Spirit of the West: 'When Cimarron Meant Wild,' 'The Colfax County War' delve into conflicts surrounding the Maxwell Land Grant

In the introduction to his book “When Cimarron Meant Wild,” historian David L. Caffey quotes a letter from a 19th century preacher, Franklin Tolby, to his sister telling her about the meaning of the name Cimarron.

It is Spanish for “wild” or “untamed,” Tolby writes, and the town of Cimarron in northern New Mexico takes its name from the river that runs through it.

Caffey expands on that. He says cimarron also describes “the country in a broader sense, for it was (and still is) a rugged mosaic of mountain and prairie landscapes.”

Spirit of the West: 'When Cimarron Meant Wild,' 'The Colfax County War' delve into conflicts surrounding the Maxwell Land Grant

More to the topic of the book, Caffey notes that the town was wild in terms of “the frequent occurrence of violent episodes common in frontier communities of the late 19th century American West.”

Caffey’s book covers a multitude of related political, judicial, commercial and cultural conflicts.

The Rev. Tolby himself became a murder victim in an act of politically inspired violence.

Years before Rev. Tolby arrived in Cimarron, situated on the Maxwell Land Grant, the grant had become the source of bloody disputes. The grant was an enormous tract — 1.7 million acres — that the Mexican government had awarded to two private individuals when it ruled New Mexico.

Mexican-issued land grants were, on paper, recognized by the U.S. in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Under American rule, however, the Maxwell Land Grant had to conform to the American legal concept of absolute ownership.

Ownership of the grant soon became a hot-button issue. So was the grant’s wealth of natural resources. It had gold, which immigrants from all over Europe mined. It had tall grass that cowboys from Texas ran cattle on.

The future ownership of the grant was an intense issue for the Jicarilla Apache and the Mouache Ute. Though nomadic, for centuries both considered Cimarron part of their ancestral homeland. The Jicarilla and Utes had adapted to Spanish and Mexican rule, but bristled under American laws that pushed to corral them onto reservations.

While Lucien Maxwell was managing the land grant, he was considered a benevolent autocrat by many parties. But new owners and a new conflict emerged when he sold the land grant to British capitalists. Dutch investors in the grant criticized its administrators. The sale disheartened many settlers, cowboys and miners who put down roots. They had long felt the grant was in the public domain.

In this period, “frontier justice” — shootings and lynchings — sometimes prevailed in settling matters. Judges and justices of the peace were accused of being corrupt.

“I tried to make the book readable and engaging,” Caffey said in a phone interview from his home in Lubbock, Texas. He succeeded.

Caffey grew up in Texas and first got to know New Mexico, its mountains and its history as a camper at the Philmont Scout Ranch in 1963. He later lived in New Mexico for 33 years, including eight as director of the University of New Mexico Harwood Library and Museum in Taos. Caffey also worked in administration at San Juan College in Farmington and at Clovis Community College.

One of Caffey’s previous histories was about the politically powerful but loosely organized Santa Fe Ring. The other was a biography of Frank Springer, an opponent of the ring. They figured prominently in “When Cimarron Meant Wild,” which could have benefitted from a list and brief description of the many, overlapping characters in the book.

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A book on a related subject was published earlier this month — “The Colfax County War: Violence and Corruption” by Corey Recko.

Recko wrote in an email that the Santa Fe Ring tried to acquire land from the Maxwell Land Grant. The Rev. Tolby not only preached, but was a vocal opponent of the ring.

It wasn’t until 1878, three years after Tolby’s murder, that the federal government sent an investigator, Frank W. Angel, to New Mexico. Angel was ordered to look broadly into the violence and corruption that plagued the territory, Recko said in the email.

Angel’s assignment was also sparked by two events. One was the murder of an English-born businessman John Tunstall by a sheriff’s posse, sparking the Lincoln County War. The other was a letter presumably showing Territorial Gov. Samuel Axtell was planning a mass killing of people he considered agitators behind the Colfax County troubles, Recko wrote.

Angel’s probe had the effect of ending the Colfax County War.