Every picture tells a story, don't it?

 

We see this somewhat stagey, somewhat spooky snapshot a lot out here.  Always in conjunction with a group known as Las Gorras Blancas.  But never with enough accompanying detail to fully explain the who, what, why, when and where of the scene being depicted.  So we looked further into it.

And it all begins in Las Vegas – New Mexico that is.  Not that glitzy, sin-city simmering in Nevada’s Mojave Desert.

The Spanish (1598-1821) and Mexican (1821-1848) governments of New Mexico made hundreds of land grants totaling millions of acres to groups and individuals as inducements to settle in the border regions of the colony.  Mexico created the 431,654 acre Las Vegas Grant in northeastern NM for subsistence settlers in the 1830s with the bulk of the land designated for the collective use of its owner-members.  That allotment was one of the most successful in attracting settlers.   

In spite of the recurring Indian raids what made the property so desirable was its proximity to the Santa Fe Trail, its good grazing land (Las Vegas means "the meadows,") and the available timber and water in its highlands.   In 1836, the town of Las Vegas was created by Hispanic settlers, many with families. After the 1848 U.S. takeover of New Mexico the establishment of U.S. Army Fort Union nearby in 1851 provided security and employment for residents plus a local market for Las Vegas products.  The Santa Fe Trail offered jobs, and the town prospered growing to over 1,000 people by 1860 – then quadrupling over the next two decades.

At las Golondrinas museum we sometimes talk about the “three W’s of New Mexico’s colonization – “wine, wool and wheat.”  Grapes thrived in southern part of the territory but not in the Las Vegas area.  Churro sheep just loved every part of New Mexico.  As did certain wheats.

During the 1860s, Las Vegas was the center of the territory’s sheep industry, with major operations like that of Don Jose Albino Baca, who owned 60,000 of New Mexico’s .5 million ovine.  The Santa Fe Trail provided the conduit for in transporting wool and weaving to eastern markets. Churro sheep brought by the first colonists in the 1500s were the predominant source.

 

“Sonora White” was the first wheat variety the colonists planted in 1599.  By the mid-1800s it was being widely grown – much in the Las Vegas area.

Along with wheat, the Spanish brought their small, horizontal waterwheel, stone-ground grist mills powered by an acequia (irrigation ditch) – aka known as “Norse wheels.”  Each village had one to supply its resident’s flour needs.

The demand for flour grew exponentially in 1846 with the arrival of the U.S. army.  More land was devoted to growing the crop, and large production mills using industrial-revolution technology started being built by 1849.   “These mills were designed to produce white flour … unlike stone mills, which retained the whole grain in the flour they produced.” (riograndegrain.org)  Good enough for its biggest customer, the military whose post in the Las Vegas area, Fort Union, became the supply depot for other bases throughout New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma.

“From 1861 to 1878, Fort Union ... funneled an unprecedented amount of cash to Hispanos of northern New Mexico [as] more than a thousand native New Mexicans worked … principally as laborers and teamsters, as well as in other capacities”  (Fort Union and the Economy of Northern New Mexico, 1860–1868)

Things were going pretty well for the grantees of Las Vegas and their descendants until the military bases in New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma were closed negating the need for Fort Union, which was shuttered in 1891.  Meanwhile in 1879 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad replaced the Santa Fe Trail as the principal means of commerce.  But more importantly changed the look, feel and character of Las Vegas.

The AT&SF established a terminal and developed the land east of the Galinas River, creating a separate, rival “New Town” Las Vegas.   Which rapidly grew with modernities such as an electric street railway, “Duncan Opera House,” Andrew Carnegie Library, Harvey House Castañeda Hotel, and New Mexico Normal School (now NM Highlands University.)  With the available timber new residents constructed homes and buildings in Victorian and Queen Anne styles familiar to them – rather than emulating the “dirt” (adobe) constructs west of the river.   In 1881 the “new” and “old” communities were separately incorporated as a city and town, respectively. Then unified under one charter in 1970  – although distinct school districts have been maintained (Las Vegas City and West Las Vegas.) 

Meanwhile Las Vegas was also building a reputation for Wild West lawlessness – a hangout for outlaws, adventurers, and notable figures such as Jesse James, Bob Ford, and Doc Holliday who killed his first man for shooting up the Doc’s Vegas saloon in 1879.

But even before the arrivals of train-men and gunslingers American expansionism under the flag of Manifest Destiny was undoing the seemingly sacrosanct connection of the Hispano settlers to their land grant.

 

The 1836 Mexican Las Vegas Land Grant was premised on communal property rights, while Americans introduced a system of individual land ownership.  Moreover, “the boundaries of these grants were very indefinite, due to lack of good surveying instruments, and they caused much worry to the American surveyor general later.  [E.g.] ‘A pine tree nine inches in diameter, bears south twenty-five degrees, fifty-six minutes east, one hundred links distant, marked L.V.G.’” (New Mexico Historical Review)  Surveyor generals were the federal officials responsible for resolving property disputes.  Many were honest and hard-working.  Others inept.  Several easily corrupted. 

In the 1860s Ohioan Octavius Decatur Gass began acquiring land and ranching in the area.  Through the second half of the 19th century more American settlers and land speculators began to purchase and demarcate “their” land with barbed wire, undermining the communal property system and displacing Hispano residents who resisted through legal means, political activism – and acts of defiance.

A clandestine organization known as Las Gorras Blancas (“White Caps” because of the hoods they wore) led the resistance conducting acts of destruction against land speculators and cattle ranchers.  “By cutting fences and burning barns, the Raza [Hispanic] sheepherders of New México fought the advance of the cattlemen, as they had fought the invasion of the Texans in 1841 before the war against México.” (We Fed Them Cactus)  The photo shown above is used consistently to represent them in Google searches, PowerPoints, books and magazine articles.

Attempts to prosecute the vigilantes failed because no witnesses would come forward.  According to historian David Correia, “by the fall of 1890 every single fence that enclosed the Las Vegas Land Grant had been cut and none had survived reconstruction.”  The Blancas then became political joining Partido del Pueblo Unido (United People’s Party) and winning electoral victories in 1890 and 1892. 

The leaders of the White Caps were the Mexican-American Herrera brothers – Juan José on the left, Pablo in the middle, and Nicanor on the right.  Pablo was elected to the Territorial Assembly but resigned after one session and was then gunned down without cause by a deputy sheriff in Las Vegas. His death, along with continued denunciations and legal campaigns by territorial officials, merchants, and newspapers squashed the budding political movement.  By the mid-1890s, barbed-wire fences again enclosed communal lands, and many local subsistence ranchers became paid laborers as ranch hands or railroad workers, forever losing their rights to communal land.  Currently, only about 350 of the original 481,653.65 acres remain.

We could not determine if the Herreras were among the original 28 grantees in 1835.  (The answer is out there.  Just not digitally.)  Too bad.  That would have completed the circle of the Las Vegas story.  For all the difference it would have made.

As to the photo that started this  –

Hand-printed on the image are the words  “settlers taking the law in their own hands cutting 15 miles of the Brighton Ranch in 1885 Copy Right by S. D. Butcher Kearney Neb.”  The Old Brighton Ranch is near the South Loop River in Custer County, Nebraska.  And the Library of Congress website explains the likeness as “a theatrical reenactment staged by the photographer to illustrate a historical event for his PIONEER HISTORY OF CUSTER COUNTY[Nebraska].”   In that state’s “Barbed Wire Wars” large ranchers fenced off public land with the newly developed fencing material, which small ranchers and homesteaders would then often destroy.  Hispanos who were part of the larger Mexican-American population in Nebraska may have been affected by the changes in land ownership and grazing practices brought about by the use of barbed wire.  Las Gorras Blancas however was never active in the Cornhusker State.

There is nonetheless this extremely superficial New Mexican connection to the photograph.  Kearney, Nebraska where the lensman lived was named after General Stephen Watts Kearny who on August 15, 1846 entered Las Vegas, NM with his U.S. Army troops, and from a rooftop overlooking the town plaza proclaimed New Mexico as part of the United States.  The “e” in the town name was mistakenly added by postmen who misspelled it.  

“Every picture tells a story, don't it?” as the Rod Stewart song reminds us.  And some have even more than one to tell – not all equal in veracity or entertainment value.