El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  The trains proved an important catalyst in western development by fostering trade and making travel easier. Crossing the country before the era of transcontinental trains could be an endurance test. Willa Cather captured the epic nature of such journeys in her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in the mid-nineteenth century just after the Mexican-American War. Undertaking the journey from Cincinnati, Ohio, to his post in New Mexico, Bishop Jean Marie Latour had no idea how to make it: “No one in Cincinnati could tell him how to get to New Mexico—no one had ever been there. Since young Father Latour’s arrival in America, a railroad had been built from New York to Cincinnati; but there it ended. New Mexico lay in the middle of a dark continent.” In the end, it took him almost a year, traveling on steamers via New Orleans and Galveston.141 Such arduous journeys would no longer be necessary. With the ease of rail transport, people from the East began to explore the West. It was now the future, the war-torn South the past. The essence of this western enthusiasm even found its way into everyday objects. The glassmakers Gillinder & Sons produced a range of pressed dishes decorated with motifs from the West, including such items as a marmalade jar with a kneeling Native American providing the handle, and other dishes adorned with images of buffalo and prairies.

  People were also lured beyond the Mississippi River by economic prospects, including work in mining or on the railroads. Metal extraction remained a booming business as silver mines joined those of gold and copper.142 Nevada, with its silver lode, had become a state in 1864.143 Related to these economic developments was the invention of barbed wire, which would be in widespread use by the end of the century, allowing landowners and ranchers to demarcate and lay claim to boundaries with more certainty. Land could be marked, cattle better contained, property divided.

  The trains began to run north and south, too. By late 1882, the Arizona and New Mexico Railway connected with the Sonora Railway, becoming the first line to cross the border with Mexico.144 The shipping of goods and the movement of people became easier, and this led to economic expansion on both sides of the border. The trains transformed their surroundings, with all the tunneling, blasting, and clearing they required. They had a similar impact on the people, as towns sprang up and work moved away from ranching.

  Alongside this, throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century battles broke out against Native Americans, who were trying to protect their lands from further incursion. This was the era of the Apache Wars and Geronimo, who became famous for his attacks on U.S. and Mexican forces. In 1876, the Native American victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn in the Great Plains acted as an impetus for the United States in its efforts to push Indians on to reservations, taking their land as more tracks were laid, mines dug, and buildings constructed throughout the West.

  Some of the new towns that followed in the trains’ paths straddled the U.S.-Mexico border, which was resurveyed starting in 1882. This time the old markers, which were often just piles of stones that had been ignored or dislodged, were replaced by new, standardized stone or iron columns that were at least six feet tall, set at roughly five-mile intervals. However, these border towns could prove tricky to mark. In Nogales, split between Sonora and the Arizona territory, the marker had to be put right outside a saloon on the U.S. side.145

  By around 1910, Nogales had a population of 3,514. Other, similar bifurcated cities would spring up along the tracks, though not always sharing a name, such as Douglas, Arizona; and Agua Prieta, Sonora. These places needed to have company offices for the trains and customs houses for goods. The shared economic needs and commercial interests, coupled with the movement of people, turned these pairs of discrete towns on maps into “binational” cities on the ground.146

  Another significant piece of legislation for the West was the 1877 Desert Land Act, which built on the land distribution of the Homestead Act, parceling public lands into private ownership on the condition that they were irrigated and cultivated. It also allowed claimants to have up to 320 acres instead of the earlier 160 acres. At the same time, questions about landownership in the former Mexican territories of the United States continued to present problems, and by the end of the century, with a rising Anglo population, New Mexico was in need of arbitration. By 1891, the U.S. government had been forced to set up a Court of Private Land Claims to adjudicate these battles. As with Texas and California, the fights often involved multiple layers of law—proving first the Spanish grant, then the legitimacy of the subsequent Mexican authorization. Even with intact paperwork, families often lost thousands of acres.147 One troubling aspect in New Mexico was how communal land grants had been used and later divided, which caused legal and political problems that spilled into the twentieth century. In the end, only about 6 percent of the total land area of around 35 million acres sought by the claimants was confirmed.148

  Land speculators and lawyers—both Anglo and Hispanic—were well positioned to profit from the failure of so many grants. In New Mexico, these elites came together in what was called the Santa Fe Ring, which was linked with political and financial corruption—a charge that would also hinder New Mexico’s future attempts at statehood.149 The men in this loose association—their name was coined by their adversaries—often made their money from land speculation, which led to involvement in lucrative investments in railroads and mines throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, though many of them denied there was any such “ring.”150

  One infamous example involved the Maxwell land grant—the vast territory acquired by Lucien Maxwell through his gradual acquisition of the Beaubien-Miranda land grant, which covered part of today’s northern New Mexico and extended into southern Colorado. It was originally given to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda. After the Mexican-American War, Maxwell, who had married Beaubien’s daughter, Luz, acquired that part of the granted lands and later bought Miranda’s share.151 Gold was discovered in nearby Baldy Mountain in 1866, and Maxwell was soon overrun with prospectors and squatters. By 1869, he was ready to sell, and he did so the following year to a group of investors, who decided to keep the grant’s name. The Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company had British backers but also connections to the Santa Fe Ring, including the leading politician Stephen Elkins.152

  Congress had confirmed the grant in 1869, but not the size of the land, and an attempt that year to undertake a survey was stopped. The secretary of the interior ruled that the original grant could not be larger than 97,000 acres, basing this figure on a Mexican decree of 1824 that limited a grant to eleven leagues, with one league being equal to 4,428 acres. Given that there were two original grantees—Beaubien and Miranda—the allowable grant now was twenty-two leagues, totaling just over 97,000 acres. The Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company, however, had based the purchase on the claim that the actual size was 2 million acres. This had enabled it to issue millions of dollars’ worth of stock to cover the costs of investing in mining and ranching plans.153 The company was now in disarray, and many of the people who had long lived there continued to press their claims. Such was the growing violence that U.S. troops had to be sent to intervene in what was later known as the Colfax County War.

  The Maxwell company struggled on, but by 1876 it was purchased on foreclosure and then sold to Dutch investors who also kept the name, settled the backlog of unpaid taxes, and hoped to profit on renewed railroad interest.154 In the meantime, the legal question of the size of the grant worked its way up to the Supreme Court in 1887. This time, thanks to earlier legal rulings, Congress no longer had to abide by the eleven-leagues rule and instead could issue a new grant. In the end, this incarnation of the Maxwell company was given 1,714,764 acres, a decision that angered many of the smaller claimants living in the territory.155 The long-running debacle also attracted the attention of the national press, and the episode reinforced the view of lawmakers and judges in Washington that the honesty of politicians and business leaders in New Mexico was dubious at best, undermining any plans for statehood.156
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  In the spirit of resistance that Juan Cortina had wielded in 1850s Texas, similar attempts were made in 1880s New Mexico to frustrate, anger, and punish Anglos who were seen to have cheated people out of their land. The best-known group, Las Gorras Blancas (the White Masks or White Caps), sabotaged ranches and railway lines where disputed lands had been seized. They cut barbed wire, drove off cattle, and destroyed bridges. From these acts, they moved into organized politics, setting up El Partido del Pueblo Unido.157 In 1890, they issued a manifesto that aimed to protect the rights of the poor, warning that they wanted “no more land thieves, or any obstructionists who might want to interfere. We are watching you.”158

  AMID ALL EARLIER talk of Mexicanization, whiteness, and land, a different vision of the West was starting to take shape by the late 1880s. The history of California, in particular, took on a heavy air of romanticization after only a generation of statehood, with the tales of striking gold on one hand and crumbling mission churches needing to be “saved” on the other.

  The dilapidated condition of the churches was no fiction. An 1852 surveyor’s report noted that at the mission of San Luis Rey, about forty miles north of San Diego, “the gardens and orchard here once being extensive … are fast going to ruin. Some half a dozen soldiers are stationed there to protect the grounds and buildings from further depredations until the title to the property shall be definitely settled.”159 Many continued to fall into disrepair. Immediately after the Civil War ended, the U.S. government returned the missions to the Catholic Church—the Mexican government had secularized the missions and taken their lands in the 1830s—but some parishes did not have the funds for their upkeep.

  The missions’ decline was an echo of the altered fortunes of Californios and Indians, for whom statehood represented a permanent destruction of their way of life. For millions of people, however, the addition of California excited their imaginations. Indeed, some of the individuals who would become the state’s most ardent proponents were not Californios but Anglos from the East. They were active participants in what they claimed was “discovering”—but was closer to creating—a “Spanish” past, replete with gentlemanly dons and benevolent mission friars, a story at odds with the realities of the actual Spanish past, Mexican rule, and subsequent U.S. conquest.

  By the 1870s and 1880s, California had turned from an imagined land into a touristic reality. Trains facilitated easy travel there and the climate was touted as health-giving. Publications played up to this image, even in their titles: one of them was the magazine The Land of Sunshine, edited by Charles Lummis. The Massachusetts-born Lummis was one of many Anglos from the East who went westward, in his case attracting national attention by walking from Cincinnati to Los Angeles for a job, an experience he later wrote about in A Tramp Across the Continent. He worked as a journalist and was an enthusiastic promoter of California. Lummis published a number of books about the West and its people, including The Spanish Pioneers and the California Missions, in which he wrote:

  It is pretty hard to read romance into the Puritans … whereas the whole Mission Era, both in its activity and its perennial influence, is saturated with romance—the thousands of place-names, the hundreds of Spanish fiestas, the innumerable Spanish songs, the remnants of the old Spanish ranchos, homes of incomparable hospitality and grace—for the Spanish Pastoral Era in California was notably the happiest and most charming life ever lived in this country.160

  Another outsider, Hubert Howe Bancroft, agreed with this assessment of California’s past and, like Lummis, managed to profit from it. Bancroft was born in Ohio and worked in New York as a bookseller before leaving for California in 1852 and settling in San Francisco.161 He started a bookstore in 1856 and collected rare histories of California before turning his hand to producing them.162 The result was a thirty-nine-volume history on the West and Mexico, with seven volumes devoted to California. He took credit, but the books were, in fact, the work of a staff of some six hundred people.163 Bancroft sold the histories through subscription and they were popular, though at one point he managed to anger his core audience, falling out with the Society of California Pioneers. That organization struck him off its list of honorary members because of “certain misrepresentations in his books,” not least his labeling John Frémont a “filibuster” in one volume, and his commenting elsewhere with some understatement that perhaps there had been some unfair treatment of Mexicans. The society went so far as to issue a pamphlet to counter what it called a “monstrous series of libels.”164

  The professionalization of historical writing was then in its earliest days; only in 1881 was the first professorial chair in U.S. history appointed. For Bancroft, history was a passion, but it was also a business. He later sold his voluminous private collection of papers and books to the University of California Library, which used these as the foundation of its Bancroft Library.

  However, he did take a genuine interest in his adopted state, including its surviving Californio community, sending his employees to collect oral histories from Californios as they recalled their families’ stories under Mexican and even Spanish rule. One prominent Californio mentioned in an anecdote in California Pastoral was María Amparo Ruiz, the “charming Californian” who married U.S. captain Henry S. Burton. When a competing suitor heard about their engagement, he pointed out to the priest that they could not be married because she was a Catholic and he was Protestant. Despite this, “the Loreto girl married the Yankee captain.”165 The Loreto girl—a reference to Ruiz de Burton’s birthplace in Baja—would end up in publishing, too, but to tell a less happy tale.

  Ruiz de Burton was angered by the treatment Californios faced, writing to a friend in 1859 that “they [the U.S.] broke their faith so solemnly pledged at Guadalupe Hidalgo. … How shameful this, in the conquering, the prosperous, the mighty nation! Better to crush us at once and not trick us out of our lands.”166 That same year, she and her family moved to the East Coast, living much of the time near Washington, D.C. After her husband died in 1869, she returned to California to find that the land they had bought years earlier was under dispute. While fighting to save it, she wrote her first novel, Who Would Have Thought It? This was published in 1872, making Ruiz de Burton one of the earliest Mexican-American female authors to write in English. Set in New England, the novel took aim at many of the hypocrisies that she witnessed while in the East. Her second work, The Squatter and the Don, published in 1885, hit much closer to home. This novel, set in the 1870s and ’80s, tells the story of the relationship between a Californio family, the Alamars, and a squatter family, the Darrells.

  Ruiz de Burton used the novel to counter the stereotypes of Californios and highlight the indignities that her people bore at the hands of state and local government, mostly focusing on the elite Californios who were facing the loss of their land. In the first chapter, the squatter William Darrell points out to his wife, “We aren’t squatters. We are ‘settlers.’ We take up land that belongs to us, American citizens, by paying the government price for it.”167 To Mariano Alamar, the Californio ranchero with tens of thousands of acres, the situation was less clear-cut:

  By those laws any man can come to my land, for instance, and plant ten acres of grain, without any bench, and then catch my cattle which, seeing the green grass without a fence, will go to eat it. He then puts them in a “corral” and makes me pay damages.168

  Ruiz de Burton used the two families’ experiences to show a wider public the transformation that was taking place in California. Her novel failed to become a bestseller, perhaps overshadowed by another book about California that was published the year before, in 1884. Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, was not only a hit, it was a cultural phenomenon. Such was its popularity that even future Cuban independence leader José Martí translated it into Spanish in 1887, writing in the introduction that “with more fire and knowledge, [Jackson] has written perhaps in Ramona, our novel,” linking it to the wider story of the Spanish and indigenous people in the Americas.169<
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  Unlike Ruiz de Burton, Jackson was not a California native, and visited the state only twice. Instead, like Lummis, she was born in Massachusetts and later became a prominent campaigner for Native American rights in the West.170 While in California in 1882, she saw the missions that would inspire her novel and that at this point were in terrible condition. Some were in such a dire state after having had been used as saloons, while others had lost their stones and tiles and animals grazed where there had once been a floor.171

  The missions provided the physical and moral landscape for Jackson’s novel, which tells a story that, while different, overlaps Ruiz de Burton’s. The title character, Ramona, the daughter of a Scottish man and an Indian woman, was taken in upon her father’s death by a prominent California family, placing her both inside and outside elite society. She falls in love with one of the Indian laborers at the ranch, Alessandro. This angers the coldhearted widow Señora Moreno, who raised her, but she elopes with Alessandro anyway and assumes the life of a California Indian. Their struggle to survive in the years that follow is put in the context of the collapse of the mission system, one that Jackson presented as a world of gentle priests and peaceful villages torn apart by the arrival of the Anglos. When Alessandro’s people, the Temecula, are driven off their mission land, their way of life is upended. He and Ramona go in search of security but are unable to find it among other displaced Indians, enduring a series of misfortunes. Years later, Señora Moreno’s son, Felipe, sets out to find Ramona. In his search, he visits many of the missions:

  He would leave no stone unturned; no Indian village unsearched; no Indian unquestioned. San Juan Bautista came first; then Soledad; San Antonio, San Miguel, San Luis Obispo, Santa Inez; and that brought him to Santa Barbara. He had spent two months on the journey. At each of these places he had found Indians; miserable, half-starved creatures, most of them. Felipe’s heart ached, and he was hot with shame, at their condition. The ruins of the old Mission buildings were sad to see, but the human ruins were sadder.172