| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

María E. Montoya. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 299. $50.00.

María E. Montoya has written an engaging examination of the Maxwell Land Grant, the most famous of roughly two hundred land grants in New Mexico and southern Colorado, the title to which originated under Spanish and Mexican rule and came into U.S. sovereignty by way of the property guarantees of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Montoya's study is one of the few book-length monographs that closely examines a single Hispanic land grant. The breadth of the study, from the making of the grant in 1843 to its final resting place early in the twentieth century, is matched by the depth of the detail that the author provides. The book is deeply sourced, beautifully written, marred by occasional errors, and full of controversial assertions. The vast empire of the grant, finally surveyed at 1.7 million acres, has fueled many romantic stories, beginning with the deep imprint left on the grant by the baronial first real owner, Lucien B. Maxwell, and ending with the latest owner, the baronial Ted Turner. To her credit, Montoya for the most part eschews the romantic tales for a more penetrating analysis. 1

Part of her analysis covers areas previously explored by other historians. Morris Taylor, among others, has already made familiar the efforts of the Dutch-owned Maxwell Land Company to control the mess the company bought when it purchased the grant in 1877. Montoya adds little that is new to that story. The director of the film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) provided more action than Montoya can in her extended description of the shoot out between settlers and grant owners at the Pooler Hotel on August 25, 1888. However, Montoya uniquely focuses on the terrain of the Maxwell grant and the peoples dispossessed in the adjudication of the grant under U.S. rule. . . .

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