Review of:  "To Possess The Land."  A Biography of Arthur Rochford Manby, By Frank Waters

Arthur Rochfort Manby was an immigrant from England  arriving in New Mexico Territory in 1882  when he was 22.  He was an educated Englishman of good family out to make his fortune in the frontiers land.  The story of his life in the Taos area of northern New Mexico is told in the Frank Waters biography entitled "To Possess the Land."  You can read the Barns and Noble description of this book by clicking the link given under the title above.

And a sorted story it is with the details of the exploitive methods used by Manby to obtain title to the better part of a hundred-thousand acre 18th century Spanish land grant and other New Mexico land in and around the old town of Taos.   The methods Manby used to acquire title to this land were well planned to obtain  the land at a cost far less than its true value at the expense of the uneducated often illiterate Native Indians and and long rooted Hispanics. 

Having achieved his dream with a court decision confirming his title, Manby set about planning  the building a luxury  resort hotel and spa focused around several hot springs on the Rio Grande river deep in its gorge where it passes near Taos.  After creating a complex system of interlocking corporations, he set about to obtaining the financing of the project from a variety of people including family and private investors in both England and the United States.  In his effort he was frequently successful in extracting money from more sophisticated subjects than his previous victims, but never did he find enough to advance his hotel project to reality, and the only development of his hot springs site to this day was a crude stone bath house over one of the springs built for his own use and enjoyment.  The ruins of of this bath house still stand today on the Rio Grande in a near 1000 foot deep chasm accessible only by foot down the eroded remains of a 19rh stage road..

After the failure of his planed hotel and spa, the loss of the land grant title and a barrage of law suites seeking damages for previous exploitations, Manby's activity turned to a cruder confidence type operation through the creation of a secret society called "The United States Secret Service Society, Self Sustaining Branch."  Apparently the purpose of the society was to extort money from new members.  Today it is hard for Americans to understand how such a group could so casually be organized and operate but in 1920's New Mexico, this one did for near a decade. 

In the end this United States Secret Service Society, Self Sustaining Branch may have been the cause of Manby's death.  In any case in early July 1929 a headless body was found in the Mamby Taos Home.  The separated head was found in another room.  The cause of death was originally ruled as natural causes.  The absence of an attached head was attributed to a large watch dog locked in the house with the body.  Belatedly a poorly organized investigations was begun in which a local doctor and neighbor identified the exhumed body as Manby.  His dentist also identified the body as Manby.  The report indicated that the severed head was the result of a clean cut negating the possibly that the dog did it.   The investigation was never really concluded or fully reported because New Mexico at the time simply simply was not willing to spend the few thousand dollars necessary to complete the investigation.  The neighbor doctor destroyed his autopsy report when the state failed to pay him.  After a while stories began to circulate of Manby's being seen alive in Europe opening the rumors that the body was not Manby's at all, and perhaps implying that Manby had engineered his own murder in order to escape his creditors and law suites.

While this man's story ends as an unsolved western mystery, this reader was left with the conclusion that this Arthur Rochfort Manby had been born about 100 years too soon.  Had he been born a century later, how well he would have fit into the corporate culture of modern corporations of the sort of  Enron and World Comm..