Trail Dust: Brothers in business

Some years ago, a friend of mine found a half dozen cartes de visites on sale in a thrift store at Los Lunas. She bought them for $15 and passed them on to me for my historical photographs collection. Cartes de visites were photos mounted on small cards that could be mass produced. They became popular during the Civil War in the 1860s when Union and Confederate soldiers had their pictures taken in uniform. The six that surfaced in Los Lunas included portraits of Nestor Armijo, his wife, Josefa, and his younger brother Nicolás, plus three views of a mercantile store in Chihuahua City operated by Nicolás from 1868 to 1872. The two brothers, as I was already aware, were long prominent in the overland freighting trade from Missouri to New Mexico, then on to Chihuahua and Durango. But what really caught my eye were the pictures of the Chihuahua store, the first I'd ever seen of a number once run by New Mexican and American merchants in that north Mexican city. Josiah Gregg, chief chronicler of the Santa Fe Trail, explains that when U.S. traders first arrived in New Mexico's capital, they started the practice of renting store space on or near the Plaza and selling their freighted goods at retail. Later, when the competition became keen and the market glutted, some of the incoming merchants carried their wares on south to Albuquerque, El Paso and Chihuahua City. By the late 1830s, members of New Mexico's leading families had joined in this profitable commerce...SFe New Mexican