Between 1850 and 1912, the year New Mexico was granted statehood, the Territory of New Mexico was a wild and dangerous place. Homesteaders, cowboys, ranchers, sheepherders, buffalo hunters, prospectors, treasure hunters and railroad men pushing the borders of the western frontier met with resistance from man and animal alike. Native Americans, who had lived on the land defending their boundaries and way of life for centuries, reacted to the wave of outsiders in various ways. The agrarian Pueblo peoples along the Rio Grande largely kept to themselves. Apache, Navajo and Ute tribes sometimes...

"Lost Treasures & Old Mines" brims with stories of gold fever, copper ore, and silver mining in the American Southwest.

The story of Spanish settlement in New Mexico begins with Francisco Vasquez de Coronados expedition into the territory in 1540-1542. The conquistadors were seeking new lands, gold, and converts to Christianity. In 1598, Juan de Onates expedition of soldiers, settlers and indigenous Mexicans arrived, charged by the Crown to colonize the northern frontier of New Spain. Far from Mexico and the seat of Spanish government, in a land of extremes already inhabited by the First Americans, these settlers proved their tenacity. Farmers, shepherds and townspeople, they lived off the land: they built...

Was life on the range in the 1880s and 1890s anything like the hard riding, hard working, hard drinking shoot 'em up images that moviegoers saw in old Westerns? Yes-and then some, the authentic documents in this collection tell us. Cowboys, sheepherders, ranchers and all those around them in Territorial New Mexico were engaged in constant life-and-death struggles. They battled with each other and with Indians. They endured blizzards, fires, drought, floods, disease and stampeding cattle. In one account, on the morning after Comanche Indians stole all their cattle, James Chisum told his...