From the train depot in Gallup, we’d climb aboard a dusty Trailways bus and travel north 110 miles to Farmington on a two-lane road. We’d pack our bags and take the Santa Fe Chief to Gallup, New Mexico. My mother didn’t drive, and flying to New Mexico wasn’t simple during wartime, so we always traveled by train. Over time, oil and gas exploration became a bigger draw, but there are still many farms and ranches there today. Consequently, they were agrarian communities small farms, fruit orchards and ranches, as their names suggest. Both were located in the fertile valleys of the three converging rivers in San Juan County. Her parents and most of her relatives lived in northwestern New Mexico, some near the very small town of Bloomfield, others in the nearest larger town, Farmington. However, during dad’s long absences at sea, or whenever we had to cross the country to live near his new duty station, we stopped in New Mexico and stayed with my mother’s family. He would soon be going off to sea again, but we made Maryland our home for most of the war years. The following year, Dad was assigned temporarily to the Navy Department, so we moved to southern Maryland, just north of Washington, DC. When war broke out, my mother, my sister Pat, and I were living in Naval housing called Anchorage, near Providence, Rhode Island. My father was in the Navy, stationed in the Atlantic on the battleship, USS Texas.
I was eight years old when the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Decemchanged so many of our lives. My clearest memories of my Irvin ancestors date back to the years of World War II. It was often uncertain and unpredictable. It was primitive and sometimes dangerous. The life the Irvins chose when they abandoned their farms in the Southeast and set sail for the still turbulent Southwest was not an easy life. A few Irvins even tried their luck drilling for gas and oil, but this endeavor could be costly and sometimes tragic. Here, during the first and second World Wars, they prospered as ranchers and farmers. They put down roots in the small but growing towns of Farmington and Bloomfield. The Irvins finally chose to migrate all the way to northwestern New Mexico, seeking their fortune in a place where water was plentiful and commerce was just beginning to boom. Returning to west Texas, the next generation continued cattle ranching as the family expanded but they were eventually defeated by floods, drought, fences, and the economics of scale. Here their lives were threatened on more than one occasion by raids from renegade Apaches and a complicated encounter with a notorious gang of cattle rustlers. The next generation continued cattle ranching but they were lured briefly to southwestern New Mexico Territory by the rich silver strikes of the 1870's. During these early years they survived the terrors of Comanche raids and the Civil War. The first generation of the Irvins to settle in Texas were farmers, but they soon left their farm and earned their living by rounding up and raising longhorn cattle. Their story includes brief accounts of the geography and the history of those times and places in order to provide essential context.
The research often took on the nature of detective work. The search for answers eventually required personal visits to small, sometimes deserted towns in these two states. Numerous inconsistencies also had to be resolved. There were initially huge gaps in the family's history.
Their story is told as it gradually unfolds during an extensive investigation of family trees, civil records, letters, photographs and old newspapers.
Through good times and bad, this family persevered, just one family of many that helped settle these two great states. From the early 1840's to the late 1950's, four generations of Irvins tried their hand at cattle ranching, silver mining, land speculation, and drilling for gas and oil. The Irvin family's story spans over one-hundred years, almost equally divided between their adventures in the hill country of west-central Texas, and in the rugged southwestern and northwestern corners of New Mexico. However, their story likely parallels the lives of many families that migrated from the eastern states to the still untamed Southwest at this time in our history. This well-documented account of pioneering in Texas and New Mexico during those states' formative years focuses on just a single family.
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