Usually in each generation of a large and long-established family there is
some one individual who stands out from the rest as a leader and as the
most perfect embodiment of the family traditions and characteristics. This
was especially true of the Delcasar family. It was established in this
country in the year 1790 by Don Eusabio Maria Delcasar y Morales, an
officer in the army of the King of Spain, who distinguished himself in the
conquest of New Mexico, and especially in certain campaigns against the
Navajos. As was customary at that time, the King rewarded his faithful
soldier with a grant of land in the new province. This Delcasar estate lay
in the Rio Grande Valley and the surrounding _mesa_ lands. By the
provisions of the King’s grant, its dimensions were each the distance that
Don Delcasar could ride in a day. The Don chose good horses and did not
spare them, so that he secured to his family more than a thousand square
miles of land with a strip of rich valley through the middle and a
wilderness of desert and mountain on either side. Much of this
principality was never seen by Don Eusabio, and even the four sons who
divided the estate upon his death had each more land than he could well
use.
The outstanding figure of this second generation was Don Solomon Delcasar,
who was noted for the magnificence of his establishment, and for his
autocratic spirit.
No Borgia or Bourbon ever ruled more absolutely over his own domain than
did Don Solomon over the hundreds of square miles which made up his
estate. He owned not only lands and herds but also men and women. The
_peones_ who worked his lands were his possessions as much as were his
horses. He had them beaten when they offended him and their daughters were
his for the taking. He could not sell them, but this restriction did not
apply to the Navajo and Apache slaves whom he captured in war. These were
his to be sold or retained for his own use as he preferred. Adult Indians
were seldom taken prisoner, as they were untameable, but boys and girls
below the age of fifteen were always taken alive, when possible, and were
valued at five hundred _pesos_ each. Don Solomon usually sold the boys, as
he had plenty of _peones_, but he never sold a comely Indian girl.
The Don was a man of proud and irascible temper, but kindly when not
crossed. He had been known to kill a _peon_ in a fit of anger, and then
afterward to bestow all sorts of benefits upon the man’s wife and
children.
The life of his home, like that of all the other Mexican gentlemen in his
time, was an easy and pleasant one. He owned a great _adobe_ house, built
about a square courtyard like a fort, and shaded pleasantly by cottonwood
trees. There he dwelt with his numerous family, his _peones_ and his
slaves. In the spring and summer every one worked in the fields, though
not too hard. In the fall the men went east to the great plains to kill a
supply of buffalo meat for the winter, and often after the hunt they
travelled south into Sonora and Chihuahua to trade mustangs and buffalo
hides for woven goods and luxuries.
There was a pleasant social life among the aristocrats of dances and
visits. Marriages, funerals and christenings were occasions of great
ceremony and social importance. Indeed everything done by the Dons was
characterized by much formality and ceremony, the custom of which had been
brought over from Spain. But they were no longer really in touch with
Spanish civilization. They never went back to the mother country. They had
no books save the Bible and a few other religious works, and many of them
never learned to read these. Their lives were made up of fighting, with
the Indians and also among themselves, for there were many feuds; of
hunting and primitive trade; and of venery upon a generous and patriarchal
scale. They were Spanish gentlemen by descent, all for honour and
tradition and sentiment; but by circumstance they were barbarian lords,
and their lives were full of lust and blood.
Circumstance somewhat modified the vaunted purity of their Spanish blood,
too. The Indian slave girls who lived in their houses bore the children of
their sons, and some of these half-bred and quarter-bred children were
eventually accepted by the _gente de razon_, as the aristocrats called
themselves. In this way a strain of Navajo blood got into the Delcasar
family, and doubtless did much good, as all of the Spanish stock was
weakened by much marrying of cousins.
Dona Ameliana Delcasar, a sister of Don Solomon, was responsible for
another alien infusion which ultimately percolated all through the family,
and has been thought by some to be responsible for the unusual mental
ability of certain Delcasars. Dona Ameliana, a beautiful but somewhat
unruly girl, went into a convent in Durango, Mexico, at the age of
fifteen. At the age of eighteen she eloped with a French priest named
Raubien, who was a man of unusual intellect and a poet. The errant couple
came to New Mexico and took up lands. They were excommunicated, of course,
and both of them were buried in unconsecrated ground; but despite their
spiritual handicaps they raised a family of eleven comely daughters, all
of whom married well, several of them into the Delcasar family. Thus some
of the Delcasars who boasted of their pure Castilian blood were really of
a mongrel breed, comprising along with the many strains that have mingled
in Spain, those of Navajo and French.
Don Solomon Delcasar played a brilliant part in the military activities
which marked the winning of Mexican Independence from Spain in the
eighteen-twenties, and also in the incessant Indian wars. He was a fighter
by necessity, but also by choice. They shed blood with grace and
nonchalance in those days, and the Delcasars were always known as
dangerous men.
The most curious thing about this r�gime of the old-time Dons was the
way in which it persisted. It received its first serious blow in 1845 when
the military forces of the United States took possession of New Mexico.
Don Jesus Christo Delcasar, who was then the richest and most powerful of
the family, was suspected of being a party to the conspiracy which brought
about the Taos massacre—the last organized resistance made to the gringo
domination. At this time some of the Delcasars went to Old Mexico to live,
as did a good many others among the Dons, feeling that the old ways of
life in New Mexico were sure to change, and having the Spanish aversion to
any departure from tradition. But their fears were not realized, and life
went on as before. In 1865 the _peones_ and Indian slaves were formally
set free, but all of them immediately went deeply in debt to their former
masters and thus retained in effect the same status as before. So it
happened that in the seventies, when New York was growing into a
metropolis, and the factory system was fastening itself upon New England,
and the middle west was getting fat and populous and tame, life in the
Southwest remained much as it had been a century before.
Laws and governments were powerless there to change ways of life, as they
have always been, but two parallel bars of steel reaching across the
prairies brought change with them, and it was great and sudden. The
railroad reached the Rio Grande Valley early in the eighties, and it
smashed the colourful barbaric pattern of the old life as the ruthless
fist of an infidel might smash a stained glass window. The metropolis of
the northern valley in those days was a sleepy little _adobe_ town of a
few hundred people, reclining about its dusty _plaza_ near the river. The
railroad, scorning to notice it, passed a mile away. Forthwith a new town
began growing up between, the old one and the railroad. And this new town
was such a town as had never before been seen in all the Southwest. It was
built of wood and only half painted. It was ugly, noisy and raw. It was
populated largely by real estate agents, lawyers, politicians and
barkeepers. It cared little for joy, leisure, beauty or tradition. Its God
was money and its occupation was business.
This thing called business was utterly strange to the Delcasars and to all
of the other Dons. They were men of the saddle, fighting men, and traders
only in a primitive way. Business seemed to them a conspiracy to take
their lands and their goods away from them, and a remarkably successful
conspiracy. Debt and mortgage and speculation were the names of its
weapons. Some of the Dons, including many of the Delcasars, who were now a
very numerous family, owning each a comfortable homestead but no more,
sold out and went to Old Mexico. Many who stayed lost all they had in a
few years, and degenerated into petty politicians or small storekeepers.
Some clung to a bit of land and went on farming, making always less and
less money, sinking into poverty and insignificance, until some of them
were no better off than the men who had once been their _peones_.
Diego Delcasar and Felipe Delcasar, brothers, were two who owned houses in
the Old Town and farms nearby, who stayed in the country and held their
own for a time and after a fashion. Diego Delcasar was far the more able
of the two, and a true scion of his family. He caught onto the gringo
methods to a certain extent. He divided some farm land on the edge of town
into lots and sold them for a good price. With the money he bought a great
area of mountain land in the northern part of the state, where he raised
sheep and ruled with an iron hand, much as his forbears had ruled in the
valley. He also went into politics, learned to make a good stump speech
and got himself elected to the highly congenial position of sheriff. In
this place he made a great reputation for fearlessness and for the
ruthless and skilful use of a gun. He once kicked down the locked door of
a saloon and arrested ten armed gamblers, who had threatened to kill him.
He was known and feared all over the territory and was a tyrant in his own
section of it. When a gringo prospector ventured to dispute with him the
ownership of a certain mine, the gringo was found dead in the bottom of
the shaft. It was reported that he had fallen in and broken his neck and
no one dared to look at the bullet hole in his back.
Don Diego’s wife died without leaving him any children, but he had
numerous children none-the-less. It was said that one could follow his
wanderings about the territory by the sporadic occurrence of the
unmistakable Delcasar nose among the younger inhabitants. All of his sons
and daughters by the left hand he treated with notable generosity. He was
a sort of hero to the native people—a great fighter, a great lover—and
songs about his adventures were composed and sung around the fires in
sheep camps and by gangs of trackworkers.
Don Diego, in a word, was a true Delcasar and a great man. Had he used his
opportunities wisely he might have been a millionaire. But at the age of
sixty he owned little besides his house and his wild mountain lands. He
drank a good deal and played poker almost every night. Once he had been a
famous winner, but in these later years he generally lost. He also formed
a partnership with a real estate broker named MacDougall, for the
development of his wild lands, and it was predicted by some that the
leading development would be an ultimate transfer of title to Mr.
MacDougall, who was known to be lending the Don money and taking land as
security.
Don Felipe’s career was far less spectacular than that of his brother. He
owned more than Don Diego to start with, and he spent his life slowly
losing it, so that when he died he left nothing but a house in Old Town
and a single small sheep ranch, which afforded his widow, two daughters
and one son a scant living.
This son, Ramon Delcasar, was the hope of the family. He would inherit the
estate of Don Diego, if the old Don died before spending it all, which it
did not seem likely that he would do. But Ramon early demonstrated that he
had a more important heritage in the sharp intelligence, and the proud,
plucky and truculent spirit which had characterized the best of the
Delcasars throughout the family history.
As there was no considerable family estate for him to settle upon, he was
sent to law school at the age of twenty, and returned three years later to
take up the practice of his profession in his native town. Thus he was the
first of the Delcasars to face life with his bare hands. And he was also
the last of them in a sense, to face the gringos. All the others of his
name, save the senile Don, had either died, departed or sunk from sight
into the mass of the peasantry.