Chapter 23: Schemes and Smoke
Supplement to Endnotes
Endnote 2) The remark about the curse of Cain, likely was tinged with the widely held belief that the biblical Cain, after killing his brother, had been cursed with blackness. Many Christians taught that Cain was cursed when he intermarried with dark-skinned people from the Land of Nod. See: George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, pp. 87-89.
Endnote 4) Per my conversation by phone with Joan O’Dell, historian of Horseheads, there is no way of knowing for sure how long those skulls remained in the area. Conversion on 7/8/2016.
Endnote 6) The papers especially derided the administration for appointing Sickles’ as minister to Spain. Some papers joked about Sickles becoming president, and then Cole filling in if Sickles did not work out for the Republican Party. The Geneva Gazette, July 19, 1867. From the moment after the murder, Cole was compared to “Another Sickles.” See: Bedford Inquirer, June 14, 1867.
Endnote 8) Cole couldn't have been seeking the position of Secretary of the Senate, as it was filled by George C. Gorham, who served for eleven years. More likely, Cole's ambitions were more modest. Papers in Chicago and New Hampshire reported that Cole sought a clerkship. Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1869, page 2; The New Hampshire Patriot, November 24, 1869; for obituary report that he worked in the post office, see: Watkins Express, January 27, 1876.
Endnote 9) Unlike all of his male neighbors who lived with women or servants, George was not listed by the census worker as the head of household. Eliza was. She appears to have rented out a room to George.
According to the 1870 Census, Eliza and George lived in a neighborhood with an even mixture of whites, “mulattoes," and blacks. Many of the men and women living close by worked with their hands: a machinist, an Irish domestic, wives “keeping house," an English carpenter, a black “laborer," an Irish hack driver, an formerly enslaved blacksmith from South Carolina, and a young white clerk in the War Department. Cole had what appears to have been a wealthy neighbor (or one who wanted to be seen as wealthy) listed as a “gentleman" who also lived with a “cook" and a servant boy. From various small notations on the census margins I am almost certain that Cole lived between 222 and 228 I Street NW.
Why have I concluded that George and Eliza lived and husband and wife? In 1912, a nephew wrote his uncle Cornelius wanting to know more about George Cole’s final days in New Mexico. He asked Cornelius: “Now can you tell me anything in regard to ever hearing of Uncle George’s second wife (the one that came West when he was sick and died)?” This suggests that George’s “second wife” was something of a secret among members of the Cole family. And it also makes clear that this was not a woman George had met in New Mexico, but one that had come from the East to nurse and care for him in his last days. See: C.H. Stewart to Cornelius Cole, July 19, 1912 in Cole Family Papers, UCLA.
In the federal census of 1880, there is an Eliza Bruce listed, in a different household. It seems to be the same Eliza that once lived with George. She is listed as an illiterate black servant born in Maryland. She lived with three other servants, and was no longer listed as the head of household. She is also listed as a widow, which lines up if she once considered herself married to George. Of course, Eliza may have been a widow in 1870 as well, as marital status was not reported on that census. It’s essential to note that she is listed as 45 in the 1870 census, and 56 in 1880. This is off by one year. But the census data in 1870 was taken on June 3, and in 1880, June 15. If Eliza’s birthday was between June 3 and 15th, there is no problem with dates. Because she was once likely a slave, she may have not known her exact birthday. See: "United States Census, 1870", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MN4M-Z4Y : Tue Oct 03 08:30:30 UTC 2023), Entry for Eliza Brice and George W Cole, 1870; "United States Census, 1880", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M6C7-7YS : Tue Oct 03 23:40:20 UTC 2023), Entry for Allan McLane and Annie McLane, 1880.
Endnote 10) I conclude this because Cole’s name is not found in the pages of the Official Register of the United States, a comprehensive record of clerks, secretaries, staff members and other federal workers and officers appointed into military and civil service. In the Official Register for 1872 it lists a George W. Cole as postmaster in Georgia, obviously not our George Cole. See page 527. Specialists at the Library of Congress searched the Official Register and found no trace of Cole. They also did not find him in the Congressional Globe or Senate Journal . Email from Library of Congress from 8/9/10.
Endnote 11) Santo Domingo was envisioned as a boon for American shipping and as a destination for southern blacks fleeing from the terror perpetrated upon them by ex-confederates. George also had his commander, General Weitzel write a similar letter on May 24, 1872 to “Judge Bartley” in Washington DC, though it is not clear for what exact end.
Endnote 12) Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up millions of acres for Americans willing to carve out a farm on the frontier. That same year, it passed the Land Grant College Act, designed to stoke the ambitions of farmers and mechanics by forming colleges that taught the technical sciences of agricultural and mechanical arts. Congress also restored the National Bank, established a national currency, and passed the Morrill Tariff which greatly benefitted America’s manufacturers. There is no question that Republican policies helped lay the groundwork for the expansive industrialization of the Gilded Age. The question is whether politics was merely the handmaiden to corporate and industrial powers, or if, as Heather Cox Richardson has claimed, war-time Republicans--most of them like Lincoln, men from agrarian roots who sincerely believed that Americans could create a society where capital and labor enjoyed mutual interests -- unwittingly paved the way for the abuses and wealth disparities of the Gilded Age. For scholars like Richard Bensel, there was little irony that the industrial behemoth emerged from the ashes of the Civil War. See: Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Endnote 13) The military was deployed in the South and the West to convert the regions into extensions of the market-centered North. With a flurry of legislation, backed by gunpowder, the Republican Congress first set out to reconstruct vanquished Dixie and convert masters and freedmen into employers and employees within a contract economy. Post-war soldiers in the West were sent to finish what had been started decades before.
In the early 1850’s, and during the war, the U.S. Army had launched various campaigns to subdue Indian tribes in its vast frontier, especially the lands wrenched from Mexico through war. While Colonel Cole was commanding black troops in Virginia the legendary Kit Carson and his U.S. troops swept across New Mexico, first forcing Apache onto Bosque Redondo, a miserable reservation on New Mexico’s Pecos River. With the help of Utes and Pueblos, Carson then targeted Navajo Indians in eastern Arizona. By burning crops, contaminating water supplies, and destroying Navajo villages, Carson broke Navajo resistance. The threat of starvation forced them to surrender. Broken, the demoralized Navajo were forced to brave the 400-mile “Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo reservation inhabited by their despised rivals, the Apaches. Bosque Redondo soon failed because of mismanagement and the refusal of captives to embrace farming.
In President Grant’s second term, he ordered thousands of soldiers to the region to eradicate and starve the shrinking bands of Comanches that terrorized ranchers in western Texas, Oklahoma and eastern New Mexico.
For a good primer of “how the West was lost,” through these violent clashes and military methods, see the introductory essay, and accompanying primary sources in: Colin G. Calloway, Ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West was Lost. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning, 2018), pp. 8-13.
Endnote 14) Gilbert had entered the Civil War as a Second Lieutenant, climbed up through the ranks, and after the conflict remained in the Regular Army. In his history of his great uncles, Cornelius and George Cole, Cornelius Smith (Gilbert’s son) places the year of arrival at Forth Union in 1871. Gilbert’s name, though, first appears in the fort’s records in 1873, though he may have been there earlier. It is possible that George migrated to Fort Union first, and that his nephew decided to transfer from Arizona (where he was serving in the Army) to New Mexico. Given how dependent George was on his nephew it seems unlikely he (George) traveled all the way to the frontier without hope of help. In a conflicting recollection, Cornelius Smith said that Gilbert left Fort Union in 1876 and that their family had been at Fort Union only three years. It is less clear when, exactly, George left for Fort Union and if he remained in D.C. until then.
See: The Smith-Cole Family Papers, 1890-1936, folder pertaining to Cornelius Cole Smith, US Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Cornelius C. Smith, Jr., Don't Settle for Second: Life and Times of Cornelius C. Smith (San Rafael: Presidio Press, 1977), pp. xv, 3-5.
Endnote 15) It may have been bad timing for George to arrive when he did. Since the war, opportunities for citizens had decreased significantly. Around the time George went to the fort, the reduction of American troops brought a steady decline in demand for labor and goods. Leo E. Oliva, Fort Union and the Frontier Army in the Southwest (Santa Fe: National Park Service, Department of the Interior) pp. 552, 555-560.
Endnote 16) The fort provided hundreds of local Hispanos and Anglos with jobs as teamsters, brickmakers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, cooks, saddlers and painters. Nearby farmers and herders produced corn, wheat, beef and mutton, destined for eastern cities, or to feed soldiers, traders along the trail, and Indians on reservations. Thanks to the son of George’s nephew (who recorded his childhood memories some fifty years later), we know something about what George actually did to support himself. Nephew Gilbert brought his son to visit “Uncle Wash” frequently. The memoir does not say where that ranch was exactly, but it does suggest that it was near Mora, near Fort Union. This is important because Cole eventually bought some land a significant distance from Mora valley, in another contested Spanish land grant. His nephew's son (Gilbert’s boy) would write years later that he remembered frequent visits to his uncle on “his” sheep ranch. But because there is no record of George owning property near the fort, it appears that he, like many recent immigrants, worked on somebody else’s ranch, or squatted on land that was traditionally held by Mexican locals as community property. See: Clark S. Knowlton, “The Mora Land Grant: A New Mexican Tragedy,” in Journal of the West, Vol. XXVII, no.3, July 1988, pp. 60-61. The Smith-Cole Family Papers, 1890-1936, folder pertaining to Cornelius Cole Smith, US Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Endnote 17) These letters are marked for 1874 by a person who preserved them. But because George is so concerned about Cornelius leaving Washington hastily, before securing commitments and friends for George’s plans, I date these letters in 1873, the year of Cornelius’s final months as Senator in Washington D.C.
Endnote 21) Created by stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad (UP)-- with shares given to cooperative politicians -- the Crédit Mobilier was a sham investment and construction company which helped the UP build the first transcontinental road. The UP investment board selected the inflated bids from the supposedly separate company (whose bids were chosen, of course, as both companies were run by the same people). The phony company was conjured up so the Union Pacific could reap the profits from the lucrative contracts; as the insiders knew, the real money was not found in running a railroad but in building it and cashing in on land speculation along its path.
Various public officials like the Vice President were given stock in Crédit at sweetheart prices in exchange for their continued loyalty in voting for further funding. The railroad giant, in effect, hired itself (through a secret second identity), set its own contract terms, and only had to float discounted (and artificially inflated) stock and cash to politicians. Revelations of the scandal in 1872 implicated prominent Republicans, like the Speaker of the House, James Blaine, the outgoing Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, the incoming Vice President Henry Wilson, and other friends in Congress, like future president James Garfield. The UP was not only bilking American taxpayers, it was bribing D.C., all so it could cannibalize itself from the inside.
Endnote 22) The Star Route Frauds: The year before George Cole arrived at Fort Union, Congress began investigations into the inner workings of what would be known as the Star Route Frauds. Civilian bidders, often in league with a combination of professional bidders, obtained plum Star Routes in the West by bidding artificially low, or by bribing postal officials and legislators.
The extent of the corruption did not come to light before the general public until about nine years after George’s attempts to secure his own contracts. Still, with his brother in the Senate, serving on important committees like the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, and the Committee on Appropriations, knowledge about the fraud is likely.
These mail routes for rural areas in the West were named for the star or asterisk that the post office placed on all documents pertaining to the remote routes.
Awarding contracts for the routes was no trivial matter. Mail was vital to Americans’ conquest of interior lands. The Star Routes delivered the letters, money and documents -- maps, plots and grids, promissory notes, pledges of friendship, and legal communications -- that made landgrabbing possible. On positions of Cornelius, see: Cornelius Cole, Memoirs of Cornelius Cole: Ex-senator of the United States from California (McLoughlin Brothers, 1908), pp. 351-53.
Endnote 23) By the time George is asking for this help, Cornelius knows that reelection bid for senator is in dire trouble, as the Republican Party had lined up another nominee. Some of this lost support might have had to do with Cornelius’s not following through with delivering Goat Island to the Railroad magnates in exchange for paying for George’s lawyers. Cornelius later claimed that the Railroad interests (incited by the Goat Island controversy), the Whiskey ring “with all its adjuncts” and National Bank influence flexed their muscles in Sacramento politics to ensure Cornelius would not return to the Senate. He was defeated by money from “politicians and corporations.” He claimed that candidates for the state legislature were paid off (by being ensured they would win their elections) if they in turn nominated a competing Republican for the Senate, Aaron Augustus Sargent, who had also come to the Pacific Coast in 1849, and associated with lawyers, newspapers and politics. See: Cornelius Cole, Memoirs of Cornelius Cole: Ex-senator of the United States from California (McLoughlin Brothers, 1908), pp. 351-52.
Endnote 25) The treaty drafts, the negotiations, and removal of a key article before the final ratification by the U.S. Senate, reveal the intention of U.S. officials to craft a treaty with ambiguous promises.
One’s ownership of land, which seemed obvious to the inhabitants of local farming communities, now had to be proven through arcane legal codes and procedures. Many locals sought out American lawyers, concluding that the only way to keep their land was to seek help from predators themselves -- or those who understood their litigative language. The only way locals could satisfy the attorney fees, though, was to deed one-third or more of the successfully claimed land to the lawyers. Attorneys learned quickly that this was the surest way to get at the land grants.
Compared to Anglo-Americans’ emphasis on the individual and his right to private property, Hispanic society and law had historically favored the building of communities. For them, use of land, and recognition by local customs, was nine-tenths of the law.
Speculators sought to turn these communally shared land grants into a commodity by etching lines on maps and giving plots permanent dimensions with a compass and mathematical equations. Hispanos, though, understood land in less abstract ways. They conceived of land ownership through tradition, verbal agreements, usage, and tangible landmarks. The original grant boundaries, and personal property within the grants, tended to be defined by natural landmarks -- creeks, trees, rocks, ponds -- which, in a decaying world, brought confusion, especially when one was looking for it.
More confusing, it was not unusual for smaller grants to exist within larger ones. And it only added to the uncertainty that many grant lands had been temporarily abandoned in past years because of frequent Indian raids. Grants in the New Mexico territory were particularly notorious for having never been recorded on maps or surveyed. Especially murky was the fact that the grants included common lands shared by neighbors for grazing animals, fishing, hunting, gathering firewood and timber, and for absorbing new settlers into the community. See: John R, and Christine M. Van Ness, Spanish & Mexican Land Grants in New Mexico and Colorado (The Center for Land Grant Studies: Santa Fe, 1980), pp.3-11.
Endnote 28) Elkins and Catron continued to acquire grant interests from the common lands, one by one, often for as little as five or ten dollars. Elkins and Catron then petitioned the U.S. General Land Office of Survey for a patent for the entire community lands, though they only had rights to a small fraction of it.
It is not clear what George meant when he said about Elkins’s help that, “I believe he will, for certain reasons I [wrote?], not pecuniary but ambitious.” He seemed to think that for men like Elkins, there was something about the landgrabbing that was more than monetary gain, like winning or outsmarting others. George W. Cole to Cornelius Cole 5/4/1873, Cole Family Papers, UCLA.
Endnote 30) Romero reminds us of the key role played by Hispanos in the ring, which began before the influx of Anglos after the war. George wrote: “I have control of Nolan [Land Grant] (much through the good opinion of Hon. V. Romero one of the most influential men in N. Mex) & far more through some shrewdness I exerted on his trial & for which he is grateful but unable to pay a cent in cash….” George obviously believed that important people in the region owed and favored him. George W. Cole to Cornelius Cole, 5/4/1873, in Cole Family Papers, UCLA.