Who owns new mexico

If you don't consider Coronado as our first tourist, ranching is New Mexico's only year-old industry. We won't try to detail the tortured overall history of land ownership in New Mexico, except to note a few basic facts. Historically, vast chunks of land were granted to private citizens as either a reward for services rendered, a payoff for political support or as a means by which a government solidified its influence over a region.

These grants often conflicted with what Indian tribes and pueblos saw as their property rights from time immemorial. From the s until the advent of U. This created great controversy. Usually, the grants were unsurveyed and they often overlapped one another. Indian rights were not always considered. Not every grant recipient fulfilled the specified conditions to get clear title, such as taking up residence and engaging in agriculture.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the agreement that ended the Mexican War and ceded most of what is now New Mexico to the United States, protected grant holders who had perfected their titles. But the U. Senate refused to ratify a provision that would have vested grantees merely in the process.

Indeed, much of New Mexico's vast federal acreage today is the result of disallowed Mexican or Spanish land grants. The result was decades of litigation--and fraud, as all kinds of dubious documents surfaced in purported support of these ancient rights.

New Mexico lawyer Thomas B. Catron gained wealth and political power--he later became a U. Senator and a county on the Arizona border is named for him--partly due to his uncanny ability to defend old land claims, often in exchange for a piece of the action. In The Santa Fe New Mexican reported he owned about 2 million acres and was part-owner or lawyer for owners of another 4 million acres.

Decades of boom and bust. We don't know of anyone today with 2 million acres of New Mexico, although oilman Robert O. Anderson, now of Roswell, may have been in that league until his fortune collapsed a few years ago. Decades of boom and bust have forced the division and sale of many large spreads. But since territorial days, New Mexico tax policy has been heavily skewed in favor of big landowners.

Property taxes are relatively low, offset by sky-high state income taxes and a gross receipts tax that unlike those in many other states does not exempt foodstuffs, clothing or clothing.

Nor do you have to be filthy rich to own significant land in New Mexico. It's not surprising that only two persons on this list—William D. Sanders and John Yates—made the Crosswinds list last fall of the state's 25 richest persons. As part of our research, we talked with county tax assessors, appraisers and other land experts. Members of our team made hundreds of telephone calls, visited some of the state's 33 county courthouses to examine land records and poured through library holdings.

In some cases we had to make judgment calls about whether to amass lands of disparate family members for the purpose of this list. That's why, for example, the many branches of the Perez families of Torrance and Guadalupe Counties aren't here.

One big caveat: While clearly we have identified the overwhelming bulk of the largest individual and family landholdings in the state, we really can't guarantee that we have found them all. While we tried to confirm acreages in some cases we relied on knowledgeable estimates from land experts. Believe or not, evaluating large landholdings is almost as much art as science.

William P. Barrett is the Special Projects Editor of Crosswinds. He is a veteran journalist for national publications, most recently as a Worth magazine contributing editor. This month Barrett rejoins Forbes magazine as an associate editor. He has since relocated to the Los Angeles area. Juliet Casey, Daniel J. All six, students at the University of New Mexico, worked as editors or reporters on the New Mexico Daily Lobo , the student newspaper. Kryloff and Barrett last wrote for Crosswinds in October when they and Ray Langley co-authored The Crosswinds 25 , a list of the state's richest persons.

We are grateful to Worth magazine , which in March published a pioneering list of the country's largest landowners, including 12 on this list. Ted Turner , Roswell GA, 1,, acres. Lee family , San Mateo NM, , acres. Bidegain family , Tucumcari NM, , acres. King family , Stanley NM, , acres. A central issue was the uphill job of adapting to a new pace and pattern of life, one ruled by a different philosophy. A country and people so unlike the rest of the United States seemed to have a poor chance of adjusting to the militant demands of American patriotism and economic nationalism.

Yet things were not as black as they appeared. The New Mexicans, like most pioneers, were accustomed to living by luck and hope, and they possessed some firm traits of character, often overlooked by American newcomers, that promised to see them through the hard times of their territorial days. The Anglo-Americans entering New Mexico in the late s and s were small in numbers but large in influence. New merchants came, as establishment of regular stagecoach and freight service with the East stimulated business.

The ranks of the military swelled with the construction of Fort Union and Fort Stanton on the Indian frontier. Besides the merchants and soldiers, there were the lawyers in frock coats and bat-wing collars. The state of New Mexican politics in the period following the Mexican War was ready-made for lawyers and opportunists of all sorts to jockey for advantage.

The assassination of Governor Charles Bent and the collapse in of the civil government created by Kearny left the area under virtual military rule. In the meanwhile, persons on the Rio Grande broke into two opposing camps: the supporters of a territorial form of government, and the advocates of immediate statehood.

In the main, Anglo-Americans, being in the minority, favored the territorial system. If New Mexico stayed a territory, its principal officials would be appointed in Washington. For that reason, the Hispanic majority tended to lean toward statehood; with the right to elect their own officials, they could easily put native New Mexicans into the highest offices.

The Compromise of , among other things provided for the organization of New Mexico as a territory. The Compromise also resolved another complicated matter — an old Texas claim to that portion of New Mexico lying east of the Rio Grande. The Territory, as organized in , included the New Mexico and Arizona of later years, and a part of southern Colorado. In accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, a joint boundary commission was organized and began in July the task of surveying a dividing line between the two nations.

The US surveyors working with the commission also had instructions to look for a practical railroad route to the Pacific, close to the boundary, and to ascertain the agricultural possibilities of the new country. In the course of the boundary work, it was discovered that the map used to establish the original treaty line had been inaccurate and that the border would in fact have to be placed thirty miles farther north. That slip meant withdrawing five or six thousand square miles from the United States and losing a potentially rich farming district in the Mesilla valley.

Before a serious dispute could develop, the American minister to Mexico, James Gadsden, negotiated in the treaty that bears his name, providing for the purchase of a large tract of desert land in southern New Mexico. The area offered an advantageous route for a transcontinental railway entirely on American soil, and its acquisition concluded the final adjustment of our border with Mexico. The gold rush to the Rockies and the ensuing boom in population led to the formation of the Colorado Territory in As a result, New Mexico lost ground, for its northern boundary was pulled back to the parallel of 37 degrees.

The reduction meant the territory was deprived of a valuable coal-mining area around Trinidad and of jurisdiction over those outermost settlements in the upper San Luis valley created by New Mexicans in the previous decade. In these early years of adjusting to its new place in the Union, New Mexico absorbed a respectable quota of adventurers, gamblers, speculators, and renegade whiskey-peddlers from the eastern states — but it also got a share of those solid upright, intelligent citizens representing the glue that held a democratic society together and gave it its strength.

Of several newspapers that shortly began printing in the territory, one, the Weekly Gazette, called attention in to the newly formed Santa Fe Literary Club whose president, interestingly, was a native New Mexican, Nicholas Quintana dedicated to the expansion of knowledge and the holding of debates on burning questions of the day.

Even more lustrous was the Historical Society of New Mexico, founded in , probably the first such scholarly body to appear anywhere in the Far West. Lamy, a Frenchman by birth and a zealot when it came to charitable works and the mission of the Catholic Church. The new bishop, after his arrival in , began a campaign to impose religious discipline upon the native clergy, whose lighthearted style of living caused him personal pain and scandalized the Americans.

But Lamy did manage to begin a new era in the moral and spiritual life of New Mexico. Working with the energy of a whirlwind, he built in succeeding years forty-five new churches and a string of parochial schools. Knopf, New York, Before education or the natural process of assimilation could make much headway, however, the people of the Southwest found themselves caught up in the momentous and ugly Civil War. It was an issue in which the New Mexicans felt only a small stake.

The question of the expansion of slavery to the western territories, especially the New Mexico territory, dominated the debate in Congress during the s. Actually, in all the New Mexico territory, there were only twenty-one black slaves in Many politicians in Washington had long recognized New Mexico as a land unsuitable for slavery because the agriculture was small in scale and native labor was both plentiful and cheap.

Territorial citizens had approved antislavery resolutions in and But a reversal in sentiment came in , with adoption of a slavery code engineered by Miguel A. Otero, the New Mexican delegate to Congress. Territorial New Mexicans desired to be left alone, for they saw little to be gained by joining in the political arguments between the North and the South over slavery and the legality of secession.

When the storm broke, splitting the country in half, New Mexico unexpectedly found herself part of the theater of conflict. From the outset, the newly formed Confederacy cast covetous eyes westward, where it dreamed of creating an empire that would reach the Pacific.

Winning the West became a crucial aspect of winning the war for the Confederacy. The grand strategy developed by Southern leaders showed plainly that as a first step toward westward expansion, New Mexico must be brought into the Confederacy.

At the outbreak of the Civil War the affairs of the upper Rio Grande made it appear that Confederate annexation of New Mexico could be accomplished with relative ease. In the lower part of the territory there existed a hard core of Southern sympathizers — mainly ranchers out of Texas, who had settled in the Mesilla district. Most of the ranking officers serving in the New Mexico military defected to the South, bringing with them precious information on war material stored at several territorial forts.

The Rio Grande, for centuries the scene of fierce struggles between the Spanish and Native Americans now experienced the violence between Northerners and Southerners. Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley of the Confederate army and Colonel Edward R. The Battle of Valverde involved the bloodiest kind of tough, stand-up fighting. At the end of the day Col. The laurels, however, were anything but clearly won. General Sibley seriously miscalculated the strength of Union arms opposing him in the north.

The Civil War in the Southwest was indeed moving toward a climax. On March 27 and 28, , regular troops from Fort Union, supported by the Colorado Volunteers, met the Rebels at Glorieta, in what would become known as the Gettysburg of the West. Chivington of the volunteers delivered a wholly unexpected thunderbolt. The debacle at Glorieta and the retreat to Texas scuttled for all time Confederate hopes for an empire in western America.

One consequence of the Civil War in the Southwest was that the U. Congress finally turned its attention to the creating of another territory. Arizona was carved from the western half of New Mexico in Another outcome was that it left the frontier open to attack by hostile Indians.

It was not lost on the tribes seeking plunder or bearing old grudges that the white men were fighting among themselves, abandoning forts, and withdrawing troops for duty in the East. The ensuing bloodshed brought nightmare days to New Mexico. His troops were ready for acting and he had fixed notions about how to deal with hostile tribes. Placing Militia Colonel Kit Carson in charge of troops in the field, the general sent his men to harry the tribe into submission.

Here Fort Sumner, constructed by Carleton, stood guard. Next it was the turn of the Navajo, a people numbering at that time some ten thousand and inhabiting the crumpled and rock-strewn lands of western New Mexico. For years, Spanish and Mexican expeditions had tried to bring them to bay, but the Navajo proved too nimble, fading into the remote canyon lands whenever their enemies gave chase.

During the last half of , government troops marched and countermarched through Navajo land, destroying crops and orchards and capturing livestock. They fought no major battles, but their campaigning left the Navajo economy in ruins. If you would like to help our coverage grow, consider donating to Ballotpedia. Federal land policy involves the ownership and management of land owned by the federal government.

As of , the federal government owned between million to million acres, or 28 percent, of the 2. Federal land is managed for many purposes, such as the conservation and development of natural resources , grazing and recreation. The federal government owns The federal government owned between million and million acres of land in about 28 percent of the 2.

Around 52 percent of federally owned acres were in 12 Western states—including Alaska , 61 percent of which was federally owned. In contrast, the federal government owned 4 percent of land in the other 38 states. Federal land policy is designed to manage minerals, oil and gas resources, timber, wildlife and fish, and other natural resources found on federal land. Land management policies are highly debated for their economic, environmental and social impacts.

Additionally, the size of the federal estate and the acquisition of more federal land are major issues. Of that total, More than From to , the federal government's land ownership in New Mexico increased by 2. The table below shows federal land ownership in New Mexico compared to its neighbor, Texas , and a northeastern state, Massachusetts.

The U. Bureau of Land Management owned nearly half of all federal land in New Mexico New Mexico has 13 National Park Service units, 10 national monuments, eight national forests, 25 wilderness areas, three national historic trails and two national conservation areas. A study by the U.

National Park Service found that 1. The table below contains a list of all state parks in New Mexico. Private mining companies, including oil and natural gas companies, can apply for leases from the U. The company seeking a lease must nominate the land for oil and gas exploration to the BLM, which evaluates and approves the lease.

The BLM state offices make leasing decisions based on their land use plans, which contain information on the land's resources and the potential environmental impact of oil or gas exploration. If federal lands are approved for leasing, the BLM requires an application from the company containing information on how the exploration, drilling and production will be conducted.