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CHAPTER 1
The History of the Duke City
The ancestral Pueblo natives were the area's first permanent occupants, probably arriving in the sixth century. They planted corn, beans and squash and constructed adobe and brick pit homes along the banks of the Rio Grande. They ultimately disappeared from the region in about AD 1300.
Albuquerque is a magnificently unique combination of the very old and highly contemporary nature, the manmade environment, the frontier town and the cosmopolitan city. It is a harmonious and spectacular combination of extremely diverse cultures, cuisines, people, styles, stories, pursuits and panoramas. It is a city with a rich history, as evidence of inhabitation dates back as long as twenty-five thousand years. That is the estimated age of bones recovered from a cave in the northwestern sector of the Sandia Mountains in 1936.
Anasazi Indians were the next to settle in the area. They lived here for two centuries, from AD 1100 to 1300, and established several communities throughout northwestern New Mexico that were connected by sophisticated transportation and communication networks.
In 1540, the Spanish arrived. Explorer-conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado came north from Mexico in search of the mythical seven cities of Cibola. He — along with his entourage of troops, priests and beasts — is believed to have spent the winter of that year in an Indian pueblo on the west bank of the Rio Grande twenty miles north of Albuquerque. Coronado eventually left, but Spanish settlers began arriving in greater numbers. This was one of the factors eventually leading to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In that year, Pueblo natives overthrew the Spaniards, who had occupied their lands for more than eighty years. Since 1598, Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar brought a small group of colonists into the mesa and canyon country of northern New Mexico, and as a result, Spain asserted its sovereignty over the Pueblo people. Spanish officials demanded that Pueblos pay tribute to the Spanish Crown by working for encomenderos, a small number of privileged Spaniards to whom Spanish officials entrusted the Pueblos and their labor. At the same time, Spanish priests established missions in the Pueblos' farming villages and demanded that the natives abandon their religion in favor of Christianity. The Pueblo natives, who vastly outnumbered their Spanish overlords, tolerated this arrangement for several generations.
Finally, in the late summer of 1680, the Pueblos destroyed the Spanish colony of New Mexico. Coordinating their efforts, they launched a well-planned surprise attack. From the kiva at Taos, Pueblo messengers secretly carried calendars in the form of knotted cords to participating pueblos. Each knot marked a day until the Pueblos would take up arms. The last knot was to be untied on August 11, but the rebellion exploded a day early. Tipped off by sympathetic Pueblos, Spaniards captured two of the rebel messengers on August 9.
When leaders of the revolt learned that they had been betrayed, they moved the attack up a day. Despite the warning, the revolt caught Spaniards off-guard. They could not imagine the magnitude of the planned assault. Scattered in isolated farms and ranches along the Rio Grande and its tributaries, Spaniards were easy prey for the rebels. It was estimated that the Pueblos killed more than four hundred of New Mexico's Hispanic residents, whose total numbers did not exceed three thousand. The rebels desecrated the churches and killed twenty-one of the province's thirty-three Franciscans, in many cases humiliating, tormenting and beating them before taking their lives.
At the time of the revolt, there were more Spanish people living on farms and ranches along the river around present-day Albuquerque than there were in Santa Fe, and about 120 Spanish settlers were killed there. Spanish survivors were driven as far south as present-day El Paso. For the next twelve years, New Mexico remained free of Spanish rule, but eventually the Spanish settlers returned. By the seventeenth century, it was sufficiently populated to have acquired a name, Bosque Grande de San Francisco Xavier. A "bosque" is a forest on the banks of a river or other body of water, or simply an area of thick vegetation.
In 1706, the ambitious provisional governor of the territory, Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdez, petitioned the Spanish government for permission to establish the bosque as a formal villa. The Spanish required a minimum of thirty families in an area to establish a villa. However, Cuervo had only eighteen in Bosque Grande. But Cuervo was a shrewd politician, and he came up with a plan that he felt gave him a good chance of acceptance. Basically, he exaggerated the truth and raised the number of families living in the area. Additionally, he made an interesting offer to the man who was responsible for preliminary approval of his application, Viceroy Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva, the Duke of Alburquerque.
In his application, Cuervo declared that he wanted to establish the villa in the name of the Duke and call it Alburquerque. The petition was accepted, and thus was born the city of Alburquerque. The first "r" in the original name was later dropped. Legend has it that a sign painter for the railroad omitted it either accidentally or because he didn't have enough room for the whole name. Another possible origin of the city's name comes from the Latin translation of Alburquerque, which means "white oak." Alburquerque, Spain, has a large number of white oak trees and thus was given the appropriate name. However, it is likely that the "r" fell out of use casually over a long period, probably given that it is nearly inaudible when spoken.
The original church collapsed in 1792. Governor Fernando de la Concho ordered every Albuquerque family to donate either money or labor to rebuild it. In 1793, they began San Felipe de Neri Church on the north side of the plaza where it remains to this day.
In 1846, the United States government claimed the territory for its own. The Civil War touched the city briefly when Confederate troops occupied Albuquerque. Once the war had passed, Anglo settlers, who had been slow to move in before, began showing a much greater interest and began arriving in large numbers.
A view of what Old Town Albuquerque was like can be found in the memoirs of Mrs. Heacock, the wife of one of city's infamous judges:
Before the coming of the railroad, there was nothing very effective in the way of law or law enforcement. There was a great deal of stealing, especially horse thieving, and sometimes shooting. People had to take the law into their own hands, and thieves were strung up on the tree nearest to the place where they were caught more often than not.
One night, about 1890, she thought, she was just clearing away the supper table when she heard shots outside. She ran to the door to see what was happening, when her husband called her back. The safest thing to do at such times was to lie down on the floor. The drunken cowboys generally had no desire to kill anyone, but it was safer to keep out of the way of their bullets. On one occasion, a cowboy had killed a child. He was drunk and looking for black cats to shoot. He was horrified when he realized what he had done, but they hanged him. They had to make an example of someone in order to make Albuquerque safe for their children.
Mr. Heacock had prosecuted the case and was so upset when the man was hanged that he refused thereafter to serve except as a defense lawyer.
Another time, Billy the Kid came to the door to get her husband to help him out of some kind of a scrape. Mrs. Heacock answered the door. She said that he looked like any nice young lad to her. Afterward, everyone was talking about him, and she was glad that she'd seen him, but she didn't ever believe any of that talk about his being a bad character. "They were after him, and he had to protect himself, didn't he?"
Another resident of the 1800s, Mrs. Fergusson, recalled Mexican girls passing by dressed in bright calico and "slat" sunbonnets, the same kind the covered wagon women wore. Their mothers were always wrapped in black shawls. She remembers hearing her father tell of seeing the Penitentes whipping themselves with cactus whips in the Old Town Plaza, though she herself never saw them until years later and then with more difficulty in an out-of-the-way Mexican village.
An octagonal adobe house once stood in the middle of the plaza. In it dwelt the barber, a big fat man named Brown. Barber Brown was also the town's lone dentist. Whenever anyone suffered from toothache, the barber was called and pulled the tooth. On top of the octagonal house was a flagpole and in the yard a cannon. It was the barber's duty to raise the flag and shoot off the cannon every Fourth of July.
In the 1880s, sheriffs were chosen in quite an unusual manner. Perfecto Armijo and Santiago Baca took turns serving as peace officer. When it was time to "elect" a sheriff, they would collect their toughest friends, meet in a vacant lot and do battle with sticks, rocks, gun butts and fists. Judge William Heacock was the referee. A crowd gathered to watch, and the onlookers voted for the winner.
One of the city's most influential forces, the railroad, arrived in 1880. Las Vegas, Santa Fe and other New Mexico towns fell victim to the piratical practices of the railroad barons, but Albuquerque welcomed the iron horse with open arms, hearts and wallets, as well as a two-hundred-foot-wide right-of-way. With the railroad came sober, solid businessmen. They intended to have safe respectable homes for their wives and children and an environment that would appeal to homebuilders, and before many years, Albuquerque had become a comparatively peaceful place. After the coming of the railroad, there was even more lawlessness for a while, but within a few years, things quieted down here, and the outlaws moved on to wilder places.
Albuquerque's racy past compares with Dodge City or Tombstone. The railroad brought new consumer goods and undesirables, including gamblers and the first prostitutes. In the late 1800s, the city had twenty saloons, multiple gambling houses and brothels. The red-light district flourished along Third and Fourth Streets between Copper and Tijeras. Train robberies and gunfights were not uncommon, and most citizens carried pistols. Vigilantes hanged many outlaws and horse thieves. In the 1880s, Albuquerque also had opium dens. There were campaigns held not to close them but rather to move them off Central Avenue, which was called Railroad Avenue back then, to Gold or Silver.
The impact of the railroad brought changes to the prevailing architecture of the city. Perhaps most important, the railroad was responsible for a drastic alteration of the ethnic makeup of the city. By 1881, the population of Albuquerque was one thousand. One legend says that Billy the Kid traveled to Albuquerque because of a tale that was spread around the town. Supposedly, a local hardware store owner had made several claims about what he would do should Billy the Kid ever have the misfortune to step into his hardware store. Billy strutted into the hardware store and walked out with a plow, while the storeowner hid under a wagon somewhere near the site of the present YMCA.
Within a few years, Albuquerque had become predominantly Anglo in population, and in 1885, it was incorporated as a town. In 1889, Albuquerque won the rather heated battle for the right to locate the state university in the city. By 1891, the population of Albuquerque had grown to four thousand. The town had twenty saloons and two banks, one of which went broke during the panic of 1893. The city also had as many as twenty-four gambling establishments. People were moving to Albuquerque for reasons of health, and the city was taking on many aspects of larger eastern cities. Even after the 1900s, there were still occasional stage holdups, and by 1903, there had been two cases of school money embezzling by the city's officials. Oddly enough, Old Town, the original town site, was not incorporated into the city of Albuquerque until 1950.
As the new Albuquerque flourished, the railroad assigned Colonel Marmon to lay out some city streets. He laid one street parallel to the horsecar line that he called Central, and the first road west of the tracks and running parallel he named First. Although the railroad did not request any roads east of the tracks, this was where Marmon plotted his widest street. He named that street Broadway and proceeded to develop four streets east of it. He named the first street Arno, after Arno Huning, who was a pioneer businessman in Albuquerque. The next two streets he named after his own children, Edith and Walter, and his last street was named High.
The mighty Rio Grande has also played a significant role in Albuquerque's history and landscape. In its early days, floods with each spring rising from the Rio Grande menaced portions of the city. Melting snow in the Colorado Mountains, together with spring rains, caused the river to reach flood stage. High water formerly flooded all the low-lying areas in the river bottoms near the city. In early days, the Rio Grande had a habit of choosing a new course almost at will. Breaking through its banks upstream, the river often chose a new path southward, sometimes passing through the center of the town.
During a devastating flood on May 28, 1874, the Rio Grande overflowed its banks and surrounded Old Town, making Albuquerque temporarily an island. At another time, the river (or a part of it) flowed along where the railroad tracks are now laid. Eastward, cloudbursts and heavy rains in the mountains often sent flash floods pouring down into the lower levels, bringing enormous amounts of silt and earth from higher points. So while the Rio Grande invariably carried away much topsoil, the mountain floods generally replaced it with rich loam from the mountain areas. The citizens were not surprised when, in 1885, a survey showed that the streets were some three inches higher than when first laid out a few years before. The mountain floods were as beneficent as the Rio's were destructive, the former more than offsetting the latter.
In later years, corrective measures were taken to deepen and straighten the Rio Grande to force it to cut its own channel and cease making trouble each spring when on rampage. Storm sewers, diversion canals and other means removed all danger from both the river and the freshets, which come rushing down from the Sandias with each heavy rain in the highlands.
Old Town Albuquerque was once more Victorian and less New Mexican. After being joined to Albuquerque in the 1950s, it became a tourist magnet. Merchants altered façades, added second stories, built new buildings and "puebloized" existing buildings to conform to visitors' expectations.
As one of North America's oldest cities — rich in a history of conquest, conflict, religion, business and violent death — it is not surprising that Albuquerque also has so many interesting ghost stories.
CHAPTER 2
The Bottger Mansion
110 San Felipe Street
The construction of the Bottger Mansion was started in 1905 and completed within two years. The residence is located half a block from Albuquerque's historic plaza, where Albuquerque's heritage began in 1706. Charles Bottger was a wool exporter originally from Germany who made his fortune after immigrating to New Jersey. He moved to New Mexico to be close to the Native American sheep ranchers and their wool supply. There were four original mansions in Old Town, and only the Bottger remains, intact, virtually as it was when built. Charles Bottger also owned a saloon west of the mansion (now the parking lot) and a toll bridge over the Rio Grande. His saloon advertised "Fine Whiskeys, Fine Cigars, Fine Women and Billiards."
The mansion was used as living quarters by three generations of Bottgers and then sold several times. During the 1940s, it was used as a home for a small colony of Buddhists. Later, it featured a restaurant downstairs and a boarding house and beauty salon upstairs.
Throughout the years, the mansion has also had its share of famous visitors. In 1955, a young Elvis Presley, along with Bill Black and Scotty Moore, performed two shows in Albuquerque and stayed at the Bottger, leaving the next day for a show in Amarillo.
In the late 1950s, a prominent Italian family rented the Bottger Mansion for a large wedding. Frank Sinatra was a guest, and he performed in the courtyard after the wedding dinner was served. In the 1940s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted criminal, Machine Gun Kelly, was being hunted by lawmen everywhere. Kelly, his girlfriend and his gang were headed back to Memphis from California and checked into the Bottger under assumed names. They had dyed their hair and purchased new clothes to help conceal their identities. After several days, the owners became suspicious when they noticed that the group always sent a neighborhood boy out to purchase the meals and bring them back to the Bottger for consumption in the rooms. They decided to notify the police but were overheard by one of the gang members. The gang quickly left, just ahead of the law. However, they were captured shortly thereafter and imprisoned.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ghosts of Old Town Albuquerque"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Cody Polston.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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