The Trinchera Letter

Aurelio Jesús Vásquez had held eight hundred acres in the Trinchera grant region of Las Animas County since 1869, inheriting both the land and the argument about it from his father, who had grazed the same range since the early 1850s under a claim derived from a Mexican land grant that the American courts had been contesting in one form or another since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The legal standing of that claim was uncertain, as such claims often were in southern Colorado during this period. What was not uncertain was that Vásquez's family had been on the land for thirty years, that they had improved it, and that the range was good.

By 1878, the pressure on small Spanish-grant ranchers in Las Animas County had become considerable. The Maxwell Land Grant Company and various Anglo investment concerns were advancing claims on adjacent parcels through the territorial courts, and men who had held land by use and inheritance were finding the legal instruments of that holding suddenly questioned. Vásquez was aware of this. He had hired a Trinidad attorney. He was not a man who could be easily frightened by abstraction.

The first letter arrived in March of 1878, carried by no one anyone could identify. It was found on a fence post at the western edge of his property, folded and tucked under the wire. Unlike most such correspondence, it was not assembled from cut type, and it was not misspelled. It was written in a clear and educated hand, in block capitals, as though the author was aware that handwriting could be identified and had taken the precaution of removing that possibility. The paper was common and unmarked.

Vásquez showed the letter to his attorney in Trinidad, who advised him not to vacate. He also showed it to the Las Animas County Sheriff, who took a report and said he would inquire. Nothing came of the inquiry. May the first passed without incident, and Vásquez remained on the land with his stock. On the night of April 14th, however, three weeks before the deadline the letter had named, four horses disappeared from the corral beside the main barn. The gate had been lifted off its pins and set down without damage. There was no struggle evident, no blood, no sign that the animals had been taken against their will. They had simply gone.

Two days later, a second letter appeared on the same fence post.

No ransom was demanded. This fact was remarked upon by the sheriff and by Vásquez's attorney, both of whom found it significant, though they drew different conclusions from it. The sheriff believed it suggested a land dispute rather than common criminal enterprise — that the horses were taken as a demonstration rather than a commodity. The attorney believed the same and argued that this made the sender traceable, since land disputes in Las Animas County in 1878 had a limited number of interested parties. The investigation pursued several of those parties. None were charged.

The horses were never recovered. Vásquez contacted the Pinkerton office in Denver, which sent a man to Las Animas County for three days in May. The agent filed a report and billed for his time. The report identified no suspect and recommended a civil proceeding against the most likely land claimants, which Vásquez's attorney had already initiated. The civil proceeding went nowhere in the territorial courts and was eventually dropped.

By June of 1878, Aurelio Vásquez had sold his claim to a Denver land firm called Frontier Acreage Associates for a sum the record does not specify, though persons familiar with the transaction in Trinidad at the time called it fair and others called it considerably less than that. He left Las Animas County that summer and does not appear in subsequent county records. The land passed through three more owners before being consolidated into a larger holding by 1890. What that holding was derived from, and who had displaced whom in the first place, depended entirely on which set of courts one asked and which set of documents one accepted as valid.

The identity of “those you displaced” was never established in the record. The phrase appeared in a county attorney's summary in 1881 during an unrelated land proceeding, cited as an example of correspondence in a disputed-title matter. It was not explained further. The two letters are not among surviving county documents.