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TWIN PEAKS
The railroad tracks pass through the saddle between the low hill on the left and that darker hill in the center. Those two hills are the Twin Peaks. The tracks were graded on fill in that area and a steep embankment is present there. Black Jack Tom Ketchum had stopped the train atop that embankment and it was too steep for the train crew to disconnect the passenger cars there. Ketchum was busily arguing with and threatening the crew when the irate conductor shot him. COMING HOME
DAY 30: MAY 21, 2013 I woke up to a howling rain squall in Amarillo and did not find a breakfast place at all. In fact, I did not find anywhere to eat in all of Texas. By the time I got to Clayton, New Mexico it was lunchtime so I found a place called the Rabbit Ears Café and gave their Mexican entrees a try. It was the only place other than fast food that I found. Their Mexican food was pretty bad and they charged extra for the chips and salsa.
Twin Peaks Clayton, NM is the little town where the outlaw Black Jack Tom Ketchum was hanged for train robbery. The good citizens of Clayton had never had to hang anyone before and they had to guess pretty much how best to do it. They got the job done without question, but it was a gruesome affair. Tom’s head popped right off of his shoulders and would have gone rolling across the parking lot and among the happy spectators except the hood covering his face was pinned to
SANTA FE TRAIL
The dark hill on the horizon to the right is Point of Rocks. The Santa Fe Trail is in the foreground. The massacre took place on private land a short distance to the northwest of where the photo was taken. his shirt. Tom tried and tried to rob many trains but he seldom met with success. Tom and his brother Sam tried to rob a train out of Folsom, NM near a place called Twin Peaks but they were driven off empty handed by grumpy passengers. A short while later they met a couple of real train robbers named Elza Lay and Will Carver who were members of the Wild Bunch. They offered to rob the same train in same place to prove it could be easily done, but Tom wanted to boss the job and was driven off at gunpoint by Carver and Lay. The robbery was fully successful, but they were run down by a posse and Sam Ketchum and Elza Lay were both wounded in the gunplay and captured. Sam died in jail from infection of his injuries and Lay recovered from his, but was given a stretch in prison. He went down with the first shot fired during the gunfight and did not participate in it. None of the booty was found on him when he was captured so he was charged with the federal offense of interfering with the mail. After he was paroled Elza
COLFAX COUNTY COURTHOUSE
The old courthouse is a fine monument to Frank Springer. He was one of the West's most unrecognized heroes. went straight. Tom Ketchum decided to rob the train in the same place all by himself but, of course, he botched the job as usual and the conductor shot him. He was captured the next morning, his arm had to be amputated and he was convicted of train robbery even though he never made off with booty of any kind. Train robbery was hanging offense back then. His death was such an ugly business that the death penalty was later removed from the offense of robbing a train.
Point of Rocks In October of 1849 a man named White was travelling with his family down the Santa Fe Trail amidst the company of a strongly situated wagon train. He was anxious to arrive in Santa Fe so that he could see to the creature comforts of his wife and child and attend to the business that brought him there. He was a businessman and hoped to get started giving the business to the local population before winter set in. The trail had been seeing heavy use due to the rush of gold seekers headed to California that year. Grazing was poor and
BOY SCOUTS
Somehow, perhaps through skullduggery, the Boy Scouts of America have come into possession of a large chunk of Colfax County. This building is their concept of what Kit Carson's trading post may have looked like. This structure is located in Rayado, but not on the correct site of the trading post. Kit's post was most likely much smaller. It is a shame that nothing remains of the original site. the oxen pulling the trade goods were gradually getting weaker and travelling slower. White decided to leave the train and rush on toward Santa Fe at a livelier pace. He made it fine until his party reached a nooning at Palo Blanco Creek a few miles east of the well-known landmark called Point of Rocks. He encountered some Jicarilla Apache there who were hoping for a little tribute for crossing their land. The encounter quickly degenerated into a confrontation, and then a massacre. One of the Jicarilla was killed and all of the men in White’s party were killed. His wife, Anne and their young daughter were taken captive along with Anne’s female slave. The Jicarilla salvaged what they wanted of White’s property and happily rode off across the prairie leaving the dead men to the buzzards and coyotes. Alarms went up as word of the massacre spread; three weeks had gone by before a military pursuit could be mounted. By then the trail had gone cold. Kit Carson felt duty bound to assist in the pursuit and patiently he worked out the trail until he located the Jicarilla camp. The attack on the camp faltered long enough for the
RAYADO
This monument has been erected in front of the Boy Scout place. It was probably moved there when the phony fort was built. Jicarilla to escape with their horses, but the camp was destroyed. Anne White was found dead in the camp. Her little daughter was taken along with the fleeing Apache, but the winter ahead was brutal for them and she probably did not survive it. Anne’s slave girl was never located. It seems likely that she was sold by the Jicarilla into the Mexican brothel trade.
Springer Lucien Maxwell was a mountain man who married into the Beaubien Family up in Taos. They held a good sized Mexican Land Grant that Maxwell acquired through inheritance and skullduggery with corrupt territorial politicians. Through more skullduggeries he was able to expand his holdings until he had become the largest single land owner in America. Through even more skullduggery with corrupt officials he was able to make his land titles valid with the federal land office. The problem was that Maxwell had far more land than he could control. When gold was discovered near Elizabethtown the squatters flooded in and that led to the contentious Colfax County War. A judicial sharpster named Frank Springer moved to Colfax County and the town bearing his name became the county seat. Many of the land disputes that sprung up during that period of unrest were settled at the Colfax County Courthouse. When the railroad came in the county seat moved up to Raton. Lucien Maxwell bought Fort Sumner from the army when they abandoned it. Lucien died in Fort Sumner and lays peacefully y at rest in the same cemetery that Billy the Kid is rumbling around in. I do not know where Frank Springer is buried but he took an instrumental role in unraveling much of the skullduggery that flourished under the corrupt political maneuvering of the Santa Fe Ring.
Rayado At the time of the massacre near Point of Rocks Kit Carson had moved his family onto property he had purchased from Lucien Maxwell at a place called Rayado, NM. The property was situated along the branch of the Santa Fe Trail coming down from Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River in Colorado. Kit’s intention was to raise cattle and grow fresh produce for sale to folks travelling down the trail. The trading post was a going concern for a few years but it fell into neglect when the War Between the States broke out and Kit joined up with the New Mexico Militia to repel the Confederate invasion and subdue the Navajo.
The day’s journey for me ended up in Las Vegas, NM at the Comfort Inn. It is a place that Charel and I stayed at a few years back after we got caught up in a fierce thunderstorm on a trip through Colorado. Las Vegas is a hard place to find anything but junk food for supper. I had to settle for McDonalds.
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