Benjamin Hale

Benjamin Hale arrived in the Cimarron country sometime before 1852, the decade when the Maxwell Land Grant was consolidating its hold over what would eventually become one of the largest private land holdings in North American history. He came, as most men came to that country, by the Santa Fe Trail — the southern branch, through Raton Pass and down into the valley of the Cimarron River. By 1860 he appears in the territorial census as a ranch foreman on a property northeast of what would become Cimarron, New Mexico, but in an area whose exact boundaries were still contested between the grant's claimants and the federal survey.

He spent the next quarter century working the large cattle operations of the Cimarron district, moving between Colorado and New Mexico territory as the land ownership disputes of the region shifted and hardened. The Maxwell Land Grant War of the 1870s — when settlers on the grant's claimed land fought against its agents and the courts — left its mark on everyone who lived in that country. Hale was not a combatant in any documented sense. He appears in the grant's payroll records through 1876, after which his employment is harder to trace. By 1882 he was working a ranch property on the Colorado side of the Cimarron, for an operator whose name does not appear in any surviving deed record.

Hale died on June 3, 1886, age seventy-one, at a bunkhouse on the Cimarron River approximately nine miles north of the New Mexico line. The cause was given as cardiac failure. He had no known surviving family. The Colfax County clerk itemized his effects in a probate record filed June 18: one canvas bedroll, one hunting knife with cracked handle, one set of playing cards missing the seven of diamonds, one pocket watch (non-functional), three letters in a language the clerk described as "foreign" without specifying which, and one folded paper, described as "a map or drawing of some land, purpose unclear."

The map surfaced again in 1924, when a Pueblo County property lawyer named Dresser purchased it from an estate sale in Trinidad. Dresser recognized two of the fence lines shown on the map as corresponding precisely to sections erected by the Rio Grande Land Company between the summer of 1887 and the spring of 1888 — sections that had not existed, and whose configuration had not been publicly proposed in any survey, as of the date of Hale's death. A third line on the map terminates at a cattle watering point not documented until its discovery in the course of a boundary survey conducted in 1934.

The archive obtained a hand-traced copy of the Dresser letter in 1931. The map itself passed to a private collector and has not been made available for direct examination. What the archive has reviewed is the tracing, the Dresser correspondence, and the 1887 Rio Grande Land Company survey records held by the Colorado State Archives. The correspondence between the map lines and the 1887 survey is, within the limits of a hand-traced reproduction, exact.

Benjamin Hale was not a surveyor. He did not read compass bearings or work with transit instruments, as far as any record shows. The three letters found among his effects were examined briefly by the Colfax County clerk and then lost. The "foreign" language noted in the probate was never identified. He left no journals and no will. The watch that could not be wound. The deck that was missing one card. These details are in the record and cannot be made to mean anything specific.

What can be said is that a man who spent thirty years working someone else's fence lines in disputed country died with a map of fence lines that did not yet exist. The country he worked was the same country where those lines would eventually be drawn. The map is the only document in this file that cannot be explained by what came before it.