María Montoya is the first scholar to examine a single Hispanic land grant closely, chosing as her target the most written about of all the roughly two hundred land grants in New Mexico, the Maxwell grant. Others have studied the Colfax County War, the grant’s legal history, and Lucien B. Maxwell himself, but no one has attempted to study as a whole this large chunk of northeastern New Mexico from the time of the Jicarilla Apache to 1900. Previous works have emphasized the grant’s top-down history: the largely unrealized plans for its economic development involving New Mexico’s leading citizens and the story of Lucien Maxwell himself, who operated it much like a feudal baron. This atypical grant was made to Charles Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1843 and came to be owned by Lucien Maxwell when he married Beaubien’s daughter and bought out Miranda’s interest. Maxwell and his wife owned...
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