Our America by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Author:Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

FOR A REALISTIC CHRONICLE of the making of the Anglo Southwest, the autobiography of Agnes Morley Cleaveland is unsurpassed. She recalled what it was like to be a settler in the wilderness during New Mexico’s long, tough integration into the United States. Her father was a construction engineer on the Santa Fe railroad, which pierced Mexican North America like a fatal lance. Speeding the colonists who wrenched the land from native and Mexican hands, the railways ultimately turned the Southwest into a patchy, imperfect simulacrum of Anglo-America.

Ray Morley’s job both symbolized and shaped the frontier, as he helped rivet the emerging gringo “nation” from east to west. Building the railway was a crazy, chaotic business. The route first projected for a coast-to-coast line across the southern United States showed how little East Coasters knew of the West: the line, if built as intended, would have run into impossible mountains and through impossible deserts. It would have had to make a detour through Mexican territory to reach its goal. Indeed, the Santa Fe line never reached Santa Fe: the topography of the Rockies forced it through the relatively minor outpost at Lamy, where a branch line took passengers and freight to the capital. Legal squabbles and cutthroat competition delayed the start of work and kept interrupting construction. Even so, when the lines began to be laid from Topeka, a little west of Kansas City, in 1868, surveying—conducted frantically, scramblingly in torturous terrain among terrifying Apache war bands—barely kept ahead of the tracks. Rival companies literally fought one another for control of the narrow gorges that pinched and squeezed the railway as it struggled westwards. Ray Morley worked for each company in turn, swapping contracts like a modern football pro. For the Santa Fe line he led a daring expedition to seize Raton Pass in 1878, keeping rivals out until his rails were laid. “Morley,” said the chairman of the company, “builds railroads with one hand, fights Indians with the other, and lives on the bark of trees while doing it.”132

Agnes Morley was only a little girl then, and she recorded the violence of frontier life with childish romanticism. Her tales of cowboy high jinks and gunslinger chivalry were worthy of an old-time Hollywood western. When her father gave up railroad construction, he became the editor of the local paper in Cimarron County, denouncing the land sharks and rustlers who persecuted poor ranchers. His big foe was Clay Allison, a legendary and in many ways typical gunfighter, whose journey to the margins of the law began with training in arms as a Confederate soldier. Gunfighting was a refuge from the restlessness of demobilization following the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Clay killed a Union man who tried to seize his ranch in Tennessee and fled first to Texas, then to New Mexico, where he led lynch mobs, terrorized towns, defied law officers, and reveled with impunity in a notorious series of death-dealing duels. In the Morleys’ hometown, he allegedly assassinated the crusading local pastor, who wanted to “clean up” local lawlessness.

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