New Mexico State Goverment history

By the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the Mexican War, made public in Washington on July 4, 1848, the United States achieved its principal objectives: the acquisition of New Mexico and California and recognition of the Rio Grande as Texas’ southern boundary.

In accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, a joint boundary commission was organized and began (in July 1849) the task of surveying a dividing line between the two nations.

The United States military governed New Mexico until a civil territorial government was created under provisions of the Compromise of 1850.

The new bishop, after his arrival in 1851, began a campaign to impose religious discipline upon the native clergy, whose lighthearted style of living caused him personal pain and scandalized the Americans.

For instance, many of the initial occupation politicians who were loyal Whigs while Millard Fillmore was President took to calling themselves “National Democrats” when Democrat Franklin Pierce became President in 1853.

Congress took a sidelong look at the problem and handed it to the Office of the Surveyor-General, which was created in 1854 for the specific purpose of adjudicating Spanish and Mexican land titles.

Even more lustrous was the Historical Society of New Mexico, founded in 1859, probably the first such scholarly body to appear anywhere in the Far West.

The gold rush to the Rockies and the ensuing boom in population led to the formation of the Colorado Territory in 1861.

Moving westward from Texas, the Confederate Army of the West occupied Santa Fe and Albuquerque in 1862, imprisoning the ardently pro-Union José Manuel Gallegos, who passed secrets to Union forces from his jail cell.

By March 1863, Carson brought four hundred warriors with their families to the new Bosque Redondo Reservation on the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico.

In January of 1864, Kit Carson led his men into the depths of Canyon de Chelly, where, for the first time, he encountered a large body of Navajo.

Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, among the early participants in that activity, took their first herd of longhorns to New Mexico in the summer of 1866.

68The election date was changed with the passage of a 1872 law that moved the election date of Delegates to the first Tuesday of November of the even-numbered year.

In 1876, however, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that eventually threatened Pueblo lands.

Following the heavy ruts of the Santa Fe Trail, it reached Las Vegas early in 1879.

In 1885, Nana escaped with Geronimo and raided until the final Apache surrender the following year.

At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, President William McKinley sent a telegram to Governor Miguel A. Otero, Jr., at Santa Fe, asking him to assist in recruiting stalwart young men who were good shots and good riders.

Northern New Mexico Community College at El Rito, originally established in 1909 to train Spanish speakers to become teachers, has branches at Española and Santa Fe.

The conservative document that body drafted was ratified by voters early the following year, and on January 6, 1912, New Mexico became the forty-seventh state in the Union.

But the duty of the federal government to intervene actively to protect Pueblo Indian lands from encroachment, the policy Spain had pursued, would not be recognized until 1913.

The state’s department of health, created in 1919, administers an extensive social service program, often in collaboration with federal agencies.

In 1921 Albert Fall, as Secretary of the Interior, sought a solution to the problem by asking his successor in the United States Senate, Holm O. Bursum, to draft an Indian land bill.

Acknowledgments History and Government of New Mexico John H. Vaughan Privately printed, Las Cruces, 1931

Scientists living with their families in almost complete seclusion soon produced the first atomic bomb and tested it on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site in the desolate White Sands of southern New Mexico.

“A Soldier’s Experience in New Mexico” John Ayres New Mexico Historical Review 24, October 1949

Then, in 1955, the government, as it crept eastward toward the Sacramento Mountains swallowing up chunks of ground, ran straight into eighty-two-year-old John Prather.

By now, August 1957, the episode was spread across the front pages of the nation’s leading dailies, and reporters were pouring into El Paso, where they looked for transportation northward to the Tularosa Basin.

Acknowledgments New Mexico, Revised Edition Calvin & Susan Roberts University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2006