Chapter 24: Buried on the Brow of a Hill
Supplement to Endnotes
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Endnote 1) Mary lived in Trumansburg with her two daughters, and had an estate valued at $9000. Something happened to her money between then and in the 1880s when she claimed to be financially desperate. She also knew about George’s land investments and futilely tried to recover them after his death. I believe that she was the last believer in George’s schemes, and lost her remaining wealth in subsidizing them.
Endnote 2) It was my dear friend Bryan Pickett who discovered in a New Mexico archive -- on a trip I pressured him into driving with me -- that George Cole had joined the masons on the eve of his death.
There would be almost nothing I could know about the Fort Union Lodge, its relics and records, if Dan Irick, a Mason himself, had not rescued the archives from various locations. Facts about Cole's request to become a Mason and other doings from this lodge can be found in the minutes of the Union Lodge records, parts of which Dan Irick (who has these books in his possession) generously shared with me. Other information came from Irick's keynote address at the Union Lodge's rededication ceremony. Dan Irick, “Speech given at the Rededication Ceremony for the Union Lodge No. 4, AF&AM. Fort Union National Monument, New Mexico, delivered on July 15, 2006."
Dan has also allowed me to peer into these records and has shared details to help me reconstruct some of what I write in this chapter.
What puzzles me most about George and masonry is what took him so long to join. Many of America’s revolutionary heroes had been Masons, from Ben Franklin to Paul Revere to George Washington. Joseph Warren (the martyred hero of the revolutionary war, and the namesake of George’s dead twin brother) was a Grand Master. Masonry was everywhere among the troops in the late war. Ben Butler was a Mason along with many other officers.
Throughout the nineteenth century, masonic lodges attracted ambitious and mobile men who longed to cement connections with strangers. The craft offered a way to locate a circle of loyal friends in a shifting and self-interested society where fathers no longer had unmatched powers to show sons the clear way to manhood. Masonry had fit hand-in-glove with the American Revolution’s emphasis on voluntary friendships, merit, and equality. Lodges required all members to submit to and rise up through the same rituals and tests of knowledge. One’s rank in the world was not supposed to influence standing within the lodge’s walls.
As it happened in the Fort Union lodge, a lowly foot soldier was the equal to his own officer. A simple farmer might issue instruction to an urbane politician.
Perhaps George had concluded, as many of his peers had, that masonry was just another way for men to tickle one another’s backs. (If so, Butler’s masonry would have only confirmed his suspicions.) If George had an aversion to the craft, his Methodist upbringing likely had something to do with it. Anti-Masonry had burned hottest among evangelicals in the upstate New York region where he was born and raised. See: Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press: 1998); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 110-115; Michael A. Halleran, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Freemasonry in the American Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).
Endnote 4) Behind closed doors the brothers formed rudimentary shapes with their limbs and bodies -- right angles, perpendicular lines, squares. Through their bodies they aimed to peer into the mind of the divine architect of the cosmos. This is why a man with a missing arm would not have been allowed to take part in the symbolic rituals. See: Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood In Victorian America, pp. 141-143.
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Endnote6) It is possible that these Masons found one black ball on the first inspection, but then after a second vote obtained a clear result. This scenario, though, would require that one of the men either accidentally dropped a black ball into the box, or originally voted against Cole but lost his nerve on the second, confirming vote.
Endnote 7) I have written a much longer, thicker description of the ceremony. I removed it to slim down a narrative that had already pressed the limits for page count. The ceremony has so many powerful symbols and teachings -- especially with life of George Cole in mind -- that I think it is worth reading. See 24.7, here.
Endnote 8) ​He didn’t join the craft simply for the promise of a burial or grave. It seems clear that he could have arranged his burial in the Fort Union cemetery where among a few hundred soldiers’ graves lay several civilians. Still, the graveyard was in poor shape, and soldiers complained that the headstones were not properly maintained. See: Leo Oliva, Fort Union and the Frontier Army in the Southwest: A Historic Resource Study (Southwest Cultural Resources Center, 1993), pp. 570-578.
Endnote 12) His supposed good fortunes were muddied with uncertainty. George (and his descendants) believed that he had purchased the whole of the grant; but other local records, and even George’s own transactions, reveal doubt and confusion. That June, for example, he paid a man named Pedro Valdez Ortega a relatively small sum of $35.50 for a portion of the grant that George supposedly already owned outright. There is also a curious sheet of paper that was kept in Cornelius’s letters that suggests that various locals who lived on the land sold their lots (or parts of their communal lands) for pittances to the two men who then turned and sold their interests to George. In other words, folks in the Cole family felt the burden to prove the doubtful claims of the men who sold George the land -- and they they had first legitimately obtained the land from its occupants. On top of that, over the span of 1872 -- a year before George bought his first portion -- a man named José Ortiz and others purchased at least fifteen deeds from local Hispanos in “Land Known Agua Negra Grant.” (See: Grantee Index book from San Miguel County Archives. New Mexico. Grantee, Ortiz José e et al; various Grantors. For document tracking the exchange of land for pittances, see: Cole Family Papers, UCLA. About the curious document from New Mexico that shows land purchases for pittances. It is kept in a folder dedicated mostly to Cornelius’s correspondences with family. It does not resemble the hand of George, Cornelius, Mary, or Olive. Its purpose is unclear. It lists transactions in New Mexico during the years that George began to invest in the grants. Under a bizarre title that says: “In the name of Gold [sic] Almighty and the Virgin Mary and the mediating master.” The entire document is written in pencil. After the heading it begins with what looks like a blank form for an expected testimony:
“I [illegible] Sandoval, and Tofolla ____ of the Ter[ritory] of N.M. a resident in the ______ [illegible] of Bermadillo, _______ legitimate son of the legitimate marriage of D. Jose Sandoval & of D[olores] Apolonia Tafolla, already dead:”
The document then lists eight transactions, each of them involving Nolan and Royval, the men from whom George had purchased interests in the Agua Negra Grant. Every transaction was for amounts like “diez pesos” or one dollar. The earliest transactions are from January of 1873, and go up to March 1875, the time that George paid $6000 to Roibal (Roybal) for four-fifths of the Agua Negra Grant. Perhaps these small amounts were what Nolan and Roybal paid locals for their own land, or for their supposed share of the communal lands on the grant. See letter with blue lines, in Cole Family Papers, in Box 15.
George (and Mary and other descendants who later gained access to George’s personal records) believed that he had purchased or obtained at least a third, if not all of the grant. But decades after George’s death, four other men claimed interest in the grant; it was reported (decades later) to Mary that none of the men who claimed to own Agua Negra had ever heard of George Cole or knew that he had the slightest interest in the grant. (One remotely possible explanation for this might be that George believed he was buying land from “Agua Negra” a place within the Mora Valley, closer to Fort Union. But it is clear in the deeds, with the naming of rivers, etc., that the land was much further south.)
This information, that the other claimants had never even heard of George Cole, though, came from the pen of Lebaron Bradford Prince, a longtime politician and judge who was regularly associated with the Santa Fe Ring. At least two of the four other “legal” owners were rumored ring members as well. In other words, the land was tied to ringmen. For nearly three decades, Mary fought to obtain rights to George’s land purchases. She employed the legal services of former Governor L. Bradford Prince who required half of George’s validated grant interests as compensation for his work. Prince was a legendary key figure in the Santa Fe Ring as well.
Mary also asked the ex-Governor for any personal information about George’s final days. Prince claimed that he knew little to nothing about him, saying that he “had not the slightest information.” Mary was especially desperate to inherit some of the grant lands after she had been rejected in the 1880s for a widow’s pension because George’s death could not be traced to his undocumented injuries from the war. Besides Prince, two of the other grant claimants (a Dr. Longwell and Spiegelberg) appear to have played a role in the ring. (David Caffey has “Longwell" listed as a “Dr. Robert Longwill.” In a lawsuit concerning the grant, one of the claimants is listed as “Robert A. Longwell” and as “Dr. Longwell” in a letter to Mary from ex-Governor Prince. See: Letter from Governor Prince to Mrs. Cole, May 26, 1906; also see: legal decision starting with “THIS CONTRACT” made in 1901: L. Bradford Prince Papers, “Land Grants” folder, Agua Negra, 1892-1912. New Mexico State Records Center and Archives; Also see, Caffey, Chasing the Santa Fe Ring, pp. 238-39.)
All this to say, that the land that George believed he had purchased was thoroughly connected to, if not gobbled up by, men associated with the land grant rings.
George’s nephew, C.H. Stewart, along with George’s surviving younger sister, traveled to Mora in 1910 to locate George’s grave and to eventually install a headstone on Cole’s spartan grave. The nephew and his mother did some investigating and claimed to discover that George had left behind personal effects worth a significant amount and that he had apparently owned one-third interest in an Agua Negra Grant. The nephew believed that George’s old estate, who seemed to include property in Mora County, had been wrongly taken, and that with some research and legal help, he could get George’s old estate. One of the men he talked to was a man named, Bohmer, a Mason from George’s lodge, who had reportedly nursed George in his dying days. Stewart claimed that a man named Hicks “owned” the Grant, thanks to the help of a “rascal” lawyer named A.A. Jones. It isn’t clear which Grant Hicks supposedly owned.
Prince supposedly told George’s nephew, who was prying into what had become of George’s assets, that he (Prince) had actually purchased George’s grant interests from Mary. Yet, for years after the date when he had supposedly bought the land from Mary, Prince continued to do legal work for Mary, “helping” her recover the grant lands.
Stewart, the nephew, reported to Cornelius that the ex-Governor L. Bradford Prince, of Santa Fe, had told him (the nephew) that he had purchased George’s interest some thirteen years after George died, from “Mrs. Cole.” If this is true, it is strange that she continued to write Prince long after to obtain knowledge of the progress in her claim on the grant. See: Cole Family Papers, C.H. Stewart to Cornelius Cole, July 19, 1912. Folder #15.
Somebody with much more expertise in New Mexico's land grants, and extraordinary patience might unravel this mystery of George Cole's land. But for purposes, the maddening exercise of trying to extract George's original claims from the confused layers of deeds, partial records and incompatible claims, suggests the kind of culture at work on the western frontier for men who raced to get ahead of the already saturated markets to the east.
Endnote 13) George certainly would have had Mexico in his mind. His brother Gilbert had served as a Consul and U.S. Commercial Agent in Acapulco during and after the war. In 1875, the Consul for Acapulco was John A. Sutter, Jr., son of one of pioneers of California and closely associated with Cornelius. George’s clear-eyed obsession with the competition between the rail lines into Mexico are clear in his final letters from April and May of 1873.
Endnote 14) For more on George's second wife, Eliza Bruce, see supplemental notes for chapter 23, footnote #9, here. In the 1880 federal census, Eliza Bruce was listed as a servant for a married surgeon in D.C. She is listed as illiterate, the daughter of parents born in Maryland (likely enslaved). She is also listed as a widow.
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Endnote 16) New Mexico meteorology reports state that on the day of George’s death it was cold and dry: “Dec. 9th-- no rain, high 44, low 23; 10th high 45, low 31-nor precip; 11th, high 47, low 26--no precip; 12th high 52, low 25--no precip."
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Endnote 18) Today there is a high-quality chain-link fence that encloses the small cemetery. In the pictures of George's sister at his grave, there is a fence there too. I do not know if that fence, or some other fence, would have been there when George was buried on the brow of the hill by his Mason brothers.