1841
1846-1848
1870
1900
A01=David L. Caffey
American regimes
American West
Author_David L. Caffey
Carlos Beaubien
Category=KCZ
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Cimarron country
Colfax County War
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Guadalupe Miranda
Jicarilla Apache
late-nineteenth-century
Lucien Maxwell
Maxwell Land Grant
Maxwell Land Grant War
Mexican
Mexico
Mouache Ute
Native Americans
Old West
Rocky Mountains
Santa Fe Ring
Spanish
Stonewall War
Texas cattlemen
Product details
- ISBN 9780806191799
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 27 Apr 2023
- Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Spanish word cimarron, meaning “wild” or “untamed,” refers to a region in the southern Rocky Mountains where control of timber, gold, coal, and grazing lands long bred violent struggle. After the U.S. occupation following the 1846–1848 war with Mexico, this tract of nearly two million acres came to be known as the Maxwell Land Grant. WhenCimarron Meant Wild presents a new history of the collision that occurred over the region’s resources between 1870 and 1900. Author David L. Caffey describes the epic late-nineteenth-century range war in an account deeply informed by his historical perspective on social, political, and cultural issues that beset the American West to this day.
Cimarron country churned with the tensions of the Old West—land disputes, lawlessness, violence, and class war among miners, a foreign corporation, local elites, Texas cattlemen, and the haughty “Santa Fe Ring” of lawyerly speculators. And present, still, were the indigenous Jicarilla Apache and Mouache Ute people, dispossessed of their homeland by successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. A Mexican grant of uncertain size and bounds, awarded to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1841 and later acquired by Lucien Maxwell, marked the beginning of a fight for control of the land and set off overlapping conflicts known as the Colfax County War, the Maxwell Land Grant War, and the Stonewall War.
Caffey draws on new research to paint a complex picture of these events, and of those that followed the sale of the claim to investors in 1870. These clashes played out over the following thirty years, involving the new English owners, miners and prospectors, livestock grazers and farmers, and Native Americans.
Just how wild was the Cimarron country in the late 1800s? And what were the consequences for the region and for those caught up in the conflict? The answers, pursued through this remarkable work, enhance our understanding of cultural and economic struggle in the American West.
Cimarron country churned with the tensions of the Old West—land disputes, lawlessness, violence, and class war among miners, a foreign corporation, local elites, Texas cattlemen, and the haughty “Santa Fe Ring” of lawyerly speculators. And present, still, were the indigenous Jicarilla Apache and Mouache Ute people, dispossessed of their homeland by successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. A Mexican grant of uncertain size and bounds, awarded to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1841 and later acquired by Lucien Maxwell, marked the beginning of a fight for control of the land and set off overlapping conflicts known as the Colfax County War, the Maxwell Land Grant War, and the Stonewall War.
Caffey draws on new research to paint a complex picture of these events, and of those that followed the sale of the claim to investors in 1870. These clashes played out over the following thirty years, involving the new English owners, miners and prospectors, livestock grazers and farmers, and Native Americans.
Just how wild was the Cimarron country in the late 1800s? And what were the consequences for the region and for those caught up in the conflict? The answers, pursued through this remarkable work, enhance our understanding of cultural and economic struggle in the American West.
Independent historian David L. Caffey is the award-winning author of Frank Springer and New Mexico: From the Colfax County War to the Emergence of Modern Santa Fe and Chasing the Santa Fe Ring: Power and Privilege in Territorial New Mexico.
