New Mexico News:

William Calvin Cheatham, part 7

Last week we looked at what the newspapers had to say about W. C. Cheatham's time in Maricopa County, Arizona before 1920.  We learned that he actually left Duncan, AZ at the very beginning of 1912 and lived in Phoenix for about five years before moving to Scottsdale, where he stayed for, at the most, two and a half years before moving on to Laveen.

We know from the census records that before W. C. and his family moved to Duncan, they were living in the town of Gray in Lincoln County, New Mexico (June of 1900).  He was there with his wife and children, and even his father had made the move from Texas with them.  He was supposedly working as a carpenter, not farming, was living in a rented house, and had four coal miner boarders.  (At first I thought maybe they were running a boarding house, but his wife does not have an occupation listed on the census so maybe not.  Then again, most of the time the census says "keeping house" for wives, and hers is completely blank, so maybe so.)

From the family history we also know that they could have only stayed in New Mexico until 1905 at the latest, since W. C.'s oldest son was married in Duncan at the end of that year.

That seems like a pretty good amount of information, but it wasn't enough to satisfy my curiosity.  Here are all of the questions I had before I stumbled upon the newspaper articles that I am going to share with you:

In what year did W. C. actually leave Texas and move to New Mexico?  Why did he go? Was he originally intending to go to Arizona and just stopped over in New Mexico?  (Could be, since he was only renting and didn't purchase a house like in Duncan.)  How long did he stay there before he moved on to Arizona?

What was he doing while he lived there?  Was he involved in politics and the church like he would be later?  He must have been a member of the Knights of Pythias already, since he was an "old member of the order" in 1909, but was the frontier town of Gray even big enough to have a chapter if Duncan didn't have one until he organized one for them?  What was life like for the family in Gray, New Mexico, anyway?

Since W. C.'s father was no longer with the family in 1910 (he would have been 85 years old by then), did he die in New Mexico?  (I just double checked the family history, and it says he died in 1901 in New Mexico, but I haven't found him in any cemetery lists.  I'm assuming this date comes from that elusive family Bible.)

Let's take a look at the articles I was able to find and see if they answer any of these questions.

(Source citation! I clipped all of these articles from the Library of Congress Chronicling America website.  Remember, clicking on the date in each heading will get you the full page the article was found in, and you can visit the Newspaper Links on the side to view the entire newspaper.)

Most of these articles come from the White Oaks Eagle newspaper.  White Oaks was a mining boom town about 30 miles from Gray - if you are following the current highway, which really takes you out of the way, so maybe they used a shorter route before the automobile!  I would say train, but I saw a video saying White Oaks refused to give land for the railway, leading to the town's demise.  So, if one was traveling by horse ... 30 miles would take eight hours at a steady walk, so I don't think you would call this a convenient trip to make.  Everything I read up until today makes a big deal about how big the town of White Oaks was - "the largest in Lincoln County!"  But I just checked the census abstract, and although it was the second largest in the county in 1900, Capitan (formerly Gray), had 670 inhabitants to White Oaks' 800 (about the same size as Duncan, AZ), so that's not a real big difference in size.

1900

White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
25 Oct 1900

Hmmm.  This doesn't say that W. C. was running for office or clerking the election.  It says the elections will be held at his "office."  Very interesting.  The census told us that W. C. was a carpenter, but now, four and a half months later, he is doing something that requires him to have an office.


1901

White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
13 Jun 1901

This article says that the Lincoln County tax assessor presented the board of county commissioners information about W. C.'s tax assessment, and they voted to raise his personal property tax.  (From reading through the old newspapers, I've seen that residents were taxed on real estate and on personal property.  I know today that generally only business personal property - assets - are taxed, not personal belongings, but this looks like they were taxing anything and everything in order to get revenue!)  It isn't clear whether the amount of $85.00 is how much they raised his tax or how much he would now owe, but I really hope it is the total amount because $85 in 1901 is equivalent to just over $2,500 today.  And it looks like that was just for the first half of the year, too.  I wonder what he owned that was worth so much money - you'll notice that other guy was raised only $5.00 on two horses! 


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
27 Jun 1901

Huh.  So W. C. was running for the Capitan school board.  (If you remember, I told you all a few posts back the the town of Gray would eventually have its name changed to Capitan.  Of course, I didn't know that yet when I first found this article, so I was pretty confused at first!)  He was running against S. T. Gray, the founder of the town, who was already on the school board and apparently didn't want to lose, so he rigged the election.  Too bad for him somebody figured it out (maybe because the returns he sent in his second report make absolutely no sense?!?!), and he was removed from his position and W. C. got a seat on the board instead.


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
4 Jul 1901

(Sorry for the quality of this one - that part of the paper was just messed up!)  When I clipped this, I was like, where is the rest of the story?  Well, there is no rest of the story.  While looking through the Arizona Republican newspaper, I noticed that they regularly printed the names of the guests who were staying at the big hotels.  I'm assuming that this is the same thing.  So this tells us that W. C. and his son A. D. were staying overnight in White Oaks, probably for some event having to do with the 4th of July.  Here is a letter published in the same edition of the paper:

Yep, I guessed right.  They were in town for a 4th of July ball, it seems.  In case you're noticing the name of the hotel and the name of the letter-writer are too similar, check this out:

I suppose the letter-writer was the former owner of the hotel.  Okay.  Back to W. C.!


Santa Fe New Mexican
Santa Fe, NM)
11 Jul 1901

Here is a nice summary of the longer article above (in case you said, nah, that's too long to read).  This newspaper must have gotten their information from the White Oaks Eagle, because they have W. C.'s initials backward just like the article above.


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
11 Jul 1901

Here are the results of the school board election fraud court case that the other article mentioned.  It looks like those guys got into serious trouble.  That $25 fine would be worth about $740 dollars today, plus they were responsible for the legal fees and court costs.  And, they weren't even finished because they still had other charges to face.  I'll bet W. C. felt pretty vindicated.

The Las Vegas Weekly Optic and Stock Grower 

(Las Vegas, New Mexico)

13 Jul 1901

This article is just restating what the other article told us about the school board election.  Apparently this was a big deal, since it was being reported as far away as Las Vegas, New Mexico (a town northeast of Albuquerque), which was 185 miles away and in a different county!  (I included the extra articles with this so you could get a sense of the times.)



White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
18 Jul 1901

A bit of a history lesson - in the 1862 Homestead Act, the U. S. government granted 160 acres of land to anyone willing to live on and make improvements to it for five years.  So I guess W. C. had gotten himself some free land in New Mexico.  But let's hope that he won this case, because the several hundred dollars in 1901 would be equivalent to $15,000 and upwards today.  (I would say that W. C. was doing alright financially back then!)  I wonder what kind of improvements he had made, and what he intended to do with the land.  (When I first read this, I was like, what does J. E. Wharton have to do with this whole thing, and under what capacity was he employed by W. C.?  But then I noticed that Mr. Wharton was the attorney for those scoundrels who tried to cheat W. C. in the school board election, so I guess he was the attorney representing W. C. in his land case.)


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
1 Aug 1901

So here we see that W. C. was paid for work by the county in the amount of $32.00 (today: $952.00).  I don't know how often these board meetings were (it looks like maybe every other month) or how often they paid people - was it a salary of some sort or payment for costs incurred for a service or contract?  What was W. C. doing that he was paid by the county?  


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
7 Nov 1901

Here we see W. C. serving on the grand jury.  The "9" after his name is referring to the precinct he lived in. You'll notice how many Hispanic names there are - it had only been about 60 years since the territory belonged to Mexico.  


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
12 Dec 1901

This is interesting, because it says that W. C., from Capitan, was in White Oaks.  But he is telling the people there about what is going on in Nogal and Bonito, nearby towns (Nogal, about 5 miles west of Capitan, and Bonito about 8 miles to the southwest).  Maybe the land W. C. was in court about was in one of those towns.


1902

White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
24 Feb 1902

Whaaaat?  W. C. was out there prospecting for gold?  (Maybe it was over there in the Nogal area mentioned in the previous article.)  There is a totally different picture of him in my mind now!  You can see from the other articles in this clip that there was a whole lot of mining going on in the area.

El Paso International Daily Times

(El Paso, El Paso County, TX)

28 Feb 1902

Okay, so I actually found this article later, while searching the Texas newspapers, but thought I'd throw it in here anyway.  The reason I wanted to include this, even though it is saying the same thing as the one above, is because it shows that this was big news - it was being reported in a newspaper from a town in Texas that was 150 miles away.

Santa Fe New Mexican 

(Santa Fe, Santa Fe County, NM)

15 Mar 1902

So this doesn't sound like such a big deal, but apparently it was back then - not only were notaries appointed by the governor, but this was being reported in a city a considerable distance away from where W. C. lived. 


White Oaks Eagle
(White Oaks, Lincoln County, NM)
2 Oct 1902

This is just a small  portion of this article, but I included so many names so you can get a sense of how many people didn't pay their taxes on time.  The article says they would have almost two months to pay up or have their property sold at auction.  The first section for precinct 9 is taxes on real estate.  This tells us that, although the 1900 census shows the family renting a home, W. C. owes taxes on a lot, so maybe by this point they were living in a home they owned.  He owed $3.48 plus 18¢ in interest for a total of $3.86  ($113.50 today).  The next section is taxes on personal property.  There were actually 150 names total on the list for the county - that's a lot of unpaid taxes!  W. C. owed $8.75 plus 44¢ in interest, for a total of $9.54 ($280.53 today).  


And that's it.  That is what I was able to find online for W. C.'s time in New Mexico.  Did we get any of our questions answered?

As for when W. C. arrived, there is no new information here since the 1900 census was taken before the first newspaper article.  We did find out that he stayed at least until 1902 (but maybe he moved before the year was over and that is why he didn't pay his taxes).

As for what he was doing there, these tell us that he ran for the school board, worked out of an office, and spent time improving land and prospecting.  He was a notary public, and was paid by the county for something.  That's all we've got.  We didn't find out anything about W. C.'s father, either.

I must say, as excited as I was to find that part about W. C.'s gold claim, I feel pretty disappointed with the lack of information I found.  So I got to thinking, if most of these articles came from a newspaper in White Oaks, which was not really too much bigger than Capitan, shouldn't Capitan have had a newspaper too?  So I started searching online and found out that they did indeed have one, beginning in 1900.  But do you think I could find any digital copies of it?  No.  But did I give up?  Again, no.  On my fourth desperate attempt to find something, I finally came across the Lincoln County Archives (I don't know what combination of search terms finally did the trick!), and hit pay dirt.

In my next post, we'll see if any of those articles will shed more light on what W. C. Cheatham was doing while in New Mexico.

                                                                                                                                       - Therese