Sep. 1—In mid-September 1875, The Santa Fe New Mexican ran a short item noting Methodist minister F.J. Tolby (the paper misidentifies him as “T.J.”) had been found slain on the road between Cimarron and Elizabethtown.
There is nothing in the seven sentences to indicate the significance of what at first glance might have seemed a tragic but ordinary crime.
Shortly before his death, Tolby had become an outspoken critic of the Santa Fe Ring, a group of influential, mostly Republican politicos who were hated by many settlers in Colfax County who were squatting on land they believed to be public but that Ring-connected figures contended was part of the Maxwell Land Grant. Convinced the authorities were uninterested in finding Tolby’s killer, some citizens of Cimarron took matters into their own hands, leading to a series of shootings and lynchings that would become known as the Colfax County War.
The New Mexican called for a crackdown. When several men with Ring ties, including a judge, were accused of conspiring to kill Tolby, the paper proclaimed their innocence and accused the vigilantes of intimidating the local courts.
“The Tolby murder is only a pretext for this armed band to visit their violence upon the peaceable citizens of Cimarron,” The New Mexican wrote in its Nov. 10, 1875, edition. “The fact is a portion of the Territory is in anarchy, and without adequate means of protection; and the sheriff seems powerless to do anything except by permission from the mob. How long will this condition of affairs exist?”
Two months later, when the territorial Legislature moved Colfax County’s courts to Taos, The New Mexican praised this as necessary to ensure justice could be done.
“By reason of their lawlessness and aggressiveness in that community … a terror has been created which has subverted all power and rendered the community helpless, in the maintenance of law and order,” the paper wrote on Jan. 17, 1876. “It has come to be unmistakably the fact that it is as much as any person’s life is worth in that county to either inform on or convict any of the murderers.”
The New Mexican noted “our friend [William] Dawson,” editor of the Cimarron News and Press, would likely disagree.
“That will be all right if he thinks it necessary; only it occurs not only to us, but to the citizens of the territory generally that it is a most damnable place to publish a newspaper where if you exercise the least shadow of manhood there is danger of a stray bullet continually awaiting the editor from some assassin’s corner; and where they so seductively and persuasively, with their blunderbusses and bowie-knives resting on his bowels, require a newspaper editor, to crawfish or hand in his cheeks without the benefit of clergy, whenever he shows the least tendency to tell simple truths about the ‘town-runners’ and desperados of Colfax County,” The New Mexican opined.
These words would prove prophetic. On Jan. 19, angered at what they saw as coverage too friendly to the Ring, members of a mob led by gunslinger Clay Allison stormed and destroyed the News and Press office. The paper reopened quickly with a new perspective, as Corey Recko recounts in his recent book The Colfax County War: Violence and Corruption in Territorial New Mexico.
“Under the original management, some embarrassment was often occasioned by differences of opinion among the editors on subjects of public interest, and these differences finally culminated in a rupture, and thereafter, and for the past few weeks, the paper has not been in accord with the prevailing sentiment in the county,” the new editors wrote in their first edition. “So obnoxious became the utterances in its columns, that a storm was aroused, which, in literal fact, shook the News and Press to its foundation.”
The events in Colfax County provide a particularly dramatic backdrop, but they illustrate the role The New Mexican played during this tumultuous period as the most influential Republican paper in New Mexico, owned or edited by figures aligned with the powers in territorial government.
Since the early 20th century, as changing business models led to a need to appeal to advertisers and readers of all political views, most newspapers have tried to maintain a more neutral voice in their news coverage. While opinions vary as to how faithfully media outlets adhere to this, in the late 19th century most papers were openly affiliated with a political party and made no attempt to be fair to the other side.
The front page of The New Mexican in 1875 usually consisted of a long column sharing the editors’ thoughts on the political news of the day. Displayed prominently under the masthead every day, above the main column, was the headline, “For Delegate to Congress STEPHEN B. ELKINS,” who was both a politician and one of the lawyers involved in the Maxwell Land Grant case.
“A strong newspaper was a common and desirable accessory, useful in cultivating public opinion that favored or at least tolerated the dominance of the elite,” David Caffey wrote in his 2014 book Chasing the Santa Fe Ring: Power and Privilege in Territorial New Mexico. ” … In Santa Fe, the New Mexican performed this function.”
The period after the Civil War was one of the most politically polarized and violent in American history. Even by the standards of our increasingly divided times, newspapers of the 1870s seem obsessed with politics, writing about the other party in tones that rival today’s most hyperbolic rhetoric.
“We have an unscrupulous enemy to deal with,” The New Mexican wrote before the 1875 territorial election. “A long series of defeats have made our opponents desperate and taught them the necessity of a thorough union of all opposing elements. ‘Anything to defeat the Republican party’ is their motto. … Let every loyal man be at his post of duty on the day of election. A full vote for the Republican ticket secures [its] triumph, and this means, in plain English, the triumph of law and order over the common enemy of both.”
Like today, polarization affected not only public sentiment but the functioning of government. Recko believes it helps explain why territorial Gov. Samuel B. Axtell bungled the response to violence in Colfax and Lincoln counties, refusing even to meet with anti-Ring figures in Colfax.
“It really is one of those things that’s kind of mind-boggling,” Recko said in an interview.
Axtell didn’t have any ties to New Mexico before becoming governor in 1875, and Recko said he couldn’t find any obvious corrupt motive to explain his actions. Things got so bad that eventually Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes removed Axtell from power.
“At that time I think it was just he was a Republican, they were Republicans, and they were the ones who had his ear when he was in Santa Fe, and he seemed to trust people like Elkins and Catron without question,” Recko said, referring to Thomas Catron, Elkins’ law partner and namesake of Catron County.
While there was turnover in The New Mexican’s leadership during this era, it remained in the hands of men with deep ties to the GOP establishment. One was Max Frost, who acquired a controlling interest in 1883 and became editor in 1889. He remained involved until he died in 1909, in Caffey’s words “ensuring that the New Mexican would remain an advocate for the Republican Party, and usually for persons and causes associated with the Santa Fe Ring.”
According to the paper’s self-description in an advertisement in the 1882 territorial Blue Book, “It represents the progressive, enterprising spirit which is to make of New Mexico a great Mining and Pastoral District. … Republican in politics, it will support every wise measure of its party, but will criticise without hesitation faults of management, or mistakes in policy, and will condemn jobbery or corruption wherever it may appear.”
Whether The New Mexican lived up to its promise to condemn corruption even from its allies is, to put it charitably, debatable. Frost and the paper “supported a corrupt clique of politicians who often used their positions for personal advantage,” Porter A. Stratton wrote in his 1969 book The Territorial Press of New Mexico.
This isn’t to say The New Mexican’s record during this time is all bad. It backed reformist causes such as banning gambling, closing saloons on Sundays and a well-funded, nonsectarian public school system. Printing pages in both Spanish and English for most of this period, The New Mexican also encouraged good feelings between the Hispano and Anglo communities. This came to the fore around the turn of the century, when southeastern New Mexico saw an influx of white settlers from the South who pushed for discriminatory voting laws, segregated schools and other measures to recreate the society they had left.
“The Roswell Daily Record, the Carlsbad Current, the Carlsbad Sun, the Artesia Advocate, the Hagerman Messenger and other Democratic papers do not like the stand the Daily New Mexican is taking in defense of the native citizens of the Territory,” the paper wrote in 1906. “The Democratic leaders and papers in the southeastern part of New Mexico are determined to disenfranchise the native people because the majority of them are wise enough to be Republicans.”
Stratton says Frost “displays best the good and bad traits apparent in New Mexico journalism before 1900.
“Outside of partisan politics Frost and the New Mexican usually adopted a course that was beneficial to the territory,” Stratton wrote. ” … It interested itself in all facets of the economic development of New Mexico and consistently advocated, with thousands of editorials, policies to aid that development. … The conclusion seems warranted that Frost and the New Mexican despite their records in politics made a significant contribution to the development of New Mexico.”
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