Category: Not Your Movie West

Lew Wallace, who spent most of his term as territorial governor writing the novel “Ben Hur,” got it right when he said, “All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.” That early strangeness, which has since been corrected, was not New Mexico’s failing. Elsewhere USA just failed to understand. I begin this Web book with four historic days demonstrating the problem and then relate an earlier “failure” in the territory: abandonment of Chaco Canyon and its outliers.