Out of the Shadows: The Women of Southern New Mexico

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Dedication

For Sally S. Reed whose generous support made this book possible.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Home-Making In The Sacramento Mountains: The Photographs of G.E. Miller and the Blazer Collection

Women’s Lives Once Lived: The Amadors of Las Cruces

Bygone Days on the Black Range

The Mescalero Basketmakers

That’s My Mountain!

It’s not the work that bothers me, but it’s the chores: Women on ranches, through primary sources

Educating The Useful Woman

Sisters of Loretto

Southern New Mexico Women’s Clubs

Appendix I: New Mexico Women In Writing: A Guide to the Circulating Collection at New Mexico State University Library

Appendix II: Documenting the Women of Southern New Mexico: A Guide to the Rio Grande Historical Collections of the New Mexico State University Library

About the Contributors

Introduction

In January 2011 Susana Martinez was inaugurated as the thirty-first governor of the State of New Mexico. Significantly, she was also the first elected female governor of the state and the first female Hispanic governor in the United States. One might expect that in a state where a woman has been able to attain the highest elected office, the history of women would be rather well developed. Sadly, the opposite is true. Book-length, scholarly studies of New Mexico women – particularly those from southern New Mexico – from frontier times down to the present are poorly represented in the wider historiography of New Mexico. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Recent scholarship includes Max Evans’s Madam Millie: Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan (University of New Mexico Press, 2002), Cheryl J. Foote’s, Women of the New Mexico Frontier, 1846-1912 (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), and two biographies by Darlis A. Miller, Matilda Coxe Stevenson: Pioneering Anthropologist (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), and Open Range: The Life of Agnes Morley Cleaveland (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). Evans popular account of the life of Mildred Fantetti Cusey, a former Harvey girl turned madam, is set in part in Silver City.

More generally, southern New Mexico is underrepresented in the vast scholarship on the history of the Land of Enchantment. The present volume addresses both the dearth of women’s history and the neglect of the southern part of the state. The nine articles in this collection are based in whole or in part on manuscript holdings of the Rio Grande Historical Collections in the Archives and Special Collections Department of New Mexico State University. All of the authors have had a formal connection with the university as professors, graduates, or staff, which has given them the opportunity to become quite familiar with the archives.

Margaret Jacobs, Professor History and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, writes of depictions of home-making in the Sacramento Mountains in the photographs of G. E. Miller and the Blazer family collections. Miller, an itinerant photographer, moved from Texas to the Sacramento Mountains in 1890. For some two decades after his arrival in New Mexico, Miller photographed scenes of domestic life. Even though the Sacramento Mountains are home to the Mescalero Apaches, most of Miller’s photographs are of Anglos. Miller contrived a makeshift studio, but his photographs tend to show people outdoors, which provides the viewer some idea of how his subjects lived in their new environment. Photographs in the Blazer collection complement Miller’s, particularly in that they provide glimpses of the lives of Mescalero women.

Darlis A. Miller, Emerita Professor of History at NMSU, offers a teaser to her recently published biography of Anges Morley Cleaveland. Cleaveland is best known for her memoir of growing up on a cattle ranch in west-central New Mexico, No Life for a Lady (Houghton Mifflin,1941). Cleaveland arrived at her new home, a ranch in the Datil Mountains, in 1885 at age ten. Like most ranch children, she leaned to ride, handle a gun, and herd livestock. She also became a writer of note. These are the aspects of Cleaveland’s life discussed in this volume. As she grew into womanhood, however, she lived a second life. Her other existence was as social activist and Republican Party supporter. This life centered on her second home, in Berkeley, California. To learn more about this facet of Cleaveland’s life, you will have to read her biography.

Las Cruces author and NMSU alumna Linda G. Harris tells of women’s lives in the Black Range, a small mountain range that runs along the Continental Divide for about half of its hundred-mile extent. Non-Indians were late to come to the Black Range, with the first Hispanic farmers arriving in the mid-1850s. Settling first in what was to become Monticello and then Cuchillo, the newcomers established small communities that followed the rhythm village of life that was traditional in Hispanic New Mexico. In the 1880s the Black Range was the stronghold of Victorio, Nana, Cochise, and Geronimo. One of Victorio’s warriors was his sister, Lozen. After the US Army brought the Indian wars to a conclusion, miners flooded into the Black Range, but almost all were men. After the coming of the railroad, more and more women came to live in the area and the mining towns boomed, although men still predominated. Life for women in the Black Range offered traditional occupations but also provided opportunity for less typical pursuits such as the ministry or running a hotel or restaurant. Given the presence of lonely men and ready money, the Black Range also attracted prostitutes. By the turn of the twentieth century, the heyday of the Black Range was over. As a result the population dwindled, and people moved out of the mining towns onto the range or away from the area.

Terry R. Reynolds, retired curator of the NMSU Museum, offers a peek at her forthcoming study of the Amadors of Las Cruces, one of the most prominent families in the community in the Territorial Period and early twentieth century. In this chapter, Reynolds focuses on the Amador women, whose lives are richly documented in several collections of family papers at NMSU. The matriarch, doña Refugio Ruiz de Amador, was wife of don Martín Amador. She was connected to some of the most powerful and influential people in northern Mexico. Doña Refugio saw seven of her fourteen children survive to adulthood and made certain that the two boys and five girls were properly educated. The girls attended school taught by the Sister of Loretto in Las Cruces. Records indicate that doña Refugio managed the family’s household finances in addition to overseeing domestic servants. Reynolds details the lives of several of Refugio’s daughters who existed in two worlds, one culturally Mexican and the other thoroughly American, in southern New Mexico, a region undergoing rapid change.

Charles Stanford, the current Processing Archivist at NMSU, and Maura Kenny, a former archivist, briefly survey some of the numerous ranching collections at the Rio Grande Historical Collections. The Chase Ranch Records document financial aspects of the operation of the Chase family ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico in the late nineteenth century. Among the documents Stanford and Kenny consulted was a ledger book that Ada Chase kept. Ada, a cousin of the ranch owners, recorded day-by-day transactions. She also taught the children on the ranch. Laura, the owner’s daughter, eventually took over for Ada. The authors also note that the Rio Grande Historical collections contains copies of Sallie Chisum Roberts’s journals for the years 1878 and 1879 and 1909 through 1929.Aallie was one of the founders of Artesia and its first postmistress. The William J. Weatherby Family Papers document the lives of William and Laura Weatherby of Alma, New Mexico. Laura’s extensive correspondence with family and friends reveal much about the family’s mining and ranching operations – and her role in them – in the Mogollon and Silver City areas of New Mexico in the early twentieth century.

Wendy C. Simpson, is a Senior Library Specialist in the Reference and Research Services Department of the NMSU Library. Drawing on her Master’s thesis on the same subject, Simpson provides a succinct history of the Loretto Academy of the Visitation in Las Cruces. Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy brought the Sisters of Loretto to Santa Fe in 1852 to establish schools. In 1870 five members of the Order of Loretto traveled from Santa Fe to Las Cruces and founded the first school in southern New Mexico, at the request of Jean Bapiste Salpointe, bishop of Arizona. In 1879 the sisters established a convent in Las Cruces, which many local women entered. As Simpson notes, the most influential nun in Las Cruces was Irish native Mother Praxedes Carty. In New Mexico by 1875, Mother Praxedes served as head of the Loretto Academy of the Visitation until 1893. Beyond her labors on behalf of the academy, Mother Praxedes was also instrumental in raising funds for the reconstruction of the church of St. Genevieve in 1886. For more than seventy years the academy received and educated students, many of whom became the most important citizens in the community.

Humanities Librarian Mardi Mahaffy has compiled a very useful guide to and list of books about women in New Mexico that are available in the circulating collection of the NMSU Library. It is interesting to note that the compilation of secondary works includes a single entry that could be considered to be set in southern New Mexico, Sherry Robinson’s Apaches Voices (University of New Mexico, 2000), a work not exclusively but primarily about Apache women’s voices. Of the memoirs/primary literature listed, only two works are at least partially set in southern New Mexico. Sophie A. Poe’s biography of her husband, Buckboard Days (University of New Mexico Press, 1981) recounts their life in Lincoln, New Mexico, but much of this book deals with John William Poe’s adventures as a buffalo hunter and peace officer in West Texas. Lydia Lane Spencer’s I Married a Soldier (Horn and Wallace, 1964) has some scenes at Fort Fillmore and Fort Selden near Las Cruces.

Joan M. Jensen, Emerita Professor of History at NMSU, has crafted an eloquent history of Mescalero basketmakers in words and selected photographic images from several RGHC collections, most notably the Arthur Goss Photographs and the Blazer Collection. Jensen notes that Mescalero women made baskets, both coiled and woven, as part of a native-initiated tourist industry that enabled these women to remain in their mountain homeland that was a place of great beauty but few economic opportunities. Goss was a chemistry professor at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts who journeyed to Mescalero in the Sacramento Mountains and photographed Mescalero women in the late 1890s or early twentieth century. Almer N. Blazer moved to Mescalero with his widowed father in 1877 as a lad. His interest in the basketmakers led him to write a description of the process and a history of one of the practitioners of the art named Datlih. He also took numerous photographs of Mescalero women at work. Basketmaking did survive beyond the 1930s but most examples of the vanished Mescalero tradition are largely limited to museum collections.

The final contribution to this volume is by Martha Shipman Andrews, NMSU University Archivist and editor of this book. Andrews has drawn on the extensive photographic collection in the Hobson-Huntsinger University Archives to create vignettes of student life of women at the institution that was evolving from Las Cruces College to New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. As she points out, the school struggled to fit women’s education into the mission of a land-grant college as defined by the 1862 Morrill Act. So it was that while the college strove to educate women it reminded them that the women’s place was in the home and cautioned against the danger of too much study. Women could study the rudiments of biology, mathematics, and the physical sciences, and delve deeply into literature and language. Engineering and the higher levels of math required for its study were off limits to women students in the formative years of the college. Although in the beginning physical education was restricted, by 1898 women could opt to play basketball. By the turn of the century, what would come to be called home economics debuted in the college’s course offerings. Some daring young ladies signed up for a co-ed class in mineralogy, which promised field trips to nearby mountains.

This volume is an important contribution to the historiography of women in New Mexico. It focuses much-needed attention on the southern part of the state and a period of history – the last quarter of the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth centuries – that is woefully neglected and understudied. Of no less importance, Andrews and her colleagues point the way to the rich and largely untapped archival materials that bear on the history of women and are housed in the Rio Grande Historical Collections. Surely readers of this volume will be inspired to delve into these manuscripts and in so doing further our knowledge of the contributions of women to the history of this state, a particularly appropriate undertaking in this our centennial year.

Rick Hendricks, New Mexico State Historian

Las Cruces and Santa Fe

Home-Making In The Sacramento Mountains: The Photographs of G.E. Miller and the Blazer Collection

by Margaret D. Jacobs

When my husband, our two sons, and I moved to Las Cruces in 1997, the high deserts of southern New Mexico were a new experience for me, a mountain dweller from Colorado. Although I came to love the desert, I still longed for mountains. Soon we were to discover, like many Anglo newcomers before us, the Sacramento Mountains that rose up from the Tularosa Basin to the east. On one of our first day trips from Las Cruces, as we drove eastward over the San Augustín Pass, descended down into the valley and skirted White Sands National Monument, and then climbed the steep route from Alamogordo into the Cloudcroft area, I was thrilled to find a little slice of Colorado. I reveled in the chance to again breathe mountain air, hear the shimmering aspens, and walk among the towering ponderosas. On many other occasions, we made the journey again, sometimes as far south as Dog Canyon, other times up north to Three Rivers, the Mescalero Reservation, or to Ruidoso.

About a century before my first trip to the Sacramentos, other Anglos – primarily from Texas and Missouri – had also flocked to these mountains, where they squatted on and later homesteaded the land, ran cattle, and logged timber. One of these Anglo settlers from Texas, the itinerant photographer G.E. Miller, used his camera to document the lives of his family and other newcomers to the area. On the surface, Miller seems to have taken a conventional set of photographs of pioneering Anglo settlers, sometimes a husband and wife, other times children or women alone, and commonly entire families. Many of the photographs convey the settlers’ relationship to the land; others show the subjects hard at work or posing proudly before their new homes.

We might view Miller’s prints simply as what the western historian Martha Sandweiss characterizes as private photographs, the vast majority of which were portraits, . . . made for particular clients and designed to be held and used as private mementoes, as opposed to public photographs [which] were produced for less personal uses, and intended to be distributed through exhibition, publication, or sale. Sandweiss asserts that a history of private photographs . . . would make for a fascinating . . . study about the history of emotions and the shifting concept of self in the American nation.¹ Additionally,