BOOKS: Wild West Boyhood

MY LIFE ON THE FRONTIER—Miguel Antonio Otero—Press of the Pioneers ($6).

In New Mexico and the U. S. Southwest the name of Otero is a potent one. Once great landowners, holders in territorial days of one enormous ranch that extended from Pefia Blanca to El Paso, Tex., members of the Otero family have been judges, governors, railroad builders, bankers, billiard champions, sportsmen. During the era of Western expansion, they lived on a scale comparable to that of wealthy Southern planters before the Civil War. The first Don Miguel Antonio Otero was born in New Mexico while it was still a Mexican province, declined Lincoln’s appointment as Minister to Spain, was instrumental in bringing the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad into New Mexico and served on its early board of directors. Last week his 75-year-old son, onetime (1897-1906) Governor of New Mexico, gave further proof of Otero vitality when he offered, in the first volume of his reminiscences, a book that is often as exciting as an old-fashioned Western thriller, sometimes as quaint as the society column in a frontier newspaper, but in general an amusing, informative, absorbing piece of work.

Chief distinction of My Life on the Frontier is its spectacular version of an old Western childhood. When Miguel Antonio Otero was a boy his father was a commission merchant, following the Kansas-Pacific Railroad as it was being built into Denver. He moved his business and family from wild Ellsworth, Kans., to wilder Hays City, where little Miguel saw Wild Bill Hickok kill one man, heard stories of his killing three more. He moved them from wicked Sheridan to the hunters’ paradise of Kit Carson, at a time when Indians harried construction crews, burned bridges, sometimes attacked trains and towns. Merchant Otero put his sons in boarding school, but they ran away; he put them in St. Louis University, but they quickly got back to the hunting grounds that made them happy. Still a youngster, Miguel met Wild Bill, Bat Masterson, Mysterious Dave Mathers, Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Pat Garrett, Clay Allison and dozens of the dance hall girls, known only by first names such as Liz,. Dolly, Steamboat, Trix, whom he was to recall pleasantly 60 years later.

An unabashed lover of tall tales and hard riding, Author Otero remembers seeing a herd of buffalo so large that it was still in sight after a day’s train ride. He saw a great part of the West’s liquor supply tied up when the Whiskey Ring fraud exposures led to government seizure of his father’s liquor stores. He went on the famed buffalo hunt of Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, when the special escort, commanded by Generals Sheridan and Custer, included the West’s most distinguished plainsmen. A master of understatement, Author Otero barely mentions the fact that after he received an appointment to Annapolis, at the age of 15, he escaped to St. Louis, made his father’s agents there return him to the West. He worked in his father’s commission house but quarreled with his father’s partner, learned to dance,, hunted buffalo and antelope, raced horses and greyhounds, was shot at in Chilili for having monopolized a girl at a party.

In a last desperate effort to educate his sons, Merchant Otero sent them to Notre Dame, again to St. Louis University, where they enjoyed the city but did not attend classes. When 19-year-old Miguel returned to New Mexico, armed warfare had broken out between the Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroads, fighting for the Chicken Creek Route in strategic Raton Pass. Still quarreling with his father’s partner, Miguel left the company, visited Denver, saw Leadville at the peak of its boom, became a member of the Chaffee Light Artillery of Colorado and served during the railroad strike of 1879, when the strikers took the roundhouse at Pueblo. Then he settled down, aged 20, to a quiet life in Las Vegas, where there were 29 killings in one month, 18 in another ten weeks, and where, as he remembered it, “one of the important events of . . . 1880 was the opening of a new saloon.”