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New Mexico State University Campus studies, bridge inspection and safety training, bilingual special education, artificial intelligence, optics, photonics and micro laser development. Yet even the fledgling Las Cruces College could not escape the onus of frontier violence. The first commencement would have been in 1883, but the college’s one and only senior was fatally shot, an innocent bystander during a holdup. From the mid 20th century on, New Mexico State University has been a major player in outer space exploration, and its influence is joined by the work at White Sands Missile Range. Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto, joined the faculty in 1955 and began a research program which ranks today among the nation’s best. NMSU operates one of the world’s largest university-owned telescopes at a site in the nearby Sacramento Mountains as a consortium of universities including the University of Chicago, Princeton and others. And, under a NASA contract, the Physical Science Laboratory manages the world’s largest scientific balloon research program, launching probes from remote sites such as Antarctica and Greenland. East of Las Cruces, just over Organ Pass on what was once the sprawling San Augustine/Cox ranch is White Sands Missile Range, one of the army’s most important weapons testing grounds and home to the Patriot Missile System. At the north end is a barren, chilling site open only twice a year: Trinity Site, where the explosion of the first atomic bomb on earth inaugurated the age of atomic warfare. There is a riddle indeed in this. White Sands Missile Range not only is the birthplace of the atomic age with its power of ultimate cataclysm, but also may hold an answer to the appearance of man on this continent. In a remote site on the range is Rough Canyon Cave where excavations by worldrenowned archaeologist “Scotty” MacNeish in the late 1990s revealed evidence of possible human use 36,000 to 50,000 years ago. If this discovery is substantiated, it will prove the presence of man in the New World far earlier than previously believed. Talk about sweeping historical scope! Truly this part of the Southwest
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is an amazing place to live. Secretly Pope plotted with more than 70 Indian communities to attack the Spanish on a single night – August 10, 1680. The 2500 Indian warriors killed more than 400 Spanish soldiers and civilians, plus two thirds of the Catholic priests, and drove the surviving Europeans back to El Paso del Norte (Juarez). A few of the formerly “friendly” Pueblo Indians also chose to flee with the Spanish, and their descendents now live in the El Paso area and the Mesilla Valley. They are the Tiguas in Isleta near El Paso and the Tortugas just south of Mesilla. Their Pueblo culture is still celebrated in festivals and religious observances throughout the year. The Pueblo Indians maintained autonomy over their ancestral lands for twelve years, restoring their religious practices and cultural observances, until the Spanish regained control in 1692. Henceforth, New Mexico remained a Spanish colony where authorities employed a more tolerant approach to their Indian subjects, until Mexican revolutionaries overthrew Spanish rule and established the Republic of Mexico in 1821. But Mexican control was short-lived. Within 25 years, America’s push for western expansion prompted a war with Mexico which ended with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty gave most of New Mexico territory to the United States, but not Mesilla and a strip of land running westward along our present day international border. Right before the onset of the Civil War, there was a great push in the country for a trans-continental railroad. Political factions vied over the appropriate route, some favoring a northern one and others a southern one. The well-located City of the Crosses provided an ideal route west as it always had, for Indian hunters and traders, the Forty Niners, the Butterfield Stagecoach, but not without access to land still belonging to Mexico. Those sponsoring the southern option dispatched James Gadsden, a railroad agent and promoter, to negotiate a land purchase from then Mexican president Antonio Lopes de Santa Anna (of The Alamo fame). Santa Anna, in desperate need of funds, agreed to sell the United States 30,000 square miles of land south of the Gila River for $10 million. Congress finally ratified the purchase, but narrowly. The Gadsden Purchase was signed in Mesilla, in the same courthouse on the Plaza that twenty seven years later would be the scene of Billy the Kid’s trial for murder. Ah yes Billy the Kid, a.k.a. William Henry Antrim, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, or simply “El Chivato” as the local Hispanics called him. Amazingly,
this buck-toothed cowboy and sometime gun-slinger is assuredly the most famous legendary figure of the region. Why he is so, is an imponderable mystery. Maybe Pat Garrett, his one-time friend and later killer, who wrote a book about him, is to blame, or Hollywood. On April 13, 1881, an all Hispanic jury found Billy guilty of the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. The ambush/murder was a key incident in the Lincoln County War of 1877-1878 which turned the tiny mountain community of Lincoln (near Ruidoso) into a war zone. He was handed over to then Sheriff Pat Garrett to be transported back to Lincoln, and henceforth, on May 13, to be “hanged by the neck until his body be dead.” On April 28, Billy killed both his guards (perhaps a gun had been left in the outhouse for him by a sympathizer), and fled Lincoln. No one in the town made any attempt to stop him. Midnight July 14, Pat Garrett caught up with Billy at the Maxwell compound in Fort Stockton. In Pete Maxwell’s darkened bedroom, Garrett answers Billy’s inquiry “Quien es” with two fatal shots. Or at least this is what Garrett claimed in his book. Others over the years have not agreed. For decades a man in Hico, Texas, swore he was Billy the Kid. And, just last year, two New Mexico sheriffs and
the mayor of Capitan, New Mexico, sought permission to exhume the bodies of Billy’s mother Catherine Antrim buried in Silver City, the person purported to be Billy buried in Fort Stockton, and the remains of Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts, the Hico man. This attempt to employ DNA testing to solve the mystery of what happened to Billy and who if not he is buried in his grave, was denied after the state’s office of Medical Investigation said the results may not be conclusive, but according to those who sought exhumation, the battle to “find the truth” is on-going. Certainly the legend of Billy the Kid will never end. The exhumation story appeared on the front page of The New York Times and in some 2,000 newspapers worldwide. Remnants of this turbulent early history remain throughout Las Cruces, in its historic sites and on-going legends, but the 20th century to the present has seen phenomenal growth and economic development. Three potent enterprises have shaped the fortunes of Las Cruces and the Mesilla Valley into the 21st century: agriculture, education, and the military/air-space industry. Often their development and influence have overlapped.
New Homes of Las Cruces Summer 2008 All real estate advertising herein is subject to the Federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to advertise “any preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national ori-
gin, or intention to make any such preference, limitation or discrimination.” Ken Thurston Homes assumes no responsibility and shall have no liability whatsoever for errors, including without limitation, typographical errors or omissions in New Homes of Las Cruces.
For more information on New Homes of Las Cruces magazine or to receive a free copy in the mail contact Kameron Johnson or Tyler Morsbach at 575-373-9422 or go to www.newhomesoflascruces.com. ©2008 Ken Thurston Homes
Production: Ceci Marquez, Mesa Publishing Corp. Editorial: Roxanne Schroeder