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
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
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
This explosion at Capitan is a classic mining camp to town. As we know it will fall apart almost as fast as it grew. Mining is dangerous and I am surprised you didn't find more deaths.
ReplyDeleteOne of my ongoing research projects is to find a Coal Miner's grave who was killed in a very big mine disaster. He is buried somewhere in my main research area Cedar Mtn, WA. Now a ghost town that a busy highway drives right over. So, gone that most folks don't even know what was there. I am big right now into old road building petitions during the 1880s - 1900. Most of those roads are now vacated and I think this grave is off one of the lost roads. Just posted an article on my blog about finding part of Rd 157.
Rd 157 was the 157th road requested in the whole county of King. In 1885 they had only that many requests. So this was an early wagon road that in the end became unusable when cars and more traffic came to my little town Cedar Mtn. It had a 20% grade. Because of this road being replaced over 80-90 years ago most people are even confused where the town was.
So.. I feel you and your research.
Not surprisingly, I find abandoned towns and whatnot very intriguing. My family used to go hiking to abandoned mining sites when my son was younger, and I've been inside one of the abandoned mine shafts (with the park ranger!) in Phoenix's South Mountain Park. It's a city park and most people don't even realize that there are old mines in there.
ReplyDeleteI'd be very interested in checking out your blog if you want to post the link in this discussion!
Here is the link to my directory of my lost mines and town articles. Cedar Mtn is my baby but this has a lot of other stuff. Plus I have blogged for over a decade and am at over 1k articles. Started with nature and crows then turned to this additive history stuff.
Deletehttp://batgurrl.net/2020/04/28/locating-lost-old-coal-mines-of-king-county/
Plus I am trying to write a memoir about my 1974 adventure where we tried to buy hash in Europe. What was I thinking? This is up on Wordpress too if you want that link. It will make your hair raise on your head and the worst part is yet to come. I am about 1/3 done but keep getting distracted. So much to do so little time.
I hear you! My dream is to turn all of the information in my blog into a series of small books covering each male ancestor in each family line - so I'd have the Cheathams, Fosters, Blackshears, etc. (I think W. C. would be proud to have a book published about his life!)
ReplyDeleteI am also itching to publish a book about the "Town Cow" of Abilene, Texas (you will come across the topic in my posts pretty soon) but I just can't seem to find the time to do it.
Oh no... I need to read faster than you produce to catch up. I took your advice and am starting at the beginning in 2018 and forward. But I understand you can't stop adding just cause of this distant cousin. LOL
ReplyDelete