Power, Prestige, and Politics - The Sixteen Surveyors General of New Mexico

The U.S. Land Office was an intensely political one, and the office of surveyor general was so important, that when President Cleveland in May 1885 gave George W. Julian the choice between it and that of governor of New Mexico Territory, Julian chose the former as the more desirable of the two. Following are short biographies of the sixteen men who held the office of ‘Surveyor General of New Mexico’ from its inception in 1854 until it was abolished in 1925. All of them had interesting careers as surveyors, engineers, lawyers, military officers, a medical doctor, and above all as politicians. Thirteen of them stemmed from east of the Mississippi River and only the last one, Manuel Sanchez, was a native New Mexican (Llewellyn was brought to New Mexico as an infant); but eight are still here, a part of our soil forever...American Surveyor