Roswell

By John LeMay

Best known as the site of an alleged flying saucer crash in 1947 and the "Roswell Incident," Roswell began as a humble trading post in the late 1860s along the Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail and eventually grew into a metropolis of southeastern New Mexico. Once a cow town and home to famous Western figures such as John Chisum, Pat Garrett, and Capt. Joseph C. Lea, Roswell is also the birthplace of the New Mexico Military Institute, the testing grounds for Robert H. Goddard's rockets in the 1930s, and the site of the Roswell Army Airfield and a German POW camp in the 1940s. Today Roswell is a popular tourist destination and home to more than 50,000 residents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439636411

John LeMay

John LeMay is the author of many books on the history of Roswell, Southeastern New Mexico, and the Southwest. His most recent book, Tall Tales & Half Truths of Billy the Kid, was published in 2015. Tall Tals & Half Truths of Pat Garrett is its sequel. LeMay is a past president of the Historical Society for Southeast New Mexico in Roswell.

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INTRODUCTION

Roswell has come a long way since it began as a mere trading post in the Pecos Valley along the Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail back in the 1860s. From that one simple outpost, with the help and guidance of individuals such as Van C. Smith, John Chisum, Capt. Joseph C. Lea, J. J. Hagerman, and many others, Roswell grew to become the hub of Southeastern New Mexico. Today it is still growing and has a wonderful year-round climate, is a popular spot for retirees to settle, and also happens to be the dairy capital of the Southwest. But more important to the rest of the world, Roswell is that little town in New Mexico where aliens and a flying saucer crashed in 1947.

Thanks to pop-cultural references in films such as Independence Day and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just about everyone thinks that’s all there is to Roswell—the aliens—while in fact there is so much more.

Were it not for the Roswell incident, as it is popularly known thanks to the book of the same name by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, Roswell may very well have been famous for being the site of many of Dr. Robert H. Goddard’s rocket tests in the 1930s. Or perhaps the town would merely be known as the stomping grounds of old-time celebrities such as Western film star Roy Rogers, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and rodeo champion Bob Crosby, to name a few, or the birthplace of more modern icons such as John Denver and Demi Moore, born here in 1943 and 1962 respectively. Maybe it would have been Roswell’s military involvement harboring the 509th Bomb Group, the only elite atomic bomb squad in the world during its time at the Roswell Army Air Field south of town. Roswell is also home to the West Point of the West, New Mexico Military Institute, whose former cadets include ABC news correspondent Sam Donaldson, artist Peter Hurd, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Paul Horgan, founder of the Hilton Hotel chain Conrad Hilton, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, and actor Owen Wilson, to name a few. Or perhaps, like neighboring Lincoln County, Roswell’s claim to fame would have been old-time Western figures such as cattle baron John Chisum and Sheriff Pat Garrett, who used to live in the area.

Whatever the case, fame or no fame, isn’t Roswell still just another little town in the middle of nowhere? While it may indeed be in the middle of the prairie, events in this small town have had a unique impact on the world, one that many people may not comprehend. Its most profound and far-reaching impact comes in the form of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, whose experimental rocket launches eventually ensured us a journey to the moon. Goddard’s rocket designs were copied by the Germans in World War II, when their V-2 rockets rained terror down upon London. Once Goddard inspected a captured V-2 rocket, his speculations were confirmed that the Germans had indeed used his rocket designs as a weapon. The U.S. Army had ironically ignored the concept of using rocketry for warfare earlier. Years later, Goddard’s ideas paved the way to the beginning of the space age and inspired Werner von Braun, a world-renowned rocket scientist from Germany.

Not far from Roswell, a weapon that would usher the world into the atomic age would be tested in Alamogordo. Roswell was close enough to the Trinity Site near Alamogordo that residents were able to see the blinding light of the explosion. Some residents also say that during the Cold War Era during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 B-52s of the Roswell Air Base (then called Walker Air Force Base) sat on the base runway with engines running ready to take off and retaliate at a moments notice.

And then of course there’s the Roswell incident of 1947, which if, like so many believe, it was the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and not a top-secret, high-altitude weather balloon as claimed by the military, it could just about make Roswell one of the most historic spots on the planet. As Toby Smith makes a case for in his book, Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of a Popular Culture, Roswell has more or less shaped the way people look at extraterrestrials, and most people are now certain that if aliens do in fact exist they must look just like the ones recovered at Roswell.

These were fairly far-reaching effects for a small town in the middle of nowhere. But, just as the amount of books written on Billy the Kid outnumber those written on the town of Lincoln itself where he roamed, fewer books have been written on Roswell the town than on the Roswell incident. So while the story of the UFO crash near Roswell will be told in this book, more importantly, so too will the town’s rich history appear in the pages ahead.

Unlike most areas in New Mexico, Roswell’s history does not begin with the Spanish exploration of the mid-1500s. The only Spanish explorers to go through the Pecos Valley included Antonio de Espejo in 1582 and Gaspar Castano de Sosa in 1590, and they recorded very little about the area. A few small petroglyphs exist in Bottomless Lakes State Park depicting the first Spaniards to traverse the Pecos Valley. Although some Mescalero Apaches roamed in the area, no other people or settlers would begin arriving in the area until after the United States had acquired the New Mexico territory in 1850 after the Mexican-American War and the resulting Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The Pecos Valley’s first settlers would come in the form of Hispanics that started the small communities of Missouri Plaza, Rio Hondo, and Berrendo in the 1860s. These settlements didn’t last long, and Roswell would have its true beginnings in the form of the aforementioned small trading post built along the Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail, and in a domino effect of events, Roswell would eventually be born and become the place that it is today.

One

THE FOUNDING OF ROSWELL

The first