History of The Old West

124 Pages. Contents: Discovery of New Mexico, Humboldt on New Mexico, Guadalupe- Hidalgo Treaty-Mexican War, The Gadsden Treaty. Frontier Forts, The Civil War - Mesilla Valley, Mesilla Capitol of Arizona Territory, The Territory Under The Confederacy, The Overland Stage Route, General Lew Wallace Author of "Ben Hur", Mesilla Riot of 1871, Apache Raids, Indian Wars, Geronimo, Millions in Gold, and Bill the Kid and Pat Garrett. My uncle, George Griggs, spent much of his life studying and writing the history of the Southwest Frontier. As a young girl, I saw him as a mysterious figure in my life, a man who had once governed a provincial territory of Mexico, who had lived with a strange Indian tribe in Chihuahua, who always wore dark and formal clothes, and who in his later years seemed already to be a figure out of history as he worked and studied in his Billy the Kid Museum near the plaza of Old Mesilla. But the fact that he was very much a human being was brought home to me almost in the last year of his life. I wanted to establish a restaurant in an old building that belonged to him and that had once been a Butterfield Stage stop. Young and brash, but also in fear and trembling, I went to Uncle George to ask him to rent me the building for my very unlikely business venture. He fixed his eyes on me and said sternly, "No! I won't rent it." My heart sank. But as I stood there, he turned to his desk, sat down and wrote out a quit claim deed to the property and handed it to me. In a stroke of the pen the property had passed from him to me! It's this very human memory I have of my Uncle George Griggs. I think it is the human thing that makes his book so good and so readable today. The way the book is written, the way the episodes are put together, makes you aware of the people of history instead of the dry facts. I like to think that La Posta, the restaurant on Mesilla Plaza in Uncle George's old building, still going strong after 35 years, is still a place where history lingers. His memory is certainly there - and his book, reprinted exactly as it first appeared in 1930 is the best tribute to his memory I can think of.…