Dawson family

Historical Background

John Barkley Dawson, patriarch of the Dawson family, drove cattle across the American frontier from Arkansas to the mining towns of California in 1855. In 1857 he homesteaded land in Fort Belknap, Texas, and began a business that sold cattle to government forts, Indian agents and the distant mining towns of Colorado. Dawson blazed the trail that later became known as the Dawson Trail. For a brief period, 1864-1865, he served as a Texas Ranger.

In 1869 Dawson and several relatives purchased 250,000 acres of land on the Vermejo River, New Mexico, from Lucien B. Maxwell. Originally a Mexican land grant given to Judge Carlos Beaubien and Senor Guadalupe Miranda in 1844, the Maxwell land grant was confirmed in 1860 according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Over the next twenty years, Dawson developed the ranch, stocked his range with cattle, constructed a dam and irrigation system for agriculture, and built a two-story ranch house and numerous buildings.

Controversy arose over the exact boundries of Dawson's property once coal was discovered under much of his range. The Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company, an English corporation, purchased the remaining portion of Maxwell's land and engaged in an aggressive attempt to remove squatters and lease tenants from portions of the original grant. During the 1880s, the corporation successfully removed occupants without valid deeds of contract. In the early 1890s, the corporation filed a suit against Dawson which was eventually decided in his favor in the United States Supreme Court in 1893.

The costs of litigation and a persistent regional drought created a financial crisis for Dawson in the 1890s. He responded by sending his three older sons on a successful stock drive to the gold fields of the Yukon in Alaska in 1893. In 1901 he sold all but 1250 acres of his ranch to the Dawson Fuel Company (no relation) and moved to Routt County, Colorado. There he built another ranch and raised cattle and horses. The Colorado property also contained large deposits of coal, which Dawson later sold to the Victor American Fuel Company in 1915. John B. Dawson died in Los Angeles, California, in 1918.

J. B. Dawson's son, Si Dawson, continued in the cattle business after the sale of the Routt County ranch. In 1918 he accepted a position as the superintendent of a large ranch called the Fazenda Morungava, located in Brazil. He lived there with his wife Lucy and son Henry Clay until December 1919, when he died of a ruptured appendix. His daughters Delphine and Dorothy were preparing to visit their parents when word arrived of their father's death.

Delphine Dawson Wilson was responsible for assembling this collection of her family's papers. She began to compile information on her family's history in 1972 and is writing a book on her grandfather J. B. Dawson.

From the guide to the Dawson Family Papers, 1852 - 1950, (University of California, San Diego. Geisel Library. Mandeville Special Collections Library.)