New Mexico’s Larget Land Owners (dated info but interesting)

     In New Mexico, only about 44% of the acreage, or 33.9 million acres, is outside the clutches of federal, state and local government–especially the Federal Government. West of the Rio Grande all the way to the Arizona state line, the overwhelming bulk of the acreage is held by government, much of it connected to the huge Indian reservations. East of the Rio Grande and south of Interstate 40, a bit more than half the land is government, most notable the White Sands Missile Range and various forest lands. By contrast, east of the Rio Grande and north of Interstate 40, only a small portion is owned by government. And this is where 25 of our 40 listees have holdings.
     Besides any unit of government and the Indian tribes, we excluded holdings of publicly traded corporations, utilities, private corporations not dominated by an individual or a family, widely held partnerships, and non-profit entities such as foundations and religious organizations. The form of ownership–individual, corporation, partnership or trust–was irrelevant so long as the benefit of the holding rested with an individual or two or a family.
 

     We counted only deeded acreage and not land leased from governmental agencies or other private landowners. We’re not writing about renters. Nor did we want to write only about hotsy-totsy developers in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, so we looked for acreage, not value. Because there is always a certain margin of error to this kind of research, we rounded to the nearest 5,000 acres. Our cutoff point worked out to be 35,000 acres. With 640 acres to a square mile, our minimum is about 55 square miles — roughly a square 7 1/2 miles along each side.
     As you would expect, all of these holdings are essentially livestock ranches, cattle or sheep or horses, with some farming and other uses. There is a simple reason for this. You can’t do much else with land far from population areas that doesn’t have a lot of rain or underground water. Even then, it can take dozens of acres to support one cow-calf unit.
     But you have to give New Mexico ranch operators considerable credit for perseverance. The livestock business in New Mexico actually dates back to 1540 when the military explorer Francisco Vasques Coronado brought up some sheep and horses from Mexico. If you don’t consider Coronado as our first tourist, ranching is New Mexico’s only 450-year-old industry.
     We won’t try to detail the tortured overall history of land ownership in New Mexico, except to note a few basic facts. Historically, vast chunks of land were granted to private citizens as either a reward for services rendered, a payoff for political support or as a means by which a government solidified its influence over a region. These grants often conflicted with what Indian tribes and pueblos saw as their property rights from time immemorial. From the 1500s until the advent of U.S. control in the 1840s, various Spanish and then Mexican rulers made hundreds of land grants covering millions of acres.
     This created great controversy. Usually, the grants were unsurveyed and they often overlapped one another. Indian rights were not always considered. Not every grant recipient fulfilled the specified conditions to get clear title, such as taking up residence and engaging in agriculture. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1848 agreement that ended the Mexican War and ceded most of what is now New Mexico to the United States, protected grant holders who had perfected their titles. But the U.S. Senate refused to ratify a provision that would have vested grantees merely in the process. Indeed, much of New Mexico’s vast federal acreage today is the result of disallowed Mexican or Spanish land grants.
     The result was decades of litigation–and fraud, as all kinds of dubious documents surfaced in purported support of these ancient rights. An article published nationally in 1885, “Land Stealing in New Mexico,” caused a sensation. New Mexico lawyer Thomas B. Catron gained wealth and political power–he later became a U.S. Senator and a county on the Arizona border is named for him–partly due to his uncanny ability to defend old land claims, often in exchange for a piece of the action. In 1894 The Santa Fe New Mexican reported he owned about 2 million acres and was part-owner or lawyer for owners of another 4 million acres.
 

     We don’t know of anyone today with 2 million acres of New Mexico, although oilman Robert O. Anderson, now of Roswell, may have been in that league until his fortune collapsed a few years ago. Decades of boom and bust have forced the division and sale of many large spreads. But since territorial days, New Mexico tax policy has been heavily skewed in favor of big landowners. Property taxes are relatively low, offset by sky-high state income taxes and a gross receipts tax that unlike those in many other states does not exempt foodstuffs, clothing or clothing. Nor do you have to be filthy rich to own significant land in New Mexico. It’s not surprising that only two persons on this list–William D. Sanders and John Yates–made the Crosswinds list last fall of the state’s 25 richest persons.
     Moreover, a full 30% of our list live outside New Mexico, where, perhaps, capital is easier to come by.
     As part of our research, we talked with county tax assessors, appraisers and other land experts. Members of our team made hundreds of telephone calls, visited some of the state’s 33 county courthouses to examine land records and poured through library holdings. In some cases we had to make judgment calls about whether to amass lands of disparate family members for the purpose of this list. That’s why, for example, the many branches of the Perez families of Torrance and Guadalupe Counties aren’t here.
     One big caveat: While clearly we have identified the overwhelming bulk of the largest individual and family landholdings in the state, we really can’t guarantee that we have found them all. While we tried to confirm acreages in some cases we relied on knowledgeable estimates from land experts. Believe or not, evaluating large landholdings is almost as much art as science.
 

     William P. Barrett is the Special Projects Editor of Crosswinds. He is a veteran journalist for national publications, most recently as a Worth magazine contributing editor. This month Barrett rejoins Forbes magazine as an associate editor. He has since relocated to the Los Angeles area.
     Juliet Casey, Daniel J. Chacon, Nick Kryloff, Dan McCay, Susan Montoya and Martin Salazar are Special Projects Reporters for Crosswinds. All six, students at the University of New Mexico, worked as editors or reporters on the New Mexico Daily Lobo, the student newspaper. Kryloff and Barrett last wrote for Crosswinds in October when they and Ray Langley co-authored The Crosswinds 25, a list of the state’s richest persons.
 

     We are grateful to Worth magazine, which in March published a pioneering list of the country’s 100 largest landowners, including 12 on this list. Other useful sources included the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and the New Mexico State Library and the State Corporation Commission, both in Santa Fe.
     Publications we consulted–and hereby acknowledge–include the Albuquerque Journal, The Albuquerque Tribune, the Amarillo Globe-News, the Artesia Daily Press, the Cibola County Beacon, the Lincoln County News, New Mexico Magazine, the Quay County Sun, the defunct Roswell Morning Dispatch, The Santa Fe New Mexican, the Santa Fe Reporter and the Santa Rosa News.
     National or out-of-state publications include Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Muncie Star-Press.