The Lyon letters- On the road to New Albuquerque

Stagecoach in La Mesilla, NM, ca. 1890. 

Today-  An omnibus north, a midnight meeting with Pat Garrett, the shysters of Socorro.

The Lyon letters are an on-going series on Albuquerque/New Mexico history as related through the letters of William B. Lyon to his fiancé Corie Bowman.

Once Corie Bowman had accepted his proposal of marriage, which occurred sometime between January and late February of 1882, Dr. William B. Lyon was ready to start a new life for himself and his imminent family.  However, prospects for a successful physician's practice were dead in the water in the tiny town of La Mesilla, New Mexico, where he had lived for the past three years since retiring from the army, and where his bride-to-be's family resided.  Lyon was ready to strike out on his own and make a success of himself in the frontier economy of the New Mexico territory, and in 1882 there was one obvious path for doing so:  follow the railroad.

The coming of the railroad had presented the territory, and indeed the American West as a whole, with its most dramatic growth opportunity of the century, and it seems that Lyon intended to capitalize on it.  His 14 years of service in the New Mexico territory seems to have instilled him with a fondness for the area, and he apparently brooked little thought of leaving it in pursuit of success.  For those who wished, like Lyon, to get in on the ground floor of a railroad-inspired growth and prosperity boom, there were two very attractive options to consider- El Paso and New Albuquerque, both of which had built major depots only the year before and both of which were in the throes of a full-on economic explosion.

Lyon remained uncertain as to which of the two offered the better opportunities, and so, at the end of February 1882, he resolved to visit both on a sort of reconnaissance mission. From the beginning, New Albuquerque offered at least one advantage over El Paso- Henry Forrester (for whom a street near downtown Albuquerque is named), a friend of the Bowman family, served as a minister in the young town's Episcopalian community. Not only that, but Forrester owned land in the town, and was eager to help Lyon and his fiancé locate an agreeable acre or so. Perhaps because of this connection, Lyon chose to visit New Albuquerque first, and set out to do so sometime on or about February 26th.
 

Pat Garrett.

On February 28th, at two in the morning, he arrived via horse-drawn omnibus at the town of Socorro, some 75 miles south of New Albuquerque.  According to a letter he sent to Corie later that day, he checked into the Jewett house, "where they gave me a room with a very tall, handsome, good natured fellow, who introduced himself to me as Pat Garrett."  Garret, of course, had gained considerable fame a mere seven months before this post-midnight meeting for having fatally shot a young outlaw by the name of Henry McCarty, aka William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.

Interestingly, William Lyon and Pat Garrett had something in common.  Lyon had served a great deal of his time in the army at Fort Stanton, in Lincoln County.  In fact, he was stationed there during the famous Lincoln County War, when Billy the Kid began his trek toward infamy, although Lyon was not inovlved in the altercation .  Garret had been serving as sheriff of Lincoln County when he had his fateful encounter with the Kid.  "He had heard of me, and I of him," Lyon wrote.  "But we were both too sleepy to indulge in lengthened reminiscences of Lincoln County."

Too bad for us.
 

Plaza at Socorro, ca. 1880.

The next morning, Lyon had a bit of time to kill before heading north, and spent it wandering around in downtown Socorro, a town he had apparently grown to know some years before, perhaps during time spent at the nearby Ft. Craig.  However, Socorro had grown considerably since then, and Lyon felt "a perfect stranger in a town that at one time was almost as familiar to me as Mesilla, wandering around almost an hour without meeting a soul I knew...   I felt lonely and lost and out of place.  I thought of poor old Rip going home after his twenty-year nap..."

Mindful of his imminent domestic needs, Lyon cast an admiring eye to the houses in Socorro's bustling downtown.  In particular, he was enamored of a small adobe whose dimensions he paced off "mystifying one lady who watched me from the window."  Although he found the houses both attractive and cheap, he regretfully wrote that "Socorro is plentifully supplied with Doctors, some of whom I met...  most of them are shysters, but they are the very fellows I would fear in competition.  They have an immense advantage in being able to fight with weapons which 'noblesse oblige' forbids the use of in gentlemanly warfare."

Soon after, he set out toward his destination- New Albuquerque.

Next-  The first saloon in New Albuquerque.