After the summer of 1970, I began sporting a heavy, oversized black wool letter jacket with a bronco patch on the sleeve and a red, black, and white crest across the back. A New Mexico Military Institute class ring hung from a chain around my neck.
The “loan” of the jacket and ring required several letters a week – complete with photographs, newspaper clippings from home, and vows of loyalty.
The entire manifestation was heavily sprayed with White Shoulders perfume to ensure the scent did not evaporate before it reached a cadet’s numbered mail slot on West College Boulevard.
Every six weeks, I crossed the mountain through Tularosa and the Mescalero Apache Reservation, past the racetrack and artist Peter Hurd’s place, alongside Hondo and Picacho, and finally into Roswell.
I attended Homecoming, the Christmas Dance, the Valentine’s Dance, and the grandest event of all: Final Ball.
My mother sewed gowns in a fury.
Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet had appeared in theaters a year or two earlier, and I had decided I should look as though I had just stepped out of the Renaissance.
Mother chased slippery velvet around her sewing table and made matching ribbon chokers and Juliet caps. I ironed my hair straight as a board to complete my historically correct couture.
In Roswell, I discovered that the girls from neighboring Texas had stepped out of the antebellum South. Their skirts involved acres of netting and cinched-waist bell shapes; their hair was high, and their accents contained considerably more syllables than normal.
At NMMI — pronounced nimmee — I learned a new language: “tutes,” “RATs,” demerits, tours. Cadets inhabited a world of uniforms, inspections, regulations, bugle calls, silent meals, and mysterious punishments. Boys marched miles for a scuffed shoe, smudged brass, or violating a rule they had not known existed.
First-year cadets were called RATs—”Recruits at Training.” Some entered high school at fourteen, skinny boys who appeared to weigh less than the full-sized Springfield rifles they carried.
Upperclassmen ruled through shouting, humiliation, exhaustion, sleep disruption, and an endless search for mistakes.
A crooked gig line, loose thread, imperfect bed, or failure to stand rigidly at attention brought demerits, push-ups, marching tours, or punishment for the entire unit. Inspections might end with buttons torn from uniforms and carefully made beds ripped apart. The lesson was obedience; the method was fear.
Some upperclassmen seemed to enjoy the method rather more than the lesson.
Former cadets recalled nighttime raids when RATs awakened to sirens, shouting, and crashing trash cans, then had minutes to dress, grab their rifles, and form outside.
One boy’s mistake could sentence everyone to hours of exercise. Even eating became a test: backs straight, eyes forward, utensils raised in mechanical right angles. It was called discipline. To a frightened fourteen-year-old, it must have resembled organized crime.
Leaving the barracks brought little relief. Roswell “townies” mocked the tutes’ shaved heads and challenged them to fights. Inside the walls, cadets were tormented for not being military enough; outside, they were tormented for wearing the uniform.
The Vietnam era
All this unfolded during Vietnam.
Some cadets hoped to become officers; others hoped college would keep them out of the war. Before that, they had to survive a system designed to strip away privacy, independence, and resistance — to build men from boys, one humiliation at a time.
My culture shock was profound.
I knew half a dozen cadets from public school, but my understanding of why they were at NMMI was limited. Some, I believed, were boys who had gotten into trouble and been offered a choice: go to the juvenile detention school at Springer or, if their parents could afford it, go to NMMI —an alternative with more marching, polished brass, and better dances.
Others supposedly needed discipline or a father figure, either because no man was at home or because the one there had exhausted his patience.
For some, NMMI was a family legacy. Fathers and grandfathers had attended, and another generation was expected to put on the uniform and follow the same path.
Some genuinely wanted military careers and planned to graduate, accept commissions as second lieutenants, and go to Vietnam as officers rather than be drafted as enlisted men. Others wanted precisely the opposite. They hoped a college deferment would shelter them until the war ended — or until the ping-pong ball bearing their birthday emerged from the draft lottery.
NMMI was no financial cakewalk. Even with tuition subsidized for New Mexico residents, barracks, meals, laundry, books, and uniforms pushed the annual cost toward $2,000 — roughly $15,000 to $17,000 today. Out-of-state students paid nearly twice as much, and there seemed to be an impressive supply of Texas families willing to do so.
I assumed all cadets were wealthy.
That was NMMI as I understood it in the early 1970s. Its story, however, began in 1891 with a former Confederate guerrilla, his formidable wife, and a peach orchard.
Before the Peach Orchard
At 19, Joseph Callaway Lea left the Missouri-Kansas border in charge of a freight train heading west.
He spent two years in Colorado trying freighting, lumbering, prospecting, and ranching while Denver and Boulder were scarcely more than collections of shacks.
His frontier education was proceeding nicely when news of his father’s death called him home in 1862.
The Kansas-Missouri border was consumed by civil war. Unionist Jayhawkers and Redlegs raided Missouri settlements; Confederate guerrillas answered with raids of their own. Homes burned, livestock vanished, and civilians died.
Neutrality was a noble position most easily maintained from a considerable distance.
Lea’s father, Dr. Pleasant Lea, was a Southern-born slaveholder married to a Northern woman, which made him suspect to both sides. According to family accounts, Kansas Redlegs came to his home, shot him, killed an enslaved man on the property, looted the house, and burned it.
Joseph and his brother Frank’s neutrality ended after Kansas soldiers arrested them while they were harvesting and placed them before a firing squad. A childhood friend among the soldiers whispered that they should run. They did, demonstrating Joseph’s lifelong preference for practical advice over lengthy deliberation.
The brothers joined William Quantrill’s Confederate guerrillas. Lea became an experienced bushwhacker, receiving ample instruction in riding, shooting, deception, and revenge. In 1863, Quantrill’s men attacked Lawrence, Kansas, burning the town and killing approximately 160 to 190 men and boys. Lea rode with a collection of relatives and future outlaws that reportedly included Frank and Jesse James, the Younger brothers, and John Jarrette.
When the Confederacy collapsed, former officers invited Lea to Mexico to offer their services to Emperor Maximilian. He declined. After years of raids, ambushes, hunger, pursuit, and bloodshed, he apparently decided one war was sufficient.
His Northern uncle used a connection with President Andrew Johnson to secure him a pardon. Lea removed his sidearms and never again habitually carried a gun.
The Captain Buys a Town
After the war, Lea wandered through the South, married, became a widower, remarried, and eventually moved his family, employees, livestock, and ambitions into the Pecos Valley. There he purchased two adobe buildings and several hundred acres.
Lea did not establish Roswell; he was more efficient. He bought it.
Roswell stood in enormous, sparsely governed Lincoln County. Lea arrived shortly before the murder of English rancher John Tunstall ignited the Lincoln County War. He refused to join it, saying that if he fought, he would do so on his own account.
Few men understood the value of law and order better than a man intimately acquainted with its absence.
Law arrived in small installments. When a drunken cowboy stabbed a man outside Lea’s store, he was arrested, taken before a judge, and fined $2.50 – the first recorded enforcement of law in the Pecos Valley.
Civilization had arrived without placing an excessive burden on the offender.
According to folklore, Lea summoned Billy the Kid and warned that if Billy brought any “capers” into town, Lea would fill him with holes. Billy supposedly laughed, agreed, and behaved in Roswell.
Lea and cattleman John Chisum later supported Pat Garrett for Lincoln County sheriff. Garrett captured Billy in 1880 and killed him after his escape in 1881.
Twenty-seven years later, Garrett himself was shot by cowboy Wayne Brazel.
Lea believed Roswell could become a commercial and railroad center, but prosperity required order—and money.
His holdings expanded until the Lea Cattle Company reportedly ran 30,000 to 50,000 cattle from the Pecos River to the Capitan Mountains.
His final wife and partner was Mabel Doss Day, the celebrated “Cattle Queen of Texas,” who managed one of that state’s largest fenced ranches and could discuss cattle, land, water, and finance on equal terms with any man.
They were the Captain and the Cattle Queen, a frontier power couple.
Together they helped develop Roswell and, in 1891, founded Goss Military Institute. They hired Colonel Robert S. Goss of Fort Worth University to run the school and placed it in their 10-acre peach orchard near downtown — approximately where the UFO-shaped McDonald’s now stands. History has a sense of humor and occasionally comes with fries.
The school opened with 38 students, 20 of them girls who attended during the day but did not board. Three buildings stood on the property, and the Leas supplied the money. In 1893, the territorial government adopted the school, renamed it the New Mexico Military Institute, and placed it under a Board of Regents. Official status did not guarantee dependable funds: in 1895, the legislature neglected to appropriate any, and the Institute temporarily closed.
NMMI reopened in 1899 as an all-male military boarding school and added a junior college in 1915. Women did not return until 1977 — 78 years after their dismissal.
Aspiring to be the “West Point of the West,” the school became known for excellent faculty while maintaining devotion to drills, discipline, and the polishing of everything capable of being shiny.
Lea became Roswell’s first mayor and reportedly made one campaign speech: “I would rather be elected mayor of Roswell than governor of New Mexico.”
He died in 1904 with one dollar in the bank because his banker refused another overdraft. Nevertheless, he owned substantial property in a growing town with streets, farms, businesses, a railroad, and schools. Then history played its final trick.
Roswell lands on the map
In 1947, ranch foreman Mac Brazel – nephew of the cowboy who killed Pat Garrett – found metallic material scattered on the ranch he was working near Corona.
When Brazel visited Corona the next day, his uncle Hollis Wilson suggested the debris might belong to one of the flying discs everyone was talking about.
Pilot Kenneth Arnold had recently reported seeing discs moving through the sky at impossible speeds, and newspapers responded with the calm restraint for which they are noted.
More than 800 similar sightings had been reported on July 4th. Some people suspected visitors from space; others suspected the Soviet Communists, who were considerably closer.
There was a reported reward of $3,000 – more than $40,000 today – to anyone who could produce an actual flying saucer. Suddenly, scattered foil and structural detritus deserved a second look!
Brazel carried the material he found to Roswell sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox contacted Roswell Army Air Field, home of the 509th Bomb Group, then the world’s only military unit capable of delivering atomic bombs. The base sent Major Jesse Marcel and counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt to collect the wreckage.
Soon a cowboy’s debris had reached a commanding general and newspapers across the nation.
For decades, Joseph and Mabel Lea used cattle, capital, determination, and a school to make Roswell notable. Then some shiny material appeared on the range near Corona, and Roswell became a household word around the world.
Aliens, apparently, had a better advertising agent.
To be continued…
