucson Territorial Pioneers Project. Arizona Historical Society.

Born in New York City in 1861, Sarah Herring received the foundations of her education in New York, before moving to Arizona with her family in 1881. Her father, William Herring, was a successful lawyer and established a sought-after practice in Tombstone, where he rose to prominence and was instrumental in the foundation of the vigilantes that attempted to curb the lawlessness of the mining boom-era town. Sarah at first took up teaching. After her brother Howard, who had been groomed to help with the family law practice died of dental malpractice in 1891, Sarah began

98 While the AHS has several photos of Sarah Herring Sorin, she left no personal writings. This is also pointed out by her biographer, Jaquelyn Kasper, and in the Stanford Women’s Legal History biographical sketch. Janitch, “Sarah Herring Sorin,” 13, 28.

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apprenticing law under her father. She was admitted to practice in Arizona in 1893.99 She then returned to New York to attend law school. Sarah Sorin received an L.L.B. from New York University in 1894.100 She kept practicing law with her father until his death in 1912, traveling to the Cochise County ranch of her husband on the weekends.101 After winning her Supreme Court case – Sorin’s third appearance in front of the high court – she returned to Arizona in order to settle matters concerning the estate of her late father. She moved to Globe and became the lawyer for local mining companies Old Dominion Copper and United Globe. She died only two years later from pneumonia.102 Sarah Sorin’s specialization in mining law had taken her all across Arizona. Not only was Sorin the only female lawyer practicing in the territory, she also was, as contemporary lawyer and later Arizona governor Richard Sloan relates “constant and dependable in everything and her innate dignity and charm of manner gained for her the sincere respect and admiration of all who came into contact with her.”103 Sloan was not the only one taken with her demeanor. The Tombstone Epitaph praised “Mrs. Sorin” for being “at perfect ease in a courtroom.” The editor further observed that Sorin “commands the respect of both judge and jury and wins the admiration of the bar for the graceful manner in which she handles her case,” concluding that: [s]he is never at a loss for authorities, being so thoroughly prepared as to have references at her fingers’ end, and no matter how complicated the issue, she possesses that happy facility of elucidation that most generally wins for her client a favorable verdict.104

Sarah Sorin was generally well-liked by both the Republican and Democratic press in Arizona. That the Epitaph praised her abilities in such an eager manner, however, might be attributable to another factor: Sarah was also Mrs. Thomas Sorin, wife of “a prominent Tombstone miner" who also happened to be the newspaper’s cofounder.105 Sarah and Thomas were married in 1898, two years after Thomas had helped Sarah and her father move their law practice from Tombstone to Tucson, where the 1st District Court of Arizona Territory was located and where business

99

Eppinga, Southern Arizona Cemeteries, 100; Janitch, “Sarah Herring Sorin,” 12.

100 Ibid., 14. 101 Arizona Daily Star, May 1, 1914. 102 This appears to have been pneumonia resulting from influenza. Crowe and Tod, Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame, 27; Kasper, “Sarah Herring Sorin,” 236. 103 Sloan, History of Arizona quoted in: Crowe and Tod, Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame: 27. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid.

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opportunities would be more plentiful. A further advantage was that travel to the various corners of the territory where the mining operations the Sorins represented could be found was easier. Also simpler was communication with, and travel to the East Coast and its industrial corporations – the firm of Herring and Sorin represented Arizona’s mining heavyweight Phelps Dodge on many occasions. The Herring-Sorins profited directly from the corporate “takeover” of the state. They represented the second generation of Arizona’s Anglos. Earlier settlers had made clear their anti-monopolistic intentions, as well as their support for Hispano allies. The Herring-Sorins, in contrast, saw the “Mexicans” as a threat to the territory’s national future.106 When Arizona defied Congress in 1891, holding yet another constitutional convention doomed to fail, William Sorin, known as a suffragist, was its president. He expressed the feeling of many post-railroad Anglos when he argued that women should have their place in Arizona’s government, so that Hispanos would not be dominant. The argument’s detractors at the time pointed out that Mormon women in Utah had taken to the vote quite happily, voting en bloc with their husbands and other male coreligionists. Arizona, they warned, would succumb to the Mormon influence.107 Sorin herself showed her independence in this matter forcefully; she opposed female suffrage.108 Sarah Herring Sorin’s case is special in several ways. She was educated, white, and considerably aided by both her father and husband in pursuing her own career. Both appear to have supported her professional independence. This allowed Sarah Sorin to live a life of comparative privilege. To her, her profession and the suffrage question had nothing to do with each other. It was precisely her upbringing that made it possible for Sorin to separate the two, in truth intrinsically connected, aspects of female existence in the Southwest. This is one reason why, though habitually trotted out in celebration of female achievement in Arizona, she makes for an obdurate, at times uncompelling heroine.109 Her law practice is another. Sarah Herring Sorin specialized in labor law, and spent her years of legal practice in the service of corporate mining interests. The first case she helped win in front of the Arizona Supreme Court in 1896 was on behalf of two mine owners who fended off the claim of an injured miner, Michael Welsh. Welsh had won a five thousand dollar payment in the lower court for injuries sustained. Sorin’s argument against the legitimacy of the claim won the day. Her claim to fame, to be the first female

106 Lamar, The Far Southwest, 382. 107 Osselaer, Winning Their Place, 11–12. 108 Janitch, “Sarah Herring Sorin,” 27–28. 109 She reportedly inspired Lorna Lockwood to take up law, who in turn inspired the first female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. Janitch, “Sarah Herring Sorin,” 19.

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lawyer to argue a case in front of the US Supreme Court unaided by a male in United Globe Mines v. James Work, helped United Globe, a subsidiary of the octopean Phelps Dodge corporation, defend its title to two mines against a single individual.110 Sorin’s whiteness, privileged upbringing, and gender were inextricable. The former two were necessary for the latter not to stand in the way of her career. She also represents a view of female agency that complicates both typical nineteenth century home-and-hearth stereotypes and the Western “manly” woman trope that is often accepted as the only real manner of behaving that would win women the grudging respect of men. Sarah Herring Sorin is an example of the advances in political representation that white women in the West had made by the end of the nineteenth century. But they did so to the detriment of minorities. Sorin’s class status and race canceled out disadvantages her gender would typically have brought: no lower class white woman, and no Hispano or black woman could have had her success in such a visible, male-dominated field at the time. None did.

D EMING : H OPES

OF A

“N EW C HICAGO ” D ISAPPOINTED

Much like Yuma, Deming owed its early life to the fact that it was a gateway town. As the closest settlement to the Mexican border it became a transportation hub from the time the railroad arrived in the 1880s. The literature that exists on its history is scant. Most complete on Deming’s early history is a pamphlet published in 1962 titled The Deming, New Mexico Story by F. Stanley, a Catholic priest and hobby historian, from whom, for a time in the mid-twentieth century, no Southwestern hamlet was safe when it came to having its story told. In staccato-style, Stanley managed to cram into twenty pages information that could sustain an epic town history ten times the pamphlet’s length.111 His is a sweeping narrative that emphasizes Deming’s few claims to fame: clean water, owing to the huge reservoir located beneath it, early siphoning of which gave the town its no longer straightforward nickname of “Windmill City;” and, in more recent years, duck racing. The erstwhile custom house still stands close to where the border line between the US and Mexico ran for five short years between the end of the Mexican–American War and the date of the Gadsden Purchase. The La Mesilla treaty placed Deming firmly within American territory. The site of the modern town lies on land that, according to the Bartlett–García Conde Compromise first pro-

110 Ibid., 21–24. 111 Stanley, “The Deming, New Mexico Story.” Archival copy from the Chávez Library, 978.9 937de L.C.

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posed in 1850, would have belonged to Mexico. Because of some shrewd politicking on the part of Texas Democrats, who accused their Whig adversaries of having ceded too much of New Mexico to their neighbor nation – including a strip of land between 31º45’ N and 32º22’ N, which Andrew B. Gray, the United States chief surveyor, considered the only viable route for a Southern transcontinental railroad in New Mexico – this resolution of the US–Mexico border dispute never went beyond the negotiating phase. For it to become official, the signature of the surveyor general was required. Gray was replaced in that office by William Emory in late 1851. While Emory was not ready to contradict the direct order from Secretary of State Daniel Webster to sign, he issued a statement with his signature that made clear that Emory only intended it to confirm that Bartlett and García Conde had reached this agreement. Whether such a crude signing statement would have held up is ultimately impossible to know, though one suspects that any expansionist Democratic government would not have contented itself with the border compromise. Either way, the Gadsden Treaty made the agreement moot within not even three years.112 Deming, as of yet called “New Chicago” and not located on the site of the present-day settlement’s historic center, but 10 miles (16 km) north of it, sank back into obscurity when it lost its status as official port of entry from Mexico. It would take another quarter century until the site once again felt the ripples of nationalization, and what was considered progress, with the Southern Pacific Railroad’s arrival in 1881. Then, such progress came with a vengeance. The small settlement, consisting, as late as the mid-1880s, of still not much more than a railway station, train yard, and a few tents and shacks – notably no adobe buildings were constructed – became a waypoint not only for trains between California and Texas, and points further east, but also a station on the north–south route between Santa Fe and Mexico. The town, under any name, was not even listed yet in the McKenney’s business directory for 1882–83. By the publication date of the Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory (1884– 5), Vol 1. it filled a respectable two pages.113 Deming for a time after the Southern Pacific’s arrival was promising to become so bustling and economically gregarious, that its newspaper, the Deming Headlight, made a recurring and forceful argument that the little settlement, because of its position at the likely junction of several north–south and east–west railways, was to actually become a “New Chicago.” This kind of optimism was not atypical. In the

112 Kohout, “Bartlett–García Conde Compromise.” 113 McKenney’s Business Directory, 1882–1883; McKenney’s Business Directory, 1888– 1889; Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory (1884–1885), Vol 1. Vertical file, ephemera. Chávez Library.

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fluid and economically changing “fugitive landscape” – historian Samuel Truett’s words – of the borderlands, many municipalities had high hopes for their places of settlement and investment. James Eldredge, a British railroad promoter, confidently asserted in the 1870s that the Sonoran port of Guaymas would become “the New York of the Pacific Coast.” Quite the opposite was in store for it. With easy railroad connections from already-established ports like San Diego and San Francisco, traffic to Guaymas, a port ill-equipped for the large ships necessary to transport ores, petered out.114 Deming in 1881 was beginning to be populated from California (the rail connection with the East had not yet been established), although only about two hundred people had amassed there by March of that year. Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four in neighboring Las Cruces, which had disappointedly admitted on March 5 that “New Chicago [.] by the way is a name that has not been and will not be adopted by any one having authority to name the new town,” only days later reported hopefully under the headline “A New Mexican Metropolis” that “the [.] railroad companies are determined to make an important point of Deming” and that “it will surely be made a port of entry and will divert a great part of the business of the El Paso custom house.”115 The Las Vegas Daily Optic was not as optimistic as Newman’s. On March 16, it pointed out that “On the day before yesterday a man was shot and killed in Deming and yesterday saw another resident turn up his toes to the daisies in a similar way. The coffin trade promises to be good this season in Deming,” while two days later, it informed: “Deming is a hard place for sharp appetites. The only feed stall in that section of the country is an old passenger coach.”116 A Windy City the Windmill City was not.

114 Truett, Fugitive Landscapes, 59. Still, Guaymas was not in want with “servicios modernos que les permitía prosperar sus negocios; electricidad, telégrafo, correo eficiente, ferrocarril urbano y una vía de ferrocarril hasta la frontera con Estados Unidos” – modern services that allowed its businesses to prosper, electricity, telegraph and post offices, streetcars, and a railway to the border with the United States. In 1890 it had about 10,000 inhabitants, dwarfing Tucson’s 5,150 that same year. Administración Portuaria Integral de Guaymas, “Acerca del puerto”; Moffat, Population History of Western US Cities and Towns, 16. 115 Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four, (Las Cruces, N.M.), March 5 and 16, 1881. “Mimbres Junction” has also been recorded as an early name for the settlement. Julyan, The Place Names of New Mexico, 108. 116 The Optic later, on April 18, disagreed with its early report of two shooting deaths, claiming that “A Chinaman” was the “First Victim of Cold Lead.” The report on this killing is interesting for its racial framing: the victim is referred to as “an inoffensive Chinaman,” while the Anglo killer, Campbell, is called a “bad, bloodthirsty man.” The

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Yet, the hope to one day rival Chicago, that prototype of Western booster success, remained. Local businessmen continued to praise Deming’s unique qualities for the next several decades. In 1910, potential homeseekers and investors were informed that: [t]he Southern Pacific crosses the county near the center and is a transcontinental road; the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe is also a transcontinental line entering the county in the northeast, reaching Deming and then running northwest to Silver City and the mining districts of Grant County. The El Paso and Southwestern system crosses the southern end of Luna County, and connects at Deming with the two other lines by means of a short branch road. It connects also with the Rock Island in eastern New Mexico, that is to say, at El Paso, and reaches Chicago.

And not only did the connections exist. They were quite practical: The Southern Pacific also sells tickets direct to Chicago as well as to New Orleans and points intermediate. A branch road runs from Lordsburg, east of Deming on the main line of the Southern Pacific, to Clifton in northeastern Arizona’s great copper district; the Globe mining district is reached from Bowie, farther eastward on the Southern Pacific, and Nogales and the Sonora country still farther eastward at Tucson, while the Southwestern opens from Deming the great mining centers of Bisbee and Douglas, and reaches also the Mexican border.

The author happily concluded: “This gives Luna County connection with all parts of the country, east, west, north and south.”117 Although boosters did as boosters must, this was not all overblown. In the 1880s, Deming for a time “was the only town with three depots for three independent railroads,” or at least the only one

Optic speculates that Campbell was “putting into practice the war cry of Dennis Kearney, the ex-agitator of California, ‘The Chinese Must Go,’” but also relates that “Campbell […] fatally wound[ed] a Chinaman who was employed as cook in his restaurant, and who, owing to the darkness, he failed to recognize and mistook for one of the [Rustler] gang.” Chinese in southern New Mexico were certainly not generally regarded as a threat, as they were in many other places in the West, though the influx of Californian settlers may have quickly made itself felt in racial attitudes in Deming. The second violent death of a Chinese American would occur later that year. The Optic on July 29 reported on a “cold blooded murder” of a “Chinaman Who Stole a Large Sum of Money.” Las Vegas Daily Optic (Las Vegas, N.M.), March 16 and 18; April 18; July 29, 1881. 117 All quotes: Andrew Jackson Wells, “Deming, New Mexico and the Mimbres Valley.” S451.N6 W4 1910z, NMSU, Las Cruces.

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with fully functional ones after the Santa Fe decided that its namesake town should only have a freight, but not a passenger depot, while Deming sported “The Biggest Railroad Yard West of Chicago.”118 The railroad brought not only settlers, but also less desirable elements of society to southern New Mexico. And it did so with a speed unimaginable only months before. Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four reported that “[t]he rapid increase in the population of this town [Las Cruces] within the past two weeks and the influx […] of a large number of tramps, thieves and desperadoes has aroused our citizens […].”119 Thirty-six first citizens promptly responded and pledged dollar amounts varying from $1.50 to $25 to organize a police force. Eleven of them had Spanish surnames. Unlike Deming, Las Cruces was an established settlement in which influential New Mexico Hispanos made their homes. Improved connections to the town were also made by means of telegraph wires; the Rio Grande Republican on July 18, 1881 reminded its readers how good they had it, now that a second telegraph wire had been strung: “Those who have experienced the delay that one wire could cause in sending a message will shudder at the bare thought of what a second restraining wire could accomplish.”120 While the well-off in Las Cruces enjoyed telegrams without delays, and drove out undesirables with their new constabulary, Deming attempted to keep up. Thirteen Western Union employees arrived on April 9, 1881 to string a telegraph wire from Las Vegas, and on September 4, forty-three citizens signed a note to the governor, stating their intent to form a militia “for the protection of our lives and property.” Not one of them had a Hispanic surname. As the Complete Business Directory of New Mexico and Gazetteer of the Territory for 1882, put it: “Its population is American.”121 Deming was a railroad junction; an Anglo town. This had not changed when statehood came. The first Official Register of the State of New Mexico’s “State Directory of County Officials” listed ten county officials in Deming, among them one woman, but no Hispanos.122 At least in one aspect it ap-

118 As Newman’s, still not over the second city comparison, bragged. Stanley, “The Deming, New Mexico Story,” 6. Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four, (Las Cruces, N.M.), April 1881. 119 Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four, (Las Cruces, N.M.), January 5, 1881. 120 Rio Grande Republican, (Las Cruces, N.M.), July 18, 1881. 121 Which, unlike larger, regional directories like McKenney’s, had a section on Deming that year. 122 “Deming Militia Founding Declaration.” Loose leaf. Ephemera files, 1880–1884. Deming Luna Mimbres Museum; A Complete Business Directory of New Mexico and Gazetteer of the Territory for 1882. (Santa Fe: New Mexican Printing and Publishing Co., 1882). Ephemera. Deming Luna Mimbres Museum. “State Official Register for

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pears the boosters had been successful; the Galveston Daily News of April 4, 1886 brought the problem during the early period of Deming’s existence to the point: “There is not a marriageable woman in Deming, N. M.”123 Edmund G. Ross: From Governor to Small-Town Editor “New Chicago is to have a newspaper” Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four informed its clientele on February 18, 1881. That newspaper, the Democratic Deming Headlight was a success. Except for an eight-year hiatus between 1948 and 1956, it has run continuously ever since.124 The paper’s first editor, J. E. Curren, referred to by F. Stanley as the “Johnny Appleseed of newspapers in New Mexico,” because he “planted a newspaper in every town he visited,” held the reins of the Headlight until 1884. Then, finding that profits were not forthcoming, he traded the paper for the Kingston Clipper in a nearby mining town.125 The Headlight’s proprietor from 1889 to 1895, Edmund Gibson Ross, came to the editorship of the small town paper after middling success as New Mexico territory’s governor from 1885–1889, still carrying the stigma of having been the deciding vote against the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.126 Born in Ashland, Ohio on December 7, 1826, Ross had learned the newspaper trade in Huron, Ohio and at several papers in the Midwest.127 He moved to Kansas in 1856, becoming active in politics there as a free stater, and continuing his newspapering career. A lifelong ardent abolitionist, he served as a delegate at the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention in 1859, and joined the Union Army during the Civil War.

New Mexico,” (Santa Fe: Eagle Print, 1912), 8–9. Since Deming did not formally exist in 1880, and the 1890 census has been lost to history partially in a fire in 1921, with the rest of the microdata destroyed by order of Congress in 1933–1935, the first census data on Deming stems from 1900. I have therefore had to rely on newspaper accounts of the population numbers, as well as the composition of Deming’s population throughout. A thorough analysis, as contained in the sections on Yuma and Tucson, has not been possible due to this lack of sources. For the fate of the 1890 census, see Blake, “‘First in the Path of the Firemen.’” 123 Galveston Daily News (Galveston, Tex.), April 4, 1886. 124 Apparently named for a particularly fascinating Southern Pacific engine lantern. Stanley, “The Deming, New Mexico Story,” 6. 125 Ibid.; Library of Congress, “About Deming Headlight”. 126 A fact that weighed on him so substantially that he wrote a whole book dealing with the subject, Ross, History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. 127 Library of Congress, “About Deming Headlight;” “Finding Aid.” Edmund G. Ross Collection, M 491, KSHS; Poore, “Congressional Directory,” 16.

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Two photographs from the Library of Congress’s Brady-Handy Collection depict him in much the same pose: seated on a comfortable chair looking left, a book on a side table to the right. Ross appears to have stuck to his suit, but not his style of grooming. He is clean shaven in one picture, and sports a well-trimmed full beard in the other. This is also replicated in another image, taken in 1865. Later in his life, Ross ended up with a compromise; his gubernatorial portrait depicts a gray-haired, wearied man with a moustache. Figure 6: Edmund Gibson Ross

Brady-Handy Collection. Library of Congress.

Ross’s palpably white complexion is fresh in what is likely the oldest image, showing him with no facial hair. It is somewhat more worn in the second one, ostensibly taken later, after he had fought in the Civil War. As waxed and waned his beard, so did Ross’s career across the United States and across the decades. Ross’s case illustrates that even belonging to the highest rungs of the territorial elite was not always a guarantee for continued prosperity. His stature as a Union soldier, and his pre-war political experience prompted Kansas governor Samuel J. Crawford to appoint Ross as Kansas’ senior US senator in 1866 after the incumbent, James H. Lane, had committed suicide. Breaking away from the ranks of Radical Republicans, Ross effectively terminated his Senate career when he voted not to impeach Andrew Johnson in 1868. Ostracized by his fellow Republicans for the remainder of his term, Ross left Washington after his term of service ended on March 3, 1871. He next spent several years in Kansas, once again immersed in the newspaper trade. Ross pragmatically switched his party

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allegiance to the Democrats in 1872, but this did not help a bid for Kansas governor, which he lost decisively in 1880. Appointed to the New Mexico governorship by President Grover Cleveland in 1885, Ross was acting governor for over a year until Congress confirmed his appointment. Animosity over his vote in the Johnson impeachment proceedings apparently had still not subsided.128 Ross spent his governorship fighting against the influence of the “Santa Fe Ring,” a territorial Republican political machine made up chiefly of Anglo land speculators, Hispanic caudillos, and many prominent lawyers, which at times resembled a criminal organization more than anything else. The ring was involved heavily in the bloody land conflict that became known as the Lincoln County War.129 Ross argued for the creation of a special court to deal with land claims, which would benefit smaller landowners over large cattle ranches.130 Ross also sided with (mostly Hispano) sheep farmers over cattle ranchers. But this did not mean he was free of prejudice when it came to Hispanic New Mexicans. In an 1889 letter written to his eldest daughter Lillian from Santa Fe shortly before the end of his governorship, Ross confided that “There is a big fight going on to-night over the school law, and it has resolved into a race issue – Mexicans vs. Americans and I am afraid the former will win.”131 His animosity might have stemmed specifically from encounters with New Mexico Republican Hispano politicians. According to George Anderson’s 1907 History of New Mexico, “J. Francisco Chaves, president of the council, and Manuel C. de Baca, speaker of the house, hampered him as no executive in New Mexico had ever before been hampered in his efforts to procure a

128 “Finding Aid.” Edmund G. Ross Collection, M 491, KSHS; Lamar, “Edmund G. Ross as Governor,” 190, 202; Anderson, History of New Mexico, 273–277. 129 Perhaps the most mythologized event in New Mexico history, the conflict, involving many of the best-known names in the “Wild West,” is treated in numerous books, films, articles, and other forms of media. A thoroughly researched complete account of the conflict and the events and constellations that led up to it and affected its immediate reception is Nolan, The Lincoln County War. 130 Such a court, created in 1891 in the so-called McCreary Bill advanced by senator and former-and-future Kentucky governor James B. McCreary, would in fact adjudicate many Mexican-era land grants in question. It did not, however, succeed in deterring corporate ownership of such claims. This will be further discussed in Chapter 7. An Act to Establish a Court of Private Land Claims, and to Provide for the Settlement of Private Land Claims in Certain States and Territories. Fifty-First Congress. Sess. II. Chap. 539. 1891. 131 Letter to Lillian Ross dated February 28, 1889. Edmund G. Ross Papers, MSS 496 BC, Box 1, UNM.

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reform in territorial affairs.”132 His position on Native Americans was that of a Westerner: Ross wanted them gone. In a letter to President Grover Cleveland, he expressed his consternation about Eastern unwillingness to remove Apache Indians from a reservation in Arizona: “It does not seem possible that such opposition could originate with persons who comprehend the situation here […].”133 In Deming, Ross kept busying himself with the fortunes of the town, and those of New Mexico, pushing forward an agenda of homesteader settlement that he had begun during his years as governor. He passed the bar exam of the territory in 1889, and worked as a lawyer in addition to publishing the Headlight. In 1893, arguing that irrigation was essential to New Mexico statehood, he introduced a resolution in the Deming Irrigation Convention that “[…] all unclaimed non-mineral public lands included within the present territorial boundaries, be ceded to such State, but upon the express condition that all reclaimable portions of said lands be brought under irrigation […].”134 Ross died of pneumonia in Albuquerque, where he had resided since his retirement, in 1907. His memory surfaced briefly again in 1956, when he was included as one of the Profiles in Courage in the book purportedly written by John F. Kennedy, and again during the 1998–1999 impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. As many of his Southwestern contemporaries, he leaves a convoluted legacy, a fact that was not lost on Anderson, writing still during Ross’s lifetime: “The romance and tragedy combined in the career of this striking figure in political life in the west […] is similarly illustrated by his experience immediately after the appointment of his successor as governor of New Mexico in 1889, when he entered the printing office of the New Mexican at Santa Fe and engaged in typesetting by hand.”135

132 Anderson, History of New Mexico, 276. The hyperbole in Anderson’s statement may itself have stemmed from racist sentiments or at least a partisan position. 133 Letter to Grover Cleveland dated August 14, 1886. Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1762–1984, Series: Letters Received, compiled 1805–1889, RG 94, NARA Washington, DC. 134 The Deming Irrigation Convention. Pamphlet. Edmund G. Ross Papers, MSS 496 BC, Box 1, UNM. 135 Anderson, History of New Mexico, 277

6. Laws of the Land

By the 1870s, the legal system was simultaneously one of the most tenuous, yet one of the most important ties the Mesilla region had with the centers of the East and West of the United States. Earlier, laws had tied the Mesilla to the Mexican South, and before that, transatlantic Spain. In the American West in general, but especially in the Southwest, with its long Spanish and Mexican legal traditions, laws mattered, and they mattered a lot. It was not, however, legislation concerning crime and punishment that most affected people’s everyday lives. Certainly, frontier violence played a role. The area of law that most concerned people in their everyday lives, however, was property law. Native Americans lost title to their ancestral lands through countless legal maneuvers by European Americans, Spanish and Anglo. Hispanos who had Spanish or Mexican titles to land were guaranteed these on paper under US rule, but in practice often had to relinquish them. This was either because Anglo institutions did not recognize them, or because the costs of legal actions drove Hispano owners to sell the land they had been able to claim in order to pay the Anglo lawyers who had helped them do it. What Hispanos could alternatively do was claim land under the Homestead Act. Whether they were successful in this endeavor, though, depended on how well they knew the legal system that made this possible. To assess just who was affected by the differences in the legal systems in what way, it is necessary to further explore the effects these different systems had when they were introduced, when both Spanish law and the American version of Common Law virtually coexisted and conflicted, and after American law had become the sole measure of judgment. What is also necessary to fathom the wideranging changes that affected local actors in the Mesilla, is an overview of the key areas of law that, more than any others, influenced the development of the region: land law and water law. Drawing on both, mining law also deserves a short assessment. As one important definition of the nation is that of a territory where one human community has a monopoly on legitimate violence, it is, however, impera-

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tive to first tackle the question of crime and punishment in a region that was part of what has become known as the “Wild West” of myth.1

T HE S OMEWHAT W ILD W EST One and a half centuries of popular lore, literature, and culture have lastingly inscribed the American West as a place of lawlessness in the collective imagination. Since the early 1980s, the New Western History has contributed much to dispel myths of wanton violence in the Old West; or more precisely, complicate them to a point where these stories are understood as results of ongoing interactions between various groups – races, cultures, lifestyles, economic systems, points of view – and not as outbursts of some ever-present conquering instinct to violate and subjugate, shared innately, for good or evil, by a certain type of westward-pushing frontiersman. That is not to say that the importance of violence has been overstated everywhere. Authors like Richard Slotkin have long convincingly shown its significance for American culture and history, and for the history of the American West in particular.2 Violence and its legal implications, though, were a much less significant part of life in the Mesilla than the everyday ways in which land and water law touched the lives of a significantly agricultural population. An increasing dependence on mining in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth did not change this. Furthermore, the kind of violence that occurred in the West was far from the indiscriminate gunslinging grit of the Western movie cliché. Rather, it tended to occur in semi-organized or emergent fashion, as acts of deliberate exclusion, inclusion and as expressions of real or imagined ascendancy – mostly of the perpetrators. Though overwhelmingly portrayed as unruly mobs, vigilantes often were, in Richard Maxwell Brown’s words “socially constructive.” That is, they were supported by a majority of a town’s citizens, dealt with real problems, and when they disbanded, they frequently left a more stable environment than that which had brought them forth.3 Still, violence was always a source of instability. As such, it rarely went unopposed. When Anglo “Regulators” formed a posse in 1859

1

In Max Weber’s influential phrase, “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 4.

2

See Slotkin’s analysis of the frontier myth: Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation.

3

Brown, Strain of Violence, 118; McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes, 101.

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to kill lower-class Mexican mine workers in the Sonoita Valley, in what is today Southeastern Arizona, American mining interests were quick to respond, mounting a counter-expedition of “Regulating regulators.” This was due to an impetus to keep the peace, and with it economic stability and prosperity; the latter two always near and dear to the nineteenth-century capitalist’s heart. Violence and racism intersected in complex ways in the Southwest. That the “Regulating regulators” also went by the name of the “Greaser Party,” shows how feelings of racism directed against one group could exist at the same time that the people who harbored them were fighting, literally, for the rights and safety of that group.4 Statistics show that there was an uptick, or at times a significant increase even, of violent behavior whenever significant numbers of Anglos began settling in the Southwest.5 This must be understood in the context of one culture supplanting another that had found a sometimes more, sometimes less workable equilibrium with the Native Americans surrounding it. Lawlessness might be expected on a periphery so removed from direct governmental intervention, distant from the capital by 2,200 miles – “and they were slow, grueling miles” as J. F. Martin colorfully reminds us – and it became a prominent feature of Western stories and histories. It did so not necessarily by dint of its preeminence, but because it expressed itself in a seemingly more outrageous fashion than elsewhere.6 That is, in a fashion that actually was little different than that of other places in the United States, but one that lent itself to be used and blown out of proportion by crafty writers and rash reporters. Violence and law enforcement in the American West have been major topics of the discourse on laws in that region. This is not surprising. Even Eugene W. Hollon, in his seminal study disproving that the American West was especially violent, dedicated nine out of ten chapters to case studies of Western violence, only to conclude in his final chapter that the West did not breed violence, and that the Eastern cities were much

4

As Kendra Moore points out, the “Regulating regulators” took on that name “specifically out of a desire to identify with the ethnic Mexican and indigenous victims […] rather than out of anti-Mexican sentiment. This does not mean that they did not hold the same racial beliefs as the men they were chasing.” Moore, “Mataron a Todos.” In this case the recently immigrated European-born elites were more sympathetic to the cause of working-class Mexicans than were American-born Anglos. Likely, the former were at the same time protecting their mining interest and securing a cheap labor supply, while the latter felt threatened in their livelihood. Europeans who had arrived during the 1850s and 1860s were also not completely conversant in the racial norms that American-born Anglos had been raised with during a period of increased immigration and nativism during the mid-nineteenth century.

5

Alarid, “They Came From the East”; Alarid, “Caudillo Justice.”

6

Martin, Yuma Crossing, 232.

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more violent places. Even the academic critics of the myth, it seems, cannot escape its entrancing power.7 The conflicts playing out in the late nineteenth century American West that Richard Maxwell Brown has evocatively united under the umbrella term of “Civil War of Incorporation” were predicated upon claims to land.8 Outbreaks of violence were partially the result of an often unreliable or even corrupt system of legal decision-making in the Western United States. Corruption was ongoing, and even more widespread were accusations of corruption. They were de rigeur with both political parties, and a general feature of the Western press. Thus, even when the decisions the courts handed down were the result of careful deliberation and even-handedness on the part of the judges, they never could quite avoid the stench of corruption. Corruption was a prominent feature of public life in Progressive Era America, and since it was so widespread, it could always easily be inferred even when not present. Hence, given the frequent lack of both financial support and immediately available military or police backup of its rulings, the system often worked better than could be expected.9 This was true in Arizona and New Mexico as much as anywhere, but unlike in other Western states, there appears to have been much clamoring about corruption, yet little actual effect. Northern New Mexico stands apart here. There, violent range wars (the Colfax County War and the Lincoln County War the most prominent among them) and a combustible mixture of clashing cultures and political corruption produced singular violence. New Mexico, in historian Marc Simmons’s words, remained “a land apart.”10 Yet, the violence to its immediate east hardly affected Southern Arizona nor the small part of southern New Mexico that had been purchased by Gadsden. The most obvious explanation is once again the strip’s low settlement density. Fewer people on more land meant less conflict over the land available. Violence was a factor in Western life, but it was not the one deciding factor it had been made out to be by early and mid-twentieth century scholars, who had come to this conclusion by way of myth, not statistics. In a sense, the most valuable

7

McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes, 270; Hollon, Frontier Violence.

8

Brown, No Duty to Retreat.

9

Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill have explored this topic from a libertarian point of view. They infer a causal relationship in which governmental interference precipitated increased violence. All told, however, governmental influence in the American West was neither especially benign nor uniquely condemnable, but a complex mixture of varied intentions and implementations. Anderson and Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West, esp. 104–119.

10 Simmons, New Mexico, 161–162, 163.

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takeaway from the disputes over just how violent the Old West was lies not in determining its violence opposed to other localities at the same time, but to the United States today. It is therefore no accident that the argument of a “peaceful” West gained momentum only after Turner’s frontier thesis had collapsed. If America was born on the frontier, as Turner so forcefully posited, then violent tendencies of American society almost a hundred years later could still easily be explained as deriving from that frontier experience. If, however, the idea of the frontier that forged the national spirit no longer held, then neither could the direct transmission of violence from it. Paired with closely examined statistics of murder and mayhem in the Western states during the “Old West” period which showed that its centers of population were relatively peaceful, this led to the sobering realization that modern American society, on the whole, was much more violent than the Wild West. Court documents and police statistics of murders and other attacks on life and limb, however, only tell part of the story. Anglo settlers may have had little inclination to violently dispose of other Anglo settlers, but violence against minorities, and especially Native Americans was rampant. As was violence in places such as the “hell on wheels” railroad towns and in mining camps, where many young men lived in close quarters.11 All across the West, so called land clubs, or claims associations, quickly formed when more than one person made claims on a parcel of land. In fact, associations guaranteeing a measure of safety and communal peace had a seemingly automatic emergent quality: absent clear outside authority, they formed almost as a matter of course. Mining camps, cattlemen’s associations, and wagon trains, all saw such emergent organization.12 Business during the era of exploitation needed relative stability in order to extract from the region. There is, however, a difference between the needs of business and the argument that government was not needed in the West. The acceptance of emergent institutions as the only “private agencies” that were necessary to protect the life and limb of Westerners rests on a false dichotomy. The libertarian point of view sees these organizations as distinctly not governmental, or otherwise state-backed.13 During most of the nineteenth century,

11 White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 228–237. 12 DiLorenzo, “The Culture of Violence in the American West,” 229–238. 13 Hollon, for example, argues that the American frontier “was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society today.” Hollon, Frontier Violence, x. While this is a true statement for American society in the 1970s, it neglects to compare it, either historically or in its contemporary form, with other civil societies. Richard Shenkman makes the same argument, relying almost exclusively on Hollon: Shenkman, Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths. The real violence in the American West, Thomas J. DiLorenzo argues, was that of the American military perpetrated against Indians, with or

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the public-private partnership was essentially the only established and proven model of action where projects reaching farther than the local sphere were concerned. Denigrating the import of this model is at odds with the historical record. The contracts that these places of community felt compelled to take out amounted to a very effective form of local government, in which “[o]stracism and threats of banishment from the group, instead of threats of violence, were usually sufficient to correct rule breakers’ behavior.”14 That this government was not a result of directives underwritten by Congress or the president did not change the fact that it was a form of local civil government, entered into by people from diverse backgrounds and of their own free volition. It was influenced by processes of decision-making that Westerners had experienced in other American states. As such, these local contracts functionally resembled other forms of contractual government common in British North America. Calling the results of such self-government “private agencies” misses that point. It is akin to denying the Mayflower Compact, source of much of the American image of selfgovernment, and the basis for government in one of the first English colonies on the continent, the status of a governmental document. While correct in their assessment that many localities in the Old West were relatively peaceful places to live, free-market thinkers like Terry L. Anderson, Peter J. Hill, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, and others therefore throw out the baby with the bathwater in their conclusion that violence did not exist in the West until the Federal Government found it useful to intervene into the region’s self-governed affairs. Violence, rather, was always a component of a multilayered, multipronged approach to personal betterment, as well as societal stability. The government undoubtedly caused much mayhem through its Indian policies. Many were illadvised. Some, however, were well-intentioned albeit ill-executed by local military commanders. The General Government was not, however, the originator of the idea that Indians should be met with violence. This was a strongly held belief among most of the self-described pioneers of the West. Their reasoning for it failed to take into ac-

without the help of vigilante posses. DiLorenzo, “The Culture of Violence in the American West.” Writing from a similar point of view as Anderson and Hill, see: Benson, To Serve and Protect, 98. Ryan McMaken likewise minimizes the importance of violence in the American West. This downplaying of violence allows claims that the Federal Government was nothing but a meddlesome nuisance on the frontier. Ryan McMaken, “The American West: A Heritage of Peace.” Robert C. Ellickson, who has criticized the libertarian model of property rights, still comes to similar conclusions concerning the emergence of self-order absent state actors. Ellickson, Order without Law. 14 Ibid.

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count complicated causalities, such as the circle of “endemic warfare” brought on by initial government neglect of the region by the Spanish Empire, and it gravely misread Indian cultural practices.15 It was born out of settlers’ present situation, eking out an existence in a strange land, unsure of enemy or ally, and under the constant psychological, if not real, threat of Indian attack. While the hatred that they brought to bear on Native Americans cannot be justified, it is clear that Westerners held such views at least partially out of simple fear. Legislators on the East Coast had much to gain from taking land from Indians, but they had just as much to gain from that land being taken under the most peaceful means possible. This had, in fact, been the Federal Government’s preferred policy for much of its history, and that of the British Colonies in North America before it. In an age when few thought twice about being both politicians answerable to their constituency while at the same time on the payroll of large corporations (the railroads foremost among these), money was to be made, and influence to be gained, from supporting some land deals that amounted to little more than military campaigns against an enemy on domestic soil. If anyone vigorously clamored for federal intervention to quash the “savage Apaches,” it was the local settlers themselves. More often than not, they did not get what they wanted, feeling neglected by Washington decision-makers. DiLorenzo provocatively claims, that “[h]istory […] reveals that the expanded presence of the US government was the real cause of a culture of violence in the American West.”16 Yet, in the case of the violent West, simplistic apportionments of blame will not do. One must instead take into account the roles of the General Government, those of railroad and mining companies, of territorial administration officials, and of local actors. The Federal Government certainly shares in the blame for the violence of the West. It was an enabler, sending troops and orders for those troops to follow. Such orders sometimes required, and at other times could be interpreted to mean that American Indians should be killed or driven away. Federal policies enabled a preexisting culture of violence in the Southwest to become fused with one forged on the battlefields of the Civil War. Yet, in the end, Washington had little control over its military. Courts martial were held and some officers and enlisted men were punished for overstepping the bounds of what violence was found to be acceptable. But despite the availability of the age’s most advanced technology, fact-finding was hard, given the circumstances. The military telegraph helped troops in the field coordinate and it provided a vital backlink to the command structure. But it mattered little in the heat of the

15 See Chapter 4. 16 DiLorenzo, “The Culture of Violence in the American West,” 229.

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moment, and could not be used to curb unwanted behavior if military commanders chose to interpret regulations loosely.17 The Hispanic elites who had held the reins of power since Spanish colonial times at first still held on to those reins. They were established, a landed aristocracy with everything but the titles. And titles, too, were informally bestowed upon those in positions of respect. Still, the highest rungs suffered the least from encroachments on their rights. They ran in the same circles as the early Anglo functionaries of the state, the very people who, with view to Washington, had at least some influence to make or break a man by confirming or denying land titles. Both Hispanos and Anglos followed their concurrent but only partially compatible civilizing impulses. One, Spanish-Catholic, reaching back to Pope Alexander VI’s Inter caetera bull of May 1493 and the negotiation of its claims with Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas a little over a year later, entailed the belief in their mandate to colonize and Christianize the Americas. It harkened back to early Jesuit missionaries for moral backing. The other, Anglo-Protestant-American, was national in scope and built on Victorian-era conceptions of value and civilization. On the face of it, both were incompatible. This is evidenced by the era’s rampant antiCatholicism, and the continued appeal of the Black Legend to nineteenth-century Americans, as well as the Spanish elite’s own ideas of inherent superiority. Yet, in close personal contact on the common frontier this presented less of an obstacle. Both views were constructed against a Native American other, preferably in the form of the Apaches. While the American Indian element was emphasized in popular fiction around the world, and the Spanish influence – although, at the time already a good half century older in the region than Anglo settlement is in the present day – was played down, it remains a part of Arizona identity, smaller perhaps than warranted, and smaller than in New Mexico, but noticeable nonetheless. Native Americans fared less well. Even though wholly one-fourth of Arizona’s land is considered part of the reservation system today, the Indians of Arizona are still constructed as apart from the Grand Canyon State’s modern self-fashioning. This process was well underway by the turn of the century. Native Americans defied nineteenth-century contemporaries’ expectations. Celebrated in tradition only, they were relegated, then as now, either to assimilation,

17 The case of Colonel Stoneman, commanding officer of the military’s Department of Arizona in 1870, is a telling example. Stoneman, deciding that he would rather spend his time in Los Angeles than in the “hot, sickly town of Tucson,” quickly departed the territory his department was named for, recommending further to close half of the military bases in Arizona. Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 132.

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adaptation, or irrelevance in mainstream politics and society. Still, they held on.18 Not until the New Western History arrived, however, did American Indian agency once more become visible in Western history. New Western History scholars, importantly also those of Native American descent themselves, put an end to the deemphasizing of micro-level actions of individuals and small groups who found strategies of cooptation of, and cooperation with, the representatives of the new American legal system.

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Land ownership is the single most important legal narrative in the history of the Southwestern United States. The intricate story of lost and gained ownership claims begins with the steady defrauding of Native Americans by both Hispano and Anglo individuals, governments and organizations.19 It continues in style and substance in the defrauding of Hispanic owners of Spanish and Mexican land titles by Anglos during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Whether in federal land grant policy, the consequences of railroads owning land along their right-of-way, or mining claims and counterclaims due to the legal separation of above-ground and belowground land ownership, land in the Southwest was always connected to power: economic and political. Charles Debrille Poston, “not your average temple-building Zoroastrian silver prospector,” as Phoenix Magazine, tongue firmly in cheek, called him was keenly aware of this.20 After securing claims for his mining operations in Southern Arizona in the 1860s, Poston, the “Father of Arizona” – his more traditional moniker – quickly went about establishing reliable legal authority for the territory. For the time being, he simply appointed himself to wield it. Poston decided that even

18 For years, the Tohono O’odham have fought the US government for violating their sovereignty by entering and using their binational US-Mexican reservation for the purposes of the Border Patrol. The United States hereby applied the same strategy used by government bodies throughout the nineteenth century: to acquire permission from some members of a tribe who claim to speak for all, and then to ignore the rest. Clifford, “The Border Effect.” Even more dramatically, the proposed border wall between Mexico and the United States would divide Tohono O’Odham territory permanently. Santos, “Border Wall Would Cleave Tribe, and Its Connection to Ancestral Land.” 19 Explained using the example of the Baca Float affair in the 1880s by Thomas Sheridan: Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud. 20 Towne, “Arizona Icons.” Poston had converted to Zoroastrianism during a trip to India after losing his wife and daughter.

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though it was now situated in American territory, his place of settlement in Arizona would function best under a set of Spanish legal regulations which had evolved to apply to the geography and culture of the place. Under somewhat questionable authority, Poston appointed himself alcalde of Tubac, a small settlement about halfway between Tucson and the Mexican border. He tended not only to town business, but also issued paper currency and performed marriages and baptisms. The latter two actions brought on an investigation by the Santa Fe diocese, but were eventually declared legal after Poston donated $700. Poston, who seems to have remembered his early Arizona adventure as more utopian community than mining enterprise, wrote that “[w]e had no law but love, and no occupation but labor.”21 Despite this claim, he was not the only Anglo to realize that Arizona’s circumstances required a different set of laws than those habitually applied in the East. The “Howell Code,” named for its main originator, Arizona Territorial Supreme Court associate justice William Thomas Howell, was the first set of laws that Arizona territory had under American stewardship. Put into place in 1864, the code was not only based on the laws of New York and California, but on fundamental tenets of Mexican law as well.22 As another early Arizonan, Charles T. Hayden, would later reminisce in flowery language, Howell “analyz[ed] the written and unwritten law of Mexico, handed down from the civilization of the valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, carefully sifted and formulated by the brightest minds of Greece, Rome, Carthage, France, Spain, and Mexico” and “[f]rom these [.] formulated the present law […].”23 Less romantically speaking, Mexican law was derived from the Spanish derecho castellano e indiano, a variant on Spanish law especially supplemented for its overseas possessions. This in turn was based upon a European legal tradition steeped in Roman law, as applied by the Spanish to their ultramarine provinces beginning in 1692.24 When Anglo law supplanted the use of Spanish codes in legal practice, the consequences were predictably extensive. Some effects were obvious and foreseeable, such as the control that Anglo law gave Anglos over the land and the people. This was not only by dint of its statutes being written and applied for their benefit, although they certainly were; as the decades wore on, Anglo domi-

21 Sheridan, Arizona, 65; Powell, Arizona, 42. 22 Goff, “William T. Howell,” 221, 229. See Chapter 4. 23 Phoenix Daily Herald, February 9, 1891. See also: Goff, “William T. Howell,” 229. Hayden completely neglected to tell his readers that much of the Howell Code had come from much closer places, geographically and temporally. As will be expounded upon later in this chapter, this romanticized version of the origin of Arizona’s laws served a purpose. 24 Baade, “Roman Law,” 865.

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nance became ever more palpable. It was also because people from other cultural backgrounds were at a systemic disadvantage because they were not familiar with the workings of the US legal system. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, just like the 1853 Gadsden Treaty, stipulated that Mexican-era legal rights of former Mexican citizens were to be respected. It expressly provided for the acceptance of land grants. Follow-through, however, was not a given. Once American law was applied to Spanish possessions it immediately worked for Anglos and against Hispanos. In the words of land grant historian Malcolm Ebright: The main reason for this was that the land grants were established under one legal system and adjudicated by another. The Anglo common law system did not sufficiently take into account important elements of the Hispanic civil law system such as customary law, which drove the legal system in New Mexico when the land grants were made. Hispanic customary law was poorly understood in late nineteenth century New Mexico because the lawsuits and governmental actions that defined and comprised customary law had not been documented in any detail at that time.25

New Mexico was no exception. Spanish-cum-Mexican law had preexisted AngloAmerican Common Law in parts or in the whole of all Southwestern states.26 But it was not just an American lack of understanding and insufficient zeal to settle old land claims fairly that made finding the rightful owner of property a game of chance. Frequent moves and changes of venue and responsibility of courts and government agencies on both sides of the border created additional trouble. In some cases, documents were simply lost. In others they were destroyed, either by accident or through Indian raids. Frontier recordkeeping was also no friend of Spanish-American claims in the legal system of the United States. In a letter dated May 28, 1886 from Hermosillo, Sonora, for example, J. George Hilzinger,27 sent there as a special agent of the Surveyor General of Arizona, wrote to his superior that I have been very busy since my arrival hunting for whatever pertains to the object of my mission. The government offices have been moved into the new building, which is only partly finished, and not much time has been spent on the arrangement of papers. A great many of the old papers have been culled from the heaps that are piled up loose upon the floor, but an in-

25 Ebright, Land Grants and Lawsuits, 1. 26 Cf. Baade, “Roman Law,” 1. 27 Father of one of the few successes of the early University of Arizona’s course of studies. See Chapter 3.

220 | W IRES T HAT B IND dustrious man might work constantly for a year sorting and arranging and still find much to do. Old documents have been brought from all parts of the state at different times and added to the heaps.28

These were clearly not ideal circumstances for any bureaucracy that had to adjudicate land claims. Both Arizona and New Mexico were different from much of the rest of the American West in that there was no tradition of extralegality when it came to land claims. In other Western states that had never effectively, at least not in recent times, stood under the legal control of an empire or nation, squatting and resultant quarrels were common before the US established direct control. Newcomers to New Mexico and Arizona, on the other hand, had simply not been numerous enough for squatting to become a major fact of life before the government established land offices. The Federal Government established the office of Surveyor General for New Mexico territory, which until 1863 included all of Arizona, in 1854. Before then, the Hispanic system had worked in the area. The handling by Anglo surveyors of land claims originally made during the Spanish or Mexican eras backs up the Mesilla residents’ reliance on the legal system to secure land. That the results were, more often than not, not equitable to American Indians and Hispanos can be attributed to national interests as much as to local attitudes. In cases where the claimants were part of the territorial elite, local Anglos often went out of their way to make sure that Hispano land claims were confirmed in the United States. Business partnership and social amicability united, for example, John Wasson, rabidly anti-Indian long-time editor of the Tucson Citizen and Surveyor General for Arizona from 1870 to 1882, with Arizona’s Hispano elite. Although initially “unprepared to give an opinion” on “[the] extent and validity” of land claims made “under the laws, usages and customs of Spain and Mexico,”29 Wasson tended to side with his Spanish-American peers in most cases, and also helped them retain their land even when Congress did not grant title to Mexican-era claims.

28 AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Misc. Files, 1789–1907, RG 49, F2, NARA Perris. 29 John Wasson, “Report of the Surveyor General of Arizona Territory,” dated Tucson, August 30, 1871 quoted in: Farish, History of Arizona, 308. Wasson’s stance against the Apache, whom he despised, appears to also have influenced his judgement in cases involving the O’odham, long friendly with both the Hispano and Anglo settlers in Southern Arizona. His role in the notorious defrauding of Tohono O’odham in the “Baca Float” land grant is ambivalent. He never questioned Hispano and Anglo petitioners claiming that the tract of land in question had long been abandoned by the O’odham when it evidently had not been. Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud, 238.

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In the case of Sabino Otero, a prominent Tubac Hispano cattle rancher with a claim of 185.7 acres, Wasson found the claim valid. Otero had filed a claim for his “Rancho de Otero” near Tubac, the oldest land grant in Arizona, on December 1, 1879.30 Wasson heard testimony on March 23, 1880, reviewed the case for another year, and in his final recommendation explained that the Mexican archives where the records had been kept had fallen prey to an Apache raid, and therefore the original documents could not be produced. Wasson was still convinced that the occupancy of the land for three generations by the Otero family constituted a valid claim.31 He even kept reminding Otero of necessary steps in the process. Wasson’s outgoing mail ledger shows that he wrote Otero on February 24, 1880, asking for testimony in support of the claim.32 He followed up on April 7, explaining to Otero in Spanish that the testimony so far provided had not been sufficient. On August 14, he switched back to English, informing Otero that “I took up the papers in your private land case intending to finally dispose of them with a strong recommendation in your favor” but then had apparently realized that Otero was not the only heir, which prompted Wasson to request additional testimony from the other heirs in question. Wasson followed up on November 3, offering “action and consultation in the matter” and stating “I may be able to assist you.” This would “enable me to report the case for action during the coming session of Congress.” Otero was not the only prominent Hispano Wasson was on at least somewhat friendly terms with. On November 23, he sent a letter in Spanish to Juan Elías, a prominent Tucsonan, to ask Elías to name witnesses for a land grant near Yuma. In a report dated February 25, Wasson recommended the claim of “[f]our square leagues, situated partially in the United States and partially in Sonora” be confirmed.33

30 Ibid., 122; Bowden, “Private Land Claims of the Southwest,” ch. 5; Letter from John Wasson dated March 1, 1881. AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Misc. Files, 1789–1907, RG 49, NARA Perris. 31 Bowden, “Private Land Claims of the Southwest,” ch. 5. Bowden’s extensively researched, bewilderingly complete six-volume thesis, held at the Center for Southwest Research in Albuquerque, is factually authoritative on Hispanic land claims in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Its analysis is limited to the legal-political interplay between the federal and territorial levels. 32 Although the year is not stated directly on the claim, it can only have been 1880, since Wasson made a final report on the claim in 1881. 33 Letters from John Wasson to Sabino Otero dated February 24, April 7, August 14, November 3; Letter from John Wasson to Juan Elías dated November 23; Report on “Los Nogales de Elías”. AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Misc. Files, 1789–1907, RG 49,

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In Otero’s case, Wasson recommended that the land be granted in a letter dated Tucson March 1, 1881. Despite such positive findings, the claim went nowhere. Otero apparently did not see much hope in further litigating the claim. Instead, he did the next best thing: he relinquished the claim to the public domain. This enabled him to immediately apply for a homestead of 160 acres, encompassing almost all of the land he had not been able to secure through the land claims transferral process.34 In its sly use of the legal concept of the homestead, unknown under the laws of Sonora that Southern Arizona had been part of, the Otero case has all the makings of a Western tall tale, worthy of Mark Twain. Easterners, through adverse action or simple inaction, as with many land claims that never advanced through the legal system, were responsible for the legal defrauding of Hispanic Americans more than any local or territorial-level actors. Where Wasson, who both wrote and received communication in Spanish, and was sometimes addressed as “Juan Wasson, mi estimado amigo,” saw peers in his Hispanic friends, the national process paid no attention to social realities in the Southwest.35 In the national view, taking away land from Hispanos and Southwestern native bands alike, and giving it to the American nation to dole out homesteads, was just and right. That Otero in the end succeeded in reclaiming his farmland is not a true success story. Even with a friend in the right place, he only did so at the expense of 25.7 acres, and more than a year’s worth of headache. In a legal sense, this is somewhat surprising. After all, Bowden states: “Since all just claims were to be respected as though sovereignty had not changed and should not be subjected to stringent rules of construction, the United States was obligated to provide prompt and reasonable means for their adjudication.”36 Why exactly, then, did a simple translation of land claims, necessarily prescribed by US law, nonetheless go awry in such a manner? The factors at play were manifold. For one thing, the procedure to “nostrificate” Mexican land grants was complicated and flawed. It was dependent on unreliable witnesses and corrupt American land surveys under the contract system, which paid surveyors by land surveyed, prompting many a dubious measurement. The process also suffered from

NARA Perris. Elías’s claim was the land near the San Pedro customs house where the Elías family held annual roundups. See Chapter 5. 34 AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Misc. Files, 1789–1907, RG 49, F2, NARA Perris. The homestead was filed in Phoenix. Homestead Entry Phoenix 09196. Records of the Bureau of Land Management, RG 49, NARA Washington, DC, quoted in: Bowden, “Private Land Claims of the Southwest,” ch. 5 35 Various Files. AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Surveyor General’s Case Files, 1800– 1891, RG 49, Box 1, NARA Perris. 36 Bowden, “Private Land Claims of the Southwest,” ch. 5.

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Surveyors General with no working knowledge of US, Spanish, and Mexican law, or even Spanish language skills, who frequently were also corrupt.37 In New Mexico, many lawyers – including, in the 1880s, two of the most prominent ones representing claimants – were under the thrall of the territorial political machine. That machine, the Republican Santa Fe Ring, as well as partisan politics and Washington-based corruption added to the problem.38 Yet, Surveyor General John Wasson in Arizona was well enough versed in both the Spanish language and the legal culture of Mexico that he was able to ascertain the validity of some claims, while rejecting others. In Arizona, seventeen of nineteen claims filed were reported on.39 Two were found to be fraudulent, both submitted by Anglo mining enterprises. One, submitted by the Sonora Mining and Exploring Company was even rejected by Wasson when he was first asked to survey it on the grounds that “it was known to be mineral for one hundred years.”40 Furthermore, no territorial organization like the Santa Fe Ring existed in Arizona – a collusion between Arizona politicians of the Government Ring and merchants of the Tucson Ring appears to be somewhat apocryphal41 – and where New Mexico’s Surveyor General had his docket full with 221 separate claims, Wasson’s nineteen over twelve years in Arizona were much easier to check thoroughly.42 Although it had passed Wasson’s tests with flying colors, once in Washington, the Otero claim was never granted. It disappeared in a processual netherworld. It was not definitively decided upon, which meant nothing else could be done about it.

37 The corrupt officials, it appears, were appreciated by public opinion in New Mexico because they “got things done.” George W. Julian, New Mexico’s Surveyor General from 1886 on, and one of the few set on equitably dealing with the claims before him, was universally reviled in that territory. Bowden, “Private Land Claims of the Southwest,” ch. 5. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. John Wasson’s “Memoranda of Safe” index dated 1893 lists all of them, with diligent notes as to their status, such as “Papers delivered to J. H. Reeder.” AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Misc. Files, 1789–1907, RG 49, NARA Perris. 40 Any patent on it should therefore have been established under the General Mining Act of 1872, which provided for procedures to lay claim to “locatable minerals.” General Mining Law of 1872, Act of May 10, 1872 (17. Stat. 92; 30 USC 28). What exactly the Sonora Mining and Exploring Company hoped to gain by claiming a Mexican land grant instead is not altogether clear, although it does seem likely that it was a strategic attempt to preempt possible competition. Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud, 151. AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Surveyor General’s Case Files, 1800–1891, RG 49, Box 1, NARA Perris. 41 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 72, 95, 117. 42 Bowden, “Private Land Claims of the Southwest,” ch. 5.

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The federal officials tasked with deciding land grants in many cases where Hispanos were involved were not easy to convince. Political wrangling in Washington was likely a factor, as was Gilded Age corruption. But so was the simple truth that government employees with little knowledge of the law and the situation in the Southwest often simply chose to not do anything. Thus, “instead of endeavoring to meet its public land problems, the federal government persistently chose to ignore them.”43 American Indians, as Thomas Sheridan opines in his review of the “Baca Float” case, also suffered from federal officials who were “guilty of historical ignorance compounded by lazy racism.”44 While racism against Hispanos was apparently not a primary factor in the territorial review of claims, once localized decisions were made nationally, it forcefully entered the picture.

T HE P SEUDO -H ISPANIC L EGACY OF S OUTHWESTERN W ATER L AW As far as legal conflicts in the Southwest were concerned, water rights conflicts were second in importance only to quarrels over land. Moreover, the latter were usually connected with the former, making it hard to fully extricate arguments over one or the other in many cases. Both agriculture and mining, the major economies in territorial Arizona and New Mexico, depended on water and land. The legal system assisted these industrial ventures in securing access to promote further expansion. Initially, there was no clear directional thrust in the interpretation of conflicting water rights philosophies by the courts. By the late 1880s, however, they would settle on fancifully interpreting Hispanic legal constructions as being in line with the needs of capitalism and progress.45 Most water related clashes, inside and outside the legal arena, stemmed from two competing ideas of water usage rights.46 Large farmers and mining enterprises,

43 Ibid. 44 Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud, 238. 45 Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 654–658. Reich’s article is invaluable in teasing out the history of how the Hispanic past was instrumentalized as a basis of argumentation to advocate in favor of Anglo prior appropriation water rights in Arizona. Much of my argument below rests on the connections between Hispanic Revivalism and the fiction of a Hispanic prior appropriation tradition made by Reich. 46 I am thankful to Silvan Eppinger for his insights into the legal framework surrounding water law in Arizona.

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both with a need for large amounts of water, tended to extract the water they needed, despite often not being the first users under the prior appropriation doctrine. Prior appropriation, in short, was the concept that water rights were not tied to land ownership, but to who had first made “productive use” of water. The earlier claimant, that is the party who could legitimately claim prior appropriation, would be entitled to the share of water they had become accustomed to extracting, leaving only the amount of water not earlier appropriated for those later laying claims upstream or downstream. It made its first appearance in 1855, when a California court decided in Irwin v. Phillips that this system had evolved with both the consent of the community and the assent of government, and was applicable to a mining water requirement dispute. Codified in Colorado in 1872, and therefore also often known as the Colorado Doctrine, prior appropriation was later adopted by most Western states. It has more recently even become one of the governing principles of water law in Florida.47 Prior appropriation builds on the principle of “beneficial use,” use that in the parlance of the age productively “improved” land for settlement or agriculture, or later industrial production – including mining. It does not require that a water user is located adjacent to the source of the water, thereby also allowing uses in geographically remote locales that can be reached through irrigation techniques. As long as an appropriator of water continues to use it for such productive purposes, they are allowed to constantly extract the appropriated share, even if a drought makes it impossible for other users to then receive sufficient water for their own purposes. Once productive use under the doctrine has ceased – or is forfeited or diminished by continued non-appropriation of the amount initially required – secondary appropriators are transferred water usage rights for their purposes if the appropriation is not sold. In most cases, the sale of water shares appropriated but no longer needed constitutes the norm.48 While the water-rich East of the United States used the riparian doctrine, this was unsuited to the arid Western climate.49 Riparian law, originating in Rhode

47 Ibid., 650. Cf. Also Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest, supra note 6, 145–164. Reich also refers to this source. 48 All in all, this is necessarily a gross oversimplification of a complex concept that varies from state to state in the American West. The literature is voluminous and varied. A good introductory discussion of the prior appropriation doctrine as applicable to the turn-ofthe-century West is Hess, “The Colorado Water Right.” An insightful recent case study is Olson, “Water Management and the Upper Clark Fork Steering Committee.” 49 Anthony Scott and Georgina Coustalin provide a thorough overview of both riparian and prior appropriation water rights through the history of the United States. Scott and Coustalin, “The Evolution of Water Rights.”

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Island’s 1827 Tyler v. Wilkinson considered it the right of any landowner along the run of a river or stream to divert as much water as they needed to their land adjacent.50 While this seldom posed problems in climates where water was plentiful and where rivers ran regular, it quickly created problems in the arid West. There, smaller streams quite frequently ran dry, or almost dry, during summer even before large scale irrigation had begun. In the eastern United States, the riparian usage system led essentially to the use of water as a finite, communally shared resource, of which all had to give up a share if there was not a sufficient amount. The first decision by an Arizona court concerning historical precedent for water rights was Dalton v. Rentaría, a conflict about water diversion of the Santa Cruz River near Tucson. According to historian and legal scholar Peter L. Reich, Dalton upheld some version of the Spanish-Mexican system of equitable water sharing based on several factors, including “just title, need, avoiding injury to third parties, reason for use, legal rights, and the common good.”51 This is in contrast to the depiction of the same case by Sheridan, which presents the image that Arizona’s courts never acknowledged the Spanish-Mexican method of water sharing.52 As Richard J. Orsi has shown, irrigation projects were not public works projects that provoked little opposition.53 They, too attracted their share of detractors. Many who opposed them were put at a disadvantage by new methods of water-share assignment through irrigation ditches, dams, and later, canals. In Arizona, prior appropriation was retroactively imbued with the cachet of precedent and older Spanish law by judges, even when it was clearly not the dominant manner of water distribution during the Hispanic era. This is especially interesting considering that such claims appeared with increasing frequency during a period when Hispanic elites were losing political power. Hispanic, that is Spanish and later Mexican water law, even though considered in line with the prior appropriation doctrine by Southwestern judges, was commensurate with neither the notion of prior appropriation, nor that of riparian use. Instead, it put first the need for a community to have access to this vital resource. Disputes were mitigated by communal sharing, and by arbitration involving a plethora of factors. These included several associated with either prior appropria-

50 Tyler v. Wilkinson, 24 F. Cas. 472 (DRI 1827). On the development of the riparian doctrine, see Horwitz, “The Transformation in the Conception of Property in American Law,” 252. 51 Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 654–658. 52 As Reich points out himself. Compare ibid., 656; Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 64–67. 53 Richard J. Orsi, “Railroads and Water in the Arid Far West,” 48.

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tion or riparian water law. This system had developed in response to the challenges of a desert environment. It was in full effect before the American takeover.54 That Arizona’s Anglo judges, beginning in the 1880s and continuing until at least the 1930s, created and upheld the fiction of a Hispanic prior appropriation law, does not at first seem likely and requires elaboration. After all, as has been argued, Hispanic elites’ grasp on political, and thus also legal power in Arizona was waning during just that period. Mexican immigrants were looked upon as a necessary evil. They were needed as cheap laborers, but considered low in class. They were discriminated against. For Anglos concerned with constructing the apparatus of the nation state, the Hispanic presence was certainly not something that elicited open enthusiasm. As Peter Reich notes, prior appropriation was a concept suited most to industrial enterprises and industrial scale agriculture, not communal husbandry of limited pastures. It had begun in Californian mining disputes, and been codified and hardened into doctrine in Colorado. In both cases, this had occurred without reference to a Hispanic past.55 This despite the fact that the two states, to different degrees, had a discernible Hispanic influence.56 Aside from Arizona, California, and Colorado, the only other state or territory in which a supposed parallel between Spanish prior appropriation and Western law made an appearance was New Mexico. There, however, it remained a thoroughly limited, tenuous link to the fictional past. It was used as a decisive argument in court cases only twice.57 Again, the massively more prominent presence of Hispanos in New Mexico was a likely basis for this discrepancy. While Anglo Arizonans could content themselves with inventing their past according to fashion, expediency, and whimsy, New Mexicans had to grapple with its realities. And these realities did not sustain an argument of Hispanic prior appropriation.58 Southern Arizona, the place where most water rights conflicts during the late nineteenth century played out, as we have seen, in the late 1880s and 1890s was in transition. Different from the “gay seventies and eighties” when a small number of interconnected and mutually benefiting self-described pioneers constituted the few communities, the following decade brought the largest increase in numbers of Anglos yet.59 Even though this would mean an almost complete transition in personnel among power elites by the turn of the century, some tenets of self-

54 Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 656. 55 Hess, “The Colorado Water Right,” 649, 655–656. 56 Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 13–40. 57 Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 560. 58 Ibid. 59 Yancy, “The Negro of Tucson,” 21.

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identification remained the same. One was a romanticizing of the Hispanic past and its white male heroes. It is no coincidence that Charles Lummis saw America first, and did so first-hand, setting out on his well-publicized stunt trek across the United States from Cincinnati in September 1884, and that Herbert Bolton and his students combated the Black Legend with heroic tales of white Spaniards conquering transcontinental borderlands from 1901 on. A generation of white intellectuals was becoming interested in the Southwest at the turn of the century.60 At just that time, Francisco Kino was also inscribed as Arizona’s quasi patronsaint.61 Non-academic local historians in the Southwest had led the way in glorifying the Spanish past. Although the Boltonians dug diligently for sources, and interpreted them within the larger context of Southwestern and continental history, the presupposition that America, as a country and as a continent, had been justly conquered, by white men for the good of all, remained.62 The idealized past was, as elsewhere in the United States at the time, useful. First and foremost, it provided gravity to any argument. This use is evidenced by the Arizona courts’ decisions, filled with paragraphs full of pathos. The Arizona Supreme Court, which had in 1885’s Dalton v. Rentaría still denied that prior appropriation applied, and held that the irrigation ditches at the Santa Cruz river near Tucson “were kept in common repair for the use of all,”63 three years later changed its tune. In Clough v. Wing, a case originating in Northern Arizona, it reversed itself and went even further back

60 Padget, “Travel, Exoticism, and the Writing of Region,” 422. On Lummis, see also Fiske and Lummis, Charles F. Lummis. Audrey Goodman delivers a fascinating overview of Lummis’s genre-mixing tenure as the editor of Land of Sunshine from 1893 on, while Leah Dilworth gives a concise overview of his importance in creating the US Southwest conceptually for the reading public in the United States. Goodman, “The Tasks of Southwestern Translation”; Dilworth, “The Southwest Imagined.” 61 Bolton’s biography of Kino, completed in 1927, marks the culmination of such efforts. Bolton, Rim of Christendom. 62 Patrick Hamilton, later Arizona’s commissioner of immigration from 1884–1885, in 1881 published his The Resources of Arizona, a book begun by the territory’s former governor, John C. Frémont. Frémont and Hamilton, The Resources of Arizona. Hamilton’s real enthusiasm for the Spanish past, however, only fully comes through in another work; “the reckless bravery, the dauntless energy, and the unconquered will of the old cavaliers have never been surpassed.” Hamilton, “Arizona: An Historical Outline,” quoted in: Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 652. Bolton himself started becoming interested in Spain’s colonial history when he first came to the University of Texas in 1901. Kemble, “Bolton, Herbert Eugene.” 63 Dalton v. Rentaría quoted in: Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 655.

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into the past, effectively arguing that water rights in the region were derived from Native American (O’odham) traditions, as well as Roman law, which had been inherited by the Spanish and brought over into the New World. There, the courts surmised, it fit together seamlessly with Native American traditions and as such was doubly legitimate.64 The evocation of the O’odham gives a clue as to why Anglos intent on industrializing and “civilizing” Arizona constructed legal arguments on the basis of a nonexistent past. They had a romantic notion, popular in American culture at the time, of an Arcadian past. This was, on the one hand, utterly incompatible with contemporary concepts of law and society and with the Victorian Age reality of Native Americans in the Southwest. On the other hand, however, it did dovetail with American ideals of a Jeffersonian-agrarian idyll, long part of the elite’s cultural vernacular, and tied intrinsically to national ideas.65 If America’s progression to empire and world power was just reaching The Consummation of Empire, third of five images in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire cycle, and well known to late nineteenth-century elites,66 then the immediate past was its most idyllic picture, The Pastoral State. Depicting an Arcadian garden landscape, it seemed just out of living memory, and thus just out of reach, for the legal civilizers.67 Recalling, in fact invoking, Arcadia was a way of avoiding Destruction and, finally, Desolation.68 The concept of a prior appropriation doctrine stemming from what was considered the best part of the Hispanic past, a never-never-time when friendly Indians milled around missions led by Franciscans, black-robed but lily-white in their civilizing purity, fit the time and place in several ways. For one, it was tied to an idealized Hispanic past. That past’s poignancy was evidenced by the prominence of mission revival architecture beginning in the 1880s, by writers extolling the virile virtue of the Spanish colonizers, or by pseudo-Hispanic fêtes in once-Hispanic, or even in new, purely Anglo, settlements.69 At the same time, it connected to the Jeffersonian ideal, gaining cogency from a fundamental tenet of American self-

64 Clough v. Wing quoted in: Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 656–657. 65 See Adams, “Die Ausbildung amerikanischen Nationalbewußtseins und amerikanischer Kultur,” 33. 66 These images were steeped in romanticism, even though the movement had passed its artistic prime. See for example Cox, “Americans and Their Forests.” 67 Cole, The Course of Empire: The Pastoral State; Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire. 68 Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction; Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation. 69 Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 652; Gebhard, “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California,” 131.

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description. Additionally, it perpetuated the myth of the noble Indian, wise to devise a system of resource-sharing in tune with his surroundings, and one that seemed created to be compatible with that of the European settlers to boot. Such a compatibility in approaches to sharing the scarce and vital resource further implied an infantilizing wholesome communion between the cultures that American enterprise had by now largely supplanted. American enterprise’s needs, miraculously, were also perfectly met by just that system of distribution. In creating a post-Columbian, yet pre-Anglo-American, Hispano-NativeArcadian water sharing tradition, Arizona’s Anglo elites acknowledged their geography. In a very pragmatic fashion, their fictions united the needs of industry with the necessity to find some sort of arrangement with the space they occupied, and with its unfamiliarity, its divergent traditions from what they had been used to on the East Coast. The fiction also helped overcome the pesky issue of the Hispanic present; of new immigrants from southern and central Mexico, whose direct ancestors had never called Sonora, or Arizona, their home, and who were barely tolerated by Anglos and old-stock Hispanos alike. They did not belong to the ideal past, while Sonorense norteños did. Norteños partnered with Anglos in industrial exploitation on both sides of the border. While the number of influential Hispanic citizens would dwindle in the decades to come, this development was not yet clearly obvious to either themselves or their Anglo allies. Since the creators of the idealized past were among the number of these allies, ancestral Spanish male role models were upheld. Only a later generation of Anglos, those who had few direct and necessary dealings with the Hispanic elites, could ignore the contributions of these elites in the future. This, however, was a process only completed in the 1920s and 1930s. The arrival in force of such new thinking showed itself in the fact that Hispanos began founding ethnic associations, modeled after mutualistas, a type of fraternal organization imitating the Masonic lodges which had become popular in Mexico since the 1850s.70 Especially significant was the first nationally operating mutualista, the Alianza Hispano-Americana, founded in Tucson in 1894.71

70 Arrieta, “La Alianza Hispano-Americana,” 109. The purpose of the Alianza as not only a mutual aid society, but also a way to retain power in an Americanizing society is discussed in ibid., 112. James E. Officer’s PhD dissertation on “Sodalities and Systemic Linkage: The Joining Habits of Urban Mexican-Americans” and Kaye L. Briegel’s dissertation on the Alianza inform most modern research on the organization. Officer, “Sodalities and Systemic Linkage; Briegel, “Alianza Hispano-Americana.” 71 Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows, 86, 88. The history of the Hispano-American mutualistas, with a special focus on the roles of women, is most adeptly recounted in Ibid., 72–89. The time of its founding itself is apropos; with Tucson’s population

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A pan-Hispanic ethnicity began to emerge only in the wake of an Anglo opposition that no longer distinguished between “old” and “new” Mexicans in the Gadsden area. Several sociedades mutualistas sprang up in Arizona towns during the 1880s and 1890s. Florence saw the founding of the Sociedad Hispano Americana de Beneficienca in 1886, Phoenix had the Sociedad de Beneficienca Mutua de la Raza Latina in 1888, the Sociedad Hidalgo was founded in Solomonville in 1889, and the Sociedad de la Protección Mutua opened in St. Johns in 1893. The Alianza expanded in this climate. It became the largest mutualista. In 1919, there were 88 chapters, most in Arizona, but several also in Texas and New Mexico.72 According to the Arizona Star, it boasted 127 chapters across the Southwest by 1927, and almost double that number two years later, 240. The Alianza even spread into Mexico, offering fraternity and insurance services, often to members who had moved to Mexico from the United States, or those that had ties north of the still permeable but increasingly inflexible border.73 By the 1920s, then, Hispano ethnicity had become a major uniting factor among Hispanic Americans, including the elites. The latter had, during the transition in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, still self-assuredly insisted on making a difference between themselves and the new, southern immigrants. The 1880s also saw the beginnings of a development that continued well into the twentieth century: that the Spanish past was increasingly useful, and that it could be instrumentalized in order to paint over problems in the present. Ironically, it was employed to justify the denigration of an increasing percentage of Hispano Arizonans and New Mexicans who supposedly were the heirs of the heroes that were now created out of the original European conquesters. This was somewhat akin to the idealization of Native Americans at the same time that it was thought they would vanish from the country once and for all. But why did a recourse to the invented Hispanic past only occur in such force in Arizona, and not in New Mexico, Colorado, California, or even Texas? It would appear that the North/South division of Arizona Territory, with most old Hispano families concentrated in the South around Tucson and Tubac, and the majority of

numbers in the mid-1890s once again rising after a dip at the beginning of the decade, Hispano-Americans wanted, as C. L. Sonnichsen writes, “a club of their own.” While Anti-Hispano discrimination in Tucson, according to his estimation, never reached the excesses of other parts of the Southwest, still “the barriers were going up.” Sonnichsen, Tucson, 145–146. For population numbers in context, see Moffat, Population History of Western US Cities and Towns, 16. 72 “Historia de la Alianza Hispano-Americana.” Alianza Hispano-Americana, MS 597, AHS; Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows, 86–87. 73 Sonnichsen, Tucson, 146–147.

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Anglo newcomers drawn to Anglo-founded Phoenix and its surrounding settlements, once again was the decisive difference. It therefore pays to take a closer look at some of the judges serving on the Territorial Supreme Court in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Their ties to other players in Arizona’s transitioning Anglo-Hispanic elite help illuminate their cultural predispositions. Judging Arizona The Arizona Supreme Court in the late 1870s and early 1880s was located in Prescott. It moved to Phoenix with the transfer of the capital to that city. The location itself was of less consequence than one might suppose as the court only sat once a year.74 It initially comprised three judges, all trial judges on the level of the district courts. Following the model in use in New Mexico Territory, these three judges also made up the Supreme Court. The problem that a District Court judge could decide a case on that level, and then be part of the Supreme Court that reviewed it, was soon recognized and countered by adding a fourth, and later a fifth judge to the court.75 Its justices were by and large Westerners, many of them early Anglo arrivals to Arizona. Lawyers in the territory were sought after and relatively well-paid as mining and land claims began filling the courts’ dockets. Charles Silent, who served as an associate justice on the court from 1878 to 1880, had come to Arizona specifically because of his appointment to the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court in 1878.76 President Rutherford B. Hayes had appointed Silent, a German-born California jurist on the recommendation of California governor Newton Booth, and California senator, and notorious Southern Pacific Railroad promoter Aaron A. Sargent. Such prominent endorsement, though, did not lead Silent to feel too much compunction to dutifully adjudicate matters of territorial law with a gavel in hand once he learned that the profession of attorney, not judge, was better paying in Arizona. He pragmatically resigned, prompting the Arizona legislature to increase his salary by $2,000 in excess of that of his fellow justices. Silent stayed on for two years.77 The extra salary, qualified by the legislature as compensation for the third of three district judges on account of his need to frequently travel across the territory, was an egregious extra expense. The Department of Justice in Washington never came around to sign off on any money given to judges in excess of the $3,000 an-

74 Berch, “A History of the Arizona Courts,” 13. 75 Goff, “The Appointment, Tenure and Removal of Territorial Judges,” 211. 76 Goff, Arizona Territorial Officials I. The Supreme Court Justices, 77. 77 Shuck, History of the Bench and Bar of California, 933.

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nual base salary.78 The Department’s position reflects the attitude of the Federal Government in general. It also habitually denied Arizona and other territories funds of various kinds that were required to enable them to function as political entities.79 Still, while much of the conflict can be traced to the Federal and Territorial levels not seeing eye to eye as to what was necessary to conduct business, the Department of Justice was also prudent to be wary. Rebecca White Berch, former chief justice of the Arizona State Supreme Court, quite bluntly notes about the courts during the territorial period that “many [judges] were incompetent or corrupt.”80 As was true for most other positions in Arizona government, such corruption, ironically, had its base in the appointment of outsiders who primarily sought personal betterment, and had much less interest in the correct conduct of territorial affairs.81 Such, at least, is the standard assumption for territorial justices.82 The accusation is not baseless, but needs to be qualified. According to historian John S. Goff, such a disparaging view on the territorial court system is based on the writings of some of his academic colleagues […] who seem to echo the desires of the people of the various areas for statehood and, hence, the right to select and control their own judges. It is commonly assumed by historians that the jurists sent out by Washington were usually political hacks and adventurers who preyed on the territory to which they were assigned.83

While a fair number of them certainly were, Goff points out that “the Arizona territorial supreme court members were probably no better and no worse than those later elected by voters […].” The main difference being that once voters were charged with putting justices in power, the jurists had to pay close heed to the wishes of the voters. This resulted in even corrupt officials making efforts to appeal to their constituency, and in judges generally being of the same party that was in power in the state. This was much unlike in territorial days, when the Federal Government’s party allegiance was evident in the appointees. As people were generally more forgiving of officials of their own party allegiance, their personal feelings reflected

78 Goff, “The Appointment, Tenure and Removal of Territorial Judges,” 213. 79 The prison system in the West, for example, was continually underfunded. Conditions in one Utah prison were so untenable that “in 1861 [.…] all but one of the prisoners had escaped, and that lone exception stayed put only long enough to receive a governor’s pardon.” Wilson, “Frontier in the Shadows,” 327, 328. 80 Berch, “A History of the Arizona Courts,” 13. 81 Ibid. 82 Goff, “The Appointment, Tenure and Removal of Territorial Judges,” 212. 83 Ibid.

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much more of an improvement in the quality of the judiciary than was warranted. Goff names several early territorial judges, including Joseph H. Kibbey and Charles G. W. French, whom he considers exemplary members of their profession, and remarks that the Arizona Supreme Court overall was surprisingly competent.84 This was likely also the opinion of the Arizona legislators when it came to Charles Silent’s appointment. That the legislature would even consider such a remarkable accommodation to Silent – it was paid only to him, and to his immediate replacement, until 1881, and then abolished – points to the fact that Silent either had many influential friends, or that he was singularly qualified. Judgeships in Arizona were sought after and subject to much machination and maneuvering on behalf of candidates by their supporters. If a judge resigned, there was usually a considerable number of candidates waiting in the wings.85 If we consider Silent’s career in California before and after his tenure as a justice in Arizona,86 it is likely that both his qualifications and his benefactors played a role. This is further corroborated by the typical fate of an Arizona Supreme Court justice, one that was spared the somewhat Machiavellian Mr. Silent: they were removed from office due to sometimes more, sometimes less spurious or vague accusations.87 Justice Department files indicate that the bulk of its correspondence involving Arizona territorial judges fell into two categories: the first was letters praising prospective candidates; or those already in office, in order to protect them from removal. The second, almost inevitably, was correspondence accusing judges or candidates of improper behavior in hopes of having them removed, or not appointed in the first place.88 Joseph Henry Kibbey, later the territory’s penultimate governor, served as Associate justice from 1889 through 1893, the period of most of the water law cases discussed. Kibbey, in fact, made his name with a ruling on water law, the so-called “Kibbey Decision.” During the Arizona constitutional convention, Kibbey would protest against the discrimination of Spanish-speaking citizens of the new state, as a move was made to disqualify those from voting who could not read the constitution

84 Ibid., 212–213. 85 Ibid., 212. 86 Goff, Arizona Territorial Officials II. The Governors, 77. 87 All in all, forty individuals held Arizona Supreme Court posts, in forty-two individual appointments; two justices served twice. Accusations included taking of bribes, unwelcome personal characteristics, or lack of impartiality in rulings. These tended to be made without submission of evidence. Cf. Goff, “The Appointment, Tenure and Removal of Territorial Judges,” 212. 88 Ibid., 212–213.

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in English. Kibbey, in opposing such a provision, quoted its incompatibility with the Gadsden Treaty.89 Given his argument in that case, Kibbey was obviously friendly with at least a few of those among the Hispano elite that would be affected by the decision. The Kibbey Decision on water law itself, however, gives clear evidence of his acknowledgment of the fiction of Hispanic prior appropriation, despite the fact that he must have been aware of the actual Hispanic precedent. Kibbey had arrived in Arizona only four years before his momentous contribution to Western water law. Born in Indiana, he had made his name in the legal profession in Virginia, where he served as a prosecutor for two years immediately prior to his departure westward.90 An early one among the number of “health seekers” that were to dominate perceptions of Arizona at the turn of the century and until World War I, when a cure for “consumption,” or tuberculosis, was finally found, Kibbey quickly became acquainted with the territory’s elite. Kibbey’s ruling came about because of the difficulty of combining the legacy of actual Hispanic laws and traditions with the water needs of the Anglo settlers. Irrigation development in Arizona from the 1870s on focused on the Salt River Valley and adjacent areas around Phoenix and Tempe.91 The Tempe Irrigating Canal Company,92 established by Anglo shareholders – landowners of parcels that would profit from irrigation – quite naturally operated under the zanjero system that had been the hallmark of water allocation in the Hispanic Southwest.93 The zanjero, a telling title derived from the Spanish word zanja for ditch, was part manager, part arbiter, and part diplomat. He was elected by the shareholders. He was tasked with checking whether every member (including water renters not holding shares in the company themselves) had the infrastructure necessary for measured irrigation; with collecting dues from the renters and shareholders; and finally, but most importantly, with making sure that water distribution was equal.94 On the Hispanic frontier, the office of zanjero did not lend itself to a conflictfree existence. The very nature of the job, distributing water equitably among constituents, required Salomonic skills. Within the neighborly confines of a Hispano village, the task was considered necessary. It carried the weight of tradition and the

89 Palsson, “The Arizona Constitutional Convention of 1910,” 116–117. 90 Wagoner, Arizona Territory, 421. For a comprehensive biography of Kibbey, see also Goff, Joseph H. Kibbey. 91 Lewis, “The Early History of the Tempe Canal Company,” 228–230. 92 A name it took on in 1871. In its first year of existence it was known as the Hardy Canal Company after one of its founders. It appears Hardy was ousted in January 1871; his name disappears from the minutes of the company thereafter. Ibid., 230. 93 Ibid., 232–234. 94 Ibid., 232–233.

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knowledge that the needs of the community exceeded that of an individual. Villagers usually obeyed the dicta of the zanjero.95 If applied to an Anglo-owned and operated irrigation company, the zanjero system posed far greater challenges. Most importantly, if the zanjero dues were to be paid by water renters, i.e. those farmers who paid the company to be able to use a part of the irrigation water, and not shareholders according to their percentage of shares owned, this meant that compliance could be quite low. Renters protested that these fees should be paid for by the shareholders, and not collected separately from each farmer by the zanjero himself. Shareholders, after all, made significant profits from renting out their water rights.96 The Tempe Canal Company did not switch to such a system of direct shareholder due collection until 1878.97 This caused the position of water arbiter until then to be founded on slushy ground. The first two occupants of the position did not last very long. Winchester Miller, the very first one, only made it from October 1872 through July 1873. The second one, J. T. Priest, finally quit after two years and after he had been slapped with additional duties to perform while enduring a 25 percent cut in salary, from $100 annually to $75.98 It is possible that the company’s early zanjeros had simply underestimated the difficulty of the job and called it quits when they did because of this misjudgment. Yet Nathaniel Sharp, the Tempe Canal Company’s third, and probably most savvy, zanjero – he held the post on again, off again for five years – also had to contend with much unhappiness from his client-employers. Since Sharp was responsible also for collecting fees from the same farmers he distributed water to, conflict was unavoidable. The records give no reason for why payments were late or missing, but as a connection between the zanjero payment and the allotted share of water was clear in the farmers’ minds – both manifesting themselves in the person of the water manager – the feeling of having received an insufficient apportionment of water cannot have made the renters quick to pay their dues.99 The zanjero did have the power to shut off water to those who did not pay, or to bring suits against them in court. Neither of these was an attractive option when faced with noncompliance. The first almost certainly would create more resentment, while the second was costly and time-consuming. Thus, even though the lawsuit and the court argument, rather than the more romantic six-guns and shootouts, typi-

95 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 14. 96 Goldberg, “Michael Wormser, Capitalist,” 188. 97 Lewis, “The Early History of the Tempe Canal Company,” 233. 98 Ibid. Tempe Irrigating Canal Co. Minute Book, 1870–1879, TH-231.01. Tempe Historical Museum. This is a copy from the original held at the Salt River Project Archives. 99 Ibid.

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cally constituted the way things were done in the West, here the power to sue ultimately accrued to not much more than an ultima ratio. A realistic option to combat routine small infractions it was not. When it came to enforcing that the payments necessary for upkeep of the canals, and those that constituted his own pay, were actually made, the Tempe Canal Company’s board had supplied its irrigation manager with a lot of theoretical options. As far as practical ones were concerned, on the other hand, they had left him high and dry. It is thus not surprising that Sharp resigned in the fall of 1879, after a motion to dismiss him had failed in the company’s general meeting in spring of that year. From then on, the Tempe Canal Company stopped electing its zanjeros, instead accepting outside applications. The job was important (and, one imagines, complicated) enough for them to hire talented, but more expensive individuals, rather than the lowest bidder. G. F. Kemper, who took over from Sharp, had submitted an offer of his services at $75 annually, a full twenty dollars more than the cheapest alternative.100 At the base of the way canal companies turned a profit despite these intractabilities lay a capitalist reinterpretation of the Hispano system of water sharing. This is most clearly evident in the existence of the position of zanjero itself. While his work looked much like it would have in a Hispanic community, there was a fundamental difference in outcome: unused water in a Hispanic village would simply not be used, or used for community activities.101 Water unused by the renters of the Tempe Canal Company, and other companies like it, was sold by its shareholders to other interested parties. The lawsuit that brought together the problems inherent in the way canal companies did business with the effectiveness of conveniently misinterpreting the Hispanic past was popularly known as “Wormser’s Case” while it played out from 1890 through 1892. It then entered Arizona legal history as “Kibbey’s Decision.” Michael Wormser was involved in the proceedings in several ways, most directly in his role as the Tempe Irrigating Canal Company’s director and as a separate plaintiff in the case. Wormser, an avuncular-looking French Jewish immigrant, exemplified the complicated and conflicting identities that Arizonans during the era took on. The motives for Wormser’s emigration to the United States, were, according to his biog-

100 Ibid., 233–234. The Tempe Canal Company, of course, was not the only such enterprise to use the system, which had proved useful and reliable in distributing water in the arid or semi-arid Southwest. Many Southwestern cities and communities employed zanjeros, and many continue to do so today. The professional is usually also called by this Spanish designation, as in Tucson, but also Los Angeles, and even Phoenix. 101 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 64–67.

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rapher Richard B. Goldberg, not religious or economic, but “personal.”102 He was a model of the type of self-described capitalist who thrived in the American West following the Civil War, owning shares in canal companies and mining ventures. He also busied himself with several agricultural experiments, including attempts to grow alfalfa and sugar beets.103 Unlike those German Jews who had established themselves in Arizona and New Mexico starting in the 1850s, Wormser could not rely on a large network of kin.104 He did, though, profit from the help of another French-born Jew, his cousin Benjamin Block, who helped him move to the West in the first place. Wormser occasionally crossed paths and did business with other French Jews. Since not many had made the Southwest their home, these encounters and partnerships were few, and Wormser appears to have done most of his business with either German-born Jews or other Anglos.105 Wormser learned Spanish early on during his stay in Arizona. He was known among the Spanish-speaking population as Don Miguel, or El Judío Miguel, the Jew Miguel. Goldberg describes his subject as an outsider who, unlike other Jews who were accepted even into Masonic lodges if gentiles were acquainted with them, was never accepted by the Anglo Christians he had business dealings with.106 Goldberg speculates that this outsider status led to Hispanos more readily accepting Wormser as a business partner, but there is no reliable way to establish this. What is certain, is that Wormser’s United States naturalization certificate read Miguel Wormser, even though he continued to sign his business documents and his personal correspondence as Michael Wormser.107 It is therefore probable that Wormser, like others in pre-railroad Arizona territory, quite naturally made use of his Hispanicized name, perhaps recognizing the usefulness of integrating into an

102 Goldberg loses himself in an over-the-top speculation, imagining Wormser taking stock of his life: “I am short, fat, balding, unmarried and poor. Where do I go from here?” Goldberg, “Michael Wormser, Capitalist,” 163–164. Economic factors might have played a larger role than Goldberg gives credit for. Since Wormser’s home town of Mittelbronn, Lorraine, had fewer than 700 inhabitants as recently as 2009, it likely was not a place of unbridled opportunity in the nineteenth century either. 103 Ibid., 164, 194. Some of Wormser’s other ventures included railroads and local politics. The less than idyllic conditions of Hispano workers in Southwestern beetfields are portrayed in Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 127–134. 104 Grytz, “‘Triple Identity,’” passim. 105 Goldberg, “Michael Wormser, Capitalist,” 166, 172–173. 106 Goldberg appears to have been quite enamored with Wormser, writing that he was “not an unkind man, but he drove a hard bargain.” He attests that Wormser “had little patience with fools [and] respected intelligence.” Ibid., 190, 192. 107 Ibid., 162.

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existing culture. Wormser’s dealings with Hispanic Arizonans, however, were not always business ventures entered upon under gentleman’s agreements among equals. He rented out part of his land in the Salt River Valley to Hispano sharecroppers on terms that made full use of their dependence on it. In 1864, the newly created Arizona Territorial Legislature passed a water law which mandated that the water in all rivers in the territory was to be considered public. This was a crude version of the later prior appropriation doctrine and said nothing about groundwater, which was “probably considered as of little economic value.”108 It laid the foundations for an eventual bifurcation of Arizona’s water law.109 Rivers and other surface water were one thing. Groundwater was another. This was an utterly artificial separation, “at odds with hydrogeologic reality” as John Leshy and James Belanger put it.110 In 1892, presiding over the Federal District Court for Arizona for the third judicial district, Kibbey ruled in Wormser et al v. Salt River Canal Company that water was bound to land (though, importantly, not in the riparian sense that it was bound to an adjacent property) and could not be traded away or controlled by the canal companies then springing up especially around Phoenix.111 The decision was not repealed. Instead, it was ignored.112 Still, in essence, Kibbey thereby established precedent for the principle of prior appropriation in Arizona. Kibbey himself later became an attorney, arguing on behalf of many Salt River Valley landholders who theoretically profited from the Wormser decision, but who were under a constant barrage by canal companies attempting to circumvent it.113 His role in Arizona water law is therefore not limited to his eponymous ruling; his later cases built on it, essentially re-arguing his reasoning as judge. A 1910 decision, Hurley v. Abbott later affirmed Kibbey’s ruling, applied its principles specifically to Salt River water, and importantly refereed which parcels of land were considered to first have been cultivated when. This re-

108 Smith, Groundwater Law in Arizona, 55. 109 The state later pioneered dedicated legislation intent on preserving groundwater in 1945. Bryner and Purcell, Groundwater Law Sourcebook. 110 Leshy and Belanger, “Arizona Law Where Ground and Surface Water Meet,” 657. 111 Wormser et al v. Salt River Canal Company (1892), No. 708, Federal District Court for Arizona, 2nd Judicial District. Kibbey’s ruling was directed against the canal company, which had given water preferentially to its shareholders, even though others had prior appropriation rights. For more on Wormser’s role in the case, see Goldberg, “Michael Wormser, Capitalist,” 187–192. 112 Ibid., 190. 113 August and Gammage, “Shaped by Water: An Arizona Historical Perspective,” 13; Lewis, “The Early History of the Tempe Canal Company,” 227.

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moved uncertainty as to the order of water appropriation, making further legal proceedings more straightforward at least in this one aspect.114 Because of the territorial legal system’s structure, Kibbey and Silent both sat on the bench of Arizona’s highest court while they were simultaneously immersed in district level trials. Their lifeways demonstrate that they were influenced by the intraterritorial network that they, for the most part, moved in, as well as by their connections to friends in Washington, DC and in other states. California in particular seemed to be an origin point for Arizona’s legal decision makers. Once these lawyers had cut their teeth in the territory, the Golden State was also often their destination for a continued, usually more profitable career. Many were attorneys; before their tenure on the bench, following it, or both. As much of the legal work to be done in the territory concerned corporations and their employees or functionaries, anyone in the legal profession in Arizona quickly came to know many of these influencers. Other cases were argued on behalf of owners of large tracts of land. Here, too, the men (and, as we have seen, one woman) in the legal profession quite naturally had dealings with people who wielded considerable power. Because of the resulting widespread double loyalties and corruption, many cases in the Arizona court system, and certainly a majority of those that landed in front of its Supreme Court, were decided in favor of corporate interests and landholders of abundant means.115 This did not set Arizona apart from other parts of the West, nor did it distinguish the period of increased industrialization and exploitation of resources from earlier times. Land, as Malcolm A. Rohrbough has remarked for an earlier period of Western history, “always accrued to the wealthy man of means, no matter what the law said.”116 It is reasonable to assume that while their cultural attitudes towards a Hispanic past might have led Arizona’s territorial justices to utilize it as an argument in deciding cases, they just as likely merely sought justifications for decisions they felt compelled to make out of personal loyalty, or because of outright bribes. California,

114 August and Gammage, “Shaped by Water: An Arizona Historical Perspective,” 13. 115 Berch is probably the most blunt about the quality of legal professionals in the territorial period. Reich, on the other end of the spectrum, does not concern himself with this factor at all, but only speculates that “cultural attitudes” led to cases being justified with spurious precedent in the Hispanic past. Goff calls out corruption in some cases, but also finds some members of the bench above reproach, and even points out redeeming qualities in some of the corrupt judges. Berch, “A History of the Arizona Courts,” 13; Reich, “The ‘Hispanic’ Roots of Prior Appropriation in Arizona,” 652; Goff, “The Appointment, Tenure and Removal of Territorial Judges,” 224–231. 116 Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 298–299 quoted in: Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 61.

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Colorado, Utah, and Texas all were already states during the time period in which these arguments were made in Arizona. This meant that they had a legal system populated by people who had more straightforward interests in the well-being of the state and in the opinion of the people, as they were accountable to them in elections. Following the will of voters, or at least giving the impression that this was what one did, was a necessity. Hence, while corruption existed, it could not always take the all too easily visible form it did in a territory. At the same time, courts in New Mexico, while subject to the same quality of legal professionals as Arizona, also had a harder time justifying decisions with nonexistent Hispanic precedent. There were simply too many influential Hispanos present in that territory for such a maneuver to be convincing. In New Mexico, by the late 1880s and early 1890s Hispanos were no longer dominant in government. Despite the barrage of Anglos that made their way into the territory, they were still, however, reasonably powerful and wealthy. This is not to say that the transition was painless, or that there was not a significant number of Hispanos who lost huge tracts of land to the laws, or the misapplication thereof, of the United States. The power elite, however, continued to contain many influential Hispanos. Part of the reason for this difference to Arizona was again to be found in the numbers of Hispanos present at the moment New Mexico became American soil. For Arizona Hispanic elites, who were few in number, alliances with the Anglo newcomers made all kinds of sense. They profited from such associations economically, personally, and politically. Hispanos allied themselves with the people they had come to trade with, and whom they had developed personal relations with. When large numbers of new Mexican immigrants, encouraged by jobs in agriculture, and even more in the exploitation industries, such as mining and the railroads, streamed into Arizona beginning in the 1880s, the established Hispanic elites saw them as a threat to their position. In the eyes of many newly arrived Anglos, the newcomers and the established elite alike were all “Mexicans.” In their own eyes, the old Hispanic families were on equal footing with their Anglo allies. As more and more new Anglos arrived, old Hispano elites became fewer in number comparatively, though they retained remarkable influence in territorial affairs. For the most part, established Anglos held similar views of the Hispanic elites as kin, and as business partners. As political and business power shifted, though, and became ever more closely tied with Washington, this understanding gradually disappeared. Elite Hispanos were still respectable, but they lost much influence. In New Mexico, which was home to many more Hispanos who also covered a wider spectrum of class and more conceptions of race than Arizona’s increasingly hardening duality, the old elites saw new immigrants as further help in increasing their numbers and pulling political weight in Santa Fe.

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T HE M EANING

OF

M INING

Nothing encapsulates the diametrical forces at work in the Mesilla more than the changes the mining industry brought in the period from the 1850s to the 1880s.117 If ownership over land or water posed severe problems, the question of who had the right to the Southwest’s subsurface mineral wealth created property disputes of a dazzling, downright mystifying complexity. The issue, at the heart of so many court cases all over the American West, was not merely one among the land-waterminerals trifecta of dubious new conceptions of property that became current around the middle of the nineteenth century. Sometimes secretly, but just as likely obviously, it was what drove land and water disputes as well. As is true for most ore mining regions, gold mining stood at the beginning of the industry in Arizona and New Mexico.118 It had been practiced in Northern Mexico since the mid sixteenth century and it was Mexican miners who first taught their mining techniques to the slow trickle of arriving Anglos in the 1850s, just as they had in 1840s California. Gold-Rush-style placer mining of a considerable scale began in 1862.119 Silver, both less valuable and harder to extract from the ground, was next in line, though gold continued to be dug up. High volume extraction, using the quartz mining technique, began in the early 1850s.120 For a period of about three decades, everyone was a miner. Terminology explains some of this. Into the 1880s, all those who worked in a profession involving mines – whether placer miner, smelter worker, or supervisor of a mining concern – were considered “miners.” The real impact of mining on some Western territories and states was significant beyond the prevalence of the words associated with it. While mining in 1900 employed about 1

117 On the several reasons for this relatively late start in the region compared to Latin America, see Lynch, Mining in World History, 114–115; Waszkis, Mining in the Americas, 37–38; Brown, “New Nations Resurrect Their Mining Industries.”. 118 Martin Lynch argues that gold mining was at the heart of the international nature of the mining industry. Lynch, Mining in World History, 245. Arizona and New Mexico’s progression of ores is similar to the development of the mining history in Nevada, California, and the United States and Latin American generally: Tingley, Horton, and Lincoln, Outline of Nevada Mining History, 11–22. 119 TePaske, A New World of Gold and Silver, 188–191. Hine and Faragher, The American West, 238–239; Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 95; Young, Western Mining, 144. 120 Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 96–97.

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percent of the workforce across the United Sates, in Arizona the number was 15 percent.121 In 1877, a silver strike near Tombstone, the territory’s last and most significant, resulted in the beginning in earnest of Southern Arizona’s mining industry.122 Up to that point, the limited availability of transportation had restricted mining to precious materials, and to smaller-scale operations. Often, these were placer mines of the kind that had existed in Latin America for centuries: The fundamental tool was the batea, a shallowly conical washing bowl; the main production device was the sluice. [A gravel bank] was cut into a series of stairstep terraces with a deep receiving ditch excavated at the foot. Dams and flumes were arranged so that a thin sheet of water cascaded downward over the entire length of the topmost terrace. Gangs of slaves then mounted the terraces, working them into a pulp with their feet and backing down as the earth was washed away. […] The heavy deposit of gold and gravel in the ditch was then hand-picked to free it of cobbles, and the silt-gold residue panned put with a batea[.]123

Silver mining in dedicated mines fell off abruptly when the metal was no longer valuable enough after the panic of 1893 caused a precipitous drop in its price. Generally, silver mining required more capital and an overall larger enterprise than gold mining in order to be profitable. Both ores, however, could still be extracted lucratively by local merchants’ relatively small scale operations. Copper mining, which would change Arizona, New Mexico, and the West, was a different beast altogether when it came to scale and necessary capital to make it work. It only became economically feasible with the arrival of the railroad in the territory in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Copper has been purified and traded for approximately six thousand years.124 Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, however, its relatively low value in comparison to gold and silver and the complicated process required for its large-scale extraction in the region made it a less than exciting business proposition in Arizona and Sonora. Additionally, recurring Apache depredations rendered the region physically unsafe and therefore unattractive to investors. It would require the intervention of both the Federal Government – in the form of military forts and the sponsorship of what has become known collectively as the “Indian Wars” of the 1870s and 1880s, as well as the granting of public domain land to railroad companies – and coastal business interests, to tap this abun-

121 Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 106; Milner, O’Connor, and Sandweiss, The Oxford History of the American West, 434. 122 Sheridan, A History of the Southwest, 53. 123 Young, Western Mining, 58–59. On Spanish prospecting in the North, see ibid., 98–101. 124 Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange, 20–21, 25–27.

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dant resource.125 Thomas Sheridan sees in the rise of copper mining the beginning of Arizona’s career as an “internal extraction colony” of the United States.126 Yet the colonial groundwork had been laid earlier. It came in the form of land and water rights decisions conducive to the exploitational needs of the mining industry. Western mining law huddled around the idea of a mineral vein’s apex, the place where it ran nearest to ground level, as the marker that gave the owner of the land above it dominion over the vein’s content. The result of emergent Western improvisation, apex law seemed to make sense in an era of placer mining, when individuals shoveled and sifted and extracted, more often than not, less value out of a vein than they had hoped for. Even then, its deceptive simplicity hid deeper-lying intractabilities. How, for example, was one to establish where the apex was located? Mining, even of the pre-industrial kind, shifted earth and changed landscapes. Starting in the 1860s, increasingly intrusive technological inventions sped up that process considerably.127 Was the apex to be retro-calculated to a time before such changes had happened, even when they were usually necessary to discover the vein in the first place? Bit by bit, Western mining law found solutions to such questions, but these were of a bewildering variety, and establishing any kind of useful precedence was an exercise in futility equaled by the struggles of disappointed goldseekers. Hundreds of times across the American West, in its several gold rushes covering the half-century from California to the Yukon, miners of the initial guard convened to create rules for their mining communities. As similar situations required similar solutions, these became standardized in many respects. Rules typically included provisions for disallowing absentee claims, or adjudicating water rights in a manner adapted from, but not identical with, Hispanic precedent. The fact that many miners traveled from one rush to another provided a stable core cast of characters perpetuating certain solutions. Such agreements worked well enough for individual Anglo miners. They were often exclusionary of blacks, Hispanos, American Indians, and other groups contextually defined to be outside of whiteness by a prevailing racial microclimate. Rules of this kind were also not beloved by mining corporations which pushed for comprehensive state laws. Ostensibly, they did so just for the sake of clarity for all. Structurally, however, clarity and mining laws written by territorial or state legislatures profited the corporations much more than individual placer

125 I use “coastal” to mean business interests located primarily on the US East and West Coasts, including, however, also nationally and transnationally acting companies from regions such as the West (specifically San Francisco) and the Midwest in this appellation for brevity’s sake. 126 Sheridan, Arizona, 65, 122, 162. 127 Wyman, “Industrial Revolution in the West,” esp. 40.

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miners. They alone had well-educated lawyers like the Herring-Sorins, and a beneficial precedent established in an official state court was that much easier to defend in another case down the road. Thus, corporations often had something to gain from influencing lawmakers writing the mining codes, and they frequently did so.128 As was the case with most Western law, having the resources necessary to hire expert lawyers helped. It “took a mine to run a mine,” and the same was true for securing the capital to defend its claims. Naturally, big corporations were at an advantage. In some cases, however, the absurd complexity of mining laws (and the occasional well-placed bribe) helped gifted amateur legal eagles as well. As Patricia Nelson Limerick remarks for the case of a Montana mining dispute129 in which a single individual owner of just “two slivers of land” located in the middle of the appropriately named Anaconda mining company’s holdings, managed to keep his gargantuan opponent tied down for years: “[w]ith creative use of the lawsuit, Lilliputians could still tie up Gulliver.”130 If they did, though, they were well-connected and educated. As the US nation state made its advance across the continental reach, it also filtered ever deeper into the lives of people. Its legal system was one of the most important tools of coercion and control, as well as of standardization and normation even in its most remote corners. Whether it came to where and how people could live, or how they could make use of natural resources, both basic and precious, the General Government inserted itself as an unavoidable factor in the late nineteenthcentury Southwest. For American Indians, this meant more and more restriction of lifeways until they were ultimately forced onto reservations and into dependency. Governmental neglect affected them just as adversely as governmental attention did. During the long history of endemic warfare in the Southwest, Native Americans had at least always been able to avail themselves of natural resources and had been able to resort to raiding where these were insufficient. The end of the Indian Wars and the large number of settlers now streaming into the region precluded this from the 1880s on. Hispano elites at first managed to hold on to signficant amounts of power. The Hispano-Anglo intermarried elite of the 1850s through 1870s was poised to fight back against some of the effects of an ever more tangible nationally tinged racism. Some were able to keep their land. Others, who had fewer connections among those

128 On local mining codes and their replacement in the age of corporate mining, see Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 106; Hine and Faragher, The American West, 266. Frontiers is an abbreviated, but updated version of The American West. 129 Described in detail in Malone and Lang, The Battle for Butte. 130 Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 114.

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Anglos who held the power in, and knowledge of the workings of national institutions, did not fare as well. Farmers, Hispano and Anglo alike, needed to figure out how to work the legal system in order to get or keep land and be able to irrigate crops. Anglos in general stood to profit most from the transplantation of a legal system familiar to them into a region at first unfamiliar. Yet for them, too, increasing ties to the nation state had diverse effects. Individual workers and miners were increasingly at the mercy of the transnationally acting capitalists who ran the growing conconglomerates which employed them. Businessmen who could not compete with the massively financed railroads and their cheap shipment of goods that had until very recently been expensive and profitable to sell, had to declare bankruptcy, or sell their businesses at a much reduced value. Those who knew how to use their talents to deal with the new realities prospered. Those who, given the changed circumstances, could no longer make a go of whatever enterprise in which they were currently engaged, failed. In the Southwest, as in the West in general, their best option was often to move on to another place and try their luck anew. By the turn of the century, it had become abundantly clear that the United States had incorporated fully its formerly Mexican territory. The Mesilla was now a place where US laws alone would decide disputes over property and resource usage, and therefore, the fates of the people who were dependent on both.

Conclusion

The Southwest stands apart. Nowhere else but in the West did colonialism come to pass so fully in the late nineteenth-century United States. Questions of whether the American nation can itself be considered postcolonial are hotly debated.1 No matter on which side of that dispute one finds oneself, the United States made the southwestern part of its territory a virtual colony. It is entirely appropriate to examine the American Southwest together with other US colonial exploits. The Gadsden Purchase region was part of the United States, but not of it. It presented a special case of industrial development, national conquest, and racial construction within nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. This double consideration provides an ample playground for historians, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and other scholars. The foremost academic conversation which attempts to make sense of the West as both place and myth is that of current American Western History, predominantly in the form of the New Western History, and in the ostensibly fresh ideas of what has already been dubbed the New New Western History, or the Next Western History. The New New Western History, if taken to mean a collection of caveats and of suggestions of what still needs to be done within the history of the West, makes valid points in criticizing New Western History as neglecting issues of race, class, and gender. Its focus on “re-opening” histories of the West, and of recontextualizing debates is enormously powerful. The

1

Following Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, the United States must necessarily be regarded as postcolonial, if there is to be any value to postcolonialism as an analytical category or approach and not merely as a political program. Stratton and Ang, “Multicultural Imagined Communities.” The United States is also certainly postcolonial in the sense that Jenny Sharpe argued in 1995: “when used as a descriptive term for the United States, postcolonial does not name its past as a white settler colony or its emergence as a neocolonial power; rather, it designates the presence of racial minorities and Third World immigrants.” Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial?,” 181.

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New New Western History is evolutionary.2 It achieves its full effect where it acknowledges that it is a refinement of New Western History, still based upon the same rejection of Turnerian frontierism. This framework is immensely useful when looking at a place as caught up in the vagaries of contingency as the American Southwest. Southern Arizona and New Mexico are particular cases of typical changes wrought by globalization, nationalization, and technology in the late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century United States. They were typically atypical in the history of American states, and in the history of global economic development and technological connectivity. As a special case of industrial modernization and of nationalization, the Mesilla region allows us a glimpse into not only the development of national democratic practices, and Federal governance, but also into the forces then at work in American society as a whole. In the Southwest, diverse American Indian cultures encountered two major European ones. There was a period of conquest by the Spanish and Mexicans, and one by the Anglos. What is often missed, despite Sarah Deutsch’s cautionary words more than a quarter century ago, is that for a not so brief length of time during the most important part of its industrial and technological development, there was a period of conquest by both. The Mesilla’s dominant culture was a continuum of Anglo–Hispano. There was not a constant clash between entirely separate cultures, one of which would win out. Until the arrival of the Southern Pacific, the makeup of that culture was predominantly Hispano. It gradually shifted towards more Anglo from then on. In that sense, Southern Arizona, and to a smaller degree Southern New Mexico differed radically from other parts of the Southwest. Texas had been settled almost exclusively by Anglos, though on contract from the Mexican government. Utah and Colorado were on the fringes of Hispanic settlement. Hispanos’ experience of moving into those states was, for the most part, one of moving into a setting dominated by Anglos. Northern New Mexico and California had substantial Hispanic populations, with New Mexico’s being several times more numerous than California’s. California, easily accessible by water, experienced a hockey-stick-shaped curve of population growth in the middle of the nineteenth century, thanks to the discovery of gold in 1848. This was also the year the Mexican War ended. Anglos came to dominate California’s politics and control the buildup of its industry and agriculture. Unlike the imperialist extraction economy that was to befall other parts of the

2

Books such as West, The Contested Plains; West, The Last Indian War; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, or, most recently White, Railroaded, have all also been called “Post New Western History.” Yet, the question of what makes them “Post New” as opposed to “New New” or just “New” cannot be satisfactorily answered.

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Southwest, California’s economy remained, at least in considerable part, a local state-based venture. The “bigwigs” there more often than not hailed from San Francisco, rather than New York.3 New Mexico’s substantial Hispanic settlement was supplemented by a rising Anglo population during the same timeframe that Arizona’s smaller one was. Yet, in a territory about the same size, but ten times as populous, the impact was felt in a different way. Anglo influence soon impacted politics, but never managed to control it completely. Anglos and Hispanos both were active in New Mexico politics in the mid and late nineteenth century, and the majority of Hispanos clamored for statehood along with Anglos.4 Almost exclusively Hispanic pockets also existed, and still exist, in the north of that state. Arizona’s Hispanic population, meanhwile, tends to eschew its major population center and political ground zero in Phoenix, hewing instead to the South.5 In all these places, on the extremes, there were imperialist Hispanos and imperialist Anglos who each wanted their culture to be absolutely dominant. Only with the large influx of Anglos after 1880 did power shift. It did so gradually. Importantly, Anglos were not the only migrants to come to Arizona in increasing numbers from the 1880s on. Spurred by infrastructure and economic opportunities, Mexican laborers, too, came to the Southwest. Once more, the railroads played an important role.6 The new settlers were overwhelmingly lower class, and overwhelmingly hailed from the Mexican South. Their family structures and culture reflected the needs of village life, and they adopted new strategies for survival in the strange land. As their numbers rose, they became more and more visible to Anglos. To them, the new settlers looked different, more “foreign” than the early Mexican settlers from Sonora.7 The resulting change in Anglos’ perception of all Mexican Americans, including the elite Norteños whose families had previously settled in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands made “Mexican” a catchall derogatory term. A baseline of racial otherness was established and then applied to the various local contexts. This more standardized variety of racism arose as a matter of course once Americans became much more mobile across the United States. It was desirable for itinerant elites to find comparable conditions everywhere. Those not part of the elite who moved to a place usually brought with them their own ideas of Americanness which they then attempted to replicate there as best as possible. Both elites and non-elites called this

3

Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 167–168.

4

Simmons, New Mexico, 135.

5

Vélez-Ibáñez, “ Regions of Refuge in the United States,” 4, fig. 1.

6

Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 49–50.

7

Ibid.

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shorthand “civilization” and tied it to what they thought to be the natural superiority of Anglo civilization. This is especially visible with critics of Southwestern statehood, such as Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, whose opposition stemmed from his belief that both Arizona and New Mexico were too Hispanic. Earlier settlers had had no need for such simplification processes. They might move, but because of the lack of transportation infrastructure they did not move as far and as frequently. They could arrive in a given local context, learn, literally, the lay of the land, and adapt to it. Their local counterparts in turn adapted to them, and a blending of traditions (some quite recent when it came to “Mexicans” who were second or third generation Europeans themselves) occurred. This is what Thomas Sheridan means by contending that Anglos Mexicanized as much as Mexicans Americanized.8 This process had occurred in other regions as well, but elsewhere had largely ceased by the end of the Mexican–American War.9 This is not to say that there was little to no difference between the two groups when they first met in the Southwest. Even those only recently steeped in a particular tradition were still ambassadors of that tradition. Their values were heavily influenced by it, their modes of work and play defined by it, their familial and social ties its product. Yet, too much emphasis has heretofore been placed on the rigidity of the “Anglo” and “Hispano” categories. Especially for the time from 1848 through the mid-1870s, this categorization itself made sense only contextually. It gained the prominence it has today because of the “Anglo invasion” through the 1920s. Because of this prominence and apparent usefulness, it has since frequently been applied to a historic period which was over before that categorization became fully relevant. “Hispano” and “Anglo” as categories are useful for many purposes. Yet sometimes they distort more than they clarify. To apply them retroactively to a time and place where racial constructions were in transition is to underestimate just how fluid ideas of race and ethnicity could be. It is to miss an important part of the story of the American Southwest: that race always mattered, but that most of the time it did not matter in the same binary manner that today often dominates discourse. Hybrid constructions of identity and belonging were part of everyday life in the region. The mere fact that there were so many microclimates of race in turn-of-the-century Southern Arizona and New Mexico speaks loudly of this. In these borderlands, transnationalism, too, was always present. The border, whether as a theoretical “line in the sand,” in Rachel St. John’s evocative phrasing, or as a fenced barrier, existed.10 But during the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-

8

Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses, 147.

9

Vélez-Ibáñez, Border Visions, 59.

10 St. John, Line in the Sand.

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turies it only subdivided the Southwest. It did not yet tear apart a congruent region in the Mexican North and American Southwest. Transnationalism in the Mesilla and around it was, and remains, specifically a transregionalism. Nations inserted themselves more and more into people’s lives through institutions and bureaucracy. On a personal level, however, region was much more important, and remained so at least until the 1920s. “Who are we?” asked Samuel Huntington infamously in 2004, earning a lot of criticism and cheers from different camps in the debate on Hispanic immigration in the twenty-first century. Huntington constructed an “are” out of a supposed “were”. He thereby also implied a thoroughly racial “should be”. Many of his most fervent critics instead defend a contrasting future hope of America as a multicultural “will be.” They cite historical precedents as a base for their criticism of Huntington’s alarmism. Previous waves of immigration have always caused counterreactions in America from those already present. From Benjamin Franklin’s fear of the German element in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania to the principally anti-Catholic, antiIrish nativism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from ever-present antiSemitism to today’s fear of the Muslim other, they are as vicious as they are predictable. The Hispano-Anglo elites populating Arizona’s borderlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made pragmatic alliances. Their allegiance was to community, enterprise, family, region, and increasingly the state which they began to fashion on the American side. Considerations of nationhood were secondary, tertiary even, to their identity. José Redondo of Yuma, a local entrepreneur with strong ties across the border, ran for public office in Arizona in 1876. The fact that American citizenship was required to hold office while Redondo had a Mexican passport does not seem to have troubled him much, nor his Anglo allies. Redondo only acquired American citizenship as an afterthought.11 To him, it was a necessity, part of the cost of doing business. He was not alone in this casual view towards his adopted country. This was because he never thought of it as just that: an adopted nation, with all the trappings of nationalism. Nationalism in Arizona and New Mexico was under construction itself. Redondo did business in a place and, where necessary, adapted to its rules. Others did much the same. The borderlands Southwest at the turn of the century was a place where national identity mattered little to most and only gradually came to matter more. It was a place where “whiteness” was an important factor, but at first this had little to do with skin color, and much with class. The period from the late 1870s through the

11 Wagoner, Arizona Territory, 41. Wagoner relates that the fact that Redondo was not technically a citizen of the United States was discovered at some point during the proceedings of the legislature to which he had been elected.

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1910s saw both ideas coexist. The conception that matched whiteness primarily with class was subsequently pushed out more and more until the connection of race firmly with skin color had superseded it. This only occurred in the 1920s. At that point, the Anglo perception of the Southwest as a place to be invaded and civilized had changed to one of it being firmly part of the United States. The Southwest became a place that had to be defended against Latino aliens, intent on undermining the firmly established supremacy of whites. The story of southern Arizona and New Mexico has been told in numerous ways. The region has been viewed as a periphery, as a colony, as a wild land to be tamed, a place of extremes, a middle ground, a contested space. But first and foremost, it was a place of becoming. The Mesilla was a landscape of modernity into which modernity intruded only at the last possible moment. It was also the brutal landscape of fraud in which American Indians and Hispanos alike were denied land and power. It was an even more brutal theater in what Richard Maxwell Brown has so poignantly called the “Western Civil War of Incorporation.”12 It was also a version of the cliché Wild West, in which fortunes could turn on a dime, and lives could be lost in response to the slightest of slights, or the most outlandish of whims. Yet more importantly, the Southwest was a place where tragedy came not merely through vigilantes and gun violence, but also as an unintended yet unmitigated result of the uncaring nature of capitalist corporations looking for profit. In mining, the territory’s most prevalent industrial venture, mishaps became calamities all too often, and fault would frequently be sought on the side of the victims, not the victimizers. Then again, the victimized were not always, and often refused to let themselves be considered, victims. They had ways and means to express agency, and they did. The Southwest also was a place in which true and meaningful cooperation happened, and one in which misguided but earnest followers of ideologies they believed to be good and true honestly attempted to accomplish change for the better. Hispanic culture, although distinct from Anglo-American culture, was still familiar enough to arriving Anglos that compatible understandings of governance and business were possible. These were to become the basis of Anglo-Hispanic elite cooperation, which in turn set apart developments in the Southwest from the rest of the West and the nation. In New Mexico, where large-scale settlement existed, the two cultures coexisted uneasily, as an entrenched Hispano ruling class had to gradually give up power to the influx of Anglos. In Southern Arizona, where Hispanic settlers were very few in number, interactions were necessarily always personal. This allowed for a somewhat easier joining of forces. Many Anglos adapted aspects of Hispano culture, and married into Hispanic families. Hispanos accepted those

12 Brown, No Duty to Retreat, 44, passim.

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newcomers who attempted to fit into their communities, not necessarily as members of these communities at first, but as individuals who had helpful talents and who could become partners in the common venture of civilizing a frontier. To do only the history of the “big men” is just as near-sighted as doing only that of the “ordinary people” without reference to the larger political circumstances they lived with and in. Pablo Mitchell has recently called for “[p]rivileging the ordinary,” in Western history, calling for a further study of “the history of non-elites who wrote sparingly, if at all, about themselves and their lives, and who materialize only fleetingly in archives and records of the past.”13 This is a sobering reminder that the privileged are still privileged, despite multiple attempts to write history more from the perspective of those who could not and often cared not to express themselves in ways that led to archival remains. It is also a potential problem. The “ordinary,” foregrounded in intent, are simultaneously denigrated to a position apart from the fabric of the political, of the world of the “famous people.” The distinction is an artificial one. Those who left records may well have been “ordinary” in some sense, while those who did not may have interfered actively and successfully with affairs typically thought of as the realm of the powerful. Many of those analyzed here occupy a limbo in between the two poles; judgment calls all, neither clearly one nor the other. All those living in the region must be seen as linked in interlocking, but also separate, networks. By categorizing individuals as representatives of only the group that we today ascribe them as having belonged to, we ignore the lived reality of the age. Instead, indidviduals should always also be seen as members of the social networks that mattered to them. Ingroup and outgroup were never entirely stable entities with fixed affiliations. Instead, they were changeable in their own time, and to a degree they remain so today. Where today white America is seen to have invaded a region, the definitions of such whiteness prevalent a century ago must give us pause. Any regional concept of whiteness that considered certain Scandinavians non-white, while at least some African Americans could conceive of themselves as white, was, if nothing else, fluid.14

13 Mitchell, “Western History Forum: Social and Cultural History,” 342–343. 14 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 102, 103. Benton-Cohen complicates Linda Gordon’s notion that blacks could easily conceive of themselves as white. Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 104. To some degree, however, it was possible to class them in the in-group with the “Americans” while Norteño Hispanos, understood to be white only a few decades earlier, by the 1880s in many places were categorized with the “Mexicans” as a racial other.

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This book has argued for a more comprehensive understanding of the Southwest by including the famous, the not so famous, and those not famous at all in a story that concerns all of them. Only at the juncture of cultural history and that of ideas, politics, contexts, and networks, can we find meaningful, if competing, interpretations of America’s climb from a colonial backwater to a powerful nation state during the nineteenth century. And only in the microcosms of specific localities can we parse developments differing in various regions. By applying the ideas of separation, relation, and connection that fuel borderlands studies, we can see both America the nation and America the continent in a transnational, but perhaps even more importantly, in a transregional context. Likewise, south of the international borderline, Northern Mexico retains a separateness from the rest of Mexico. Economically and culturally, it is much more in tune with the US Southwest.15 Local and regional examples enable us to understand how global developments affected those that experienced them during what might be termed a regional economic sattelzeit bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16 These developments affected people in any societal strata, of any culture, gender, or function. If there were but one single narrative strand to be extracted from the Mesilla during the most important phase of its industrialization and economic incorporation, it would not be that of progress so beloved by turn-of-the-century US contemporaries. Nor would it be one of preordained tragedy, or of the comedy found in a plethora of transcultural misunderstandings. Instead, the story that should be told

15 The region accounts for 87 percent of US-bound NAFTA maquiladora manufactures, and for 85 percent of trade with the United States overall. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography, 335. Kaplan’s account is journalistic, and cannot escape a certain amount of jingoism in the spirit of Samuel P. Huntington, whom he quotes extensively, but does not fully agree with. It nonetheless draws attention to a major cultural change in the United States: the importance of Hispanic Americans, especially in the Southwest, and the rising econo-cultural importance of the transborder region of which the Mesilla is the central part. 16 As opposed to the intellectually defined concept of a sattelzeit. Reinhart Koselleck coined this term to describe as a transitional period during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century during which modernity can be understood to have taken root. The time is also sometimes referred to as the période charnière, emphasizing the pivotal, and at the same time the connecting nature of the period. It is this connective function for the analyzed region that is emphasized by terming it a “secondary sattelzeit.” Jürgen Osterhammel has argued in favor of naming this period Viktorianismus, or Victorianism because of the singular influence of Great Britain on the world during this time. Victorianism, according to Osterhammel’s view, ends in the 1880s. He considers the remaining years until 1900 as the fin de siècle. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 102–113.

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again and again in different words and from multiplying perspectives is that of a tragedy of errors in which cultures met, cooperated, and clashed. It is a narrative of governments and of people, of technology and of places, of laws and of resources. To tell it is to tell a story of how individuals become enmeshed in cultures and structures, and how they in turn change these.

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Steffen, Charles G. “Newspapers for Free: The Economies of Newspaper Circulation in the Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 3 (2003): 381–419. Stratton, Jon, and Ien Ang. “Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in Australia and the USA.” Continuum: The Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (1994): 124–158. Szasz, Ferenc Morton. The Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, 1865–1915. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. TePaske, John J. A New World of Gold and Silver, Edited by Kendall W. Brown. Atlantic World. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2010. Thiel, Johannes. “Eusebius Franz Kühn ‘Padre Kino’: Vergessener Amerikamissionar und ‘Gründer’ Arizonas.” Katholisches: Magazin für Kirche und Kultur, June 7, 2011. Accessed March 25, 2017. http://www.katholisches.info/2011/06/eusebiusfranz-kuhn-padre-kino-vergessener-amerikamissionar-und-grunder-arizonas. Thomas, David Hurst. Exploring Ancient Native America: An Archaeological Guide. New York: Routledge, 1999. Thomas, Grace Powers. Where to Educate, 1898–1899: A Guide to the Best Private Schools, Higher Institutions of Learning, Etc., in the United States. Boston: Brown and Co., 1898. Thompson, Raymond H. “Emil W. Haury and the Definition of Southwestern Archaeology.” American Antiquity 60, no. 4 (1995): 640–660. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden with Thoreau’s Essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”. Rockville, Md.: Arc Manor, 2007. Thorndale, William, and William Dollarhide. Map Guide to the US Federal Censuses, 1790–1920. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1987. Tingley, Joseph V., Robert C. Horton, and Francis C. Lincoln. Outline of Nevada Mining History. Reno: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, 1993. Tinker Salas, Miguel. In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfiriato. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Tolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck. “Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910 to 1930.” American Sociological Review 57, no. 1 (1992): 103–116. Towne, Douglas. “Arizona Icons.” Phoenix Magazine, December 2011. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982. Trainor, Richard H. Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, 1830–1900. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1993. Truett, Samuel. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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———. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. 3rd ed. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006. Walker, Henry P., and Don Bufkin. Historical Atlas of Arizona. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press, 1974 Waszkis, Helmut. Mining in the Americas: Stories and History. Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 1993. Weber, Max. Politics as a Vocation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Weddle, Robert S. “Benavides, Alonso de.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed March 13, 2017. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ fbe45. Welch, Richard E., Jr. “"The Federal Elections Bill of 1890: Postscripts and Prelude.” The Journal of American History 52, no. 3 (1965): 511–526. West, Elliott. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. ———. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. White, Devin Alan. “Transportation, Integration, Facilitation: Prehistoric Trail Networks of the Western Papagueria.” PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2007. White, Hayden. “Interpretation in History.” New Literary History 4, no. 2 (1973): 281–314. ———. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. ———. “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory.” History and Theory 23, no. 1 (1984): 1–33. White, Phillip M. American Indian Chronology: Chronologies of the American Mosaic. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. ———. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Wilcox, David R., and Don D. Fowler. “The Beginnings of Anthropological Archaeology in the North American Southwest: From Thomas Jefferson to the Pecos Conference.” Journal of the Southwest 44, no. 2 (2002): 121–234. Wilcox, David R., and W. Bruce Masse. The Protohistoric Period in the North American Southwest, AD 1450–1700. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1981.

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Williams, Stanley Thomas. The Spanish Background of American Literature. 2 vols., vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Williamson, Samuel H. “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a US Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present.” MeasuringWorth. Accessed March 22, 2017. http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare. Wilson, James A. “Frontier in the Shadows: Prisons in the Far Southwest 1850– 1917.” Arizona and the West 22, no. 4 (1980): 323–342. Wood, Peter H. “From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, edited by Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. 279–316. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The James W Richard Lectures in History, University of Virginia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Woody, Clara T., and Milton L. Schwartz. Globe, Arizona: Early Times in a Little World of Copper and Cattle. Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1977. Woosley, Anne I., and Arizona Historical Society. Early Tucson. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Woznicki, Robert. The History of Yuma and the Territorial Prison. N.p.: n.p., 1995. Wrobel, David M. “Introduction: ‘What on Earth Has Happened to the New Western History?’.” Historian 66, no. 3 (2004): 437–441. Wyman, Mark. “Industrial Revolution in the West: Hard-Rock Miners and the New Technology.” The Western Historical Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1974): 39–57. Yancy, James Walter. “The Negro of Tucson, Past and Present.” MA thesis, University of Arizona, 1933. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, ed. Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Yetman, David. Sonora: An Intimate Geography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Young, Otis E., Jr. Western Mining: An Informal Account of Precious Metals Prospecting, Placering, Lode Mining and Milling on the American Frontier from Spanish Times to 1893. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977. Zeleny, Carolyn. “Relations between the Spanish-Americans and Anglo-Americans in New Mexico: A Study of Conflict and Accommodation in a Dual Ethnic Situation.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1944. Zeman, Scott C. Chronology of the American West: From 23,000 BCE Through the Twentieth Century. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002.

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F URTHER R EADING Bair, JoAnn W., and Richard L. Jensen. “Prosecution of the Mormons in Arizona Territory in the 1880s.” Arizona and the West 19, no. 1 (1977): 25–46. Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Dobyns, Henry F. Spanish Colonial Tucson: A Demographic History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976. Henderson, Timothy J. Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United States. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Hoerder, Dirk, ed. American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent European Research. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Huntington, Samuel P. “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite.” The National Interest, no. 75, Spring (2004): 5–18. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lockwood, Frank C., and Tucson Civic Committee. Life in Old Tucson, 1854– 1864: As Remembered by the Little Maid, Atanacia Santa Cruz. Tucson: The Tucson Civic Committee, 1943. Markowitz, Harvey. American Indians. Ready Reference. 3 vols., vol. 1. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1995. Nisengard, Jennifer E. “Communal Spaces: Aggregation and Integration in the Mogollon Region of the United States Southwest.” PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2006. O’Brien, William Patrick. “‘Olam Katan’ (Small World): Jewish Traders on the Santa Fe Trail.” Journal of the Southwest 48, no. 2 (2006): 211–231. Paulsen, George E. “The Yellow Peril at Nogales: The Ordeal of Collector William M. Hoey.” Arizona and the West 13, no. 2 (1971): 113–128. Rodriguez, Marc S., ed. Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship, and Community. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Sonneborn, Liz. Chronology of American Indian History. Facts on File Library of American History. Updated ed. New York: Facts on File, 2007. Trigger, Bruce G. and Wilcomb E. Washburn, eds. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. 3 vols., vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Warren, Kim. “Gender, Race, Culture, and the Mythic American Frontier.” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (2007): 234–241. Wright, Lyle H., and Josephine M. Bynum, eds. The Butterfield Overland Mail. San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1942.

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A RCHIVAL S OURCES Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe, Arizona (AHF) • Records of the Overland Telephone & Telegraph Company • Roscoe Willson Collection Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Arizona (AHS) • Alianza Hispano-Americana records • Arizona Federation of Women’s Clubs records • Brena, Pedro C., 1885–1930. Biofile • C. C. Smith, “Manuscript History of the Oury Family.” Typescript • Charles M. Clark Collection • Diane Tully Tretschek, “Pinkney Randolph Tully and Charles Hoppin Tully, Arizona Pioneers.” Unpublished manuscript • Grand Army of the Republic records • James Eoff Officer Papers • Joseph Lee Wiley Papers • Smalley Family Papers • T. D. Casanega Papers • Telegraph Ledger • Telegraph Lines in Arizona, 1871–1879 • Wiley Box Papers, 1837–1913 • Newspaper collection Arizona Historical Society, Yuma, Arizona (AHS Yuma) • Ephemera files Arizona State Archives, Phoenix, Arizona (ASA) • Territorial Papers • Newspaper collections • Historical photographs Arizona State University Archives and Special Collections, Tempe, Arizona (ASU) • Alianza Hispano-Americana Records • Yuma Organizations University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Arizona (U of A) • Bisbee Memorial Day Celebration

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• Catholic Church, Diocese of Tucson Records, 1721–1957. Series II: Vicariate Apostolic of New Mexico, the Vicariate Apostolic of Arizona and the Diocese of Tucson, 1863–1957 • Oury Family Papers, 1799–1933. Series II: Granville Oury Papers, 1860– 1865 • Selim Maurice Franklin Papers, 1873–1931 • University of Arizona Office of the Registrar, 1916–1923 • University of Arizona Registration Book Chiricahua Regional Museum and Research Center, Willcox, Arizona (Chiricahua Regional Museum) • Newspaper collection Tempe Historical Museum, Tempe, Arizona (Tempe Historical Museum) • Tempe Irrigating Canal Co. Minute Book, 1870–1879 New Mexico State University Library, Las Cruces, New Mexico (NMSU) • Rio Grande Historical Collections University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico (UNM) • Edmund G. Ross Papers • Governor Edward G. Bartlett Papers Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Santa Fe, New Mexico (Chávez Library) • WPA Guide to New Mexico files • Vertical files, ephemera Deming Luna Mimbres Museum, Deming, New Mexico (Deming Luna Mimbres Museum) • Ephemera files, 1880–1884 • Ephemera files, 1885–1889 Huntington Library, San Marino, California (HL) • Tuttle Collection • Wharton Papers

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National Archives, College Park, Maryland (NARA College Park) • Records of the Bureau of the Census, Enumeration District Maps • Newspaper collection National Archives, Washington, DC (NARA Washington, DC) • US Census 1870, Arizona Territory. Microfilm Publication M 593, Roll 46 • Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1762–1984 • Records of the Bureau of Land Management • Records of the Confederate District of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona • World War I Draft Registration Cards. Microfilm National Archives at Riverside, Perris, California (NARA Perris) • AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Misc. Files, 1789–1907 • AZ Court of Private Land Claims, Surveyor General’s Case Files, 1800– 1891 • Surveyor General of Arizona, Letters Sent, 1879–1895 Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LOC) • Newspaper collections

A RCHIVAL S OURCES (E LECTRONIC ) Archive.org (ARC) • US Census Records, http://archive.org/details/us_census Arizona Historical Society (AHS) • Tucson Territorial Pioneer Project, http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/cdm/ landingpage/collection/ahstuc Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library Digital Collections (DCLL), • Arizona Territory Legislative Journals, http://ualawlib.omeka.net/ items/browse?collection=6 Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka (KSHS) • Edmund G. Ross Collection, http://www.kshs.org/archives/45677 Online Archives of California (OAC) • Herbert Eugene Bolton Papers, 1890–1953, bulk http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9z09s1s7

1909–1951,

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Sharlot Hall Museum Archives (SHM) • Map Collection, http://www.sharlot.org/archives/maps/index.html

N EWSPAPERS Arizona Star (Tucson, Arizona. Variously as Arizona Star, Arizona Daily Star, Arizona Weekly Star) • 1873–1914 Arizona Sentinel (Yuma, Arizona) • 1878 (single issues) Galveston Daily News (Galveston, Texas) • 1886 (single issues) Las Vegas Daily Optic (Las Vegas, New Mexico) • 1881 (single issues) Los Angeles Star (Los Angeles, California) • 1859 (single issues) Mesilla Times (Mesilla, New Mexico) • 1862 Newman’s Semi-Weekly Thirty-Four (Las Cruces, New Mexico) • 1881 New York Times (New York, New York) • 1919 Phoenix Daily Herald (Phoenix, Arizona) • 1891 (single issues) Prescott Miner (Prescott, Arizona) • 1873 (single issues) Rio Grande Republican (Las Cruces, New Mexico) • 1881 (single issues) Tucson Citizen (Tucson, Arizona. Variously as Tucson Citizen, Tucson Weekly Citizen, Arizona Citizen, Arizona Daily Citizen) • 1870–1920 • 2008 (single issue)

P RINTED S OURCES Ashurst, Henry F. A Many-Colored Toga: The Diary of Henry Fountain Ashurst, edited by George F. Sparks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962. Clauson-Thue, William. The ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code Specially Adapted for the Use of Financiers, Merchants, Shipowners, Brokers, Agents. London, 1881.

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Frémont, John C., and Patrick Hamilton. The Resources of Arizona: Its Mineral, Farming, and Grazing Lands, Towns, and Mining Camps; Its Rivers, Mountains, Plains, and Mesas. Prescott: Arizona Legislative Assembly, 1881. Frémont, Lily. The Arizona Diary of Lily Frémont, edited by Mary Lee Spence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Larrabee, Charles S. Charles S. Larrabee’s Cipher and Secret Letter and Telegraph Code, with Hogg’s Improvements. New York, 1884. Ross, Edmund G. History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson: President of the United States, by the House of Representatives, and His Trial by the Senate, for High Crimes and Misdemeanors in Office, 1868. Santa Fe: New Mexican Printing Co., 1896. Smalley, George H. My Adventures in Arizona: Leaves From a Reporter’s Notebook, edited by Yndia S. Moore. Tucson: Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, 1966. W. G. Press & Co., Telegraphic Cipher Compiled by W. G. Press & Co for the Exclusive Use of Themselves and Their Correspondents. Chicago, 1885.

L EGAL D OCUMENTS Arizona Legislature • “Arizona Senate Bill 1070: An Act Amending Title 11, Chapter 7, Arizona Revised Statutes, by Adding Article 8, Amending Title 13, Chapter 15, Arizona Revised Statutes, by Adding Section 13-1509; Amending Section 13-2319, Arizona Revised Statutes; Amending Title 13, Chapter 29, Arizona Revised Statutes, by Adding Sections 13-2928 and 13-2929; Amending Sections 23-212, 23-212.01, 23-214 and 28-3511, Arizona Revised Statutes; Amending Title 41, Chapter 12, Article 2, Arizona Revised Statutes, by Adding Section 41-1724; Relating to Unlawfully Present Aliens.” 2009. • “Water Code of the State of Arizona, Chapter 164: Laws of 1919 – Amended 1921, Chapter 64,” edited by the Office of the State Water Commissioner. Phoenix, 1921. Arizona Supreme Court • Clough v. Wing (1888), 2 Ariz. 371, 17 P. 453 • Dalton v. Rentaría (1887), 2 Ariz. 275, 15 P. 37 Arizona Federal District Court, 2 nd Judicial District • Wormser et al v. Salt River Canal Company (1892), No. 708

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New Mexico Legislature • “New Mexico House Bill 0285: An Act Relating to Capital Felony Sentencing; Abolishing the Death Penalty; Providing for Life Imprisonment without Possibility of Release or Parole.” 2009. Rhode Island Circuit Court • Tyler v. Wilkinson (1827), 24 F. Cas. 472

Historical Sciences Gesa zur Nieden, Berthold Over (eds.) Musicians’ Mobilities and Music Migrations in Early Modern Europe Biographical Patterns and Cultural Exchanges 2016, 432 p., 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8376-3504-1 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3504-5

Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott, Kirsten Heinsohn (eds.) Germany 1916-23 A Revolution in Context 2015, 266 p., 39,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8376-2734-3 E-Book: 39,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2734-7

Jörg Rogge (ed.) Recounting Deviance Forms and Practices of Presenting Divergent Behaviour in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. In Collaboration with Kristina Müller-Bongard. 2016, 208 p., 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8376-3588-1 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3588-5

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titels in our entire list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Historical Sciences Susanne Duesterberg Popular Receptions of Archaeology Fictional and Factual Texts in 19th and Early 20th Century Britain 2015, 572 p., 49,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8376-2810-4 E-Book: 49,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2810-8

Elisabeth Cheauré, Regine Nohejl (eds.) Humour and Laughter in History Transcultural Perspectives 2014, 138 p., 24,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8376-2858-6 E-Book: 21,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2858-0

Heta Aali, Anna-Leena Perämäki, Cathleen Sarti (eds.) Memory Boxes An Experimental Approach to Cultural Transfer in History, 1500-2000 2014, 242 p., 32,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8376-2786-2 available as free open access publication E-Book: ISBN 978-3-8394-2786-6

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titels in our entire list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!