Rail and water, water and rail. These were the indicators of value and future promise on the Great Plains in the 1870s. A man or a woman could make something of the land with them, but would probably fail without them, or so it was understood. Economic failure was a real possibility in the depression years after 1873, but the decade was also an…

The Pecos River of the nineteenth century, unlike its faint twenty-first century shadow, was a formidable watercourse. The river stretches some 755 miles, from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe to its eventual merger with the Rio Grande. Control over the public domain of southeastern New Mexico came from controlling access to…