These episodes are non-fiction accounts relating to New Mexico from the earliest visit by a priest, Fray Marcos de Niza, sent by the Viceroy of New Spain in 1539, to the unwelcome intrusion of an enemy saboteur in World War I. Between these extremes we meet a witness who recalls details of an abandoned dwelling whose owner lived there two hundred years earlier, newspaper accounts of a shoot-out at Pinos Atos and its bloody aftermath, a stage ride from Las Cruces to Silver City, and how cattleman John Chisum dealt with two knights of the road. Billy the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse is seen in a new light, and an introduction to the Lincoln County War will help the unfamiliar reader to understand what was truly a New Mexico horse opera, with tragic results. The role of the military in the nineteenth century is shown in a glimpse of life at one fort and the report of an Army scouting party that saw a part of the country prior to its settlement. And what would an anthology be without a dog story?

A pictorial celebration of New Mexico's history and landscape. In celebration of New Mexico's statehood centenial, Richard Melzer focuses on the various social and political elements that have made the Land of Enchantment what it is today. Filled with images that document the past hundred years, New Mexico is a photographic delight accompanied by brief insightful essays that leave the reader in no doubt of a history that is both imposing and exciting in its scope. This book is also an official product of the state's centennial celebration. Richard Anthony Melzer is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico Valencia Campus. He is a former president of the Historical Society of New Mexico and is the author of many books and articles on twentieth-century New Mexico history.

Born in Santa Fe in 1802, Donaciano Vigil was an active participant in many of the critical events in New Mexico's history in the nineteenth century. Vigil was witness to New Mexico's transition from a Spanish province (1802-1821) to a Mexican department (1821-1846) and eventually to an American territory (1846-1877), and he was a key player in most of the events of that era. As a Hispano soldier and officer in the New Mexico Militia, he was instrumental in the Navajo Wars, the Rio Arriba insurrection of 1837, the Texas invasion of 1841, and the American invasion of 1846. As a Mexican statesman in New Mexico, he was one of the most active assemblymen. Following the American occupation, he joined the civil government, first as secretary, then as governor. It was in these roles that Donaciano left an enduring impact and legacy on the territory. In this gripping biography of a remarkable man, Maurilio E. Vigil and Helene Boudreau fill the gap within the scholarship on Hispanics in nineteenth-century New Mexico.

On their return to New Mexico from El Paso after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the New Mexican settlers were confronted with continuous raids by hostile Indians tribes, disease and an inhospitable landscape. In spite of this, in the early and mid-eighteenth century, the New Mexicans went about their daily lives as best they could, as shown in original documents from the time. The documents show them making deals, traveling around the countryside and to and from El Paso and Mexico City, complaining about and arguing with each other, holding festivals, and making plans for the future of their children. It also shows them interacting with the presidio soldiers, the Franciscan friars and Inquisition officials, El Paso and Chihuahua merchants, the occasional Frenchman, and their Pueblo Indian allies. Because many of the documents include oral testimony, we are able to read what they had to say, sometimes angry, asking for help, or giving excuses for their behavior, as written down by a scribe at the time. This book includes fifty-four original handwritten documents from the early and mid-eighteenth century. Most of the original documents are located in the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, although some are from the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico City, and elsewhere. They were selected for their description of Spanish Colonial life, of interest to the many descendants of the characters that appear in them, and because they tell a good story. A translation and transcription of each document is included as well as a synopsis, background notes, and biographical notes. They can be considered a companion, in part, to Ralph Emerson Twitchell’s 1914 two volumes, The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, summarizing the documents of the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, now available in new editions from Sunstone Press.

Jack M. Campbell (1916–1999) was elected governor of New Mexico in 1962 and reelected in 1964, the first New Mexico governor in twelve years to win a second term. In this engaging autobiography, Campbell traces his life story across major historical events in the country and New Mexico. From humble beginnings on the plains of Kansas through his career as an FBI agent and his first days practicing law in Albuquerque, Campbell writes of his early attraction to the beauty and culture of New Mexico. After serving in the US Marine Corps in World War II, he returned to New Mexico and devoted himself to improving the state’s political and economic circumstances as a legislator, governor, and private citizen. Through a series of impressive accomplishments, he succeeded in bringing the state fully into the twentieth century. Campbell truly was New Mexico’s first modern governor.

This book tells the story of the thousands of “health seekers” who journeyed to New Mexico from 1880 to 1940 seeking a cure for tuberculosis (TB), the leading killer in the United States at the time. By 1920 such health seekers represented an estimated 10 percent of New Mexico’s population. The influx of “lungers” as they were called—many of whom remained in New Mexico—would play a critical role in New Mexico’s struggle for statehood and in its growth. Nearly sixty sanatoriums were established around the state, laying the groundwork for the state’s current health-care system. Among New Mexico’s prominent lungers were artists Will Shuster and Carlos Vierra, who “came to heal and stayed to paint.” Bronson Cutting, brought to Santa Fe on a stretcher in 1910, became the influential publisher of the Santa Fe New Mexican and a powerful U.S Senator. Others included William R. Lovelace and Edgar T. Lassetter, founders of the Lovelace Clinic, as well as Senator Clinton P. Anderson, poet Alice Corbin Henderson, architect John Gaw Meem, aviator Katherine Stinson, and Dorothy McKibben, gatekeeper for the Manhattan Project. New Mexico’s most infamous outlaw, Billy the Kid, first arrived in New Mexico when his mother, Catherine Antrim, sought treatment in Silver City.

When author Gail Okawa was in high school in Honolulu, a neighbor mentioned that her maternal grandfather had been imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp on the US mainland. Questioning her parents, she learned only that “he came back a changed man.” Years later, as an adult salvaging that grandfather’s memorabilia, she found a mysterious photo of a group of Japanese men standing in front of an adobe building, compelling her eventually to embark on a project to learn what happened to him. Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile is a composite chronicling of the Hawai‘i Japanese immigrant experience in mainland exile and internment during World War II, from pre-war climate to arrest to exile to return. Told through the eyes of a granddaughter and researcher born during the war, it is also a research narrative that reveals parallels between pre-WWII conditions and current twenty-first century anti-immigrant attitudes and heightened racism. The book introduces Okawa’s grandfather, Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Protestant minister, and other Issei prisoners—all legal immigrants excluded by law from citizenship—in a collective biographical narrative that depicts their suffering, challenges, and survival as highly literate men faced with captivity in the little-known prison camps run by the U.S. Justice and War Departments. Okawa interweaves documents, personal and official, and internees’ firsthand accounts, letters, and poetry to create a narrative that not only conveys their experience but, equally important, exemplifies their literacy as ironic and deliberate acts of resistance to oppressive conditions. Her research revealed that the Hawai‘i Issei/immigrants who had sons in military service were eventually distinguished from the main group; the narrative relates visits of some of those sons to their imprisoned fathers in New Mexico and elsewhere, as well as the deaths of sons killed in action in Europe and the Pacific. Documents demonstrate the high degree of literacy and advocacy among the internees, as well as the inherent injustice of the government’s policies. Okawa’s project later expanded to include New Mexico residents having memories of the Santa Fe Internment Camp—witnesses who provide rare views of the wartime reality.