Celebrating Route 66

Aztec Sacrifice & Pozole

Fitzsimmons-Maher Prizefight

Judge Roy Bean

(Wikipedia) The Fitzsimmons-Maher Prizefight (February 21, 1896), also considered, unofficially, as the 1896 World Heavyweight Championship, occurred between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher on a sandbar in the Rio Grande River just far enough outside of the American city of Langtry, Texas ... Continued

In Northeast New Mexico, the beginnings of promise — and tension

Santa Fe Trail marker near Grenville, New Mexico

(Santa Fe New Mexican) McNEES CROSSING, N.M. — Charles Jordan has seen a lot of living — and enjoyed it. His eyes are searching, his smile welcoming, the lines just below his eyes a roadmap of possibility. You can almost imagine him joining a caravan of traders on the Santa Fe Trail some 200 years ago. Standing in a vast prairie of beautiful emptiness, Jordan looked at a 1920s-era monument surrounded by grazing cows that commemorates a long-forgotten historic event, one tied to the events on that trail. Continued

David Thomas: Zeroing in on Southern New Mexico History

(Wild West) ... After launching a software company and writing computer programming manuals, he went on to author well-received books about New Mexico history, including several about the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. Thomas, 75, recently spoke with Wild West about his writing and some of the more interesting figures from the Mesilla Valley. Continued

Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice

Al Capone was one of the many gangsters who enjoyed vacationing in Hot Springs.

(NYTimes) ... Hot Springs, as David Hill writes in “The Vapors,” a history of the town during its sin-soaked heyday, let a lot of people be — with varying degrees of vengeance. Among them were workaday gamblers and good-timers like Kelley, but also bookmakers, con artists, prostitutes, shills, crooked auctioneers, outlandishly corrupt politicians and boldface-named mobsters. From about 1870 until 1967, when the reformist governor Winthrop Rockefeller shut off the vice spigot, the town’s chief municipal expression was a wink. The mayors winked. The cops winked. The preachers winked, or at least averted their gaze. Winking was how a Bible Belt town of 28,000 (circa 1960) attracted upward of five million visitors per year and why, as Hill writes, on any given Saturday night, there may have been “no more exhilarating place to be in the entire country.” Continued

Bob Wills in New Mexico

Mural honoring Bob Wills in Roy, New Mexico (Sixgun Siding)

(ilovenewmexicoblog.com) My daddy grew up in Porter, New Mexico, the youngest of ten children. He delights in telling what I think of as "baby of the family" stories (I have a number of my own. . .), about how the older brothers used to torture him by hiding behind the tank and jumping out to frighten him when he had to walk to the windmill after dark to turn the pump off, or how he sometimes had to stay in and help Granny Terry in the house because he was the baby.
Or how he had to be the designated driver of my Grandpa Terry's 1936 Ford sedan when his older brothers and the local boys wanted to go to Tucumcari to tomcat around during World War II. When he was eleven years old. Continued

The Antiquities Act of 1906

(Wikipedia) The Antiquities Act of 1906, officially An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities (16 USC 431-433), is an act passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt on June 8, 1906 giving the President of the United States authority to restrict the use of particular public land owned by the federal government by executive order, bypassing Congressional oversight. The Act has been used over a hundred times since its passage. Its use frequently creates significant controversy. Continued

Photo: Pueblo Bonito Chaco Canyon New Mexico (Library of Congress).

John R. Brinkley

Courtesy of The Radio Historian

(Wikipedia) John Romulus Brinkley (later John Richard Brinkley; July 8, 1885 – May 26, 1942) was an American quack who fraudulently claimed to be a medical doctor. He had no legitimate medical education and bought his medical degree from a "diploma mill". Brinkley became known as the "goat-gland doctor" after he achieved national fame, international notoriety and great wealth through the xenotransplantation of goat testicles into humans. 

Although initially Brinkley promoted this procedure as a means of curing male impotence, eventually he claimed that the technique was a virtual panacea for a wide range of male ailments. He operated clinics and hospitals in several states, and despite the fact that almost from the beginning, detractors and critics in the medical community thoroughly discredited his methods, he was able to continue his activities for almost two decades. 

He was also, almost by accident, an advertising and radio pioneer who began the era of Mexican border blaster radio. Continued

Book Review: The Stolen Pinkerton Reports of the Colonel Albert J. Fountain Murder Investigation

(Wild West) This is Vol. 6 in the Mesilla Valley History Series, editor David Thomas having written the first five volumes. The murder of Albert Jennings Fountain on Feb. 1, 1896, caused even more shock and outrage than might be expected in New Mexico Territory, as killed alongside the prominent attorney was his 8-year-old son, Henry. The double murder was never solved, despite an investigation by Doña Ana County Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man who’d killed Billy the Kid, and Pinkerton National Detective Agency operatives John Conklin Fraser and William C. Sayers. Continued

Hawkins Hawks Hideout

(UNM) Photograph shows a group of men and women posing in front of an underground hideout. Text on reverse reads "This is the famous rendevous of Hawkins and Spikes, notorious New Mexican desperados, killed in 1903. There were port holes every few feet. The cave was 12 feet by 14 feet and contained a chimney. I'll not name the persons. Located near Caprock in the vicinity of Tucumcari."

Bootleg, Texas

Grain Elevator near Bootleg

(TSHA) Bootleg (Bootleg Corner) is in southwestern Deaf Smith County. 

There are two stories about the origin of its name. One associates the name with Moonshine Sheep Camp, where a moonshine still was once located; the campground was for cowboys and others traveling from La Plata to Endee, New Mexico. 

Another story has it that the community was named for a "bootleg school"–a small school building that was moved to various locations by agents selling land for the Capitol Syndicate so that prospective customers would believe there was a school near the land they were buying. Continued

Colt Paterson

(Wikipedia) The Colt Paterson is a revolver. It was the first commercial repeating firearm employing a revolving cylinder with multiple chambers aligned with a single, stationary barrel. Its design was patented by Samuel Colt on February 25, 1836, in the United States, England and France, and it derived its name from being produced in Paterson, New Jersey. 

 ... The Republic of Texas purchased 180 of the revolving shotguns and rifles and a like number of handguns for the Texas Navy in 1839. When Samuel Houston disbanded the Texas Navy in 1843, Captain Jack Hays armed his company of Texas Rangers with surplus stocks of the pistols. The repeating handguns became very popular with the Rangers, providing them with sustained firepower against their Comanche adversaries. Continued

Bull Town

(TSHA) ... Originally the community was the Hay Hook Line Camp of the XIT Ranch, and the ranch headquarters was one of the county's earliest buildings. When the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway was built through the ranch in 1898 a switch was placed at the site to be used by cowboys to unload cottonseed shipped in as feed. Some of this feed was invariably spilled along the tracks, causing XIT cattle to gather at the unfenced right-of-way. Often they lay down, compelling railroad workers to get off their trains and prod them off the tracks. As a result the site was labeled Bull Town, a name replaced by the more elegant Bovina when the post office was established on January 31, 1899. Bovina soon experienced a boom and for a time shipped a larger volume of cattle than any other shipping point in the world. Continued

The Fleagle Gang

(Wikipedia) The Fleagle Gang was a group of early 20th century American bank robbers and murderers. They were found and executed or killed after robbing the First National Bank in Lamar, Colorado. Their cases were the first in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used a single fingerprint as part of the evidence leading to a conviction.
They were also suspected to have committed a series of previous bank robberies over a 10-year period. Continued

Goodbye Halloween, Hello “Safety”

(Free-Range Kids) ... Was there ever really a rash of candy killings? Joel Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, took it upon himself to find out. He studied crime reports from Halloween dating back as far as 1958, and guess exactly how many kids he found poisoned by a stranger’s candy? A hundred and five? A dozen? Well, one, at least? “The bottom line is that I cannot find any evidence that any child has ever been killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating,” says the professor. The fear is completely unfounded. Now, one time, in 1974, a Texas dad did kill his own son with a poisoned Pixie Stix. “He had taken out an insurance policy on his son’s life shortly before Halloween, and I think he probably did this on the theory that there were so many poison candy deaths, no one would ever suspect him,” says Best. “In fact, he was very quickly tried and put to death long ago.” Continued

Photo: Double exposure "spirit" photograph of girl standing, holding flowers, surrounded by spectral figures of three [4]people / photograph by G.S. Smallwood, Chicago, Ill c1905 (Library of Congress).

Over a century ago, masks were controversial during the 1918 flu pandemic

Historic 1866 Texas well produced just 10 barrels of oil

(American Oil and Gas Historical Society) In December 1859, less than four months after Edwin L. Drake’s first U.S. oil well drilled in Pennsylvania, a similarly determined petroleum explorer named Lyne (Lynis) Taliaferro Barret began searching in an East Texas area known as Oil Springs. The 1848 invention of “coal oil” — kerosene — had prompted demand for an illuminating fuel made from oil, inspiring speculation and drilling. Continued

Letter from Back East: Roanoke’s ‘Lost Colony’ Was Never Lost, New Book Says

Virginia Dare, the first Anglo child born in North America,
sustained herself on nuts, berries, and product endorsements.
(Virginia Dare Winery)

(NYTimes) In 1590, the would-be governor of a colony meant to be one of England’s first outposts in North America discovered that more than 100 settlers weren’t on the small island where he left them.
More than 400 years later, the question of what happened to those settlers, who landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of modern North Carolina, has grown into a piece of American mythology, inspiring plays, novels, documentaries and a tourism industry in the Outer Banks. Continued

Outlaws Abandon Fort: Cattle Stealing "Mesa Hawks" Pursued by Officers

An early, and quite sensational, account of cattle rustlers in the Quay Valley.