Back to Capitan - 1901 to 1903:

William Calvin Cheatham, part 9 

Last time we looked at newspaper articles from Capitan, New Mexico to see what they could tell us about W. C.  We only covered the year 1900, but I think it was pretty enlightening.  Not only did we learn a whole lot more about the town itself, but here is what we found out about W. C.:

He moved to New Mexico some time in 1899 at the latest, because by December of 1900 he reports that he had been in town for more than a year.

He served on the Capitan school board.

In addition to being a carpenter, he held the office of Justice of the Peace for Capitan, which meant that he was the judge for all legal matters taking place in town.

He was highly regarded in the community.

Today we are going to continue where we left off, starting at the beginning of 1901.

But wait!  Here is that spiffy map I made in case you forgot where all of the towns were:

1901


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
11 Jan 1901

If you remember, back in October of 1900 there was an article in the White Oaks Eagle about elections being held at W. C.'s office.  The other men mentioned in it, however, were different, which means either the election officials changed, or elections were held more than once a year.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
25 Jan 1901

Here are the election results.  Alas, W. C. did not win another term as justice of the peace.  There were two more articles about the election in the same paper:

So it looks like the Mexican population of Capitan supported Robert Hurt, which undoubtedly helped him get elected.  Also, Robert Hurt was the town druggist.  He was not in the 1900 census, so he was a relative newcomer.  He was a member of the Bachelor's Club that I mentioned in my previous post, which probably also helped him get elected (you know, since there were so many bachelors in town).  Oh, and he was also a business partner and buddy of none other than Gray and Lightfoot (You know they owned the newspaper - he is mentioned in there multiple times every single week!), which I'm sure didn't hurt him in the election either.  (By the next election year, however, he would fall out of favor with those guys, for choosing to switch parties and run as the Republican candidate for county assessor.  They had a lot of not so nice things to say about him then. See what I meant by the newspaper reading like a soap opera?)  Oh, and you know what?  Maybe the fact that W. C. ordered the closing of the bars on Sundays back in August lost him a few supporters as well!


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
1 Feb 1901

I guess this would be W. C.'s last paycheck from the county!  ($10.75 = about $320 today)


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
8 Feb 1901

Just another election story.  Funny how the vote totals in this article don't match the vote totals in the other one.  They are only off by one vote each, but given what was going to happen with the school board elections in June . . . .


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
8 Feb 1901

I hate to include more about this guy, but both parts are interesting.  The first tells us that the justice of the peace was not only the town judge, but also the mayor.  See, I told you W. C. was an important guy in town!  The second part just gives another example of the types of cases being heard by the judge.

I'm going to stop right here and throw something up that isn't a newspaper article.  It is another summary of a coroner's inquest of a mine accident in the Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, 1901:

I included the whole thing because it shows exactly how a case in W. C.'s courtroom would go. Also, there are two things to take note of when you read this.  First, W. C. was presiding over this inquest on the 22nd of January, 1901.  That means that, although the elections were held on January 14th, the new term of office hadn't begun yet.  And second, W. C. didn't just preside over the coroner's inquest, he was the coroner!  So while in New Mexico he was a carpenter, prospector, school board member, judge, mayor, and coroner.  And everyone thought he was just a farmer!

Okay, back to the articles.

The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
22 Feb 1901

Well, New Mexico was pretty progressive, weren't they?  I guess they had a higher opinion of women that that newspaper over in Clifton, Arizona (ten years later!).


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
15 March 1901

Okay, so I know this article is long and doesn't even mention W. C.  If you don't want to read it, I'll sum it up:  they were beginning the construction of a new school house (up until this point school was being held in an old house - well, not too old since the town had only been around for about 15 years!), which was going to cost $12,000 to build.  (That's nearly $356,000 in today's money.)  It was going to be glorious and wonderful, made of brick and stone, and would be big enough to accommodate the growing population. (I read in one of the articles that the population of Capitan was up to 1000 people by then.)  It praises the "fathers of the town" for their foresight (This would be S. T. Gray - no wonder he couldn't accept losing the school board election after all the work he put into getting the new building built!) and the town population for raising the $12,000 through the sale of bonds in just one year.  Here is a picture of the school in 1911:

I guess having the "largest and foremost school in the territory" didn't go unnoticed, since Capitan was chosen as the site of the Lincoln County Teacher's Institute in April of 1901.  (I came across an article I didn't think to clip at the time, saying that all teachers, even those currently teaching, would have to attend the teacher's academy and get certification before they could teach.)


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
31 May 1901

Articles like this one appeared almost every week during the next two years.  Apparently rumors abounded that the coal was playing out and the town was going to go bust.  I can imagine this had a lot of people very worried.  Funny thing is, when I first started trying to find information about Capitan online, I actually came across websites that said this very thing happened around 1902, which is not true.  There is a book you can preview online (here) that says the mines finally played out in 1904, causing the remaining miners (there were only 25 left by 1905) to be moved to another mining town.  There must have been enough going on to keep Capitan proper from going completely bust, though, because the population was still around 500 in 1910 and the town never did die out completely. (But, of course, it did not become a second Pittsburgh like that article I put up last week predicted!)


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
7 Jun 1901

Okay, so I know this is another one with absolutely nothing to do with W. C.  And I know the print quality is terrible.  But it was just too funny, so I had to share it.  That guy would have had an absolute heart attack if he found out how much time students would spend studying in 2018!


Since these articles skip from the beginning of June to the beginning of September, I would just like to point out here that there were no articles in the Capitan newspaper about the whole school board election fiasco - I'm guessing because the culprits ran the newspaper - what could they say, really?


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)

6 Sep 1901

Another example of the reporting style of the time. Wow.  I can't even begin to comment on this one.  I tried to find out what exactly was happening, but couldn't find anything at all.  There was off and on conflict between the Hopi and the federal government over the removal of their children to the Indian schools up until 1906, so maybe it had something to do with that, since from what I could discover, the "Indian conflicts" (mostly with the Apache) were over by this time.


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
13 Dec 1901

I don't know what kind of business W. C. was doing in White Oaks; the guy he was with, W. B. Puckett, was one of the other men who had run for the school board with W. C., so maybe it had something to do with the school.  He was also in that previous article where he and W. C. were talking about the mining activity in Nogal, so maybe they were there for something to do with that.  (Yep, I went back and checked and that article from the White Oaks newspaper - with a typo on W. B.'s name - is dated the day after this.)


So, not too much going on for W. C. in 1901.  After finishing up as justice of the peace at the end of January, we don't hear too much about him.  There was the whole school board thing and the land case on his homestead claim (shared in my New Mexico News post), but other than that, we don't know what he was up to.  The family history tells us that his father died in November, but there was no mention of it in the newspaper.


1902

The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
10 Jan 1902

When I saw this, I had no idea what it meant.  What was the 'Cash Store' and why was W. C. commenting on it in the newspaper?


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
17 Jan 1902

Oh, look.  At the very top it says "New Cash Store."  (I'm assuming this means as opposed to a store that took credit, like the coal company store.)  And W. C. was the manager.  Maybe the business he was conducting in White Oaks back in December was related to this.  I wonder what happened to the whole carpentering thing.  

And now that I think about it, I always did wonder what was up with W. C. and his sons buying the Laveen store once they went to Arizona - a farmer deciding to run a general store?  Well, I guess W. C. already had experience doing just that!


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
9 Feb 1902

This is just an example of the types of things W. C. was doing as a member of the Knights of Pythias.  There were a whole lot of articles like this that I didn't copy because W. C.'s name was never mentioned.  Maybe I'll go back sometime and clip them all so you can see what he did for a social life back then!


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
14 Feb 1902

This is just the local paper reporting on that same gold find that we read about before.  The other article said it was found five miles west of Capitan, which is right about where Nogal was located.  


 The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
25 Jul 1902

This is just some more about the growth of Capitan (and a funny lit bit about a train robbery).  It's been 5 months since we heard anything from W. C. - maybe his mining claim or work at the cash store were keeping him busy.


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
25 Jul 1902

In case you can't read this, it says, "W C Cheatham and family left this week for Roswell to be absent for a short time."  Roswell is about 70 miles due east of Capitan.  I tried to find out if the train ran between the two - the maps make it look like it didn't, but I read a little article about some girl coming in on the train from Carrizozo to Capitan on her way home to Roswell which made it sound like it did.  If it didn't, the family had a good two days of travel each way.

The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
25 Jul 1902

Here we see that W. C. had found a cow about six months prior.  The estray notice was published so that the owner could claim his property within a given amount of time or forfeit ownership to W. C.  This notice actually ran in the paper every single week until December of 1902. (You'll notice that the date at the end is a typo, since it should read 1902 instead.)


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
10 Oct 1902

Wait.  What?  This says that W. C. was no longer living in Capitan, but was instead living in Nogal. 


After reading this I was like, okay, so while reading the newspapers I did notice that Ira Sanger (another school board buddy) was running for office in a different precinct, and I did notice that he was actually the previous owner of that cash store that W. C. was managing.  But I hadn't had any indication that W. C. had followed him elsewhere.  So I was thinking, well, those mining claims were over near Nogal, maybe he moved to be closer to that?  And that's when I decided to go looking for a Nogal newspaper.  Luckily, they had one for 1902 online!  So this is what I found (these dates are going to backtrack!):


The Nogal Republican
(Nogal, Lincoln County, NM)
10 Jul 1902

So at the beginning of July, W. C. was still a member of the Capitan lodge (implying that he still lived in Capitan), but went to Nogal to help establish a Knights of Pythias lodge there.  Apparently Nogal was growing quite fast.  This is interesting because it says that W. C. was an officer of the Myrtle Lodge (in Capitan), even though the Capitan newspaper never mentions his name in any of the numerous K of P articles!  


The Nogal Republican
(Nogal, Lincoln County, NM)
14 Aug 1902

When this article says "electric railway,"  it doesn't mean trains.  It is just referring to finally getting electricity to those towns.  I think they had to wait more than just a short time, though, because I saw a report in the September 1902 edition of the Engineering and Mining Journal that says "a power plant will be put in" near one of the coal mines, meaning that it wasn't even built yet.  I guess they were all just excited and had their hopes up that it would be soon!


The Nogal Republican
(Nogal, Lincoln County, NM)
28 Aug 1902

Hey!  Here he is carpentering again!  (I guess he wasn't too fond of the mercantile business.)  Now we know what he was doing in Nogal!  (Not mining!) Remember, the town of Nogal was booming at this time.  I'm starting to think that W. C. wasn't going to let a good business opportunity pass him by!


So it looks like W. C. moved to Nogal at the beginning of August, and was still there in October.  Here is another article from the Nogal newspaper that was pretty funny and gives a picture of what it was like in those mining towns:


The Nogal Republican
(Nogal, Lincoln County, NM)
22 May 1902

I told you these newspapers could be pretty entertaining!


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
19 Dec 1902

This was from the Capitan newspaper, but the section was called Nogal Notes.  It looks like W. C.'s buddy Ira was settling in, and the part about school enrollment tells us the town of Nogal was growing fast.

And that was it for 1902.  (And that was also it for the Nogal newspaper, because I only found the year 1902 online.)


1903

The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
9 Jan 1903

Wait, wait, wait.  It looks like W. C. was not only back in Capitan by January 1903, but that he was running for justice of the peace again!  Which means he must have been back long enough for people to decide they wanted him as a candidate.  Which means his business venture in Nogal lasted for like, less than five months.   I'm not sure why they needed to choose candidates for the ticket when the last time both W. C. and his opponent Robert Hurst were democrats.  Maybe the town was small enough and new enough that they didn't do things along party lines yet back then.  But this articles definitely sounds like they are fielding candidates for their political party, don't you think?  (And on a side note, I'm pretty sure they didn't have a constable before this point, because I read an article that was complaining that North Capitan/Coalora had a constable but they didn't.)


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
9 Jan 1903

These were in the same edition of the newspaper.  Strange that they were barely choosing the candidates like, less than two weeks before the election!  Notice that they are mentioned three times right here - the newspaper must really have wanted for them to get elected!  

This was also in the same edition!  Unfortunately, the newspaper never printed the election results.  (Weird, right?)  Not only that, but there are no more articles mentioning the justice of the peace or judge or whatever.  So we don't know if W. C. was reelected or not.


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
23 Jan 1903

This is a little article about the wonders of modern technology in the year 1903.  I just thought I'd throw it in here because it gives a nice perspective on the differences between then and now.  (And even though it says '100 years ago,' virtually all of these advancements came about during W. C.'s lifetime.  So he probably felt exactly like us older folk today when looking back at the pace of invention!)


The Capitan Progress
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
 3 Jul 1903

This article appeared almost seven months later.  There was no mention of W. C. in the interim.  Maybe he lost the election and decided it was time to move on.  I have absolutely no clue as to what he had been doing in Roswell - I did a newspaper search, but it was a much larger town (2,000 people in 1900 and over 6,000 by 1910) so residents didn't get mentioned nearly as much in the newspaper and I didn't find anything.  Notice that the article, though dated July, says that W. C. had been living in Roswell "for some time."


So that is all I was able to find for New Mexico.  And once again we see that we answered some of our questions and were left with new ones at the end.  (Sigh.)  Oh well.  Let's do a quick summing up of what we've learned about W. C.'s time in New Mexico:

W. C. settled in Gray (Capitan), New Mexico sometime before the end of 1899.

In 1900:
He worked as a carpenter and served as Justice of the Peace.  He was also trying to defend his homestead claim in Capitan.

In 1901:
He served on the Capitan school board and continued to defend his homestead claim.

In 1902:
He managed a general store, was prospecting for gold, was appointed as a notary public, served as an officer in the Knights of Pythias, and moved to Nogal where he engaged in a construction business partnership.

In 1903:
He was back living in Capitan, ran for justice of the peace again, and moved from Capitan to Roswell, New Mexico.

I'm going to keep looking to see if I can find out when he made the final move from New Mexico to Arizona.  If any of you all come across something with that bit of information, let me know!

I'm heading off to the Arizona State Archives tomorrow to do some more digging, but it's going to take me awhile to pull whatever I find together, so next time we'll start looking at the newspaper articles from Texas.


                                                                                                                                            - Therese

Back to Capitan - 1900:

William Calvin Cheatham, part 8 

Today we are going to go back to New Mexico and fill in some of the blanks about W. C.'s time there.  During the three weeks that I was looking and looking (and looking) for an online database with a Capitan newspaper, I was also doing some research about the town.  Remember, it was originally named Gray, but later the post office, and thus the town itself, had a name change.

Unbelievably, it was pretty much impossible to find anything about Gray online.  From my hours of looking, I got a website saying Gray was a ghost town, but it didn't have any pictures.  I also got a bunch of information saying that Gray was renamed Capitan (after the Capitan Mountains to the northeast of the town), which never completely died out and is still there today.  (Then I discovered that the original settlement known as Gray was actually just a bunch of homesteads and the town proper sat about a mile away.  It was the original buildings of Gray that are now a ghost town. In addition, supposedly more than half the population of Capitan actually lived in the coal company housing about a mile north, in what was known as Coalora, or North Capitan!)  Anyway, I pretty much had no idea what the place was like, other than that it was a turn of the century town of about 700 people.  I could only guess that it was very similar to the nearby White Oaks, which I could find stuff about online.  (I guess if a town goes completely bust there is more interest in it than if it just slowly dwindles into a small "village" as Capitan is called today.)

It just so happens that, although the Capitan newspaper is available online, it has not had that OCR thing done to it, so you can't search for names.  Which means the only way to find the person you are looking for is to scan through all of the articles.  So after reading every edition (published weekly) from April of 1900 to the middle of 1903, I feel like I know tons about Capitan.  Let me tell you, if you ever have time to just read through them all like I did, you should.  It was super entertaining, like reading a novel or watching a soap opera!  Seriously.  The newspaper was chock full of train accidents, robberies (of trains and people - they didn't have a bank in town during this time), people getting shot, and fires.  There were regular outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and diphtheria throughout the county.  There were lots of articles about Indians, mining, and mining accidents.  One postmaster was issuing fraudulent checks from Capitan's nonexistent bank, while another postmaster absconded to Mexico with $3000 of postal money and was hunted down by the law and brought back home.  The town even had a secret society called The Bachelor's Club, which had midnight meetings in the attic of a prominent citizen's home and was dedicated to finding brides for the multitude of single men in town.  Oh, and of course there was S. T. Gray of school election fraud fame, who was apparently so important that he was traveling to one neighboring town or other every single week on business.  There were numerous articles about the town having so many newcomers that every house was occupied and new buildings were constantly being built (this fits in nicely with W. C.'s census claim that he was working as a carpenter!)  Pretty much think of a wild west town, and then think of a mining boom town, and then mix the two together, and that was Capitan.  (Of course, I didn't know all this until I'd read about 100 newspapers!)

This is pretty much the only picture of historic Capitan that I could find, and it is actually from about 15 years after W. C. was gone.

I'm actually going to stop right here for a minute. I think that giving you all a breakdown of the information in the census will help you put the articles in context a little better, since you won't be reading all of that miscellaneous stuff about people other than W. C.  The census is lumping the entire Capitan area under the name of Gray, since that is what the post office was still designated as at that time.  There is no real good way to know which households were in which parts of the "town."

Total Population: 670
Households: 142
Households with boarders:  46
Miners: 96  (+ 7 others with mine-related occupations) (many miners were from foreign countries, and there were a handful who were only 13 and 14 years old!)
Day Laborers: 81
Farmers/Herders/Stockraisers: 12
Railroad:  12
Real Estate Dealer: 1
Contractors/Builders: 3
Carpenters: 19
Bricklayers/Stone Masons: 3
Painters: 2
Merchants: 9 (3 were Chinese and 2 were Italian, all five accounting for two businesses, which means that there were at most 6 stores of one type or another in town - probably general merchandise - not counting things like the bakery, butcher shop or drugstore)
Store Clerks: 9
Bookkeepers: 3
Hotel Proprietors: 2
Saloon Proprietors/Managers: 3
Bartenders: 5
Physicians: 3
Druggist: 1
Barber: 1
Baker: 1
Butchers: 2
Cooks: 5
Glassblower: 1
Seamstresses: 3
Watch/Clock Repair: 1
Brass Moulder: 1
Printer: 1
Insurance Agent: 1
Telegraph Operator: 1
School Teachers: 4 (one of whom was actually a married woman - they must have really needed teachers!)
Prostitutes: 2
Livery Stable Owner: 1
Blacksmiths: 3
Sawmill Proprietor: 1 (There was only 1 employed at "Timbering,"  so some day laborers must have worked here.)
Servants: 8 (5 Chinese - living with the Chinese merchants, 1 white, 2 black - living with a physician and the Superintendent of Mines)

That's a total of 307 employed people (give or take for errors in counting), mostly men.  That leaves around 363 residents who were wives and children.  (Yet there were only 3 school teachers!)  This means that it wasn't just a bunch of single men - I'd say more than half of them were married and/or had children.

If you notice, almost one third of the households kept boarders.  Remember how W. C. had four boarders of his own, and I was wondering whether they ran a boarding house?  Well it looks like that's unlikely, since so many people had boarders, undoubtedly because there wasn't enough housing in town.  They must have been packed in like sardines, with men sleeping in their parlors - I guess now we know why so many carpenters were needed!   (See what one can figure out just from taking a little time to look through 14 pages of census records and reading some newspaper articles?)

Speaking of those newspaper articles, as interesting as their stories were, I have to say that overall the newspaper wasn't all that great.  It had very poor print quality, half the paper was copied from other sources, and it tended to run the exact same stories over and over for weeks (and even months!) on end.  When President McKinley was assassinated, the paper only devoted a tiny section on page 6 (out of 6) to the story!  It was also very poorly organized and, at times, tortuous to read.  The paper from White Oaks was much, much better.

Having said all that, I was a bit surprised that there wasn't as much about W. C. as I expected there would be.  I did notice, however, that the "gossip" section pretty much covered the same ten people every single week.  The newspaper did solicit people to submit what they were up to, so maybe those were just the people who liked to get attention.  Or maybe it was because the owners of the paper were none other than Mr. Gray and his election-fraud sidekick, Mr. Lightfoot.  I have one other theory, but I'll wait to tell you about that one.

Before we get to the articles, I feel that I must give you all a new map.  I made this one myself because I absolutely could not find one that showed all of the towns that needed to be on it.  The newspaper articles talk about these places a lot, so this will help you get a sense of the area (those are the modern roads - there's no telling how closely they follow the original routes):

(There were some smaller settlements in this area, but they don't show up on most maps because they were really small - Bonito and Nogal, which are on many maps, were mostly farmers, stockraisers, miners, and day laborers, with only 1 postmaster, 7 merchants, 1 school teacher, and two bars between them - and nothing else!)

All of the articles below came from the Lincoln County Archives website.  You'll notice that the earlier ones are from El Capitan and the later ones from The Capitan Progress - the newspaper just merged with another one (which I haven't found online - maybe it mentioned W. C. more!) and changed its name.

1900

El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
13 April 1900

Well, look at that.  W. C. was the justice of the peace in Capitan in 1900.  (I guess that explains why the county was paying him.)  Besides telling us that W. C. held office while in New Mexico, it also gives us a hint as to when he actually arrived there.  This article is dated the beginning of April, so he must have been in town long enough to have been elected to the position.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
11 May 1900

I just put this article in here so you could see what kinds of things the people of Capitan had to deal with living in a frontier town!  (This is shortly after the train line through the coal mining section of the town (North Capitan) was finished - that's it right there in the picture below.  The spur into Capitan proper wouldn't be finished until the end of August, as we'll see in an upcoming newspaper article.)

El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
25 May 1900

This one is interesting.  When I first saw "Judge Cheatham,"  I was like, is a justice of the peace called a judge?  Apparently they are sometimes, and apparently they were back then, because W. C. was the only Cheatham in town.  You know, when the previous article said he was justice of the the peace, I was kind of like, meh, okay, because that is a pretty minor office to hold today.  But as we are going to see, it was a very big deal in a frontier town.  In this case, W. C. tried someone who was breaking into railroad cars.  So he was the law in town, so to speak.  Now that I've read through the census, I notice that there was no sheriff or deputies or jailer in Capitan.  So I wonder who did the arresting until the sheriff could be called, and where they kept the accused until he was transferred to the jail over in Lincoln.  (I'm pretty sure from all I've read, that "the next term of court" refers to those tried in the county courthouse with the county judge.  I think maybe some of W. C.'s cases were transferred there instead of being tried locally.)


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
4 Jun 1900

See, here is a case that was tried and sentenced by W. C. himself.  Of course they did have to send the guy off to the county jail since they didn't have their own.  Notice in the last section that a new "liquor house" was going up.  I'm assuming this means a saloon? 


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
4 Jun 1900

If you remember, last week's post showed an article from October of 1902 in which W. C. was listed as being delinquent in his taxes.  They were much harsher about selling off your property than they are here in Arizona today.  Remember, they had two months to pay up or lose their property - last I checked, Arizona law only sells a lien on the amount you owe, and you have five years to pay it off before whoever buys the lien is allowed to sell your property to recover the amount.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
22 Jun 1900

So, none of these mention W. C., but they are pretty enlightening.  The first section mentions how fast the town was growing.  The second one tells us that they had a baseball team that played the teams in neighboring towns.  The fourth one tells us that there were some pretty well-off women in town if they were serving ice cream in June in a place that didn't have electric freezers yet and was basically in the middle of nowhere so ice was probably not so easy to come by.  And the last one tells us that there were actually nine deputy sheriffs in town (I guess we now know there were plenty of men to do the arresting), but they obviously had other occupations because nobody listed "deputy sheriff" in the census.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
22 Jun 1900

This is from the same newspaper as the one above - also here just to give you a sense of what life was like for W. C. and his family.  Even thought they were just a frontier town, you can see why they said before that they would be putting on "metropolitan airs" - there were seven telephones in town!  You can also see that there was no lack of entertainment, with dances (that $1 admission = $30 today!), baseball games, and horse racing (apparently a big deal in Capitan - by 1901 they even had a formal racetrack).  You'll also notice that W. C. was keeping busy with his judge duties, with two arrests and a jury trial to deal with in one day!


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
30 July 1900

Here we see W. C. again, giving his report on what he did as justice of the peace in Capitan.  It looks like he wasn't paid a flat salary, but instead was paid based on the cases that came before him.  At this council meeting his pay was approved for $14.10 and $4.00, for a total of about $545 in today's money.  Notice in the last paragraph that it says that from this point on, deputies and constables wouldn't get paid if their arrests result in acquittals - it seems they were making a  lot of arrests that were unwarranted.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
6 Aug 1900

This article is talking about that homestead claim that was called back to the land office which I shared in my previous post.  If you remember, a person is required to live on their homestead land.  We have no idea if W. C. was living in town or on this land, but this article implies that he wasn't living on his claim.



El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
13 Aug 1900

The first section tells us that W. C. ordered the saloons closed on Sundays.  Too funny.  We already know he was active in the Presbyterian church in Duncan, but I guess he was pretty devout, huh?  When he arrived in Capitan there was no church.  At some point in 1901 or 1902 (I didn't really pay attention to the date) there was a traveling preacher who would come into town.  If I remember right, I think there was a Baptist Church there by the time I quit looking at the articles (summer of 1903). 
The second section is about a case W. C. heard - it's interesting to see what kinds of crimes were being committed around town.


Santa Fe New Mexican
(Sanat Fe, NM)
20 Aug 1900

The saloon closing was a big deal, being reported as far away as Santa Fe and Las Vegas (NM).  (Make sure you read the first and last parts of this clip - the first is going to become relevant in just a minute, and the second one is where we find out when the railroad was finished.) 


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
24 Aug 1900

I just included this one for the fun of it.  Newspapers back then weren't quite the same as today!


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
21 Sep 1900

There are two parts to this clip.  In the first, it is talking about how many men refused to either pay the road tax or work for three days.  There were articles I didn't share with you talking about the new road being built from Capitan to -I forgot!  It was either Lincoln or Nogal.  Anyway, it seems that W. C. was a pretty harsh (or sensible) judge.  That original $3 tax became $9 for the guilty parties, which was equivalent to $271 - a pretty hefty fine.  They must have really needed that road, and there must have been a whole lot of slackers!

The second section is pretty sad, actually, but I included it so you could see, once again, how reporting differed back then.  The aim of the newspapers was just as much to provide entertainment as it was to report the news, so articles were often sensationalistic (hence the "burned almost to a crisp" description).


Alamogordo News
(Alamogordo, NM)
27 Sep 1900

Here is a nearby town reporting on W. C.'s judgement concerning the road tax dodgers.  It is also telling us some interesting stuff about the area.  Notice that the school in Tularosa (roughly the same size town as Capitan, and about 15 miles southwest of Ruidoso and about 8 miles north of Alamogordo) was going to start classes in three days, and they only had two teachers for the 301 children who would be attending!  


Santa Fe New Mexican
(Sanat Fe, NM)
27 Sep 1900

This time Santa Fe was reporting on the road tax dodgers.  It's funny how they copied the El Capitan article almost word for word!


Las Vegas Daily Optic
(Las Vegas, NM)
3 Oct 1900

And now for Las Vegas, New Mexico.  It looks like they wanted to use W. C.'s ruling as an example to get their residents in line as well!  (Funny thing -  I think I came across this article in my first sweep of the New Mexico newspapers and when I saw 'Judge Cheatham' I said, "that can't be our guy; it must be a different Cheatham."  Which just goes to show, you have to be careful, but can't just dismiss stuff that doesn't fit the 'official' story either!)  


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
19 Oct 1900

This is another one where W. C. is getting paid by the county.  I'm assuming for some justice of the peace duties, since this is the same amount he earned in the other article, but I can't say for sure because the top of the newspaper is all smudged up and cut off.  (Here you go: $4 = $120 today)


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
19 Oct 1900

Remember how I told you that there were 307 residents with occupations in Capitan in the 1900 Census?  Well, this says that there were 400 registered voters by October, which is only four months after the census was taken.  If you consider the fact that 32 of the original people with occupations were teenagers and a handful were women, both of whom would not be eligible to vote, you can really see how the town had grown in such a short time - that's an increase of approximately 130 men (a whopping 48% increase in the population in four months!), many of whom were sure to have brought their families with them!


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
26 Oct 1900

Here is where we see the official name change from Gray to Capitan.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
2 Nov 1900

Here we see two of W. C.'s children, Delila (age 11) and Leonard (age 8) listed on the honor roll at school.  In all the times I saw these articles, there were never more than these two teachers listed, even though the census showed four teachers. (I did notice that there were an awful lot of children in town who were very young, and most of the boys 13 and older were working, so these must be the grade school age classes.)  My first instinct is that they must have had a whole lot of students if there were 26 on the honor roll in the one class, but I checked the census and only six kids had "at school" under occupation.  Of course, that is ridiculous, because there are way more than six kids on this list, so I guess that is just meaningless.  I'll stick with my instinct.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
2 Nov 1900

And now we have one about W. C.'s son Shelton heading off to school.  He was just about 13 years old at the time (November birthday).  I don't know if they didn't have a high school yet in Capitan (very likely) or if they just thought he would receive a better education there. (Even with four teachers, there were probably like 70 kids in each class!) The grandfather that he was going to be living with would be Fred Brookreson, the father of W. C.'s wife Mary.  And just in case you forgot and were wondering, Dee (age 22) and Elmer (age 16) were both working at this point and no longer in school.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
9 Nov 1900

The kids were still on the honor roll!  I saw one time that one of these specified that the kids were on the honor roll for not being absent or tardy for the month, so I don't now if this list has anything to do with grades.


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
23 Nov 1900

Just more judging on W. C.'s part, this time for an assault. 


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
23 Nov 1900

I'm pretty sure that they, in fact, did NOT open a steel plant there.  This is pretty much all I saw reported on this.  


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
28 Dec 1900

When I first saw this article, I was like okay, I'll bet W. C. was one of the ones who joined.  But then I did not see his name in a single article in this newspaper about the Knights of Pythias for the next two years, and so I was like, well, maybe not?  But then I found an article out of a Nogal newspaper saying that he was indeed a member of the lodge in Capitan.  (They met on a weekly basis, so I guess there was plenty of socializing going on.)


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
28 Dec 1900

Remember how I told you that W. C.'s justice of the peace job was a big deal?  Well here he is presiding over a coroner's inquest and holding preliminary hearings in a murder case!  (Also, remember when I said the sheriff deputies must have had other jobs?  The census says deputy sheriff Smith was a day laborer.  So he was doing something, we just don't know what.)


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
28 Dec 1900

Here we see that W. C. was running for justice of the peace again.  Strange that this article is from the end of December and the elections haven't been held yet.  The article tells us that W. C. was very well respected in town and did a great job serving as a judge.  


El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
28 Dec 1900

This clip is announcing W. C.'s candidacy in the upcoming elections (ah, January 14).  It is interesting because he says that he has had the position for "more than one year."  Since this is dated December 28 and elections are being held in January, this would have to mean one of two things:  either the election date had changed (and elections had been held in November, maybe), that W. C. somehow ended up in the position by some means other than being chosen in an official election. (Because if it had been a two-year term that he was elected to, you'd think he would have said "almost two years" instead.)  Either way, it tells us that W. C. was already in Gray, New Mexico before the end of December 1899.


And that's it for the year 1900.  This will be a good place to share a couple of things that I found that are not newspaper articles:

New Mexico Legislative Manual 1905

This is from a New Mexico government publication from 1905.  It is showing that notary public appointment from last week's post.  When I first saw it I thought it must mean that W. C. was in New Mexico until 1906, but then I realized that he received his appointment in March of 1902, which means the March 22, 1906 date would be when it expires.  Of course, he wasn't even still in that state by 1906.

And here is a portion from the Annual Report of the Department of the Interior: 1900.

This is another example of how one of W. C.'s duties as justice of the peace was to hold coroner's inquests when somebody died.  See, like I said, he was a very important person in town!

Oh, and here is the article from the newspaper about the accident:

El Capitan
(Capitan, Lincoln County, NM)
4 Jun 1900

Wow!  I just shared, like, 25 articles with you - I didn't realize I had so many!  I'm going to go ahead and end this post here (and change the title up there, since I thought I was going to put all of the articles in one post!), and next week we'll finish up in New Mexico.



                                                                                                                                            - Therese