Wallace and Other New Mexican Ghost Towns

 New Mexico is dotted with ghost towns. 

Some were mining towns that died when the mines either closed or ran out of ore. Dawson, was a coal mining town until the mines shut down in the 1950s. Now all that is left is a haunting cemetery that remembers the 383 men who lost their lives in mine explosions in 1913 and 1923. Lake Valley was a silver mining boomtown and White Oaks was a hub for those who sought to make their fortune in gold. Ancho was a center of brick production, providing most of the bricks San Francisco needed to rebuild after its disastrous 1906 earthquake. 

Others, like Glenrio and Budville, catered to the traffic on old Route 66 and died when I-40 came through. 

Steins, New Mexico

And before the highways came through, there were  railroad towns that blossomed as the rails were being laid, only to whither when the work was done. Steins, Montoya, and Wallace are such towns. 

Wallace was a town on Indian land, along the Galisteo river three miles east of Santo Domingo Pueblo. It was created to be a distributing center for merchandise in the San Pedro mining district, serving Cerillos, Golden, Madrid, Hagan, and many other little sites that are now forgotten.   The first house was built in January 1880. By the end of 1882 there were 600 inhabitants, and the town boasted a Fred Harvey dining room, a post office, hotel, and a school that was in use seven days a week because it served as the dance hall on Saturdays and the church on Sundays. Two years later, the population was over 1,000. In its heyday, the town boasted several general stores, carpenters and blacksmiths, two chinese laundries, a pool hall, and numerous saloons. 

Even from its outset, Wallace was a wide open town known for its drinking, gambling, murder, wild gunfights, and lynchings. One of its most infamous residents was J.H. Conway, also known as Ellis Conway, O.L. Hale. Although he was a wanted man, for murder, forgery, and jail escape, he managed to get himself elected as Wallace's Justice of the Peace. While serving as a judge, he also ran a gambling ring that was known to resort to robbery when they did not win through cards. 

But all good and not so good things must come to an end. Wallace's boom turned to bust soon after the new millenium began. One reason is that Santo Domingo Pueblo was not happy having such a rowdy town occupying its land. The railroad removed its shops and roundhouse, leading to the demise of the boarding house. Many railroad families moved away. By 1906, the town's name was changed to Thornton, perhaps in an attempt to distance itself from its infamous past. In 1932, a new highway was cut between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, bypassing the town, now known as Domingo, by four miles.

We would know almost nothing at all about Wallace if it were not for Father Stanley, a priest who wrote small histories of New Mexico's towns. His book The Wallace (New Mexico) Story was published in October of 1962. By then, the town had become little more than a trading post used by the local Indians and visited by tourists wishing to see an old-time trading post. Stanley hoped that Fred Thompson, the owner of the post, would reconstruct part of the old town and make it into a tourist attraction, but that did not happen.

Today, Wallace is, I believe, completely gone. The site remains on pueblo land and is difficult to get to since Santo Domingo blocked off the old road between Madera and Algodones during the COVID pandemic. Looking at online satellite land maps, the land looks barren. 

Gone, but not completely forgotten. When a copy of Father Stanley's book came into my possession, his story about Judge Conway fired my imagination, and The Winding Road to Wallace, my Western Romance, was born. Although my main characters are purely my invention, Conway is in my book, as are some of the merchants and lawmen that Stanley mentions. A little bit of this ghost town has risen from oblivion to ride again. 

The life and death of Sylvester H. Roper, American Inventor

Firearms are not my specialty. Fortunately, I know people who know things that I don't. 

I relied on Ken Dusenberry back when I was writing Where Duty Calls,  the first book in Rebels Along the Rio Grande, my middle grade trilogy of historical novels set in New Mexico during the Civil War. Ken was an Army veteran, an historical Civil War reenactor, and knew a lot about everything, especially artillery. He was the one who told me, kindly but firmly, that pistols and rifles were not guns. They were firearms. Cannons and howitzers were guns. Unfortunately for me (and for a lot of other people. Ken was well respected and loved in a lot of different communities) Ken passed away before I completed the third book in the series.I still miss Ken and his witty and insightful advice. He made my first two books much better, and may be one reason why the first two were finalists for the Western Writers of America's prestigious spur award and the third was not.

I'm now working on another book set in the old west. The Winding Road to Wallace is an historical
romance set in New Mexico in the 1880s. It is far less fact based than the Rebels series, but I still wanted to avoid anachronisms and artifacts that were out of the time period or just plain wrong. I was lucky enough to have R.G. Yoho look at a very early draft of my manuscript. Bob, as those who know him call him, is from West Virginia and is passionate about the history and tales of the American West.  He's a prolific and award-winning author (I think he's up to 15 titles) and most of his works are Westerns or nonfiction about the west or American history, his latest being Destined to Ride Alone, a young adult novel about an orphan escaping a terrible past. Like me, he's a member of the Western Writers of America.

I can't remember what firearm I had placed in the hands of  Prudence Baker, the leading lady in my story. Prudence knows even less about firearms and guns than I do. In the opening scene, she levels an empty shotgun at a man she perceive to be a threat. It goes without saying that her rash action didn't help her much. Thank goodness for the story, and for Prudence, Bob Yoho let me know that there were better firearms to place in Prudence's hands. 

Bob suggested I give Prudence a Roper revolving shotgun like the one pictured above. This was an early cartridge-firing repeating shotgun and could carry and fire four rounds without reloading. It used a rather unusual open-bolt mechanism that I (and I assume Prudence) don't quite understand. When you fully cock the hammer, a shell drops into position between the bolt and chamber. Pulling the trigger causes the bolt to drop forward, chamber the cartridge, lock it in place, and fire it. Cock the hammer again and the fired casing leaves the chamber but stays in the rotary magazine, and a new shell slips into the firing position. As a result, you can fire four rounds before you have to unload four empty shells from the magazine carousel. Lucky for me, I had Bob to help me understand this process, while Prudence had Thomas Johnson to teach her how to shoot. 

The Roper revolving shotgun was invented by a man named Sylvester Howard Roper, who invented a lot of things besides arms. Born November 24, 1823 in Francestown, New Hampshire, he showed interest in mechanical contraptions form an early age. When he was twelve he made a stationary steam engine even though he had never seen one. Two years later, he built a locomotive engine. Roper left Francestown at a young age to pursue work as a machinist.In 1842 he filed for his first patent, which was on a padlock. 1854 he invented a small, handheld sewing machine. In 1861 he invented a hot air engine and filed  patents for several more. His most powerful engine could produce 4 HP. His last invention, filed with the patent office in 1894, was for a fire-escape.

Roper's interest in guns may have begun during the Civil War, when he worked at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. More formally known as the United States Armory and Arsenal, and opened in 1777, it was the first federal armory and one of the first factories in the United States dedicated to the manufacture of weapons.The Armory closed in 1968.

While Roper was there, the facility outpaced Confederate firearm production by a ratio of 32 to 1, a decisive factor in the outcome of the war. Advancements in machine manufacturing allowed the Armory to increase production capacity from just 9,601 firearms in 1860 to 276,200 in 1864. In addition to shear numbers, advancements in technology and design made the name Springfield famous for its muskets and rifles and inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write an anti-war poem about the factory. The Springfield Model 1903 continued to be used in both World War One and Two.

Roper invented the first shotgun choke, a set of short tubes that could be threaded onto the outside of a shotgun barrel. This allowed the shooter to vary how wide his shot would spread, suiting different targets and ranges.

He invented his revolving shotgun and a revolving repeating rifle sometime around 1866, when he filed for a patent on his creation. In 1882, he and the more famous gunmaker Christopher Miner Spencer were granted a joint patent for an even more sophisticated repeating shotgun mechanism. Roper continued to refine revolving magazines and repeating mechanisms, filing more patents in 1889.

But Roper's first love was engines, not firearms, and it was engines that gave him his most glory and was possibly the cause of his death. 

In 1863 he built one of the earliest automobiles, a steam carriage that he drove around his Boston neighborhood. The Roper steam velocipede, built in 1867, was a kind of bicycle with an attached steam engine, and may have been the first ever motorcycle. Sylvester Roper was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002 because of this invention, which should figure prominently in every steampunk novel or movie.

The contraption had an oak and steel frame. It ran on handcrafted ash wheels, which must have produced a hard, bumpy ride. The rider placed his feet on footpegs that stuck out of the front axle, a position that was not ideal for steering.  

The engine was powered by vertical firetube boiler that was heated by charcoal. It had one cylinder on each side of the frame and used the rear axle as a crankshaft. Piston valves were driven by return cranks on the outside of the main cranks. The water-tank was in the seat, and the steam pressure gauge was connected by a rubber hose to the seat's front.

Roper exhibited his steam buggies and velocipedes at circuses and county fairs, where they were huge hits. 

Father Stanley: New Mexico's Priest and Historian

 

In 1940, a 38-year-old former Franciscan named Francis Stanley Louis Crocchiola arrived in Taos to take his position as assistant pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The journey to Taos had been a long and complicated one, but his arrival marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to influence how people study the history of New Mexico.

Francis Stanley Louis Crocchiola began life as Louis Crocchiola.  The sixth child in a family that eventually grew to eleven children, he was born in Greenwich Village, New York on Halloween, October 31, 1908. His parents, Vincent and Rose Crocchiola, were Italian immigrants.

During his junior year at the all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School, Crocchiola decided he wanted to become a teacher. However, since teaching positions were few and far between in the late 1920s, his parish priest suggested he join the church and combine teaching with the priesthood. Despite his father’s objections, Louis enlisted in the Franciscan Order of the Atonement and began his seminary studies at St. John’s on the Hudson in New York. He was ordained on February 10, 1938 at Immaculate Conception Shrine in Washington, D.C. and began teaching at the same seminary from which he had graduated.

Then, God intervened. Three days after being ordained, doctors found two spots on his right lung. Crocchiola, who had added Frances and Stanley to his name when he was ordained, had developed tuberculosis. Antibiotics had not yet been developed, and the cure for tuberculosis was to live in a place with a dry climate and low humidity. Church officials allowed the priest to choose where he could go to recuperate and Crocchiola, who had been fascinated by tales of the Old West, chose Hereford, Texas, in the flat and arid Llano Estacado.

Crocchiola, who now went by the far easier to spell and pronounce name of Father Stanley, did not arrive in Hereford to propitious signs for his recovery. He stepped off the train in February 1939 during one of the region’s black dust storms. Furthermore, while the Archdiocese of New York wanted their priest to heal, they also needed his services. By fall, he found himself back in New York, again teaching at St. John’s. For two years, he bounced back and forth from duties on the east coast and brief respites on Texas plains as his health deteriorated.

Finally, Father Stanley sent an urgent request to his governing board, the Commission of the Archdiocese of New York, to find a permanent place for him in a southwestern climate. Since they were not able to meet his pleas, they granted him permission to find his own solution to his problem. Father Stanley left the Franciscans and became a diocesan priest. He then appealed to the Archbishop of Santa Fe, R. A. Gerken, for an assignment in New Mexico, arguing that he was fluent in Spanish. The archbishop assigned him the assistant pastorate of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Taos.

A year later, Father Stanley became the pastor of San Miguel Church in Socorro. He later served parishes in Raton, Villa Nueva, Sapello and Pecos. While he was serving at Pecos, he was sitting in a restaurant owned by a man who had formerly been a policeman in New York City. Stanley asked about a bullet hole in the restaurant’s front window and the former cop confessed that the hole had a real story and the one he told because it was good for business. The truth was, someone, he did not know who, had accidentally put a bullet hole in the window. But when people asked about it, the owner said it was from someone who was shooting at Jesse James. This prompted Stanley to begin questioning whether the stories he heard from his parishioners were true or mythic.

In 1946 Father Stanley became the fifth pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church, a small adobe structure on Martinez Street in the eastern section of Raton, New Mexico. His rectory had been a coal camp house in a town filled with a lot of mining and history of immigrants who came to work those mines. He contacted the Santa Fe Archives Department requesting information about the town, and received a six-volume set of books. Only one page was about Raton.

 Stanley decided to do his own research, interviewing Raton natives, searching through documents in the county clerk’s office, the public library, and the files of The Raton Daily Range. This resulted in a steady stream of articles about Raton and other Colfax spots published in Catholic and historical periodicals.  In 1948, he published his first book, The Raton Chronicle. He convinced several women who worked at local banks to transcribe and type his handwritten manuscript and got a local artist to design and illustrate the cover. Knowing that Father Francis Stanley Louis Crocchiola was too difficult for most people to pronounce or spell, he published with book under the pen name F. Stanley. While most people today assume the F is for Father and refers to his priesthood, it actually stands for Francis. 

But if The Raton Chronicle was F. Stanley’s first book, it certainly wasn’t his last. He decided to write a book about every town in New Mexico, even the remote, thinly populated ones and the ones that had ceased to exist. Stanley wanted readers to be able to understand what life was like, even in the most out-of-the-way places in New Mexico. He wanted readers to have the opportunity to glimpse the minutiae of life in a bygone era.  “Now and then people talk about places like Yeso,” Stanley writes in his introduction to his book The Yeso New Mexico Story, “but no one seems interested enough to preserve its history on paper. It may not be exciting or interesting, but it is a place, it has a name, it has people. Yeso may not be important to the man at the wheel trying to make it from California to New York in three or four days, but it is very important to the people who call it home or once called it home.”

Stanley’s dedication led to the publication of 177 books. While his The Civil War in New Mexico is a whopping 544 pages, most of his titles run from eighteen to twenty-six pages. Printed on folded-over 8.5 x 11 paper which has either been stapled or saddle-stitched in the cross-section, these little editions are a kind of historical chapbook. Most have the same, simply-designed cover featuring a red zia symbol on a bright yellow background, and a title that states the name of the subject, a town, village, or ghost town in a format such as “The Wallace (New Mexico) Story” depicted here and published in 1962. The information in these booklets include snippets of old-timer gossip, and facts gleaned from newspaper clippings, old hotel registers, and the records of early explorers to the region. 

A few years back, I received a large assortment of F. Stanley’s books. Looking through them, I found them an amusing and sometimes charming collection of gossip, recollections, and detailed minutiae that fascinated me. Even though it is relatively close to where I live, I had never heard of Wallace, a town that Stanley said was thirty-three miles northeast of Albuquerque and three miles east of Santo Domingo pueblo, along the Galisteo River. Wallace, he said, was along the stagecoach trail that also linked San Pedro and Golden and was an important station along the A.T.&S.F.R.R railroad. Stanley provides the names of the leading businesses of the town and the positions of those who were in town government. He talks about how the locals built their own school, and what they did for entertainment.

But the most interesting bits of information were the ones about J. H. (otherwise known as Ellis) Conway, who was the town’s fourth Justice of the Peace. Stanley states that Conway, whose real name was O. L. Hale, was arrested in Silver City, New Mexico in February 1883 by an Iowa Sheriff who wanted to extradite him to Lucas county, Iowa on forgery and jailbreaking charges. On their train trip back east, a second sheriff, this one from Trinidad, Colorado, tried to wrest Conway from the Iowa sheriff so that Conway would face manslaughter charges dating back to 1878. Also included in Stanley’s telling is corruption in Wallace, including a bunco ring. (Bunco then must not have been the fun game it is now.) Stanley’s story was just too fun, and it became the basis for my novel The Winding Road to Wallace.

After decades as a priest in New Mexico, Stanley was sent back to Texas, where he served in the Texas communities of Rotan, St. Francis, Canadian, Stratford, White Deer, Lubbock, Friona, Dumas, Pep, Amarillo, and finally, Nazareth. On his days off he did research at West Texas’ A&M University Library. He often used his vacations to visit with older residents of small western towns to gather more information for his books. 

The former New Yorker, sent out west by his superiors to recover his health, became fascinated by the heritage of New Mexico. He loved the state, and apparently the state loved him back, for instead of dying young, he lived until 1996, when he died at the advanced age of 87. He is buried in the Nazareth, Texas cemetery.