Maxwell Land Grant

This text focuses on the circumstances surrounding the Maxwell Land Grant in New Mexico and southern Colorado. The grant involved more than two thousand square miles of land. This work reviews the history of the land in question from the days of Mexican rule under Governor Armijo, to the time of Vigilantes in Raton. It also speaks of the ownership controversy, wherein the Utes, Apaches, Spanish and Americans all thought that they were the true land owners.

In this volume, published originally in an edition of 250 numbered and signed copies, Stanley (Father Stanley Francis Louis Crocchiola) takes on the task of telling the complex story of the Maxwell Land Grant.

How a land empire was acquired and consolidated in 19th century New Mexico.

Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The Southwest has been and continues to be the scene of a collision between land regimes with radically different cultural conceptions of the land's purpose. We meet Jicarilla Apaches, whose identity is rooted in a sense of place; Mexican governors and hacienda patrons seeking status as New World feudal magnates; "rings" of greedy territorial politicians on the make; women finding their own way in a man's world; Anglo homesteaders looking for a place to settle in the American West; and Dutch investors in search of gargantuan returns on their capital. The European and American newcomers all "mistranslated" the prior property regimes into new rules, to their own advantage and the disadvantage of those who had lived on the land before them. Their efforts to control the Maxwell Land Grant by wrapping it in their own particular myths of law and custom inevitably led to conflict and even violence as cultures and legal regimes clashed.

When the United States acquired New Mexico by invasion and conquest on August 15, 1846, it inherited a land grant problem of considerable magnitude. This problem continued for decades until 1870 when the United States Congress suddenly declined to act at all on any New Mexico grant claim. Among the grants that had been confirmed, however, was the Miranda and Beaubien, or Maxwell Land Grant, and that is the dominant theme of this book. Originally made in 1841 to Guadalupe Miranda and Charles Beaubien under Mexican rule, the Maxwell Land Grant was determined to embrace almost two million acres of land—2,460 square miles. Politicians, Indians, courts, ministers of the gospel, early day settlers, and soldiers, all had their place in the story of the Grant. Governor Manuel Armijo, the last chief executive under Mexican rule, Padre Martinez of Taos, Lucien B. Maxwell, Kit Carson, Charles Ben, Dick Wootton and many another old timer live again in these pages that read like fiction but are, in fact, totally true accounts. WILLIAM A KELEHER (1886–1972) observed first hand the changing circumstances of people and places of New Mexico. Born in Lawrence, Kansas, he arrived in Albuquerque two years later, with his parents and two older brothers. The older brothers died of diphtheria within a few weeks of their arrival. As an adult, Keleher worked for more than four years as a Morse operator, and later as a reporter on New Mexico newspapers. Bidding a reluctant farewell to newspaper work, Keleher studied law at Washington & Lee University and started practicing law in 1915. He was recognized as a successful attorney, being honored by the New Mexico State Bar as one of the outstanding Attorneys of the Twentieth Century. One quickly observes from his writings, and writings about him, that he lived a fruitful and exemplary life. He is also the author of “Turmoil in New Mexico,” “Violence in Lincoln County,” “The Fabulous Frontier,” and “Memoirs,” all from Sunstone Press.

When American settlers arrived in the southwestern borderlands, they assumed that the land was unencumbered by property claims. But, as María Montoya shows, the Southwest was no empty quarter simply waiting to be parceled up. Although Anglo farmers claimed absolute rights under the Homestead Act, their claims were contested by Native Americans who had lived on the land for generations, Mexican magnates like Lucien Maxwell who controlled vast parcels under grants from Mexican governors, and foreign companies who thought they had purchased open land. The result was that the Southwest inevitably became a battleground between land regimes with radically different cultural concepts. The struggle over the Maxwell Land Grant, a 1.7-million-acre tract straddling New Mexico and Colorado, demonstrates how contending parties reinterpreted the meaning of property to uphold their claims to the land. Montoya reveals how those claims, with their deep historical and racial roots, have been addressed to the satisfaction of some and the bitter frustration of others. Translating Property describes how European and American investors effectively mistranslated prior property regimes into new rules that worked to their own advantage--and against those who had lived on the land previously. Montoya explores the legal, political, and cultural battles that swept across the Southwest as this land was drawn into world market systems. She shows that these legal issues still have real meaning for thousands of Mexican Americans who continue to fight for land granted to their families before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, or for continuing communal access to land now claimed by others. This new edition of Montoya’s book brings the land grant controversy up to date. A year after its original publication, the Colorado Supreme Court tried once more to translate Mexican property ideals into the U.S. system of legal rights; and in 2004 the Government Accounting Office issued the federal government’s most comprehensive effort to sort out the tangled history of land rights, concluding that Congress was under no obligation to compensate heirs of land grants. Montoya recaps these recent developments, further expanding our understanding of the battles over property rights and the persistence of inequality in the Southwest.