Chapter 3. 1886: Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory

From his desk by the door, where he’d been busy shuffling papers and making notes all morning, Baca said to me, “Marshal, I believe it would save the District money if we added another deputy.”

I suppressed a smile — actually I suppressed an outright laugh. When Baca had turned twenty-one back in February, I’d told Elfego that he could have the next deputy position that opened up. Hired to be our clerk, he’d been chomping at the bit ever since. Still, I knew the young man didn’t make idle claims and I reckoned he might have something of value to contribute. I decided to find out.

“What have you got, Señor Baca? Bring those papers over to the deputies’ table where we’ll have some room to work and you can explain it to me.”

I left my desk and walked over to the six-by-three foot table the deputies used when they were in Santa Fe, usually brought here for court appearances or to deliver prisoners. We housed federal prisoners in the Santa Fe County jail, which held a special contract with the federal district court just for that purpose. We kept the table clear of extraneous material so the deputies would feel they had a dedicated work space when they were in town.

The only items on the table were a jar that held a half dozen sharpened pencils and a stack of three shallow baskets one of which held blank sheets of paper and the other two the most-used forms that a deputy might require: Incident Report and Mileage and Expense Claim forms. Incident Reports were used to provide accounts of a deputy’s official dealings, from meetings with local officials and transfers of prisoners to gun battles, injuries, and deaths.

I pushed the baskets and the jar to one end of the table and watched Baca bring over a sheaf of pages which he began separating into several stacks, each topped by a page of Baca’s well-organized notes. I saw pages of his neat hand that held summaries of annual expense reports, mileage fees, and travel reimbursement breakdowns, and further breakdowns between deputies’ out-bound mileage and return mileage with prisoners, which were paid at different rates. The final stack was the monthly accounts of cell rentals from county jails and town lockups where federal prisoners were held until a deputy marshal assumed their custody.

Deputy United States Marshals were not paid a salary. They earned mileage fees for various federal prisoner transport duties and arrest fees for service of federal fugitive arrest warrants, the latter for personally finding and arresting fugitives who were charged with federal crimes. The miles accrued in those searches was also reimbursed, but only if they made an arrest. As the District Marshal, I retained twenty-five percent of those fees, beyond my base salary of seventy-three dollars a month. When I was a deputy, I’d averaged about forty dollars a month, not including the occasional fugitive rewards from non-federal sources, which could exceed my monthly deputy’s pay by three or four times. But those were just happenstance and nothing I counted on.

Sometimes deputies held second jobs or ran a business to supplement their income. That wasn’t a problem as long as it didn’t interfere with or involve their duties or authority as a federal deputy marshal. My chief deputy, Orrin Spencer, was a Mormon bishop at the Latter Day Saints’ Lordsburg stake. One of the deputy marshals, Felix Bannerman, also worked as a part-time sheriff’s deputy. When I was a deputy, I’d used reward money to invest in local businesses. Most of the deputies, however, chose to lead a frugal, though not deprived, life. It was when a man decided to get married and raise a family that things got tight. Most deputies weren’t married.

Currently, the New Mexico Territory Judicial District had seven deputies serving eight sub-districts. They were posted in Gallup, Lordsburg, Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Laguna, and Roswell. Santa Fe County was its own sub-district and was, ostensibly, overseen by the New Mexico District Marshal himself, that being, currently, me. In practice, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, as happened with most local law enforcement offices throughout the Territory, was usually the arresting agency. In the case of an actual federal fugitive warrant to be served, I could either do the job myself, or recruit help from local law officers, who were paid at the rate of a dollar fifty a day. But federal fugitives in the capital were rare, and prisoner transfers were never required, as the Santa Fe County Jail was where all transfers ended up from throughout the territory.

Looking at me briefly, Baca began with, “Part of the problem is that the deputy sub-districts were laid out before the railroads were built. Marshal Garrison based the sub-districts on distance and population, and it made good sense at the time, more or less.” His last comment suggested some equivocation, and I suspect he meant the Taos sub-district, which had been my assigned post as a deputy. The sub-district was laid out to include two natural features that effectively cut it into three separate sections requiring excessive indirect travel.

Baca went on, “But now, if we were to depend more on railroad travel, we could reduce the cell-rents we’re paying to local jails.”

“Hold on a second,” I objected. “How do you figure to save money by paying for more railroad fares?”

“By at least two ways, Marshal. Firstly, we would reduce cell-rent fees by removing federal prisoners from most local jails sooner. Secondly, train travel will reduce per-diem costs in transit by reducing deputies’ time-in-transit through faster travel by train rather than on horseback.

“And, finally, there is a third reason. Amador Cabal tells me that the Department of the Interior has negotiated contract rates with the railroads that are one-half the normal passenger fare, and even less in a baggage car or caboose if the deputy has a prisoner.”

That sort of fare reduction by the railroads was not as remarkable as it might seem.

The profit in railroading was concentrated in the hauling of freight, not passengers. Most passenger services, except in some populated areas of the country, actually lost money for the roads, so the lowered fares would barely be noticed. What made passenger service worthwhile for the roads was that passenger trains brought settlers to buy railroad-owned land and then those settlers raised crops or produced goods that would then be hauled away by railroad freight trains. At the same time, passenger service for local settlers made their lives more tenable and hence more inclined to buy the goods that railroad freight trains brought from other places. One might say that passenger services primed the pump for the freight services.

Moreover, at that time, the railroads found themselves in a hazardous political situation.

There had been a growing din of protest over the railroads’ uneven and seemingly arbitrary freight fee practices, and Congress had been taking an interest. Many congressman were coming out in support of federal regulation of interstate commerce. Hence, it was possible the generous federal passenger fare reduction was an effort to head off government concerns about freight rates.

The United States Department of the Interior was involved because it had been created in eighteen seventy-three specifically to manage the U.S. territories and other domestic lands. Previously, the Department of State had held that oversight, even though the designated concern of the Department of State was external relations, that is, foreign affairs.

I was aware of all this because, in my job as District Marshal, I was a political appointee. Therefore, I purposely kept abreast of national and local political news, at least as far as newspapers and gossip went.

Gazing at Baca’s serious face, I realized that I was no longer surprised by the young man’s academic displays.

Baca had attended a demanding church school in Kansas through the sixth grade, at which point the family moved back to New Mexico. In Belen, he had another year at a Jesuit-run school, finishing their coursework. Since then, he had been largely self-taught, spending much of his spare time reading. And he had been a quick study when it came to office procedures and record-keeping. He’d even hinted that some day he might want to become an attorney.

The mention of railroad fares brought to mind a flurry of reports that had been required during the winter. “Oh. Is that why we had to gather all those travel records in December?”

“Yes, sir. That’s when I first got interested in minuting the expenses accrued by the deputies.”

“So it wasn’t since February tenth, then?” Baca blushed; February tenth had been his twenty-first birthday, when he became eligible to serve as a regular federal deputy marshal.

“That might have made it a bit more personal, Marshal, but it had caught my attention when we collected the train travel records.”

“I’m sure it was, Elfego. My comment was meant to tease.”

“I realized that, Marshal. I just...” His voice faded into uncertainty.

“So what is it exactly that you are proposing?”

“Well, sir, I think it would better serve to organize the districts based on the greater use of railroad travel.”

I nodded. “Some questions come to mind, but I’ll hold them until you’ve made your case.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Baca went to his desk and returned with a paper roll that, as he opened it on the table, revealed itself to be a map of New Mexico Territory. Among the major towns, rail lines, and land features, someone — I assumed Baca — had outlined our current deputy sub-districts in heavy pencil. He looked up at me and said, “I may make some obvious points, Marshal, but I’ll mention them only in passing to construct a base for my recommendations.

“The first of those obvious points is that most of the Territory’s populace is concentrated along the few rivers and in the mining districts, and more recently along the railroads. In the case of the central Rio Grande and Mesilla Valleys, we have both the railroad and the river supporting a growing number of settlements, including railroad towns on every line, such as Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Deming. Outside of that, we have extensive regions with very few people, mostly scattered in Indian reservations, cattle and horse ranches, a number of small villages, and a few small towns like Agua Negras, Fort Sumner, Lincoln, Roswell, and Eddy. Those last are all in the eastern third of the Territory in the Pecos River Valley. The northeast corner of the Territory has very few people, as does the region between the Pecos and the Rio Grande valleys. Another area with little population is in the northwest corner, except for a few settlers along the Rio San Juan and its tributaries, between the Jicarilla reservation and the Navajo reservation. The northern part of the Jemez mountain region is mostly empty, too.

“Something else I considered was the barriers to travel. The Sangre de Cristo and the Organ Mountains present the biggest obstacles, especially in the winter, when they are all but impassable. Those ranges extend from up in Colorado all the way to Las Cruces — except for Glorieta Pass, east of Lamy, which the Santa Fe trains use and which is open year-round. In the summer and early fall, there are a number of mountain passes that allow slow but practical crossings every ten or fifteen miles, at least if you’re on horseback.