"One of the most interesting and picturesque regions of all New Mexico was the immense tract of nearly two million acres known as Maxwell's Ranch, through which the Santa Fe Trail ran. Maxwell belonged to a generation and a class almost completely extinct, and the like of which will, in all probability, never be seen again; for there is no more frontier to develop them.
Several years prior to the acquisition of the territory by the United States, the immense tract comprised in the geographical limits of the ranch was granted to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda, both citizens of the province of New Mexico, and agents of the American Fur Company. Attached to the company as an employer, a trapper, and hunter, was Lucien B. Maxwell, an Illinoisan by birth, who married a daughter of Beaubien. After the death of Guadalupe Miranda, Maxwell purchased his interest, and that of the heirs of Beaubien, thus at once becoming the largest landowner in the United States.
At the zenith of his influence and wealth, during the Civil War, when New Mexico was isolated and almost independent of care or thought by the government at Washington, he lived in a sort of barbaric splendor, akin to that of the nobles of England. The thousands of arable acres comprised in the many fertile valleys of his immense estate were farmed in a primitive, feudal sort of way, by native Mexicans principally, under the system of peonage then existing in the Territory. He employed about 500 men, and though the men were virtually slaves, Maxwell was not a hard governor, and his people really loved him, as he was ever their friend and adviser…"
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