The Jewish Founding Fathers of Tucumcari

On a snowy fall day in 1900, a carriage of Chicago-based Rock Island Railway officials stopped at the small town of Liberty, New Mexico. Given shelter by the Goldenberg family, the strangers supposedly confided that the railroad would soon lay tracks in the vicinity on its way to link up with the El Paso & Northeastern Railway at the Pecos River near Santa Rosa. At first the settlers at Liberty were skeptical, as the story goes, but their doubts soon vanished. Railroad surveyors appeared, saying a “strong probability” existed that a good-sized town would arise somewhere nearby.

According to local legend, Alexander D. Goldenberg; his brother, Max B.; his brother-in-law, Jacob Wertheim; and two other Liberty residents, James Alexander “Alex” Street and Lee Kewen Smith, immediately started planning to form a real estate company and sell town lots. To do so, these five men, uncertain of the exact route of the prospective rail line, supposedly filed a straight north-south “ribbon” of homestead claims between the Canadian River and Tucumcari Mountain, thereby monopolizing any future townsite.

Although this story resembles the classic myth of frontier enterprise common in Hollywood westerns, it is half-wrong and the other half is not quite right. First, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for only five claimants, each with the limitation of 160-acre homestead entries, to monopolize the 12-mile expanse of land between the river and the mountain.

Moreover, local, state, and federal records present a much different, and more intriguing, scenario of how the Goldenberg brothers and their colleagues obtained the crucial land they wanted and became the founding fathers of Tucumcari. Finally, the myth glosses over the significant role of a remarkable group of Jewish merchants and business owners, beginning with the two Goldenberg brothers and Wertheim, in the town’s establishment and its more than half-century of success as a commercial and railroad center.

Besides setting this myth straight, this article explains the crucial role early Jewish merchants played in the development of Tucumcari. This small Jewish community, by tapping into and utilizing a regional Jewish network, injected new sources of capital and cultural standards into an isolated and sparsely-populated area to create a vibrant urban hub. As a result, the early Jews in Tucumcari reflected the broader patterns of Jewish influence in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West.

Jews in the West

Beginning with the California gold rush and following the completion of a transcontinental railroad network, several thousand Jews joined the culturally diverse throngs of Forty-Niners and their successors in that far-off El Dorado. Jewish merchants, bankers, and tradespeople became prominent figures in the previously unsettled interior areas opened by the railroads. Furthermore, Jewish entrepreneurs often established the first businesses of western towns and played a significant role in their growth and prosperity.

Most Jews in the West, no matter their location, operated merchandizing concerns and followed similar business practices. Local newspapers were filled with their advertisements and their stock of goods was always up-to-date with the latest fashions. Moreover, the success of these enterprising merchants depended on their “adaptability” in facing the unique challenges of the West. This adaptability often meant moving on to other opportunities when set-backs occurred. They had little regard for traveling great distances if the new location offered prospects of greater profits.

The early Goldwater family of the Arizona department store clan, for example, experienced successive business disappointments in California and Arizona before finally making a fortune first in Prescott and later, on the second attempt, in Phoenix. Such adjustments were often necessary because the West was not smoothly integrated, but instead consisted of geographical subunits with different economic and marketing demands. For instance, trade with Native Americans, in which many Jewish merchants and peddlers took part, carried unique problems and dangers.

Solomon Bibo excelled in this trade at the Acoma Pueblo west of Albuquerque by learning the language, gaining the confidence of the tribe, marrying the Indian governor’s granddaughter, and, in an accomplishment that “defies explication,” becoming governor of the pueblo himself.

Jews in the West also had to adjust their relationships with their Jewish counterparts in the East. Unlike the East Coast cities populated with great numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the West was home to mostly Western European Jewish immigrants. This difference meant that, by the early 1900s, Jewish communities in the American West had become more homogeneous, and less influenced by the brand of “Jewishness” characteristic of the Yiddish-speaking newcomers. As a result, these westerners, “marked by a drastic discontinuity with Jewish life in the Old World,” were less European in thought and lifestyle than their East Coast counterparts. Although Jews in the West nonetheless maintained strong relationships with their eastern friends and families, and often received financial assistance from them, they had difficulty explaining to easterners that the Jewish experience on the East Coast was not representative of all America.

Western Jewish communities faced unique economic opportunities and hardships and were rapidly becoming more than mere outposts of the eastern Jewish establishment. Among other differences, the West had a shortage of temples and rabbis, as well as eligible Jewish brides. To remedy the first problem, laymen often conducted religious ceremonies in homes. For special occasions such as funerals, rabbis traveled from distant cities. In remote western towns Jewish men often married local Gentile women, although these marriages frequently ended in divorce. Anti-Semitism ran rampant in the East but was muffled in the West. Also, most Jewish merchants were urbanites who had to adjust to the mores of rural, overwhelmingly Gentile western towns. The Jews adjusted by becoming “ardent joiners” in various local civic, social, and business organizations and thus cast their lot with the communities. Joining often led to increased social status.

In 1925 Florence Prag Kahn of California became the first Jewish congresswoman when she succeeded her deceased husband, Congressman Julius Kahn. She served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In fact Jews were elected to offices at every level in the West. Despite all of their joining proclivities, however, western Jews were bound together in tightknit networks based on ethnicity, family loyalty, and a common Jewish heritage that branded them with a separate identity. As a result, “A landsman, . . . [or] fellow countryman, was a trusted member of the Jewish frontier network and many would make their way from Europe to the frontier merchant Jewish networks. They would arrive, learn the business and branch out on their own.” This clan-like system became the glue that kept relatives and friends together and facilitated such matters as loans, marriages, and the expenses of emigration to this country.

Jews in Tucumcari

A few Jewish merchants appeared in New Mexico during the heyday of the Santa Fe Trade. Solomon Jacob Spiegelberg, for example, came to Santa Fe in 1844, became a “traveling agent” for a mercantile firm, and supplied American occupation troops at Fort Marcy during the U.S.-Mexico War. He and his four brothers then started a retail and wholesale dry goods store in Santa Fe and went on to make substantial fortunes in various enterprises.

After the Civil War, a much larger contingent of predominantly German-Jewish immigrants arrived seeking economic security and social status. Some of these later arrivals bypassed Santa Fe for opportunities east of the Pecos River at the trading outpost of Las Vegas. Until it was surpassed by Albuquerque around 1920, this rail center was the largest urban community in territorial New Mexico in the roughly four decades following the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad in 1879. Las Vegas also had the largest Jewish population in the territory, as well as the first synagogue, Congregation Montefiore. The Jewish patriarch of Las Vegas and architect of the territory’s mercantile capitalism, Charles Ilfeld (“Tio Carlos” or “Tio Charlie,” as the Hispanic locals called him), became wealthy through his widespread merchandising, sheep ranching, money lending, and land interests.

The Charles Ilfeld Company was “the most important merchant enterprise in territorial New Mexico” and no other Jewish mercantile business “enjoyed equal length or breadth of influence.” A pattern emerged in which Jewish newcomers often worked first at the Ilfeld firm in Las Vegas or one of its several branches before striking out on their own as merchants, ranchers, or land dealers. Unsurprisingly, two Jewish entrepreneurs familiar with Ilfeld’s success turned up ninety miles east of Las Vegas as the dominant figures in the founding of Tucumcari.

Brothers Alex and Max Goldenberg and their wives Henrietta and Emma, both sisters of business partner Jacob Wertheim, and another brother, Hugo Goldenberg, were among a group of German-Jewish immigrants who came to New Mexico after the Civil War. In later business affairs Max usually stayed behind the scenes and let Alex take the public spotlight, while the diligent Wertheim seemed to shun any special attention. Hugo chose a separate path, eventually in ranching near Santa Rosa. As a result, Alex customarily both spoke and acted for the family, although his background hardly seemed to qualify him for this responsibility. He was born in Westphalia, Prussia, in 1866, arrived in the United States at age nineteen, and went straight to the Las Cruces area. A talented musician who later performed in Tucumcari, he reportedly had studied at a Berlin conservatory. First he tried cattle ranching briefly, and then, after marrying Henrietta in 1892, moved to Mexico. During an extended period south of the border, he “played piano” (probably in a saloon or similar place), gave piano lessons, and for a couple of years tried the “export business, handling coffee and vanilla.”

If nothing else, Alex gained a fluency in Spanish during his sojourn in Mexico and his earlier dalliance with ranching in southern New Mexico that served him well when dealing with Hispanic customers. In 1899 Alex went to Liberty, the civilian offshoot of then-abandoned Fort Bascom just north of today’s Tucumcari, where he and Wertheim bought the Jarrell General Merchandise Store. The name of the new enterprise, M. B. Goldenberg and Company, undoubtedly indicated his brother Max’s major involvement and financial assistance in the venture. Even though Alex had skipped a hands-on Ilfeld apprenticeship, he knew Tio Charlie and his business methods quite well through a tangled web of family and business interrelationships. Max Nordhaus, brother of Ilfeld’s wife, Adele Nordhaus Ilfeld, was the patriarch’s budding partner and heir-apparent, and Max and Adele were cousins of the Alex D. Goldenberg.

Goldenbergs through their mother, Bertha Nordhaus Goldenberg. The web became even more complicated when, in 1905, Max Nordhaus married Bertha Staab, daughter of the pioneer Staab merchant family of Santa Fe. Through this marriage the Ilfeld and Nordhaus families established ties with several other prominent New Mexico Jewish residents, thus strengthening the Goldenbergs’ niche in the crucial kinship-centered Jewish network. Alex Goldenberg’s two brothers, Max and Hugo, who had migrated from Germany to America in 1875–1876, both became enmeshed in the Ilfeld network.

For several years the burly Max, known in Ilfeld company circles as “Big Max” to distinguish him from “Little Max” Nordhaus, worked closely with Ilfeld as one of his account collectors and a manager-broker for his sheep herds and wool transactions. Moreover, the venturesome Max and Hugo, involved in various enterprises on their own, became indebted to the Las Vegas firm through loans and credit for wholesale goods sent by Ilfeld to their mercantile store at Puerto de Luna on the Pecos River. The Golden-berg family stores experienced the same Liberty, and later at Tucumcari, with the sum reaching more than $11,000—a whopping amount at the time.

In short, the Goldenbergs exemplified how the Jewish network operated and, more specifically, how the Ilfeld concern and Las Vegas served as a launching pad for many Jewish business owners and ranchers who rose to prominence elsewhere in New Mexico.

While the myth of Tucumcari’s founding that involved a ribbon of homestead claims between the Canadian River and Tucumcari Mountain has its appeal, official records reveal convincing evidence that early Jewish business leaders played the decisive role in creating the town. The real story starts at the future intersection of Main and Second streets with the Joseph Israel building, the Vorenberg Hotel, the First National Bank, and, later, the Sands-Dorsey drugstore at the corners, which became the pulse of the downtown business district. This important crossroads lay only a block or so away from the train depot where Second Street temporarily dead-ends. In terms of strategic real estate investment and sales, the Goldenbergs and their associates had to gain control of land adjacent to the hub-like depot, where they would plat their townsite. They did so, but not by filing a long row of homestead claims.

In April and May 1901, six months before the Rock Island tracks reached the site of Tucumcari, Jacob Wertheim and Alex Goldenberg entered adjacent 160-acre homestead claims that straddled the prospective railroad route. Both tracts, however, were too far west of the eventual depot location. Strategically, in terms of real estate investment and sales, Lee K. Smith filed on 40 acres just north of the railroad tracks that abutted the future depot and the townsite. Alex and Wertheim had probably received faulty tips about where the depot would be situated when they chose their homestead sites. Despite the isolated prairie locale, however, these determined Jewish-immigrant entrepreneurs were no country bumpkins. After they learned the real depot location, they took immediate steps to possess most of the adjacent area, which involved other, although not necessarily easier, ways than filing homestead claims.

Alex Goldenberg’s methodic acquisition of the 120 acres that the real estate company platted as the original townsite revealed both his sophisticated business acumen and, probably, his family’s financial connections through the Ilfeld Company. Strangely enough, the trail to Goldenberg’s acquisition of 80 acres south of the Rock Island depot began with William H. Riley, an African American Civil War veteran of Ocala, Florida, who had served in Company I, Forty-Fifth Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry Volunteers. Riley never resided within a thousand miles of Tucumcari, but his military service entitled him to a Soldiers’ Additional Homestead entry of approximately 80 acres. He sold these rights in the form of a certificate, or scrip, with the location of the land itself left blank, to A. A. Thomas, a Washington attorney and land broker. In turn Thomas sold the certificate to William E. Moses, a Denver lawyer specializing in land scrip, who transferred to Alex the document, dated 21 November 1901, for $600.

Now Alex could use the paper form like a blank check to select any 80 acres he liked from the public domain available for homesteading. Two days later at Clayton, the closest federal land office at that time, Alex Goldenberg paid a registration fee of $11.03 and thereby initiated the bureau-cratic process of ownership. Then, legal “Assignee” Alex Goldenberg, utilizing the “Soldiers’ Additional Homestead Re-Certified Right” of Riley, officially submitted his purchased scrip for the 80 acres of public domain south of future Main and Second. Perfunctory legal technicalities dragged on until the plot was patented and finally entered in the county records on 24 April 1905. In a similar transaction, Alex Goldenberg used land scrip to obtain the remaining 40 acres of the original 120-acre townsite. This acquisition involved the original townsite plat of Tucumcari 1. Lee Smith filed separately on 40 acres adjoining the townsite.

Following Smith’s death, the plot was acquired by Alex Street, with Alex Goldenberg as a silent partner. The 80 acres originating from William H. Riley’s Civil War service. The 40 acres originating from William Kirkpatrick’s Civil War service. Location of depot. another Union army veteran, William Kirkpatrick of Rockerville, Pennington County, South Dakota, who had exchanged his ownership of land in the Black Hills Forest Reserve, originating from his military service, for equivalent rights elsewhere. Ollin E. Smith, an enterprising lawyer in Clayton, had somehow become Kirkpatrick’s legal representative and sold this “lieu land scrip” for $600 to Alex, who used it to acquire the 40 acres east of the depot. The real estate company could now proceed with its plans to plat the original townsite. Along with Lee K. Smith’s 40-acre homestead adjoining the depot on the west, the Goldenberg brothers and their associates controlled most of the prime land around that centerpiece of railroad activity.

Thus the essential parts of early downtown Tucumcari around the Main and Second intersection were obtained by Alex Goldenberg’s shrewd land deals that stretched back through Denver; Washington, D.C.; Ocala, Florida; and the Black Hills of South Dakota; not by filing a row of homestead entries between the Canadian River and Tucumcari Mountain. Such trades in paper certificates that represented tangible property were perfectly legal and were common practice at that time. In fact Clayton lawyer Smith apparently made a business out of selling scrip. Earlier he had struck a similar bargain with the founder of the nearby railroad settlement of Logan, who used scrip originating from the same South Dakota Civil War veteran to establish that 80-acre townsite.

With all the pieces falling into place, the Goldenbergs and their business associates organized the Tucumcari Townsite and Investment Company at Liberty on 22 November 1901. With a working capital of $10,000 (soon increased to $20,000 of “paid up stock”), the company could begin fulfilling its mission of “buying and selling real estate, laying off and establishing a townsite, selling town lots and doing anything necessary in conducting a general townsite business.” The officers were Lee Kewen Smith, president; J. Alex Street, vice president; Jacob Wertheim, secretary; and Alex Goldenberg, treasurer. Although Max Goldenberg’s name did not appear in this list, he nonetheless played a significant role in the company’s founding.

This was the beginning of Tucumcari, although it did not become officially recorded as a “village” until March 1902, a “town” until 16 August 1906, or “The City of Tucumcari” until 5 August 1908. One of the earliest official maps of property ownership in Quay County, founded 28 February 1903, bears in tiny, neat handwriting the notation: “The Original Town of Tucumcari.” This inscription, inside bold hatch-marked lines designating the boundaries of the 120-acre townsite, resembles a fetus in a mother’s womb. This resemblance was appropriate considering the uncertainties ahead for the “‘Infant Wonder’ of the Great Staked Plains,” as a newspaper dubbed embryonic Tucumcari.

The hard-driving Alex appeared more often in the public eye as the mastermind of family business affairs. He spearheaded the formation of the Tucumcari Electric Light and Water Company and later the expansion of the company’s townsite operations and holdings, which included the Goldenberg Addition and four other real-estate additions. He built a one-story, rambling but imposing rock home on Railroad Avenue at the western edge of town, adding occasional rooms as his family grew to number seven children. He eventually became president of a creamery, a director of the First National Bank, an owner of large-scale ranching and land interests, one of the first Quay County commissioners, president of the school board, head of the county Republican Party, and a member of the Elks and Woodmen of the World.

He was elected for two successive terms—an unusual feat—as the grand master of New Mexico Masons in both 1918 and 1919. His name often appeared in records as the silent partner with half-interest in a property or as the treasurer or secretary-treasurer, but not president, for various enterprises, most likely indicating that he was the source of the investment funds and the person who actually controlled them. Alex Goldenberg’s imposing presence sometimes drew opposition. Occasionally he tangled with the powerful railroad companies, most often in heated land disputes where he matched his business skills against the talents of specialized corporate lawyers. His active role in local civic affairs likewise drew criticism. Some critics, referring to his reputed domination of the school board, complained publicly about a “Goldenberg regime” that mishandled funds. In a long and detailed open letter, he methodically defended himself against these charges.

Various other Jewish merchants and townspeople joined the extended Goldenberg family in the early development of Tucumcari. Joseph Israel, who arrived in 1903, soon got started with his Golden Rule Cash Store. Four years later, he opened Israel’s as a clothing store in the two-story, sandstone Israel building on the northwest corner of the central commercial intersection of Main and Second streets. Israel ran breezy, voguish newspaper ads, boasting that his store carried straw hats for the windy month of March because “Straw Tells Which Way the Wind Blows”—a common weather condition in Tucumcari. Israel was elected the town’s mayor in 1916 and, like Alex Goldenberg, served on the five-member board of directors of the First National Bank.

Israel moved from Tucumcari to California about four years before his death in 1928. Another Jewish merchant and consistent Jewish joiner, Detroit-born Louis Blitz arrived in 1903 and ran a jewelry store on the Main Street ground floor of the Israel building from 1910 until his death in 1937. Family members kept L. Blitz Jewelry in business until 1965.

On the northeast corner of Main and Second stood the upscale, Spanish-style Vorenberg Hotel owned by Adolph Vorenberg, who invested $40,000 for the hotel’s construction in November 1910. For the building’s dedication in May 1911, Vorenberg hosted an elegant dinner with territorial governor William J. Mills as the guest of honor. An immigrant from Meimbressen, Germany, Vorenberg had first gone to Philadelphia; then to Wagon Mound, New Mexico, where he worked in the mercantile concern of his brother, Simon; and finally to Tucumcari. At Wagon Mound, he married Mirjam Lowenstein, the daughter of a pioneer Jewish merchant family, which may explain the source of funds to build the hotel.

Although not Jewish himself, Henry B. Jones, long-time president of the First National Bank on the southeast corner of the intersection, had first joined his boyhood Michigan friend, Santa Rosa Jewish merchant Julius Moise, and entered banking there, but later moved to what became the bank’s main branch in Tucumcari. The ubiquitous Alex Goldenberg, an influential director at the Tucumcari bank, had struck up a friendship with Jones and likely had a hand in making him the new president.

Any account of Jewish residents must refer to the numbers in individual families. The extended Goldenberg family—a total of fifteen people that included Alex and his wife Henrietta, their seven children, Max and his wife Emma, the Wertheims, and, early on, a sister and brother-in-law, the B. B. Kronenbergs—made the greatest impact of any family on Tucumcari’s Jewish population. The Kaufman clan, with ten family members, came in a close second. In 1910 German immigrant Emil Kaufman started Kaufman’s dry goods and ready-to-wear store on Main Street. Both Emil and his wife,

Martha Baer Kaufman, an immigrant from France, took prominent roles in community affairs, clubs, and service organizations. In addition to their two young daughters, Emil’s brother Max and his wife Lillian Jacobs Kaufman resided in Tucumcari during most of the 1920s and 1930s, while Max managed the men’s department of the store. Max and Lillian had a daughter and a son, who, along with Emil’s two daughters, attended the local schools. Moreover, Martha’s younger sister lived with the family and graduated from the local high school. Martha’s gregarious French father, Bernard Baer, an Old World European gentlemen known to the town’s children as “Grandpere,” lived in his daughter’s home for several years. The Emil Kaufmans left Tucumcari in 1938.32

The two Jewish-run firms that survived the longest in the Main and Second business district were Goodman’s Cash Grocery and H. Bonem’s clothing store. Herman Goodman and his son, Joseph, came from Roy, New Mexico, in 1916 to set up a grocery store. Joe Goodman married Lucille Lederer of St. Louis in 1924, just a year after his father had wed his bride’s mother. Although the Goodman store emphasized “Cash” for purchases, it ran into financial difficulties during the Great Depression, mainly because, according to a local editor, the elder Goodman’s “bigness of heart” had resulted in too many overdue credit accounts. In fact the hard-boiled editor waxed sentimental in Herman’s obituary, declaring that the world had lost a man with “a heart larger than the body within which it throbbed.” Unfortunately, when he died in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, the father left his son to deal with bankruptcy. Joe handled the problem successfully, returning to business with “that ever-ready smile and good nature.”

Soon after a newspaper described him as “one of Tucumcari’s best loved citizens,” whose pleasant personality had won him “countless friends” and a host of faithful customers. A veteran of the First World War, Joe Goodman held practically every office in the local and state American Legion and helped organize the Veterans of Foreign Wars post. He belonged to the Masonic and Elks lodges, was known for his dedicated work in the Chamber of Commerce, and served on the city council for successive terms. After her husband’s death in 1948, Lucille, assisted by their son, Bernard Goodman, continued to manage the grocery store for several years. A tough-minded businesswoman who kept a close watch on overdue accounts, she could proudly point out that, with the son’s involvement, Goodman’s had lasted for three generations in Tucumcari. As a further point of pride, the family lived in a historic residence at the northwest corner of Aber and Third streets which later entered the National Register of Historic Places as the Baca-Goodman House.

Herman “Sonny” Bonem migrated from Germany at age fourteen and eventually moved to San Marcial, a Rio Grande settlement, where he was in the dry goods and clothing business for twenty years before moving to Tucumcari. The H. Bonem clothing establishment started with the purchase of Tafoya & Lawson’s building, fixtures, and goods for $18,835.85 in September 1913.35 In 1925 Bonem sold out and traveled around, including the West Coast, looking for another business location but returned the next year to Tucumcari and bought out the L. M. Shank store. The new H. Bonem firm, calling itself the “Style Headquarters for Men,” was managed until the store’s closing in 1968 by the founder’s son, Joseph, who had a keen sense of responsibility for community involvement. He was especially active in the Chamber of Commerce and served as its president. For forty years of public service, and his contributions as the organization’s past president, the Kiwanis Club awarded him the Legion of Honor in 1977. Two other Bonem sons played prominent roles in the community. David Bonem served as city attorney and the district judge, and Gilbert was the “chief clerk,” or manager, in the jointly operated Southern Pacific-Rock Island depot. A daughter, Hannah, helped run the store.

Like the Goodmans and the Bonems, as well as many Jewish joiners in the West, the town’s early Jewish merchants sought and quickly gained acceptance in the community’s commercial and social circles. Significantly, membership in most of these organizations was by invitation only. Despite such social integration, however, Jews in Tucumcari remained attached to their traditional religious faith—a difficult task since the nearest rabbi and temple were in Las Vegas. Adherents of Judaism, including Moise family members of Santa Rosa, attended religious meetings held in Alex’s home, where the services “tended toward” Reform Judaism and included mixed sentiments about Zionism.

Others simply observed major High Holy Days and raised their children in the teachings of Judaism. Without a Jewish house of worship in town, the local Presbyterians and Baptists made their sanctuaries available for funerals, in which a rabbi usually presided and the Masons often had charge of the burial services. As was common in small western towns, Jewish males in Tucumcari had difficulty finding suitable marriage partners. Often these men married local Gentile women, and sometimes attended church services with them, but rarely “joined” the congregation through conversion to Christianity. Whether in church or elsewhere, citizens of Tucumcari readily recognized who was Jewish in their midst. Overt anti-Semitism, however, was largely absent, at least in everyday speech and action toward local Jewish residents. As previously mentioned, anti-Semitism prevailed less in the West than in some other sections of the country, such as the Northeast.

The exclusive Jewish network of New Mexico often played a determining role in professional and romantic lives of individuals. For example in 1906 Jacob Wertheim paid the transportation costs for his seventeen-year-old cousin, Joseph Wertheim, to come to Tucumcari from Brakel, Germany, to work in the Goldenberg store. Jacob Wertheim’s own passage to the United States had been paid by his brother, Herman Wertheim, a Las Cruces–area merchant and reportedly the first Wertheim to arrive in territorial New Mexico. After Joseph had paid off his debt to his uncle, he became a traveling salesman for a national shoe manufacturer. On his business trips, he visited the home of his father’s first cousin and Wagon Mound merchant, Simon Vorenberg, and fell in love with the family’s seventeen-year-old daughter Emma, his third cousin. When Emma went to Tucumcari to visit her Uncle Adolph, who owned the Vorenberg Hotel, Joseph pursued her and won her hand.

Like the apprenticeship experience provided for many successful Jewish merchants by the Ilfeld Company of Las Vegas, Joseph’s employment by the Goldenbergs in Tucumcari helped prepare him for a business career on his own, first in clothing stores at Artesia and Carlsbad, and later as a cotton broker and insurance agent in the Pecos valley. In return he served the Jewish network by bringing other family members to New Mexico, including his brother, Herman Wertheim, who was given a job in the Seligman mercantile store at Bernalillo.

The Kohns of Montoya

Although Alex Goldenberg was the main founding father of Tucumcari, Howard Louis Kohn was, according to one newspaper, the “all time leading citizen” of entire Quay County. The extended Kohn family’s widespread financial enterprises and record of public service made the nearby village of Montoya, where the Kohns eventually moved in 1902, the most important of all the surrounding satellite settlements in the growth and prosperity of Tucumcari. At Montoya, with the entrepreneurial skill of an eastern corporate mogul, Howard Kohn put together the original parts of the T-4 Cattle Company, which became one of the biggest ranching outfits in the Southwest. Even so, he was no “drugstore cowboy,” although in later years his brightly shined shoes (not cowboy boots), customary dark three-piece suit, and stylish grey fedora perhaps suggested otherwise.

Further enhancing this image of urbane success, he eventually drove a big blue Buick, married, and moved to Tucumcari. Once established in an imposing new home on south First Street, Howard Kohn became a familiar, and even yetta (née goldsmith or goldschmidt) more imposing, figure in the community’s life. Despite this newfound prominence, however, he never forgot his firsthand knowledge of the everyday tough, dirty hardships of a working cowboy. According to family lore, Howard’s birth on 8 November 1861 was the first ever in the vicinity of Cherry Hills, a mining camp in present-day Denver.

In November 1860, however, the wife of Howard’s uncle, Henry Goldsmith (or Goldschmidt), had died at the nearby Cherry Creek location while giving birth to a daughter, Clara, named for her mother. More accurately, Howard may have been the first Jewish male child born in the vicinity. His parents, Samuel and Yetta (Goldsmith or Goldschmidt) Kohn, both arrived in America as children, and met and married in Leavenworth, Kansas. Finding little success raising cattle in Colorado, the Kohns returned to Leavenworth, and moved to Las Vegas probably in 1867 or 1868, reportedly by oxen-drawn wagon. There they opened a wholesale and retail firm dealing primarily in wool, hides, furs, and grain.

As usual with ambitious Jewish merchants in Las Vegas, Samuel was drawn into the financial empire of Charles Ilfeld through a partnership involving sheep and cattle ranching. Besides caring for their four children, Yetta Kohn developed a profitable trade as a seamstress. Following her husband’s death in 1877, she continued his business for a while before moving her family to the village of La Cinta located below the present site of Conchas Dam. She opened a general store, became postmistress, and almost immediately filed a homestead claim and started trading land and real estate. She also established Y. Kohn & Co., with the 4-V cattle ranch, managed by her son, Howard, as the firm’s main operation. One account even has her operating a regular ferry service across the Canadian River, pulling on a hawser stretched from shore to shore for motive power. In all likelihood, however, the self-reliant widow occasionally steered a crude raft on the short trip, but only as a courtesy when visitors needed to cross and not as a daily water taxi business.

On one such occasion, a newspaper editor offered to take over the navigational duties, but found that “Mrs. Kohn would not surrender her position to the masculine member [of the group] and with the pluck and presence of mind of a true salty, carried her precious cargo to the opposite shore . . . as if she had been a New England fisherman’s wife all her life.” On the return crossing, a violent rainstorm suddenly blew up, and she used her “iron muscle” to grasp the hawser tighter and pull the craft to safety.

It was at La Cinta that Howard Kohn started learning the cattle business and the hardships of a working cowboy. He bailed and stacked hay, kept constant watch over the family herd, and branded and castrated the steers, which numbered about three hundred by the fall of 1883. He also probably rode with the other cowboys in some of the cooperative spring, summer, and fall roundups sponsored by the ranchers in the region that covered the unfenced open range of the public domain for seventy-five miles to the Texas line. For young Kohn, hearing the cowboys spin their yarns, absorbing the shared wisdom of the cattle business, and enjoying the camaraderie of the campfire and the chuck wagon was an initiation into the “cowhand brother-hood.” He received an even stronger dose of this initiation when, on a long trip to buy bulls, he stayed overnight at an isolated ranch near the Texas Panhandle. During the night another traveler rode in, shared the only bed available with Kohn, and left at dawn. Kohn was “more than shocked” when told the next morning that the traveler had been Billy td square.”

In 1888 the owner of the large Bell Ranch—originally the Pablo Montoya Grant of some 656,000 acres bestowed by the Mexican government in 1824—was consolidating his holdings by buying out the land claims and cattle of the settlers inside and adjoining his boundaries. These transactions included nearly four thousand head of cattle owned by the Kohn family and two other small ranchers. Earlier, probably by 1886, Yetta had moved from La Cinta to Wichita, Kansas, and her sons most likely left after the cattle sale. In 1902 after Howard had run a couple of fairly successful livery stables in Denver, and other family members had lived in various places, the Kohn clan moved to Montoya. At Montoya the Kohns paid “a handsome figure” for the Henry K. Rountree & Co. mercantile, land, and cattle interests, whose owner had become discouraged about business prospects because of a prolonged drought.

As a harbinger of the Kohns’s financial success at Montoya, a big rain fell that very afternoon, ending the dry spell. An unlikely springboard for making a fortune, Montoya was only one of several aspiring homesteader villages surrounding Tucumcari. Its proximity to Tucumcari, augmented by a twenty-mile rail connection, made Montoya a virtual “suburb” of the county seat. The railroad offered an incentive for local growth and economic development, but more so, the trade of settlers on almost every 160-acre available homestead seemed to promise long-term prosperity. Of crucial importance for the Kohn brothers, however, they had ready access to loans and advice from their uncle, Solomon Kohn, a wealthy New York City industrialist and financier.

Briefly a boomtown, Montoya claimed a population of five hundred by late 1907, and more than thirty business establishments, including five saloons. Soon after their arrival, Montoya became the Kohns’s domain. As one newspaper editor later commented, “Starting out on a small scale, in what was then a desolate place, within a short period of ten years they became one of the richest firms in eastern New Mexico, making their money in the general merchandise, cattle and land business.” Howard’s younger brothers, George and Charles, joined him as owners of the Kohn Brothers retail and wholesale store. Like Ilfeld in Las Vegas and the Goldenbergs in Tucumcari, the firm boasted that it sold “Everything for Everybody” and bought wool, hides, livestock, and produce. Yetta Kohn still kept watch on the family’s affairs, but she passed most of the decision-making to the oldest brother. The Kohn daughter, Belle, had attended college in Topeka, Kansas, where she met and married Albert Calisch. The Calischs and their son, Stanley, also moved to the Montoya valley.

This tightknit family functioned smoothly with a division of business roles. George, who primarily managed the Kohn Brothers store, also served as the town’s postmaster and justice of the peace.55 The youngest brother, Charles, who had valuable experience working in a major Denver merchandising concern, helped run the store and often traveled to eastern cities to purchase goods. He assisted in other family ventures, but primarily as the “Agent” of the Montoya Townsite and Land Company, he sold and developed town lots and rural lands. At first he only dabbled in politics but in time he became a Republican power broker.

Brother-in-law Albert Calisch acquired a ranch in the Mesa Rica area, invested in the local weekly newspaper, occasionally continued his trips as a traveling tobacco salesman, and also gradually became involved in county politics as a Democrat. The earlier partisan role of Republican Charles and the later alignment of Democrat Calisch illustrate the shifting political winds of the region. The local newspaper, in which Calisch invested, began as the Montoya Republican but switched to the Montoya Democrat when the voting pattern of the newly arrived homesteaders revealed an overwhelming majority of Democrats. Even before the switch, the paper’s editor warned the new state’s ruling party about the large number of Texas Democrats moving into New Mexico as settlers: “Oh you republicans! There is a day of reckoning coming to you in the near future.”

The eldest brother, Howard, who was acclaimed locally as “the cattle king of the Montoya valley,” devoted most of his attention to obtaining ranch land and buying and selling livestock. He traveled widely to purchase prime cattle, attended regional livestock association meetings, and sometimes returned to the life of a cowboy. On one occasion he took “a company of cowboys” with camping gear and a chuck wagon on a fifty-mile ride northwest of Montoya “for a general spring round up” of cattle he had bought. To improve his own cattle herd and the livestock bloodlines of other area ranchers, he shipped from Texas a carload of registered Hereford bull calves, which he offered to sell at cost—one hundred dollars per head. In time Howard regularly sold rail shipments of cattle, mostly yearling steers, numbering one thousand to twelve hundred head at a time. Perhaps because he had not figured how to herd cattle in an automobile, the local newspaper editor joked, he was the last of the three brothers to buy a car, in his case, a Model-T Ford in 1915. Members of the Kohn family became involved in banking and ranching as well as the ownership of a hotel and several other businesses. All eligible family members, including the Calischs, filed homestead claims.

In the midst of these encouraging signs, however, came a series of tragic family losses. The cycle began on a happy note when the youngest of the brothers, Charles, who had by now made a name for himself in New Mexico politics, married at age forty-five on 31 January 1916. The bride was Hannah Bonem, daughter of the Tucumcari Jewish merchant Herman Bonem. Both families considered it an ideal marriage, but unanimous approval changed to sorrow when Charles suddenly died of an infected tooth in Kansas City on the fourth day of the honeymoon. Three days after Charles’s death, the second oldest Kohn son, George, died of a heart attack in the Vorenberg Hotel while awaiting the arrival of his brother’s body. The stark chain of deaths did not stop there. In declining health after the passing of her two sons, Yetta died quietly about a year later.59 Following his mother’s death, and with the impending move of his mar-ried sister, Belle, from Montoya to Tucumcari and then to El Paso with her husband, Howard Kohn stood virtually alone.

Effectively head of the family for several years, Howard had already reorganized the Kohn Brothers firm after the deaths of his brothers, as the Kohn Mercantile Company, with himself as president, Calisch as vice president, and John D. Thomason as secretary-treasurer. Head salesman for several years, Thomason now managed the store, leaving Howard with time to acquire land and deal in livestock.60 About this same time what had seemed like a bright future for Montoya was turning out to be an illusion. Following a severe dry spell, 1909–1912, homesteaders started leaving in droves. With scant rain and unproductive land, survival on a 160-acre claim proved too difficult.

Between 1910 and 1920 the population of Quay County declined by about 30 percent, from 14,912 to 10,444. Although this exodus foreshadowed doom for the mercantile trade at Montoya, it was hardly a total loss for Howard Kohn. When homesteaders could not repay loans to him or settle credit he had extended them through the Kohn Brothers store, Kohn usually ended up with their land. Under these emerging conditions, Kohn made what was probably the most important business decision of his life when he traded the family’s mercantile interests for Vidal Ortega’s extensive ranch lands and cattle. At La Cinta Howard Kohn had joined the cowhand brotherhood; now he was a full-fledged cattle king.

One thing was still lacking, however. After the deaths of his brothers and mother, and the impending departure of the Calischs, he needed a companion—someone who was not only a confidant but could also help keep an eye on his complex financial affairs. As a teenager, Clara McGowan had shown a streak of romantic idealism. She disdained the steamy popular novels of the day, and considered the “high-est goal” of her lifetime to be introducing “to the world the wholesome and wonderful works of such authors as Shakespeare.” She had an unsettled child-hood as her extended family followed her wheeler-dealer maternal grandfather, Seth L. Baker, all over the country from one speculative venture to another. Between two of these moves, Clara stayed behind in the South. Although her mother described Clara as “a very timid child,” and one plagued by a series of serious diseases, such as dysentery and diphtheria, she became a sturdy, self-confident young woman. After completing an accounting course in Indianapolis to qualify for a higher salary, she returned to the South, where she made her own living in the company offices of a rough-and-tumble Mississippi lumber camp. Moreover, she acquired a skill possessed by few women at that time—she could drive an automobile. When her father, John Leonard McGowan, became ill, probably with tuberculosis, Clara’s parents looked for a dry climate. By some stroke of fate, they landed in Montoya, where they bought a local hotel in early 1919. With his health continuing to decline, Leonard took his own life in March of that same year.

During a visit to Montoya, either before or after her father’s death, Howard Kohn persuaded Clara to stay as the bookkeeper for the Kohn store. A strikingly attractive blonde of twenty-three, she soon won the heart of her employer, who was thirty-nine years her senior. They married in January 1923. Despite the age difference, Kohn had found a mate who was well-qualified to help keep an eye on the accounts for his business enterprises. In May 1927, before moving from Montoya to Tucumcari, the couple had a daughter, Yetta, named after Kohn’s mother. Already a familiar figure in town, Howard Kohn now became a permanent fixture in community affairs. He was a major stockholder of the First National Bank, a charter member of the Elks Club, a Mason, a generous supporter of the Girl Scouts, and an officer of state and national livestock organiza-tions. He donated land and paid construction costs for his pet project—a Girl Scouts retreat named Camp Kohn. He made regular trips to the T-4 ranch headquarters at Montoya. Haunted by the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lind-bergh’s baby son, Kohn parked his big blue Buick every day outside Yetta’s elementary school and gave her a ride home. Howard Kohn died at his Tucumcari home on 2 November 1933 at age seventy-two, a day after helping fight a prairie fire on his ranch and suffering a stroke. A local newspaper reported that he had no record of wedding picture of clara (née mcgowan) and howard serious illness, and that the night before fighting the fire he had attended a party at the Elks Club, kohn “dancing until ‘good night’ was played.”

Perhaps the most heartfelt tribute came from his mother-in-law, Pearl McGowan Cude, who later wrote privately that Howard Kohn had been “one of the finest men I ever knew.” After her husband’s death, Clara’s talents were put to the test. A vivacious, graceful woman who could ride a horse with ease, Clara was nonetheless not a calf roper with jingling spurs. More important, though, she had exceptional managerial skills and ten years of experience helping her husband with his financial interests. The T-4 ranch itself presented few problems, but untan-gling Howard Kohn’s maze of money lending, which approached commercial banking, was an entirely different matter. Then, even more challenging, there was his multitude of partidocontracts, the time-honored system of loaning out livestock on the shares. Although partidocontracts had biblical origins and general use in New Mexico for at least two centuries, Kohn may have set some kind of record with them. At the time of his death he reportedly had ongoing agreements, in various stages of fulfillment, for three thousand head of cattle, spread out over several eastern New Mexico counties.

These legally binding documents clearly had advantages for big ranch-ers like Kohn but could cause resentment among homesteaders who were struggling to build up a small herd and resented their subservient role. In fact scattered criticism had already surfaced about the benefits to Kohn in the partidocontracts as well as his acquisition of land tlara was left to handle these financial and controversial matters. She eventually deciphered and settled the maze of loans, phased out the partido contracts, and reorganized her late husband’s other business interests. A few years after her marriage, in 1938, to the town’s most prominent physician and surgeon, Dr. Thomas B. Hoover, the T-4 had doubled in size.

When the eastern owners of the Bell Ranch dissolved the enterprise and sold it off in pieces, in 1947, the Hoovers purchased the 117,000-acre south-western portion known as the “Mesa Rica Country.” At the same time they disposed of 20,000 acres of the T-4 south of U.S. Highway 66. Howard had controlled 107,600 acres of land when he died, including 85,600 acres he owned outright and the rest in government and private leases.65 Today, with headquarters still at Montoya, the T-4 Cattle Company, LLC is owned by Howard Kohn’s daughter, Yetta Kohn Bidegain, her husband Phillip B. Bidegain, and their children and grandchildren. The ranch con-sists of more than 186,000 acres plus leases on an additional 15,000 acres of state land, or about 315 square miles, in Quay, Guadalupe, and San Miguel counties. With a grazing program set at forty acres “per cow unit,” the ranch comfortably supports 2,500 cattle. The extended Bidegain family also engages in farming and the breeding of quarter horses. By 1997 the Bidegains were the fifth-largest landowners in New Mexico, and by 2010 the forty-seventh largest in the United States. In fact, by the mid-twentieth century, the T-4 spread compared in size with some of the best-known big Texas ranches.66 It was a far cry from the time at La Cinta when Howard Kohn rode as a working cowboy and started learning the cattle business.

Contributions of Jews at Tucumcari

In November 1926, M. B. Goldenberg and Company announced in a double-page newspaper ad that it was quitting business and would sell a large stock of goods at “greatly reduced prices,” put on sale the fixtures, and offer the building for rent. This news came as “something of a shock” to the many faithful customers, who had long regarded the firm as the pillar of the local business community, going back to “about the time when the first bear grass was being planted and the foundation of Tucumcari Mountain was being laid.” In reality it was twenty-five years, but long enough for Max and Alex. The Goldenberg brothers, who had gradually turned over active management to Alex’s sons, wanted to use their remaining years in other pursuits. Max had spent his early years outdoors in the sheep and wool trade, and he intended to return to that lifestyle. Alex had always been of an “artistic nature,” and he wanted to devote more time to his music and books.

About a year later, in January 1928, a local newspaper reported that the Goldenberg building would be remodeled into a new fifty-room hotel with all the latest conveniences. Every room would have a bath; hot, cold, and ice water; electric fans; a telephone; and a radio connection with a master radio receiver in the hotel lobby. The proprietor, W. A. Randle, had operated the Vorenberg Hotel. Appropriately, six months later the local Goldenberg Electric Company, run by Alex’s son, Hugo, placed a big electric sign reading “Hotel Randle” atop the remodeled and nearly completed structure. With fourteen-inch letters that glowed in red and green lights, it was the largest such sign in Tucumcari and could be noticed “for miles by tourists coming into town.”

When Alex Goldenberg died at age seventy in April 1936, a hard-boiled newspaper editor, now turned uncharacteristically emotional, paid tribute to “the passing of a good friend, one of culture, of high education, accomplished, a real gentlemen of the old school.” Alex was an outstanding community leader who had contributed large amounts of money to many worthwhile causes, and “his support always meant success” for a civic project. He had been “one of that handful of intelligent old pioneers” who had dreamed of someday damming the Canadian River for irrigation. Over the years his “intelligent discussion and arguments,” as well as the thousands of dollars he had donated for such promotional objectives, were largely responsible for the impending construction of Conchas Dam. Everyone knew and respected Alex and Max, the editor said, especially the many homesteader families with little children “who would have gone hungry and cold during the hard winters” without the kindhearted help of the two brothers. Moreover, the editor declared, the Goldenbergs had probably been more influential than any others in making Tucumcari and Quay County what they were.

Out of respect for Alex Goldenberg, downtown businesses closed during his funeral, as had been the case when his brother Hugo died in April 1911, and also would be done when Max died in July 1940.69 Alex and the corps of early Jewish business owners literally helped put Tucumcari on the map. Largely because of the Kohn family’s widespread financial and political activities, Montoya became the most important of all the outlying homesteader villages in Tucumcari’s early growth. When Howard Kohn moved from Montoya to Tucumcari, his wealth and prestige not only immediately strengthened the Jewish presence but gave a boost to the general community as well.

At his death in 1933 Kohn was hailed for his long attention to the livestock business “until the present time.” He had been instrumental in the phenomenal increase of cattle in Quay County, where numbers had grown “by leaps and bounds” from 10,000 head in 1912 to as many as 50,000 head in 1916. Six years later, in 1923, Kohn expressed pride in his fifteen years as a livestock dealer and his contribution of upgrading the county’s herds by the introduction of registered bulls. When he died, the community recognized him for these accomplishments that helped local industry expand. A local paper declared that Kohn was not only one of New Mexico’s largest and wealthiest land owners, but one of its “most progressive citizens” who always backed “development and advancement.” Charles Kohn, as a Republican power broker, also helped shape Tucum-cari and the entire county in several ways. A skilled orator and debater, he was known as Montoya’s unofficial mayor. He was elected as one of two Re-publicans, along with three Democrats, in the county’s five-member delega-tion to the constitutional convention of 1910 that prepared the way for New Mexico statehood in 1912.

Increasingly involved in partisan affairs, he headed the county Republican organization and served on the party’s territorial and state central committees. In those positions his endorsement was required, even in that Democratic county stronghold, for federal appointments made by Republican presidents such as postmaster at Tucumcari. He spent much of his time in Santa Fe and at the county seat at Tucumcari, in deliberations on such issues as the unsuccessful proposal to divide Quay County, and fre-quently attended the town’s Chamber of Commerce meetings.

Likewise, the Kohn’s brother-in-law, Albert Calisch, a Democrat known for both eloquent and rousing political speeches, later represented Tucumcari’s interests for two terms in the state senate. After he moved to Tucumcari, Calisch operated the Vorenberg Hotel, and as head of the Kiwanis Club’s publicity committee, Calisch put his considerable journalistic talents to use in regularly promoting the town’s business attractions. A relatively short twenty-mile rail link provided a tangible bond between Montoya and Tucumcari. It was possible, given the frequency of passenger train service, for a Montoya resident to have supper at home, “see a good play at a reasonable price” in Tucumcari, and be back home early the next morning for breakfast. This example of an important social connection sug-gests the overarching influence of railroads in the growth of the Tucumcari area as well as the success of its early Jewish merchants. Railroads had first attracted the Goldenbergs and the Kohns to bet on the future development of the Tucumcari area, and this gamble paid off handsomely.

A crucial economic stimulus occurred when the division operations terminal between the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad (and later, more importantly, the eastern division point of the Southern Pacific’s Rio Grande Division) and the Rock Island was moved from Santa Rosa to Tucumcari in 1906. By 1920 Tucumcari was a major regional rail hub. Two Rock Island lines, from Chicago and Memphis, came in and met the EP&SW, then owned by the Phelps Dodge Corporation, but soon were taken over by the Southern Pacific Railroad. In addition a Phelps Dodge branch line ran 132 miles north to coal mines at Dawson, from which the copper giant shipped coke through Tucumcari to its smelters in Arizona. Besides the elite train crews of engineers, firemen, and conductors, Tucumcari had a large round-house, extensive switching tracks, and other facilities where a sizable body of unionized railroad employees earned substantial salaries that undergirded the local economy. Even for Howard Kohn, a significant part of his fortune resulted from access to rail shipments of livestock.

In short Tucumcari rose and fell with the railroad. After the Second World War, diesel locomotives and corporate reorganization of the railroads, ac-companied by the construction of a federal interstate highway system with bypasses that ignored such small burgs, signaled the demise of Tucumcari as a transportation center and brought on the erosion of its population.73 As the town declined, the remaining Jewish merchants closed shop, and no new Jewish businesses replaced them.

The impact of Jewish merchants on western towns often reached far beyond local business circles. These European immigrants, usually more urbane than other community members, added a large measure of cultural sophistication to the roughhewn homesteader and ranching settlements where they appeared. Alex Goldenberg, for instance, studied music in Germany, probably at a Berlin conservatory, and undoubtedly fostered musical apprecia-tion in audiences at his performances in Tucumcari. More broadly, Jewish loyalty to family and kinship, as displayed in the Jewish network, inevitably had a leavening effect in an embryonic place like early Tucumcari.

In their most obvious contribution, however, the Tucumcari Jews not only adapted to their surroundings and joined in promoting the common welfare, but backed these gestures with sizable monetary investments that raised the town’s profile. While the Goldenberg store was not as big as some other western stores, such as the Jewish-owned Popular Dry Goods Depart-ment Store in El Paso, it could have served a much larger town. In addition to merchandising, some Jewish merchants in Tucumcari served on the boards of local banks, and became major shareholders, and some engaged in what amounted to private banking by loaning money to individuals for such resi-dential improvements as curbs and sidewalks. Jewish merchants commonly gave clothing or extended credit for food and supplies to the needy who had little prospect of repayment.

The ability of these unusual entrepreneurs in a remote place like Tucum-cari, particularly the Goldenbergs and Kohns, to raise large sums whenever they chose, and to pour that money into area enterprises, is still a source of amazement. In fact Tucumcari never had a large number of Jewish residents. By the First World War, the total Jewish population of New Mexico had grown slowly to about 860. At that time only 40—men, women, and children—of Tucumcari’s 3,000 residents were Jewish. Despite these small numbers, no western town was influenced more by such a small band of Jewish en-trepreneurs. These enterprising Jews founded the town, nurtured its early growth, and witnessed it become the urban trading center for surrounding rural communities. Ironically, considering the Jewish influence in the town’s early history, there apparently are no locally owned Jewish businesses, and no Jewish residents in Tucumcari today.

• https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol89/iss1/3