The city fathers who founded Silver City were never quite comfortable working with the powers that be in Santa Fe. The resulting attempt to align the region with Arizona Territory captured the attention of state government officials, especially with the possibility of losing one of the richest parts of New Mexico territory at the time.
Douglas Dinwiddie explored the political influences that shaped Grant County in the years leading up to New Mexico statehood in Chapter 9 of the newly released history of Silver City, ““Unpacking Silver City: Revealing
the Rich Tapestry of a Historic Town,” the first comprehensive historical record of Silver City in three decades, which is edited by Silver City Museum director Bart Roselli, and features the in-depth research of 10 prominent local historians.
Dinwiddie explores the peaks and valleys in the struggle for statehood for what was then the New Mexico Territory through the lens of Silver City, which remains to this day the only community in the state with a separate city charter that is recognized by the state legislature. That charter was granted to keep the rich mines of the region connected to New Mexico.
Impact of the Civil War
Hudson Street in Silver City is named after a man named Richard Hudson, who arrived in the region in 1862 as part of a group known as the California Column. Like Hudson, many prominent early citizens came to Silver City as a result of the Civil War.
During the Civil War the Confederates invaded New Mexico. Mesilla was seized by pro-Confederates out of El Paso in 1861 and Pinos Altos was filled with people who had southern sympathies. The pro-Confederate militia in Pinos Altos was called the Arizona Rangers, but they were pro-Confederate.
“When the main invasion of New Mexico took place in 1862, the Union did not have sufficient troops to fight back so they raised an army in California, which was remaining loyal to the union,” Dinwiddie said. “They marched them across southern Arizona and into this area. A lot of people who became prominent in New Mexico after the Civil War were soldiers in that California Column, and one of them was Richard Hudson.”
They got to New Mexico too late to really fight Confederates, who had been defeated in the battle at Glorieta Pass in March of 1862 and had retreated out of New Mexico. When the California Column arrived in late spring of 1862, it didn't have any Confederates to fight, so it was put to work fighting Indians.
They built forts over the next couple of years, and when the war ended and the volunteers were let go, a lot of them just decided they would stay in New Mexico.
Hudson became a prominent citizen in early Silver City and was one of the people that negotiated in Santa Fe to get concessions to allow Silver City to have its charter.
Santa Fe Ring
The discovery of rich minerals brought a lot of the original entrepreneurs into the area here, but there were problems coming from the territorial government. “One group causing issues for Silver City was the infamous Santa Fe Ring, and Thomas Catron in particular,” Dinwiddie shared. “Catron was kind of a carpetbagger who had come to New Mexico. He was an attorney, and he was able to manipulate a lot of the land grants to enrich himself.”
Catron was a leader of the Santa Fe Ring, which included other powerful politicians and lawyers who, like Catron, controlled large land grants. Stephen Elkins was another power broker in the Ring. They were calling the shots in the whole territory in the 1870s, and their connections were part of the reason that the people in Silver City felt like they were outgunned.
“They ended up being the villains in the story for a lot of people and it was somewhat remarkable, I think that Silver City was able to battle with them and kind of come out on top and get the town charter approved,” Dinwiddie said. “It didn't hurt that Silver City had the good fortune of being in this prosperous area at the time with all these mines and some of the leading politicians even in Santa Fe and, and ultimately some of the later territorial governors actually owned stakes in some of the mines around Silver City.”
Every year, Silver City celebrates Territorial Charter Day in February, and one of the reasons it still celebrates is because that charter still gives Silver City rights that no other community in the state has.
It does present a problem at times. One of the problems was that Silver City always determined when it would hold municipal elections. Within the last few years, the state of New Mexico decreed that all communities need to have their elections in November.
“Silver City had typically had its municipal elections in March,” Dinwiddie said. “Under the charter, it should have been able to continue to have its elections in March, but then the word came down from the state that we want everybody doing their elections in November. There was a brief brouhaha about that and the city fathers in Silver decided it wasn't worth pushing the envelope. Plus, for the last several years, the lieutenant governor, Howie Morales, has been a local man. I think he kind of said to Silver City, ‘You guys need to cool it. This is kind of embarrassing for me as lieutenant governor.’ The charter is still on the books and, and, uh, uh, uh, on occasion it does cause some heartburn.”
Kit Carson
During the Mexican War, American troops that had occupied Santa Fe were ordered to proceed on to California and they weren't sure the best way to get there. They enlisted the help of Kit Carson, the famous frontiersman, who was familiar with this area of southwest New Mexico.
When he was a young man, Carson had worked with a group of trappers who had come into the Gila looking for beaver. By that time, Mexico was independent from Spain so the famous copper mine, the Santa Rita Copper Mine, was being mined and they encountered the miners.
Some of the trappers Carson was working for bought an interest in the copper mine and Carson worked there briefly in the 1820s and he was familiar with this area. He led them down through this area and then turned westward to California.
Carson is just one example of a well-known historical figure with ties to the Silver City region that came due to political or military activity.
The Rough Riders
Theodore Roosevelt was a native New Yorker, and tragically when he was just a young man, his wife and his mother, who he was very close to, both died on the same day. Roosevelt needed a break to get his mind straightened out, so he used some of his family money and bought a ranch in North Dakota, where he became a cowboy for a few years
During that time in the late 1880s, early 1890s, he really developed an affinity, a real close respect for westerners and for cowboys. He was still very ambitious and knew that his political future was still back east, so he went back there.
“Roosevelt was the assistant secretary of the Navy when war broke out with Spain in 1898,” Dinwiddie recounts. “He got this brainstorm that he could form a volunteer regiment made up mostly of westerners and lead them into battle. The official name of the regiment was the First Volunteer Cavalry, but the press soon gave it the nickname of the Rough Riders.”
Roosevelt started recruiting mostly cowboys, not exclusively, but there were about 1,100 or 1,200 recruited, and more of them came from New Mexico than from any other place.
“Grant County, which included what's today Luna and Hidalgo counties, the southwestern corner of New Mexico, basically, provided over 50 of the recruits for the Rough Riders,” Dinwiddie said. “They trained briefly and then they went to Florida and waited to get on a boat to go and help invade Cuba. A lot of them never got to Cuba because they didn't have enough ships and even when they arrived in Cuba, they didn't have their horses because they didn't have enough transport, so they ended up having to fight as infantry.
“Roosevelt wrote a book right after the war about the Rough Riders. You can still get one. It's still in print today. There’s a photograph in the book of a guy riding a wild bronc trying to break the bronco, and it turns out that the guy in the photograph was a guy named Tom Darnell, who was a cowboy from the Silver City area, actually Deming is his official hometown, so there’s a lot of connection locally to the Rough Riders.”
Roosevelt became famous as a result of the war and was put on the ticket with McKinley in 1900. After President McKinley was assassinated Roosevelt became president and came into office with a lot of friends in New Mexico as a result of the Rough Rider experience.
Those New Mexico associates immediately began pushing Roosevelt to help New Mexico attain statehood. It didn’t happen prior to his decision not to seek reelection in 1908, but William Taft eventually signed the documents bringing New Mexico in as a state in 1912.
“Without Roosevelt's friendship and, and pushing the issue, who knows how long New Mexico might have waited,” Dinwiddie said.
This is the second of a 10-part Desert Exposure series on “Unpacking Silver City.” We’ll explore the history as the book does, covering the events that led to the creation of each of its chapters, one history-making topic at a time. This collection of stories comes from Chapter 9 of the book, “People, Places, and Politics: Government’s Role in Grant County 1868-1912,” written by Douglas M. Dinwiddie, PhD.
