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    New Mexico's Rangers:: The Mounted Police
    New Mexico's Rangers:: The Mounted Police
    New Mexico's Rangers:: The Mounted Police
    Ebook223 pages1 hour

    New Mexico's Rangers:: The Mounted Police

    By Chuck Hornung

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    About this ebook

    The New Mexico Mounted Police were forged from a frontier civil crisis and hammered to life upon the anvil of necessity. The Sunshine Territory of New Mexico had become the last outlaw haven in the Southwest. In the tradition of their red-coated namesake, the Northwest Mounted Police of Canada, this small band of range riders used their fists, guns, and brains to restore law and order during the closing years of New Mexico's territorial era. They carried their mission forward into the early days of statehood.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439639788
    New Mexico's Rangers:: The Mounted Police
    Author

    Chuck Hornung

    Author Chuck Hornung is a respected authority on New Mexico�s frontier law enforcement and has written widely on the subject. He had a close, personal relationship with Fred Lambert, the last living member of the New Mexico Territorial Mounted Police. Hornung has spent four decades researching New Mexico�s rangers and cultivating an association with family members of these lawmen of a bygone era. He owns the world�s largest private collection of mounted police memorabilia, and his books about the rangers are the standard on this subject.

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      Book preview

      New Mexico's Rangers: - Chuck Hornung

      collection.

      PREFACE

      I never intended to write an illustrated history of the New Mexico Mounted Police. In fact, I had never even heard of these lawmen of the last frontier in the southwest until I was a graduate student. Television and movie westerns had led the general public to understand that it was the Texas Rangers, with just a little help from the obscure Arizona Rangers, that brought law and order to the whole area west of the Pecos without any help from law enforcement officers in that mysterious void between Arizona and Texas called New Mexico.

      I was attending school in Kentucky and my girlfriend, now my wife, was in school back east, so I spent long weekends in the university library. The 26 volumes of evidence for the Warren Commission Report made for frustrating reading material, as did the New York Times’ coverage of the daily events of the Civil War. While looking through the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I discovered a reference to the mounted police in an article about New Mexico. I loved the land of enchantment and had spent many summers working on a northeastern New Mexico ranch during my high school and college years.

      During the rest of that term, I sought information about the mounted police from New Mexico’s state archives and historical societies. I learned two things. First, little was known about the mounted police in their homeland, and secondly, two names seemed to come up when someone did know something about these rangers: Fred Fornoff and Fred Lambert. I was told that both men had died long ago. On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in June 1967, I came face-to-face with a living legend. I met Fred Lambert at his home in Cimarron. The story of that meeting is told in my book Fullerton’s Rangers. It was that meeting that started my journey to record the adventures and to preserve the memory of New Mexico’s Rangers: The Mounted Police.

      This volume is possible only because for the past four decades we have slowly tracked the men of the mounted police, and along the way we have met many of their descendants and family friends. It has been a rewarding, sometimes tedious journey. When we took up the trail, few librarians or archivists had ever heard of the mounted police and so many others confused these horseback territorial state lawmen with a present-day volunteer group, the New Mexico Mounted Patrol, which assists the New Mexico State Police on special occasions. The New Mexico Mounted Police are the forefathers of the New Mexico State Police.

      One

      THE CLOSING FRONTIER

      THE RISE OF MOUNTED POLICE

      The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war between the United States and the Mexican Republic in 1848. This treaty seeded Mexican lands that encompassed the present states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of southern Nevada and southern Colorado to the United States. The Territory of New Mexico was created from these lands by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850.

      The Gadsden Purchase Treaty established New Mexico’s southern boundary with the Republic of Mexico in 1853 when Congress agreed to buy some disputed lands in the Mesilla Valley from Mexico for $10 million.

      The boundary line between New Mexico and Arizona territories was authorized as the 32nd meridian in February 1863, but was not established on the ground until 1875. New Mexico’s southern and eastern boundary with Texas was established in 1859, but a dispute with Texas over the eastern border was not settled until 1891, and the southern line argument continued until 1930. New Mexico’s northern boundary line with Colorado was not finalized until 1960. This was 110 years after the territory had been established.

      New Mexico Territory contained 121,666 square miles in a land mass extending 390 miles from north to south and 350 miles from east to west. Even today, New Mexico has less water per acre that any other state in the federal union.

      At the turn of the 20th century, New Mexico Territory was the last refuge for bunko artists, rustlers, gamblers, and an assortment of other outlaw types. Members of the newly reorganized Texas Rangers and the infant Arizona Rangers had arrested, killed, or driven most of the shady characters out of their jurisdiction and into the Sunshine Territory, New Mexico’s nickname before statehood. Colorado sheriffs and the Mexican federal police tightened the vice from the north and the south. New Mexico needed its own ranger force to combat the lawless element.

      COUNCILMAN GRANVILLE ADDISON RICHARDSON. Granville Addison Richardson was an attorney and a Democrat. He saw the need for a New Mexico ranger force to deal with the territory’s outlaw situation. As a councilman in 1899, he introduced a bill to create a 13-man company of territorial mounted police. The ranger force was designed to operate much like their namesake police force in Canada, thus the name. The force would cost the territory $9,120 per year for salaries. On a comparative scale, the captain was to be paid $200 per month, or slightly less than the average salary for a public school teacher. In later years, Richardson served in the 1910 New Mexico State Constitutional Convention, two terms in the New Mexico State Legislature, and ended his public career as judge of the fifth judicial district. A street in Roswell, his hometown, is named in his honor. (History of New Mexico, 1907.)

      COUNCILMAN THOMAS D. BURNS. Thomas D. Burns, a Republican from Tierra Amarilla, was a banker, merchant, and stockraiser who represented Rio Arriba County and San Juan County in the council in 1899. Burns chaired the council’s Territorial Affairs Committee, and on January 30, his committee was assigned to review Richardson’s New Mexico Mounted Police Bill. The committee debated the need for a ranger force and the cost to taxpayers verses the desirability of the territory’s stockgrower associations to bear the financial burden of the range riders. The council, on a split vote, sent the bill back to the committee to die. (History of New Mexico, 1907.)

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