Joseph and Mabel Lea did not intend for New Mexico Military Institute to be merely a place where boys marched, polished brass, shined shoes, and suffered consequences for beds whose corners lacked conviction.
They wanted to bring a first-rate education system to territorial New Mexico, where formal schooling was scarce and students reaching the eighth grade was considered sufficient by parents who needed another pair of hands on the farm or ranch.
For families with means and larger academic ambitions, boarding school offered another path. NMMI became known for military discipline, but discipline alone does not make a school great. Its lasting distinction came from teachers who carried larger worlds into isolated Roswell.
Three professors in particular illustrate that tradition. One may have been a count.
One became a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner without earning a college degree.
And one’s research on Billy the Kid eventually filled 13 feet of shelving — more than twice the outlaw’s estimated height of five feet seven inches.
The Count
Luigi Martini-Mancini was born in Florence, Italy, and arrived in New Mexico carrying enough titles and adventures to make an ordinary résumé appear underdressed.
He graduated from the Kingdom of Italy’s National Military School, served as an Italian Army officer, worked for the Duke of Aosta, and spent time in the diplomatic corps in Madrid. Then he read glowing newspaper accounts of sunshine and limitless farming opportunities in the Pecos Valley and did what many dreamers did around the turn of the century: he went west to New Mexico Territory to make his fortune.
After an unsuccessful attempt at farming, he became a postal clerk in Eddy — today’s Carlsbad — before joining NMMI’s faculty in 1898. The 1902 Bronco yearbook listed Major Luigi Martini-Mancini as professor of Modern Languages and Business.
Local newspapers preferred more hoopla and frequently referred to him as Count Martini-Mancini. Whether the title signified genuine aristocratic ancestry, military courtesy, frontier imagination, or Luigi’s own helpful suggestion remains uncertain.
Territorial New Mexico was not inclined to audit European nobility closely.
Besides, a multilingual Italian count lent elegance to a school surrounded by ranches, dust, and tumbleweeds.
One thing is certain: Roswell residents found him delightfully eccentric.
One story claimed he refused to have his clothes washed locally and shipped them to a more civilized laundry, believing that only a proper establishment could be trusted with a gentleman’s shirts.
Whether true or not, it sounded exactly like something a count would do.
In October 1902, Martini-Mancini became an American citizen in Roswell. He taught foreign languages at NMMI for 11 years.
And then he turned to the newest language of all: wireless communication.
The Count left Roswell to become assistant manager of the foreign department of the United Wireless Telegraph Company in New York.
Newspapers proudly described him as Roswell’s own “wireless expert.”
At a time when radio bordered on wizardry, Luigi traded translating European languages for translating invisible messages flying through the air.
Then Europe descended into the First World War. The Kingdom of Italy had originally been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary but joined the Allies in 1915 after being promised territory.
Martini-Mancini returned to Europe during the war. In May of 1916, he boarded the Dutch steamship Batavier V.
Shortly thereafter, the vessel struck a mine laid by a German submarine, killing three crew members and one passenger.
Early reports listed Martini-Mancini among the drowned, though newspapers could not agree whether he was Italian or American.
The American Embassy eventually clarified that the former Italian officer and Roswell professor had become a naturalized American citizen.
By the time Martini-Mancini disappeared into the North Sea, he had been a soldier, diplomat, failed farmer, postal clerk, professor, major, possible count, American citizen, and wireless pioneer.
His life seems less like one biography than several that became entangled.
The Chronicler
NMMI’s most celebrated librarian possessed a name long enough to occupy its own book shelf: Paul George Vincent O’Shaughnessy Horgan.
Born in Buffalo in 1903, Horgan moved with his family to Albuquerque in 1915 when his father contracted tuberculosis.
He attended Albuquerque High School and then NMMI, where he formed a lifelong friendship with fellow cadet Peter Hurd, later one of New Mexico’s best-known artists.
Horgan never earned a college degree.
This omission would eventually be mitigated by 19 honorary degrees, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the general embarrassment of any university that had not hired him because they considered him insufficiently educated.
After briefly working for the Albuquerque Morning Journal, Horgan returned to Roswell in 1926 as NMMI’s librarian.
The job provided a salary, rooms full of books, and time to write. His first five novels were rejected. He treated rejection as apprenticeship rather than prophecy.
In 1933, The Fault of Angels won the Harper Prize and began a career encompassing fiction, history, and biography. His masterpiece, Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, followed the river through Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American worlds. It won the Bancroft Prize and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for History.
In 1976, Horgan received a second Pulitzer for Lamy of Santa Fe, his biography of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy.
He remains the only New Mexico author to have won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Horgan’s 1960 novel A Distant Trumpet, set during the Apache wars, became a Warner Brothers cavalry epic starring Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette.
The screenplay rearranged characters and changed Horgan’s ending, because Hollywood has always regarded history as merely a suggestion.
Several of Horgan’s shorter works also reached television during the 1950s and early 1960s through programs including Studio One, Fireside Theatre, The Ford Television Theatre, and General Electric Theater.
For a time, the NMMI librarian occupied the unusual territory between serious scholarship and popular entertainment.
Horgan’s interests extended beyond the printed page. He helped found the Santa Fe Opera and served for 10 years as chairman of its board. In 1960, Horgan joined Wesleyan University, eventually becoming professor of English and permanent author-in-residence. He spent much of the remainder of his life in Connecticut but returned to New Mexico for visits.
Horgan was formal in an increasingly informal age. For dress occasions, he wore a ribbon signifying a Vatican honor and a gold watch chain across his vest. At home, he received guests in a velvet smoking jacket and patent leather slippers with bows.
Student waiters who worked his parties wore red waistcoats at his house and black ones at Wesleyan’s Russell House.
His home, converted from the stables of a Greek Revival mansion, was dominated by a living room library containing thousands of books in immaculate order.
He entertained writers, artists, professors, and publishers, paid his student waiters twice what they expected, and demonstrated that formality, unlike stinginess, could be charming.
Ceremony was Horgan’s way of creating beauty and order. Books were arranged, meals presented, clothes chosen, guests welcomed, and all events were staged. He believed writers should work every day and filled notebooks during his journeys through the Southwest. New Mexico supplied the landscape; Horgan supplied the notes.
His later years offered a sobering lesson about literary fame. Short of money, he sold his books and papers to a collector.
They agreed if she ever sold them, they should be offered to Yale.
Horgan spent his life rescuing people and places from obscurity. But the once famous writer is now unfamiliar even to many New Mexicans whose history he preserved.
By the time of his death in 1995, Paul Horgan had enjoyed the full courtship of literary fame. Reviewers praised him, universities awarded him honorary degrees, Hollywood adapted his work, and two Pulitzer Prizes confirmed that the reading public respected him. Then, slowly and without ceremony, the romance ended.
Horgan’s books disappeared from stores, royalties dwindled, and Yale declined to acquire the papers of a man once considered one of America’s finest writers.
The Kid
If birth certificates included career predictions, Maurice Garland Fulton’s might simply have read: Professor.
Education was not merely respected in the Fulton family; it was the family trade.
His father was chancellor of the University of Mississippi, and his maternal grandfather presided over three colleges including Vanderbilt.
Born in Mississippi in 1877, Fulton earned two degrees from the University of Mississippi and completed graduate work at Michigan, stopping short of the dissertation.
That did not prevent him from teaching at Mississippi, Michigan, Illinois, Centre College, Davidson, and Indiana University.
After serving as an Army colonel during World War I, he arrived at NMMI in 1922 as professor of English and history and remained there the rest of his life.
Fulton chaired the English Department and taught Shakespeare and composition.
He believed prose, like a cadet formation, should stand straight, know where it was going, and avoid unnecessary frills.
Then Billy the Kid entered the syllabus.
The Lincoln County War had occurred only about 90 miles from Roswell and remained within living memory. It offered everything respectable scholarship normally tries to avoid: disputed killings, unreliable witnesses, missing documents, political grudges, and a despicable outlaw whose reputation grew more charismatic with every dime novel he was featured in.
Fulton began researching the Kid just as movies and books were turning the Old West into America’s Camelot.
Cowboys, sheriffs, floozies and outlaws became national founding heroes. Pat Garrett became the legend’s stoic lawman, while Billy the Kid became its reckless young outlaw — the more dangerous, romantic, and enduring figure of the two.
While Hollywood polished the legend, Fulton investigated it. He interviewed survivors, descendants, lawmen, ranchers, and residents. He collected letters, court records, newspapers, maps, photographs, diaries, and legal documents.
Fulton’s archive of evidence about Billy the Kid eventually filled 13 feet of shelf space — more than twice the outlaw’s estimated height of five feet seven inches.
In 1927, Fulton edited and republished Pat Garrett’s rare 1882 Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, adding an introduction, notes, illustrations, portraits, and a map. Garrett’s book was part biography, part defense of his conduct, and part frontier mythology, but Fulton restored it to circulation and gave later scholars a foundation.
Fulton also collaborated with Horgan on New Mexico’s Own Chronicle and helped preserve the historic town of Lincoln.
The partnership must have been formidable. Horgan brought literary elegance, visual imagination, and velvet-smoking-jacket civilization. Fulton brought documents, footnotes, and the suspicion that someone had misdated a gunfight.
He taught Shakespeare by day and investigated Billy the Kid by night, though the subjects were not entirely different.
The Lincoln County War had rival houses, corrupt officials, murdered father figures, hotheaded young men, revenge vows, and an increasing number of corpses.
It was Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet with faster horses.
For 33 years, Fulton taught cadets to impose order upon their writing and analysis of literature. In his spare time, he tried to impose order upon the Lincoln County War.
Fulton intended to write the definitive history of Billy the Kid, but witnesses contradicted one another and certainty kept moving beyond reach. He died in Roswell in 1955 without completing the book.
Historian Robert N. Mullin later organized Fulton’s research and published History of the Lincoln County War in 1968.
Postscript
Martini-Mancini, Horgan, and Fulton were very different teachers. One connected Roswell to Europe and the wireless age.
One transformed the Southwest into literature. One pursued historical truth through a thicket of folklore.
Each made scholarship feel like a living adventure rather than information to be memorized for a test. That was part and parcel of the Leas’ larger vision.
NMMI might train a cadet to stand straight, obey orders, and survive an inspection, but its finest educators taught him to look beyond the parade ground toward neglected histories, disputed evidence and worlds he had never imagined.
