Explore Local History: The Wild Wild West

Billy the Kid might have been a punk, but he was a literate one.

Two of the infamous outlaw's letters, acquired recently by the Museum of New Mexico, demonstrate fluency in English, neat handwriting and a candidness about his case.

On a cold and snowy morning in February of 1878, two groups of men armed with rifles and shovels glared angrily at one another across the wind-swept Raton Pass in northeastern New Mexico. W.B. Strong, the new president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, had hired local gunslingers and lawmen to ensure his claim to the pass, but so had Gen. W.J. Palmer from the Denver and Rio Grande Railway.

With bullet holes in the saloon and ghost sightings down the hall, the 19th-century St. James Hotel still evokes the rough-and-tumble Wild West, when it’s said more than two dozen guests checked in, but never checked out.

T. James Wright was one of those who, in 1881, bit the dust. After cleaning out other guests in a poker game, it’s said Wright retired to bed, where another player shot him to death and stole his winnings.

More than a century later, the historic hotel here in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains has recently come under new ownership. And the hotel’s new management is promising guests a decidedly better stay than that had by...

Cordelia “Dedie” Snow can’t wait for the Rail Runner Express to officially begin service to Santa Fe on Wednesday.

“Oh, absolutely, I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “When I was a child I lived near Philadelphia, and that’s how we went to the city, by getting on a train. In a way, this is the same thing. We can get on the train and go to Albuquerque. Go to the city. I’m a big fan of trains.”

Nostalgia aside, Snow is a fan of the Rail Runner for another reason: She did some of the historical research for the corporation that originally owned the Railyard acreage. A historical sites archaeologist with the Archaeolo...

Carl Turner “was a renaissance man if ever there was such a person in New Mexico,” said Rodger Beimer, who worked with Turner in the 1980s. “He appreciated this state and really loved the people.”

Turner, 87, died Saturday after a yearlong fight with prostate cancer.

Turner served as the first executive manager of the New Mexico Rural Electric Cooperative Association in Santa Fe for exactly 29 years, from one April Fools’ Day in 1960 until another in 1989.

He was pivotal in the creation of the Cumbres and Toltec Sce-nic Railroad. The train runs between Colorado and New Mexico and captures the feel of a late-1800s steam locomotive.