J. Robert Keating's Poteet Victory: A Book Review by Pete Warzel

Poteet Victory
By J. Robert Keating
Atmosphere Press
Hardcover, 620 pages

I met Poteet Victory in 2019 when he became interested in and eventually stepped up as the buyer of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation’s former Delgado House on Palace Avenue. He had known the building for many years and fell in love with it, then wanting to make it his gallery, Victory Contemporary. He is an honest, direct, caring, and talented gentleman, and his wife Terry is as genuine a person as you can be. He had to weather COVID in his new gallery and did so thanks to internet sales. He and Terry are fine stewards of this important property in Santa Fe. Poteet also works in his studio on the upper floor.

They had donated to our publication of the 5th edition of Old Santa Fe Today, so several weeks ago I visited them to deliver a copy of the finished, published book. Poteet and I caught up and when I left I saw a rack with copies of this book for sale.

The biography by Mr. Keating is adventurous…a “Biographical Novel.” Being a self-proclaimed literary snob, I was quite leery. No need. Most of the book plays out as an interview conducted by Elliot Jacobs, a filmmaker (fictional character) interested in Poteet’s life. The dialogue is real, as captured by Keating on tape, and the tone of Poteet’s and Terry’s voices are right on the mark, capturing the rhythms, inflections, and vocabularies of both. There is a sense of sitting in Poteet’s studio, upstairs at the Delgado House, listening to him tell you the stories of his life.

Poteet was born Robert Lee Poteet, and took his grandmother’s family name at the end – Victory. So, today he has two last names, and doing so recognizes the importance of his American Indian heritage, his grandmother was Cherokee, his father Cherokee and Choctaw. What Elliot Jacobs, and I am sure Keating, thought he was going to hear was an Indian story. What Poteet’s life has been to this point is that, but really something different, so very individual to the nature of the individual. When asked how he wished to be described he says “’American Indian.’ ‘So you prefer American Indian (rather than Native American)’ “Yeah. I do. You’re native American.’” To the point but with a smile.

Poteet, surprisingly to me, was a scrapper, a street fighter. As a boy and then a man, he would try anything as a living: bull riding at age thirteen, pipeline work in high school, National Guard in the Viet Nam era. He learns and then builds a silkscreen print operation in Hawaii, that makes him some good money. In his twenties he goes and lives in New York City where he helps Andy Warhol develop his own screen print capabilities. Through Warhol he knows the rising reputation of Basquiat, and pulls no punches in what he thinks about it. “It’s like….It’s what I mean about artists like him bein’ a big hoax.”

In Michigan, during a job working with an oil company negotiating mineral rights with landowners, he is told by a woman that he would quit his job, move west, and work “…somethin’ to do with art.” West turned out to be Santa Fe, and his first job was as a bartender at Vanessie’s. He is invited to bring his paintings to hang in the restaurant (he studied at the Art Students League of New York), and they sell. He attends AA and works on his art, and begins selling by word of mouth. The University of Oklahoma commissions Poteet for a mural about The Trail of Tears. The mural became extremely controversial and was stopped by the University, incomplete. This goes to the core of Poteet’s being, with emotion and anger deeply felt to this day. His idea for the massive three-panel mural was the American Holocaust, and he is distraught that this history is not taught in our schools.

Keating writes forty pages on Poteet’s explication of the mural. It is important to Poteet’s story, perhaps the ghost in the machine of a very American success story. His success is via exemplary art sales, and the operation of a gallery, Victory Contemporary. As the story enters 2019 Poteet says, “Did I tell ya I’m in negotiations for a building?” That is our building, or was before his purchase - the Delgado House. And so we have come full circle. When he starts telling the stories that make up his life he is asked if they are true. His only answer is “Yeah, it’s all true.”

Which is what is so compelling about this book. Most autobiographies tell the edited life, the one that presents the subject’s view of his or her own self, and that view is a deluded model, not a reality. I remember reading a memoir by the poet and novelist Jim Harrison many years ago, and expected to find a gritty, unvarnished look at his fascinating, if not rowdy life. The disappointment was in the lack of substance. Granted, this is not an autobiography, but it may as well be as it is told in Poteet’s voice through an interview narrative technique. It is nothing except bald truth – warts and all. It is the warts that makes it a read about a very human success story, but one not without turmoil and angst. “Yeah, it’s all true.”

AVAILABLE AT VICTORY CONTEMPORARY AND ATMOSPHERE PRESS

Tracing Time: A Book Review

Book Review
Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
By Craig Childs
Torrey House Press
Paperback
228 Pages, $18.95

Review by
Pete Warzel

Craig Childs is a naturalist, environmental activist, adventurer, desert rat, and a wild man. Wild because of some of the risks he takes, like swimming in flash floods, maybe riding is a better description, and chasing bears in order to capture photographs. He is also an extremely talented writer.

Torrey House Press is a non-profit publisher based in Salt Lake City, focused on a “literary” approach to environment and landscape particularly in the American west. The firm is now twelve years old and publishes elegant, relevant books. Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, is a fine, recent example.

Craig Childs and Torrey House are made for each other.

Childs puts the personal in his writing, starting mostly from a hand’s on, first person experience, that leads you into his vast knowledge and research on the subject. He is a master of the southwestern mountains and desert, all that inhabits that land, and has become an expert on the ancient ones who roamed the stark geography for thousands of years. House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest was Childs’ exploration of the roots and migration of the Anazasi. The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, presented his view of nature through reflective encounters with wild fauna, up close and personal. That book presents an amazing piece of writing in three pages, “Hawk”, that describes a hunt by a hawk for a rabbit, by simply describing the tracks, the sweeping wing traces, the dislodged fur, all in the record left on new snow. You never see the action; you know the action by following the signs.

Tracing Time also begins with the personal: “My sport is seeing.” We could add interpreting as a related pastime. Childs is in the frame of each image discussed, then branches out with conjecture, and discussions with experts, he is not claiming to be an expert, simply an observer. It becomes more personal as it all takes place in the initial days and months of COVID, pointing to an exact moment in modern times that marks the long years back to the ancient. His musings are varied for each symbol, his observations so interesting in the detail. Some examples: 

• Handprints: ‘These were not the marks of generic lives or of gods in legends, but individuals with names and faces, each a different person, a crowd, a room of applause. Holding up your own hand to compare sizes is involuntary.”

• Spirals: “Spirals are the high verb of rock art. They are the trappings of motion, like stepping into a planetarium with stars and planets swiveling around a domed ceiling.”

• Galleries (meaning a space filled with hundreds or thousands of images, some overwritten through time): “If a rock is living and thinking, certainly the art painted on it is non-stop chatter.” And, “It is what Carol Patterson calls ‘the presence of meaning.’ You don’t have to know what it is, only that it exists.”

• The Hunt: “if you encounter rock art while walking randomly, know that it’s not random. You’ve stepped into a pattern. Suddenly you find you are a pin in a map, an axis around which the land seems to turn.”

 There are no photographs in the book, rather quite elegant drawings of images from the rocks by Gary Gackstatter, that front each chapter, representing isolated images of the subject pattern Childs specifically addresses.  The effect is spare and simple, giving us an idea of the “art”, but keeping the focus on the narrative.

Craig Childs has written a paean to the symbolic work of the Southwest, and the landscape that is integral to the images left for us to ponder. “I am not offering a guidebook to places, but a guidebook to context, meaning, and ways of seeing.” He may offer speculation, or his own reflections, but he never states that this is the translation, this is what it means. He knows his subject first hand, and is well equipped to write the stories in this fascinating look into the past.

I Got Mine: A Book Review

I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer
By John Nichols
University of New Mexico Press
Hardback, 280 pages, 36 halftones
$27.95

A Review by Pete Warzel

John Treadwell Nichols will be 82 years old this year. He has been writing for much more than a majority of those years, having his first publishing deal for A Sterile Cuckoo, at the age of 23. A wunderkind, for sure. The golden boy.

This memoir by Nichols covers that initial success and the years that follow, up to now, focused on the writing aspects of his 23 novels and non-fiction books, myriad essays, political diatribes, screenplays, and all the work that did not get published along the way. Some of his personal life comes through in this book, some of the marriages, the political engagement, and certainly his pure feelings about Hollywood, but it is really a travelogue through a writing life. In that, it is fascinating.

I once had the opportunity to visit John’s storage shed in Taos many years ago, to view the manuscripts, the endless rewrites, that now reside at the University of New Mexico in the John Nichols archives. I believe it is no joke in this memoir when he cites the astounding 35th draft of his book On the Mesa, a non-fiction love story about the natural world around Taos, that finally came in at 193 pages. All his manuscripts filled a shelf that ran around the shed about the size of a two-car garage. Boxes filled the floor. It was a three-dimensional visualization of this memoir.

The title I Got Mine is taken from the epigram to the book, a two verse quote from a traditional song that tells the tale of a gambler losing all his money at a crap game, but when the police broke up the game someone dropped a bet on the floor, immediately swiped by the narrator on his way out the door. That is a witty analogy to John’s success, or not, as a writer. No money, big money, broke again. The Milagro Beanfield War sells very little, lingers, becomes an underground classic, while the third book in The New Mexico Trilogy, Nirvana Blues, becomes a best-seller in major cities and sends Nichols on his first book tour. Milagro percolates and becomes a film project for Robert Redford, and so up and down, paydirt and paucity.

Nichols rings true when he recalls the screenwriting gigs for Hollywood films, capturing the essence of the biz, as only his sense of humor can do. “So we park, take an elevator to the top floor, and sit down with Eddie Lewis and eight tanned moguls wearing Armani suits… Everyone gets comfortable, politely eats a delicate little cucumber and sprouts sandwich, takes a sip of Pellegrino sparkling water and then the head addresses Costa: ‘Well Costa, tell us what you have in mind’” Perfect. Costa is Costa-Gavras the director of Missing, an outstanding film that Nichols wrote the screenplay for… and got pushed out of the film credit by the Screenwriters Guild. Hollywood politics, a cruel outcome since it won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

He also rings so very true when he talks about his adopted home of Taos, New Mexico. “The stands at Friday or Saturday Taos High football games boasted cheering fans. Overhead, doves flew south trailed by noisy sandhill cranes. The Wednesday drive-in movies featured Tony Aguilar – I parked the family there to learn Spanish and enjoy the music. Lightning streak lit up the western sky as we pigged out on butter-drenched popcorn.” Idyllic, small town America, but in the kingdom of New Mexico, Chamisaville, to some. 

There is a sense of endless energy in this book. Nichols writes and writes and rewrites, multiple novels and screenplays at once, while taking time to commit to political protest and engagement, raise a family, remarry and remarry. He describes himself as “…a one man writing factory, working on five novels at once.” My sense is that at 81 he still has a good chunk of that energy left. This book gallops and roars, laughs out loud at the publishing business, the movie business, and at the author himself. John Nichols really never pulled his punches in his writing, or in conversation or protest. This book follows suit. He is ethically consistent in everything he does, like it or not.

Let me close with an opinion. American Blood, a Nichols novel from 1987, breaks the mold of his work, and it is a masterpiece. Like Cormac McCarthy, but in Nichols own style and vision, he explores the undercurrent, no, the heart and soul of America as violent. I remember when it was first published, I bought it and read it in a night and day. It is a powerful, ugly, beautiful piece of writing, and I could not put it down deep into the night. It scared me, as does our country more and more these days. John has written a lot of very good books with his singular sense of humor and love of land and people. American Blood is a work from deeper inside. It was I thought, on that first reading, truly a great novel. I will go back and read it again and hope I was correct. It is, given the past several weeks of repeated mass killings in our country, a reflection of our society, but written 35 years ago. It is timely again, and might be of interest to you, but with a WARNING. It is violent and disturbing. The reviews Nichols includes in I Got Mine might be worth reading before trying out American Blood. A comment Nichols himself makes in this memoir about being asked to write a screenplay of the novel is to the point. “This time around I chickened out of writing a script because I couldn’t deal with the violence.”

So let’s end with this to put it all in perspective. Nichols is on the set of The Milagro Beanfield War in Truchas, New Mexico, 1986. Robert Redford walks by and says “ Oh, John Nichols, are you slumming in Hollywood again?” Enough said. John Nichols has had a wild ride.

Donaciano Vigil: A Book Review

Review by Pete Warzel

518 Alto Street is an elegant, traditionally adobe plastered home, formerly owned by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, and recognized as historically significant by the Foundation’s Register of Properties Worthy of Recognition, as well as the National Register of Historic Places. HSFF holds a preservation easement on the property ensuring the façade, footprint, and specific elements be maintained as is, in perpetuity.

The house was brought to prominent public attention in the 1960s when owned and renovated by Charlotte White and companion, the sculptor Boris Gilbertson. It was much earlier owned by the Vigil family, the land purchased and the home built sometime between 1792 and 1800. It is the birthplace of Donaciano Vigil, Territorial Governor of New Mexico following the murder of Governor Charles Bent during the Taos Revolt in 1847. His fascinating life spanned Spanish, Mexican, and United States jurisdiction of the area in the 19th century, and so was at the center of the change to what we are now.

Authors Maurilio E. Vigil (descendant of Donaciano) and Helene Boudreau, both professors at New Mexico Highlands University, have written a thoroughly researched, engaging history of Donaciano Vigil, within the context of New Mexico history, and the long arm of Spanish colonization of New Spain and the northern reaches of what would become our state. The detail in this book is prodigious, the writing well done, the story fascinating. And because of our former ownership of the Alto Street House, Donaciano feels like a cousin we are just learning about.

The authors trace the origination of the Vigil family from Spain, and follow the emigration of the noble class to the new world due to “…the many Spaniards trapped in this archaic social and political system…” that arose under the Austrian Habsburg monarchs of Spain during the sixteenth century. Juan Montes Vigil II was the third named Vigil immigrant to the Americas, and the patriarch of the family in New Mexico. Juan Montes Vigil III had a son out of wedlock, Francisco Montes Vigil, most likely a mestizo, and the first Vigil to move his family to New Mexico, following Don Diego de Vargas’ call for settlers to propagate the newly reconquered land in 1695. (The authors pull no punches in describing the years of Spanish return following the Pueblo Revolt, “Santa Fe was liked an armed camp….Food was scarce, and it was up to Vargas to remedy the situation. He commanded a force to Picuris and Taos to steal food from the natives.”)  Juan Cristobal Montes Vigil II, great grandson of Francisco Montes, purchased the land and built the home on Alto Street sometime around 1800, where Donaciano was born in 1802.

I have long pondered the lack of focus on Mexican history in Santa Fe, and why that might be. It is a significant missing piece in the way the city promotes its past, and a hole in our own knowledge of the cultural history of our city. No longer. Donacinao Vigil’s life is at the heart of Mexican rule in New Mexico, and the authors fill in the blanks with great research and detail. In many ways, Donaciano is a cultural bridge between Spain and U.S. ownership of the land here. Born under Spanish rule in Santa Fe, he begins his prodigious career in the military, as many of his forefathers had done for Spain and Mexico. He serves during the rebellion in Santa Cruz in 1837, and again during the attempted Texas invasion of New Mexico in 1841, takes on a political persona as secretary of the assembly in the Department of New Mexico under Mexican regime in Santa Fe, and following General Kearney’s invasion by the Army of the West, and proclamation that New Mexico was now part of the U.S., is appointed Secretary of the first, civil U.S. government. That position was second in political command to the governor, Charles Bent. Upon Bent’s murder in Taos during the Taos uprising, Donaciano Vigil stepped into the position and began to create new government structure and process, following the Kearney Code, and supervised the creation of the Vigil Index, a guide to the document archive of Spain and Mexico for future use by the United States in lawsuits and land claims. His dedication and energy out ran the new national affiliation’s timeframe as he was informed the structure could not stand, since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo had not yet been signed by Mexico and the U.S., so ownership of New Mexico was still under Mexico jurisdiction. Ooops.  

The subtitle of the book cites Donaciano Vigil’s service as soldier, statesman, and territorial governor, but that leaves so much of his life out of the picture. An active life of community and political involvement put him at the center of everything. He retired to land purchased in Pecos, NM, ostensibly as a gentleman farmer, yet continues to be called and serve as a Territorial Representative to the New Mexico legislature. He built a molino, grist mill, on his land beside the Pecos River, and ground corn and threshed wheat for his neighbors, augmenting his income. Upon his death, he received a spectacular send-off by his fellow New Mexicans, the authors quoting historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell, “…by far the largest and most distinguished gathering ever witnessed in New Mexico.”

Professors Vigil and Boudreau have written an important book on a native born New Mexican who straddled three political and cultural worlds, and was instrumental in forming the government of the United States in the Territory that would eventually become the forty-seventh state. In doing so, they highlight Mexican history in Santa Fe, and how governmental transition worked and cultures interacted on way to becoming New Mexico.

Donaciano Vigil: The Life of a Nuevomexicno Soldier, Statesman, and Territorial Governor
By Maurilio E. Vigil and Helene Boudreau
University of New Mexico Press
Hardbound, 318 pages, $39.95

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Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey - A Book Review by Pete Warzel

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Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art

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Review by Pete Warzel 

Somewhere near Santa Fe lives a man who in the 1990s set the art world spinning, with joy or disdain, depending upon which side of the working divide you were on.

The divide was in makers and doers in the democracy of art and beauty v. the arbiters of art, the tastemakers, the “therapeutic institution” that told you what was worth looking at or listening to or reading at night. Dave Hickey should have been on the institutional side of the division having entered the world of art criticism and academia. He was not. He had arrived via start-up art galleries and managing an established one in NYC (from which he resigned when asked to present an exhibition of Yoko Ono’s artwork), writing songs in Nashville, drugs, sex, rock and roll, and doing a stint as executive editor of Art in America magazine. Then Dave Hickey wrote The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (1993), and his world and that of art criticism and the official determination of worthiness changed. For the better, I would think.

The dialogue had begun and Hickey was either a genius (he did receive a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2001) or the really bad boy in a room full of tweeds. He said in an interview in BOMB Magazine, April 1995, “…I am an art critic, which is the single unfundable, ungrantable, unendowable endeavor that is even vaguely connected with the arts. And justifiably so, in my case, since I am not with the program.”

You get the picture.

Enter Daniel Oppenheimer an excellent writer and admitted Hickey fanboy. He presents Hickey’s critical work as born in fear “… that legitimacy and legibility are the enemies  of freedom and forgiveness. So he writes to protect the places where he found refuge from the people from and in whom he perceives judgment.” Maybe. But there is no argument that Hickey’s take no prisoners’ criticism changed the conversation, perhaps the status quo.

Dave Hickey was born in Fort Worth, Texas, 1940. His father was a dedicated, amateur jazz musician, taking Dave to impromptu gigs that opened up musical and artistic worlds for the boy. The family was mobile and Dave became a surfer, a writer, eventually a gallery owner in Austin before moving to NYC and entering an entirely different realm of art, exposure to the rock stars of painting, music and literature, and a life that was not afraid to take risks or fail. He had received a BA from Texas Christian University and an MA from the University of Texas and gave up on his doctoral dissertation before opening the Austin gallery named “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, which is typical Dickey humor since his abandoned dissertation was about “the hidden syntactic patterns in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction.”

He was writing art and music criticism for the national magazines and during a panel discussion in the late 1980s launched the idea that he would explore in depth in The Invisible Dragon, and later in Air Guitar. The theme was a democratization of art and a return to “beauty”, not precisely defined, but “the beautiful…is a form of rhetoric….The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.” The beauty in art – painting, music, writing, can bring people together over the object or art that they love. The institutions only propound virtue, making learned judgments in doing so, and are oblivious to the individualized, multi-faceted nature of the beautiful.

“Beauty” as democratized in The Invisible Dragon would secure him a tenured position in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the city and its cultural nuances informed his written work going forward. Writing about his associates at UNLV he observed, “I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line social hierarchy – that having ascended from ‘food” to ‘cocktail’ in Las Vegas, there is hardly anywhere else to go (except perhaps, up to ‘magician’)…because the rich are not special in Las Vegas, because money here is just money…. Membership at the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat.” (from Air Guitar)

In 2010 he and his wife, Libby Lumpkin, curator, art historian, and newly appointed professor of art history at UNM, moved to Albuquerque and then Santa Fe. Hickey is now in poor health, eighty years old, mostly unable to travel. However, he did return to Las Vegas in 2017 to give several lectures at UNLV, and witnessed the massacre at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. 

Although Oppenheimer does not quote Hickey about life in Santa Fe, he certainly gives hints, if we accept he has “learned” the critic well enough to speak for him, in a very Hickey-like tone – Santa Fe is “…a brief squiggle of kitsch along his Silk Road…. “ In an article written for Harvard Design Magazine in 2001 that I found, Hickey addresses his then adopted hometown, Las Vegas, Nevada, and his future place of exile, Santa Fe, New Mexico, as “dialectical utopias” because “…the cities do speak to one another – although neither one of them listens.” Hickey knows what we all know, but makes no qualms about airing his opinions, perhaps not knowing then, or more likely, not caring, that he would come to live here one day. But perhaps he had an inkling, as he also curated the acclaimed SITE Santa Fe biennial in 2001. In his curatorial statement for that exhibition, now twenty years ago, Hickey stated “I know how to look and I remember what I see.” What he saw in Santa Fe at the time (in the Harvard Design Magazine piece) was an “invented” community, a “choice”, a “dream within the dream.”  That “…attempts to embody and evoke the eternal West.”

I think that kind of observation makes the dialogue, for us, interesting, even if we are not quite listening. The parallel universes of Las Vegas and Santa Fe could only be a Hickey construct. They are each visions of the American West, two very different embodiments of the “beautiful”, and so, individual statements about the country itself. I wonder what he thinks now, after living here for a good spell.

Daniel Oppenheimer has written a succinct gem of critical biography about a writer/critic who had the insight to take on the defects of his own chosen profession, empower artists, and speak truth when the world was seemingly ready to listen. Bravo to them both. Dave Hickey might be “far from respectable” as the title implies, but a brilliant voice to listen to, and take heed. This biography just might lead you back to read Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, or Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, to learn what the intellectual commotion was really all about.

Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 141pages
$24.95 (Order the book at top of this page page) 

A Book Review -- John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General

John P. Slough The Forgotten Civil War General - Richard Miller

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Reviewed by Pete Warzel

On April 29, 2021 Richard Miller presented a Zoom Salon El Zaguán talk to the members and general participants of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The subject was John P. Slough and his unlikely victory at the battle of Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, during the early days of the American Civil War. The presentation was narrowly focused on his role as commander of the First Colorado Volunteers, marched south from Denver to defend New Mexico against the insurgent Confederate troops from Texas. Miller’s lecture was excellent, and intriguing.

The basis of the talk was Mr. Miller’s new book. John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General is recently published (available in the HSFF gift shop), and although the hook here is the Civil War and perhaps for us, Glorieta, the research and writing is so much more. This is a fascinating look at regional economic and social history of the mid-west during the early 19th century. It truly is history writing at its best – an individual biography placed within the greater cultural context of geography and time, and significant social disorder. The societal turmoil and accompanying political interaction is eerily familiar to us today.

Slough began his business and political career in Cincinnati, Ohio, a booming city on the edge of the fault line where pro and anti-slavery factions, as well as the political parties, became violent. Remember, at this time the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, and so Free-Staters. The Democrats then, leaned to slavery and the new Kansas Territory became the battleground for not simple political warfare, but vicious physical clashes on the ground and in the statehouse. Slough was expelled from his seat in the Ohio legislature for striking a fellow representative over a personal (read political) slight. He moved to Kansas Territory in an opportunistic act to create an expansive legal business in land speculation created with the expansion west. This was the America of unlimited opportunity for aggressive individuals. It also was the America of social and political division. John Brown and his men murdered pro-slavery sympathizers in Kansas.

Kansas business leaders went to Denver in 1858 to ride the gold boom and the growth of the city named after James W. Denver, then current Kansas territorial governor. Slough followed in 1861 having previously invested in Denver real estate from afar. It was a tough frontier town, not the sophisticated home he left in Leavenworth, Kansas. “Outside the hastily built homes and shops, mules, hogs, and dogs wandered Denver’s streets in great numbers and provided sport for drunken sharpshooters.” (I am tempted here to say not much has changed in 160 years but it has). With Kansas achieving statehood, the Colorado Territory was created and government administration became imperative upon Lincoln’s election and the threat of war, to keep the territory within the Union. Colorado Territory was akin to Kansas – a hotbed of emigrants from neighboring states, south and nouth, pro and anti-slavery. William Gilpin, the territory’s first governor feared insurrection and Slough stepped in as Colonel of the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry, having no military background in his resumé. The volunteers were miners from the Rocky Mountains and his third in command was John Chivington, to become infamous as the commander at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

I recommend viewing the recorded Salon presentation by Richard Miller on the HSFF website, regarding the Battle of Glorieta Pass, and the mis-steps of its inexperienced commander. https://www.historicsantafe.org/545-hsff-blog/2021/4/30/richard-miller-on-col-john-slough

He resigned his post and headed east to join the war proper in Virginia, to Harper’s Ferry, now as a brigadier general, and then as military Governor of Alexandria, Virginia, a major location for defeated Union forces as well as Black refugees fleeing enslavement in northern Virginia. His position afforded him access to the major players of Lincoln’s administration and the war effort.

When the war ended Slough was to make a new decision on where to start on another career to add to lawyer, politician, military commander and governor. In 1866 he became the chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court.

Upon visiting his former battlefield at Glorieta he was appalled at the cemetery for his fallen soldiers, and urged the Legislature to fund improvements and add “plainly inscribed monuments”. What he got was a $1500 appropriation for a monument in the city – the Soldier’s Monument. Erected in the center of Santa Fe Plaza in 1868 Slough never got to see it, as he was shot and killed in the Exchange Hotel, Santa Fe, in December 1867. As we all know, he could not see the monument today were he able.

Miller writes of the “American narrative” that “those willing to move across the continent…had a greater opportunity to gain economic and social status than the less venturesome stuck in their settled lives back east.” This was the “American land of opportunity” that John P. Slough sought, succeeded and failed, succeeded again. Yet in the end, Miller states, Slough’s life is a “story of great opportunity and failed ambition.” Richard Miller tells that story extremely well.

John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General by Richard L. Miller, University of New Mexico Press, Hardcover, 304 pages.