Las Vegas, New Mexico, Part 1

Las Vegas--no not that one--used to be the most important city west of the Mississippi. That’s what Doyle Daves tells me. Doyle is a retired chemistry professor and, like many New Mexicans, has terrible things to say about Houston up till, a few seconds later, he remembers he’s being rude. He loves talking about his town’s history; loves it so much he seems to forget I’m from Texas after a while.

He runs the historical association on Bridge Street, which is National Street in either direction, but is Bridge Street for the two blocks on either side of the quaint bridge that connects the old town, Las Vegas, and the new town that the incoming Anglos set up in the 1870s to access the railroad, East Las Vegas.

"We’ve been going downhill as a city ever since."

That’s a 140 years of downhill.

"It’s not been easy."

He tells me his family is actually new to New Mexico. "My grandparents moved here in 1913." Again, I tell him as a Houstonian I can’t relate. If your family moved to Houston in 1913, you’d be ancien regime. "Families are old here. Some go back to the 1690s, when the Spanish returned after the Pueblo Rebellion."

The shop is lined with old photos of the town, its ruling families, its formerly great hotels, its history of rodeos and Rough Rider reunions, and a bookshelf of chapbook sized history tomes that Doyle has written over the past 15 years. As an addict I jones up with a few.

He tries to interest me in a display he’s working on about S. Omar Barker, Las Vegas’s own legendary cowboy poet. I google a few verses and quickly lose interest. I get him back to talking about the 19th century again, how the Americans came in and established local rule through the existing families, who were not particularly loyal to Mexico City anyway (click on photo for detail), how the outlaws in these parts were mostly old Confederates and the lawmen old Union vets, how Las Vegas avoided picking up an arts scene like, he rolls his eyes a bit, Santa Fe.

An elderly couple comes in. They’re the Romeros and they want to know if Doyle has anything on Mr Romero’s grandfather. After a couple of questions, Doyle realizes he’s the grandson of the brother of the town’s sheriff and political boss from the 1890s, Secundino Romero. And he’s off on a tear, unloading a treasure trove of anecdotes about Boss Romero’s crooked deals, rivalry with the East Las Vegasans, the corrupt trial where he got a snoopy reporter convicted of murder, only to have the Anglo governor pardon the reporter the next day.

Doyle’s stories swim with pride. How the two towns merged, where the brothels and opium dens were, how violent the town got once the railroad came through and all the gangsters were run out of Dodge City--some years there were over a hundred murders in this town of under 6000. He makes event the economics a love ballad. The two great hotels fought relentlessly over which would house Teddy Roosevelt when he joined the Rough Rider Reunion of 1899. The old Spanish families wrangled over irrigation plans so that every lot access to the river, creating long thin land plots that still shape town built on their remains. S. Omar Barker used his own initials and thus named his ranch "the Lazy SOB." The sheering and wool spinning factory downtown used to see six mile long lines of sheepherders waiting to run their herds through. That factory is abandoned in the old town square now, two doors down from the coffeeshop.

After over an hour in his company I’m convinced I have to come back here, but the day is aging. He directs me to check out the Rough Rider museum before I go, although he manages my expectations. Once I get over there, I see he’s right, but the display on the Chinese laundries is completely fascinating, if too sparse. There were gangsters, businessmen bringing over families after working around the Chinese Exclusion Act, and even a spectacular murder which led to the first Chinese immigrant ever being accepted as a witness in an American court.

This the perfect small American town if you love tragedy.