Cocoposts

The Fantastic Fraudulent Floating Land Grant

The Peralta Grant scheme to defraud the government and the people of Arizona was cooked up by a clever opportunist named “Doc” Willing. Willing died long before realizing his dream and shortly after involving a St Louis real estate developer named James Addison Reavis. Reavis saw it through to the bitter end when he was found guilty by the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims in Santa Fe and sentenced to a fine and two years in prison. He died penniless in Denver in 1914.

The huge claim stretched from Silver City to Phoenix and encompassed the territory’s richest
 land. At the time Reavis got involved, the substance of the audacious movida consisted of old 
papers in a burlap sack and some carvings on a rock near Casa Grande. Like some other slick promoters and profiteers of the era, Reavis was from Missouri.  He had
 enlisted in the Confederacy but surrendered to Union forces after forging furlough papers.
Thomas Catron later recalled that Reavis had served in his artillery regiment but left to get
 married and never returned.

While the outcome of the scheme was ultimately unsuccessful, Reavis profited for years from
quitclaim deeds sold to settlers and miners.

To be continued...

Source: The Peralta Grant: James Addison Reavis and the Barony of Arizona. Donald M. Powell, University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.

Four Decades on the Horse

Will Sands in The Durango Telegraph has the history of the Iron Horse, the bike race from Durango to Silverton this weekend, and the brothers who started it all. (Telegraph Photo of rider on Coal Bank Pass last week.)

Four decades later, Tom and Jim Mayer are also going to make a second run at it. In honor of the 40th anniversary, the brothers will again race from Durango to Silverton this Saturday, Jim inside the locomotive and Tom atop the same Schwinn Paramount that he rode and won the original challenge on back in 1971. “It’s no longer a 10-speed; my knees can’t do that any more,” Mayer said. “But I thought it would only be appropriate to ride the original frame in tribute.”

(Telegraph photo of an early Iron Horse race)

Roundhouse Compass

  A compass is useless in a directional crisis if you don't happen to have it with you.  But there's no excuse to be willfully ignorant when you've got one.  I suppose it's a little like a man I know who has a GPS in his car but won't listen to a woman's voice telling him where to go.  She's always saying, recalculating, recalculating. I think he enjoys trying to confuse her.

The debate and outcome of the driver's license bill on the House Floor felt historic  -  not in a good way.  I felt like a House groupie with a hangover when it was over - the rapid-fire phrases: mister-speaker-gentleman-from-donaana, and motion-to-go-out-of-the-order-of- business-committee-reports ringing in my ears. 

The Seven Burros of Bronson Cutting

About my favorite sculpture at the Roundhouse is the bust of Bronson M. Cutting. His big chubby face greets those approaching the capitol from the east where he faces Atalaya Hill, the direction of his beautiful home, Los Siete Burros, located on Old Santa Fe Trail. (Historic Santa Fe Foundation)

The bronze was commissioned by his friends and admirers and dedicated at a ceremony in 1939 on the anniversary of his death in a plane crash four years earlier.

Bronson Cutting fell in love with New Mexico and its people upon his arrival in 1910 and devoted the rest of his relatively short life to improving their lot.  His "rare combination of moral courage, modesty and marked ability" was directed at fighting injustice and advancing progressive policies.

Although nominally a Republican, he shunned party regularity to champion progressive reform in state and local government. After his service in World War I, Cutting organized the Hispanic veterans through American Legion chapters and forced the Republican and Democratic parties to adopt progressive planks and candidates and to include qualified Hispanics in their administrations. Once elected to the United States Senate in 1928, Cutting criticized the weak efforts of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt to end the Great Depression. (Bronson M. Cutting: Progressive Republican, by Richard Lowitt.)

Stephen Fox describes the political scene in Desert Exposure: 

In the north they danced to the tune called by the Maxwell Land Grant Company, coal mines and the Santa Fe Railroad; in the south it was the Phelps-Dodge and Chino mining companies and the El Paso Railroad. The Republicans also made mutually profitable alliances, blatantly exchanging bribes for votes, with the old Spanish land-grant ranchers and stockmen who controlled the Hispanic counties in the north.

The Democrats were clustered in "Little Texas," the southeastern part of New Mexico that was settled in the late 1800s by former slaveholders from the neighboring state. The Democrats were virulently racist, even by the minimal standards of 1912. (...)  

Cutting declared a plague on both their houses: Republicans were too crooked, he decided, and Democrats were too anti-Hispanic. Instead he became a party unto himself. His main allies, it turned out, were Hispanics, who then numbered about 60% of all New Mexicans.

Jack LaLanne RIP

Pipe Politics

Concerns that new Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval's reorganization of the State's Agricultural Department is motivated by ag board opposition to the proposed water pipeline seem not too far-fetched.  (More from the Great Basin Water Network.)

Patricia Mulroy, Water Empress, the Southern Nevada Water Authority's chief executive,  and very very pro-pipe and pro-pipe growth, is on the Gov's transition team. 

Ag board members and others probably oppose it because without water there is no agriculture, or much life at all in the Great Basin for that matter.  But I'm just guessing here.

Martinez Mythmaking

NMPolitics guest puts Martinez in Thatcher's league.  That's it.  NM needs a Falklands War. 

Few of the objective comparisons between our incoming governor and the former Prime Minister of Great Britain are going to be very flattering.  To either one of them.  Insight from Germaine Greer in UK Guardian on Thatcher's rise to power and the media.

It was the Sun that dubbed Thatcher "Maggie" and created for her an entirely new persona, concentrating on good housekeeping values and the breathy rhetoric of making Britain great again. ... The alliance between the Maggie machine and the Murdoch media made possible the ultimate defeat of the print unions and the modernisation of the newspaper industry. And another brick was added to the rising edifice of Thatcherism.

 

Edward Abbey's Cadillac For Sale

1975 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible No Min. No Reserve!

  eBay Motors.

Obama's Big Dog

Love the photo of the White House dog, Bo, in the doorway.  And I believe that's Obama's new budget director, Jacob Lew.  I got it from Ezra Klien's Wonkbook at The Washington Post.

From the Post Who Runs Government site:

Widely respected by centrists and liberals alike, Lew was a well-received selection for deputy secretary of state by policy wonks for his competent work as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Clinton administration. In July 2010, President Obama tapped him to return to his old White House stomping grounds as the replacement for outgoing OMB Director Peter Orszag.

Bo got big.  And he has a blog. 

They Rarely Meet a Developer They Don't Like

In spite of economic meltdown and water, the same guys are poised to finance and build the same way.

Las Vegas City Life has a great list they call the Web of Evil excoriating the likes of Sharron Angle, Liberty. com and Americans for New Leadership, as well as a Nevada developer's alliances with a County Commissioner on the Blue Diamond Hill development. 

Local residents and conservationists have been angry with developer Jim Rhodes since mid-March, when county commissioners approved a controversial deal allowing him to build houses on roughly 1,700 acres atop Blue Diamond Hill, near the Red Rock Conservation Area. The deal saw Rhodes drop his 5-year-old lawsuit against the county after commissioners agreed to amend the 2003 ordinance that prompted it. The long-embattled Rhodes first has to emerge from bankruptcy (not easy considering his estimated $400 million in liabilities) and then wait for an eventual market recovery to chew away at the inventory of unsold homes across Southern Nevada.

But Rhodes’ attorneys said he will eventually try to develop the land. Of course, even in a county that rarely meets a developer it doesn’t like, this kind of sensitive deal needs the patronage of local officials to shepherd it through the bureaucracy. Which is where Clark County Commissioner Susan Brager comes in.

Brager, a licensed real estate agent whose district includes the Red Rock area, voted for the deal, chiefly on the advice of Chief Deputy District Attorney Rob Warhola, who acted almost as an advocate for Rhodes during a contentious hearing on the matter.

It all sounds so darn familiar.  You can't write fiction this good.  Trust me on that.  Truth is stranger.

Thanks Robert.