When Cimarron Meant Wild: The Maxwell Land Grant Conflict in New Mexico and Colorado by David L. Caffey (review)

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• When Cimarron Meant Wild: The Maxwell Land Grant Conflict in New Mexico and Colorado by David L. Caffey
• James Bailey Blackshear

When Cimarron Meant Wild: The Maxwell Land Grant Conflict in New Mexico and Colorado. By David L. Caffey. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, Pp. 259. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index.)

The historiography of land grabs and shooting wars in the Territory of New Mexico during the nineteenth century is quite robust. One of the most famous events has to do with what happened on the Maxwell Land Grant. A good short list that covers different aspects of this story includes María E. Montoya's Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900 (2005), William Keleher's Maxwell Land Grant: A New Mexico Item (1984), and Morris F. Taylor's O.P. McMains and the Maxwell Land Grant Conflict (1979). Interested historians and lovers of Southwestern history can now add David L. Caffey's work to this list.

While on the surface it may seem that if you have read one of these histories, you have read them all, nothing could be further from the truth. With each passing decade historians bring forth additional perspectives on such events, shedding light on why the past is never over. Caffey illustrates this by focusing on some of the same social issues that confront modern society: gun violence, racial injustice, corrupt politicians, and alcoholism.

This history begins in 1841, when Mexico granted 97,000 acres to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda. Some of this land was in southern Colorado, and some of it was in northern New Mexico. The majority of all this was handed down through Beaubien's daughter María de la Luz to her husband, former United States Army scout Lucian Maxwell. The Santa Fe Trail ran through the property. Once New Mexico became a United States Territory, government officials expanded the grant, declaring that it included 1,714,764 acres.

By the end of the 1860s, Maxwell ruled like a feudal lord over a massive fiefdom around the town of Cimarron in Colfax County; merchant and government contractor, Indian agent and mediator, and patron to Nuevomexicanos who ranched and farmed for shares. Life was good even before gold was found and plans for a rail line were made that would run right through his property. But such news also sparked an influx of newcomers into the grant. Miners clashed [End Page 107] with the Jicarillas and Utes who lived there. Then Texas cattlemen arrived and fought with everybody. Maxwell to this point had managed to keep the peace with everyone settled in the various valleys and small towns on the grant, but in 1870 he had a change of heart, sold everything to a group of English businessmen who lived on the other side of the world, and moved to the Middle Pecos River Valley. He left behind several competing groups with different cultures and goals. The English corporation that now owned the grant added to the tensions by implementing a plan to root out the Nuevomexicano settlers, independent miners, and Texas cowboys.

Caffey looks at this history from two perspectives. One is an overview. What are the big impacts of western expansion into the homeland of the Jicarillas and Utes? Why do those who live in the grant look upon the political cabal known as the Santa Fe Ring with such animosity? How is frontier justice used by the different factions to achieve their goals? What is the impact on society when people who drink a lot always have a gun on their hip? The second perspective is more personal. Caffey delves into the men in the Santa Fe Ring, particularly Missourians Thomas B. Catron and college buddy Stephen B. Elkins. Caffey is one of the leading historians on Ring antics, if not the top expert. In an interesting juxtaposition, he also looks at two college buddies from Iowa who settled in New Mexico, Frank Springer and William R. Morely. These two became significant counters against the Santa Fe Ring and the Maxwell Land and Railway Company. Caffey also does a fine job of...