Pan American Trust: On Property, Speculation, and Boundary Maintenance at Tres Piedras Estates

SPEC­U­LA­TION

Assum­ing a prob­a­bil­i­ty ß that a giv­en invest­ment will reach its max­i­mum val­ue, it then fol­lows that there is a prob­a­bil­i­ty of 1‑ß that the invest­ment will be worth­less.¹

In the sum­mer of 1962, Bill Irons — a 14-year-old boy from Erie, PA — and his par­ents turned their fam­i­ly car to the west. Wrap­ping their teal Cadil­lac around the Great Lakes, across the Great Plains, and over the Cas­cade Range, the Irons fam­i­ly brought their Cold War road-trip to a halt at the heart of the aero­space race: Boe­ing’s Seat­tle. Their des­ti­na­tion: the Cen­tu­ry 21 Expo­si­tion — oth­er­wise known as the Seat­tle World’s Fair. Orig­i­nal­ly planned as a reca­pit­u­la­tion of the Alas­ka-Yukon-Pacif­ic Expo­si­tion of 1909 and its cel­e­bra­tion of an untamed Amer­i­can West, the pres­sures of a loom­ing space race and the grow­ing per­cep­tion of a lag­ging dis­par­i­ty in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy led the orga­niz­ers to focus on an opti­mistic, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-dri­ven present instead of anachro­nis­tic themes of West­ward land­ed expansion.

Yet, there was at least one booth at the fair that did not get the memo. Robert Gol­u­bin, Pres­i­dent of the Great South­west­ern Land Com­pa­ny, set up a tent near the South entrance of the fair and, lur­ing fair-goers with promis­es of free poo­dles and real estate, ​“auc­tioned” off ¼‑acre ​“resort ran­chos” in Taos Coun­ty, New Mex­i­co. Shep­herd­ed in by a gre­gar­i­ous sales­men, Bill Irons and his fam­i­ly were steered toward the Space Nee­dle and its adja­cent land office to hear the spiel of a man­ic sales­man eager to sell them a piece, albeit remote, of the Amer­i­can dream. Tres Piedras Estates, as the sub­di­vi­sion of ran­chi­tos was named, were ​“gen­er­ous­ly endowed with the bless­ings of nature” and where, Gol­u­bin and his men assured them, ​“you will dis­cov­er the gen­tly rolling, fer­tile land that has caused the fab­u­lous resort area in Taos coun­ty to become the play­ground of out­door-lov­ing peo­ple everywhere.“2

And every­where was indeed their tar­get mar­ket. Over 10,000 peo­ple from across the US, Cana­da, and beyond were the pur­port­ed ​“win­ners” of Gol­u­bin’s land auc­tion — receiv­ing let­ters in the mail announc­ing their lucky draw with the only require­ment being final pay­ment of clos­ing costs of rough­ly $50. Cheap for the promise of a sound prop­er­ty invest­ment fea­tur­ing ​“an abun­dance of col­or­ful aspen, state­ly pine and fir trees,” as their brochures promised, but per­haps a shake­down for the ¼ acre of sage­brush and sand that actu­al­ly await­ed the buy­er. With lots actu­al­ly val­ued at approx­i­mate­ly $3 and with over ten thou­sand peo­ple respond­ing to their tru­ly unbe­liev­able ​“free-lot” luck, Gol­u­bin and his No-Share­hold­er-Lia­bil­i­ty com­pa­ny walked away with mil­lions in fair-goers invest­ments. Includ­ing those of Bill Irons and his family.

Set up in the shad­ow of Seat­tle’s Space Nee­dle, Gol­u­bin rec­og­nized that spec­u­la­tion bears an uncom­fort­able kin­ship with the spec­tac­u­lar and the spec­ta­cle. Where­as the lat­ter requires prox­im­i­ty, embod­i­ment, and an imme­di­ate affec­tive ori­en­ta­tion, spec­u­la­tion relies on dis­tance — a dis­em­bod­ied (and there­fore not con­firmable) van­tage point. Unver­i­fi­a­bil­i­ty is the ker­nel to any suc­cess­ful land hus­tle. And as the sole medi­a­tor between the worlds of spec­u­la­tion and the spec­tac­u­lar, Gol­u­bin served as an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor of promise and profit.

Tres Piedras Estates was only one of a series of spec­u­la­tive land scams that washed across mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. Hawk­ing pieces of pri­mar­i­ly sun­belt real estate in New Mex­i­co, Ari­zona, Flori­da, and beyond, var­i­ous devel­op­ers ranged in cul­pa­bil­i­ty from oppor­tunis­tic truth-stretch­ers to flat-out thieves and liars. ​“Swamp Mer­chants” in Flori­da and costal states reg­u­lar­ly sold lots cov­ered by 3 feet of Ever­glades water, while the more auda­cious tried to build paper empires by sell­ing deeds to land that sim­ply did not exist. It was a spec­u­la­tive pat­tern where one expert decried, ​“This boom is filled with peo­ple try­ing to swing a $5 mil­lion deal on $5,000.”² Gol­u­bin, for his part, actu­al­ly owned the land which he was sell­ing and had even made some of the inter­nal improve­ments — such as grad­ing the roads and stak­ing indi­vid­ual lots — that he had promised to his clients. Yet, even those man­i­fest efforts could not save Gol­u­bin from the courts, as he was tried and con­vict­ed of mail fraud under the Inter­state Land Sales Act in 1965.³

L = Y(P‑C) – YDF

At the heart of this sto­ry are the dynam­ics of spec­u­la­tion. Eschew­ing tra­di­tion­al mea­sures of fun­da­men­tal val­ue and focus­ing instead on the adapt­abil­i­ty of price move­ments, the spec­u­la­tor enters into a pact with time, val­ue, and uncer­tain­ty. But what land spec­u­la­tors of ear­ly- and mid-20^th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca relied on, in addi­tion, was a struc­tur­al mis­fit between dis­tance and prox­im­i­ty that was a hall­mark of the geo­graph­i­cal imag­i­nary of Amer­i­ca. In a ter­ri­to­ry that exists beyond the pre­vail­ing mod­els of land use eco­nom­ics — from Ricardo’s Law of Rent through von Thunen’s land equa­tions, for­ward to the Chica­go School’s soci­o­log­i­cal maps — under­stand­ing 20^th-cen­tu­ry land spec­u­la­tion requires an updat­ed eco­nom­ic the­o­ry of the mar­gin. That is, it requires a mod­el in which dis­tance and trans­porta­tion costs fac­tor as addi­tive—rather than the con­ven­tion­al sub­trac­tive — vari­ables. In the cal­cu­lus of spec­u­la­tive advan­tage, the swamps of Flori­da and the desert of New Mex­i­co were attrac­tive pre­cise­ly because of their iso­la­tion, remote­ness, and inaccessibility.

Spec­u­la­tion, per­haps more than oth­er abstract prin­ci­ples of free­dom or democ­ra­cy, sits at the heart of the Amer­i­can project. Look­ing up through the ocu­lus of the dome of the US Capi­tol rotun­da in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., a view­er is met by the pan­theon­ic sur­face of a fres­co detail­ing six abid­ing tropes of Amer­i­can self-nar­ra­tion: War, Sci­ence, Marine, Com­merce, Mechan­ics, and Agri­cul­ture. The Apoth­e­o­sis of Wash­ing­ton, a vast fres­co with 15-foot high char­ac­ters paint­ed by Con­stan­ti­no Bru­mi­di, is notable in our sto­ry for the pres­ence of Robert Mor­ris, ​“Financier of the Rev­o­lu­tion.” As the cen­tral char­ac­ter of the tableau of Com­merce, Mor­ris, seat­ed next to Mer­cury, the Roman god of com­merce, is being hand­ed a bag of gold by the winged god, who holds a caduceus in his oth­er hand while Mor­ris looks up in a tired glance from his ledgers. And while labor­ers toil at the turned back of Mer­cury, a mer­chant makes a deal, and a fac­to­ry looms hazy in the dis­tance, what is tru­ly miss­ing from this tableau of finance and capi­tol is the sto­ry of Mor­ris as the country’s most noto­ri­ous and, for a time, suc­cess­ful land speculator.

In post-Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Amer­i­ca, no land-job­ber was bet­ter known or unmer­ci­ful­ly car­i­ca­tured than Robert Mor­ris. ​“Bob­by, the cof­fer­er” occu­pies para­dox­i­cal posi­tions in the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ists — appoint­ed as Super­in­ten­dent of Finances by Con­gress in 1781, he nonethe­less main­tained an active role in numer­ous spec­u­la­tive and dodgy land ven­tures through­out his tenure. Writ­ing in 1780 to Silas Deane, his part­ner in the spec­u­la­tive Unit­ed Illi­nois and Wabash Com­pa­nies and the Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion­er to France, he request­ed that he deter­mine ​“whether it is prac­ti­ca­ble to make sale of vacant lands in Amer­i­ca by send­ing out drafts or sur­veys, descrip­tions and cer­tifi­cates, to ascer­tain the sit­u­a­tion, qual­i­ties of land, title, ect. [sic], and in what part of the con­ti­nent lands are most desired by such per­sons as would be inclined to spec­u­late, for I am ready to join you in any oper­a­tions of this kind that would turn advan­ta­geous­ly to our­selves […].“⁴

Spec­u­la­tive advan­tage oper­ates in a sur­pris­ing­ly con­sis­tent way across time — be it of the Mor­ris or the Gol­u­bin type. Reflect­ing on the per­va­sive­ness of the spec­u­la­tive land scams of the 1960s, Attor­ney Gen­er­al Robert F. Kennedy writes, ​“Adver­tis­ing for such fraud­u­lent sales has played on retire­ment hopes, the promise of the West, and the lure of easy cred­it,” con­tin­u­ing, ​“in the past two years we have expe­ri­enced a sharp increase in the sale by mail of near­ly worth­less land for great­ly inflat­ed prices.”⁵ The first spec­u­la­tive mech­a­nism that allows the ​“near­ly worth­less” patch of sage and sand to be sold for a prof­it is the prac­tice of first-in-time land pur­chase and sub­se­quent sub­di­vi­sion, where­by risk is spread across numer­ous small­er units far out­side of a ter­ri­to­ry expe­ri­enc­ing devel­op­ment pres­sures. Suc­cinct­ly fram­ing this cal­cu­lus of risk, Robert Caro writes: ​“The rea­son is sim­ple: The land is cheap­est there, the chance for prof­it there­fore the great­est.”⁶ The sec­ond mech­a­nism lies in the rec­og­niz­able metonym lying at the heart of Kennedy’s ​“promise of the West,” where­in unin­hab­it­able desert is seman­ti­cal­ly trans­ferred into ​“ran­cho estates.” And final­ly, the exe­cu­tion of any good spec­u­la­tive land scam is pred­i­cat­ed on the mis­match of access to infor­ma­tion and on the con­struc­tion and cap­i­tal­iza­tion of an unre­al­ized desire — on ​“retire­ment hopes” or on the promise of own­ing a piece of the Amer­i­can Dream. All of which is to say, spec­u­la­tion relies, fun­da­men­tal­ly, on trust. How­ev­er misguided.

In the case of Gol­u­bin, this spec­u­la­tive chain was fur­ther rein­forced by the per­va­sive geog­ra­phy of the postal sys­tem. As the medi­um through which the land sales of the Great South­west­ern Land Com­pa­ny were announced and financed, mail deliv­ery pro­vid­ed an anony­mous but ubiq­ui­tous mech­a­nism through which poten­tial cus­tomers might be reached. Gol­u­bin and his asso­ciates would take part in land sales through the mail — send­ing infor­ma­tion and notices of award of ini­tial lots and solic­it­ing fur­ther pur­chase through a $25 down and $25-a-month scheme. So, while their gam­bit had as its final object some­thing as seem­ing­ly reli­able and secure as land, it was the dif­fuse ter­ri­to­ri­al­i­ty of the postal ser­vice that allowed this sit­u­at­ed com­mod­i­ty to have pur­chase across the coun­try. It was, after all, under the Mail Frauds Act that Gol­u­bin was ulti­mate­ly tried and found guilty. Yet, while much has been writ­ten about the ways in which the postal sys­tem con­struct­ed con­nec­tions across the vast ter­ri­to­ry of the coun­try,⁷ there has been lit­tle com­ment about the ways in which the post simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­struct­ed dis­tance. At the heart of most land-by-mail schemes is a struc­tur­al inter­val intro­duced between buy­er and sell­er. While the rhetoric of inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty sure­ly remains applic­a­ble in these spec­u­la­tive schemes, a sec­ond postal rule, the sep­a­ra­tion of sender and receiv­er, is the oper­a­tive principle.

Between the sub­di­vid­ed sec­tion of land called Tres Piedras Estates and prac­tices of the Great South­west­ern Land Co. lies the prin­ci­ple of prop­er­ty. The square mile in ques­tion is impor­tant because it crys­tal­izes an abid­ing ten­den­cy in the Amer­i­can psy­che that can only be described as a will toward spec­u­la­tion, one that reach­es back to pre-Rev­o­lu­tion­ary real-estate prac­tices, through ear­ly nation­al land pol­i­cy, through the guiles of 19^th- and 20^th-cen­tu­ry land-job­bers, and for­ward to today’s hous­ing cri­sis and the palsied response. But, more than just anoth­er emblem of this will to spec­u­la­tion, Tres Piedras Estates found itself at the heart of a mid-cen­tu­ry real-estate cri­sis that includ­ed Sen­ate hear­ings, postal reform, sub­di­vi­sion reg­u­la­tion, and an emerg­ing set of rules for the man­age­ment of land. The admin­is­tra­tive suite of buy­ing, sell­ing, sur­vey­ing, plat­ting, and financ­ing this square mile of land makes real a set of rela­tion­ships that are often con­fused for property’s object. In this, we would do well to remind our­selves of the fun­da­men­tal­ly rela­tion­al def­i­n­i­tion of property:

In a strict legal sense, land is not ​‘prop­er­ty’, but the sub­ject of prop­er­ty. The term ​‘prop­er­ty’, although in com­mon par­lance fre­quent­ly applied to a tract of land or a chat­tel, in its legal sig­ni­fi­ca­tion ​‘means only the rights of the own­er in rela­tion to it’. ​‘It denotes a right over a deter­mi­nate thing’. ​‘Prop­er­ty is the right of any per­son to pos­sess, use, enjoy, and dis­pose of a thing’.⁸

Yet, the suc­cess of a spec­u­la­tive endeav­or, even bar­ring spe­cif­ic fraud­u­lent meth­ods, is not a fait accom­pli—and, fol­low­ing econ­o­mist Edward L. Glaeser, pre­sum­ing that one believes the prob­a­bil­i­ty to be ß that a giv­en invest­ment will reach its max­i­mum val­ue as com­pared to invest­ments of a sim­i­lar cat­e­go­ry, it then fol­lows that there is a prob­a­bil­i­ty of 1‑ß that the invest­ment will be worth­less. This 1‑ß prob­a­bil­i­ty is the risk that Gol­u­bin took on a sage­brush plateau in north­ern New Mexico.

PROP­ER­TY

S30 T28N R10E
One square mile.
2223 lots. Rough­ly ¼ acre each.
A sub­di­vi­sion known as Tres Piedras Estates.

Sit­ed in the high-desert of north­ern New Mex­i­co, the plat asso­ci­at­ed with the Tres Piedras Estates sub­di­vi­sion was a vision­ary doc­u­ment — if by vision­ary one means a seem­ing­ly irrec­on­cil­able gap between what-is and what-is-pro­posed. From a stretch of chamiza and sage-brush, the own­ers of the prop­er­ty, guid­ed by a Mr. Thomas H. Wag­n­er (NM Reg­is­tered Land Sur­vey­or #3517), con­jured an urban grid­iron plan of rad­i­cal pro­por­tions. Only a lit­tle less quixot­ic than, say, the 1811 Com­mis­sion­ers Plan for Man­hat­tan or the Pub­lic Land Sur­vey Sys­tem in which it is sit­u­at­ed, Wagner’s plat sub­di­vid­ed the arid land atop a ¼‑mile thick lava flow into ¼‑acre house lots. Cor­ners were staked with 2”x2”x5” oak hubs, and select roads were etched light­ly into the sandy soils. This was one of three large-scale sub­di­vi­sions ini­ti­at­ed by the behest of Mr. Robert N. Gol­u­bin, pres­i­dent of the Great South­west­ern Land Com­pa­ny, Inc., head­quar­tered in Dal­las, Texas, with offices at 636 San Mateo Boule­vard S.E., Albuquerque.

Sec­tion 30 is a tract of land claimed through the 1862 Home­stead Act, albeit over 70 years lat­er. In 1939, a cer­tain Mr. Leo David Wood­en sub­mit­ted a Cer­tifi­cate of Reg­is­ter at the Land Office of San­ta Fe, in accor­dance with the Act’s stat­ed pur­pose ​“To Secure Home­steads to Actu­al Set­tlers on the Pub­lic Domain,” for near­ly ³⁄₄ of Sec­tion 30 of Town­ship 28 North Range 10 East of the New Mex­i­co Prin­ci­pal Merid­i­an. The let­ter of this instru­ment was made patent under the hand of none oth­er than Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt despite an egre­gious math­e­mat­i­cal error in which the com­pos­ite land described is called out as 640 acres on the Patent where­as the sim­ple addi­tion of the same tracts on the US GLO plat clear­ly only sum to 600 acres. Even the Gen­er­al Land Office, whose sole pur­pose was to orga­nize the dis­burse­ment of the pub­lic domain, seems to have fall­en trap to the com­mon per­cep­tion that land in this region was so use­less­ly inter­change­able that eas­i­ly ver­i­fi­able impre­ci­sions in orig­i­nal patents were accept­ed and entered in the cadas­tral reg­is­ter for all time. This 600 (née 640) acres was described by an ear­li­er 1836 Peta­ca Land-Grant Plat as sim­ply ​“Chamiza bush­es” and classed in the 1918 US Sur­vey­or General’s field notes as: ​“Soil, loam, rocky 3^d rate.” A 1959 New Mex­i­co Office of the State Engi­neer Report on Ground-Water Con­di­tions fills out the geo­graph­ic and geo­log­ic sto­ry as it char­ac­ter­izes this entire stretch of land as a lava-capped plateau with lit­tle or no sources of water to be found except through exceed­ing­ly deep wells.⁹

While Mr. Wooden’s Actu­al Set­tler sta­tus¹⁰ is lost to his­to­ry, he flipped his hold­ings only a short year lat­er in an inscrutable trans­ac­tion for the sum of ​“Cer­tain Valu­able Con­sid­er­a­tions and Ten and No/​100 Dol­lars.” The grantees were a cer­tain Sid­ney L. and Imo­gene C. Franklin — the for­mer of whom was, accord­ing to the 1940 US Cen­sus, born in 1887. Sid­ney quick­ly con­sol­i­dat­ed his hold­ings and, on March 23, 1943, he filled out the hold­ings of sec­tion 30 by receiv­ing the gov­ern­ment patent to the final ¼‑¼ sec­tion. The Franklin’s hold­ings stretched across the high desert at an ele­va­tion of 7,850 feet, and the ranch house, yard, and cor­ral they built there were some of the few human mark­ers in the 30 miles of sage­brush between Tres Piedras and Taos.

Franklin Ranch, as it would come to be known in the region, encom­passed hold­ings of any­where between 6 and 10 square miles, though their sage-brush king­dom was sub­ject to the vagaries of arid land­scape on the lava-capped plateau. The 1959 engi­neer­ing report com­ments that the Franklin Ranch well, at some 473 feet deep, was com­plete­ly dry and, owing to the unique geol­o­gy of the area and the poros­i­ty of the native lava rock below the sur­face, known to be ​“blow­ing air.” Water, not air, was what was need­ed to grow a west­ern ranch­ing inter­est, which may be the rea­son why, in 1952, the Franklins entered into an irreg­u­lar mort­gage oblig­a­tion with a Juan and Mar­i­an Iri­art for the stock­ing and trans­port of cat­tle on their land. The text of this instru­ment, record­ed in the Taos Coun­ty Clerk’s Office, reveals the com­plex set of rela­tion­ships and trade-offs that can sit at the heart of a prop­er­ty exchange:

The Iri­arts agree to stock the lands cov­ered by this mort­gage, and it shall be their sole deter­mi­na­tion as to the num­ber of head of cat­tle placed there­on. The Franklins shall receive one-third (1÷3) of the gain in cat­tle, and there shall be paid on the prin­ci­pal and inter­est of this mort­gage, on the dates here­in above men­tioned, one-half (1÷2) of their one-third (1÷3). There shall be no month­ly payments.

The Franklins shall have the care and cus­tody of the cat­tle so placed on the said lands, and shall look after said cat­tle to insure that the said cat­tle are prop­er­ly cared for at all times, and shall fur­nish salt, range and water for the said cattle.

The Franklins shall round up and deliv­er to ship­ping pens all cat­tle under their care and cus­tody, at the times spec­i­fied by the Iri­arts. The Iri­arts agree to fur­nish the nec­es­sary trans­porta­tion to trans­port the said cat­tle to and from the properties.

That this arrange­ment was not in the Franklin’s best inter­est is attest­ed to by the fact that, three years lat­er, Sid­ney and Imo­gen grant­ed to the Iriart’s the entire­ty of sec­tion 30 for the again mis­matched sum of ​“One Dol­lar and oth­er valu­able con­sid­er­a­tions.” That this war­ran­ty deed exists in dupli­cate — one dat­ed May 21, 1955, and the sec­ond Feb 23, 1957 — only fur­ther adds to the ques­tion­able nature of this trans­ac­tion on land the right­ful own­er­ship of which would only become even more con­vo­lut­ed. Three years lat­er, in 1960, the Iri­arts liq­ui­dat­ed their hold­ings in the area, and it was a short year lat­er, on July 13, 1961, when the sub­di­vi­sion plat for Tres Piedras Estates was filed.

Enter Gol­u­bin.

At the time of the sub­di­vi­sion plat fil­ing for Sec­tion 30, Town­ship 28 North, Range 10 East, Gol­u­bin was not yet the legal own­er of that prop­er­ty; and the trans­ac­tions from the Iri­arts to bank own­er­ship to Golubin’s Great South­west­ern Land Co., Inc., would be marked by mis­man­age­ment and retrac­tion to such a degree that, to this day, title and own­er­ship ques­tions con­tin­ue to plague all of the lots at Tres Piedras Estates. To explain the redun­dan­cies in title, we must intro­duce a third par­ty: the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Com­pa­ny, Inc. — a No Share­hold­er Lia­bil­i­ty inter­est head­ed by Roger S. Cox, Pres­i­dent. On the July 1961 plat that bears its name, the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Co. ded­i­cates ease­ments and rights of way for the new­ly imag­ined Tres Piedras Estates — ease­ments and land that, in fact, they do not yet own. Indeed, not until August 1962 do the records show title being trans­ferred from the bank to the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Co. How­ev­er, in high­ly incon­sis­tent chronol­o­gy, the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Co. had already trans­ferred own­er­ship of the land in ques­tion to the Great South­west­ern Land Co. in April of that same year, some four months pri­or to being grant­ed actu­al title.

To add to these incon­sis­ten­cies, the out-of-sequence title from Pan Amer­i­can to Great South­west­ern includ­ed erro­neous descrip­tions for the land being trans­ferred, includ­ing approx­i­mate­ly 65 acres of land not owned by said grantors. That lat­ter fact alert­ed the Taos Coun­ty Clerk to the incon­sis­ten­cies in fil­ing, and, at 9:50AM on March 1, 1963, in an instru­ment exe­cut­ed to cor­rect the record ​“appear­ing in Book A‑76, Page 24, records of Taos Coun­ty,” the Great South­west­ern Land Co. quit­claimed the deed for the land in ques­tion to the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Co. At 9:52AM on that same day, the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Co. quit­claimed the cor­rect­ed land descrip­tion back to the Great South­west­ern Land Co.

Which is to say, the Pan Amer­i­can Trust Com­pa­ny had legal, unen­cum­bered own­er­ship over said land for exact­ly two minutes.

In the two years that the Great South­west­ern Land Com­pa­ny oper­at­ed before Golubin’s 1963 fed­er­al indict­ment on mul­ti­ple counts of fraud, it sold over 35,000 lots, mak­ing mil­lions for the pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny. Golubin’s first tri­al in New Mex­i­co, in May 1964, result­ed in a hung jury; how­ev­er, a year lat­er, in August 1965, the case was retried, and Gol­u­bin was found guilty of six­teen counts of mail fraud and was giv­en three years on each count, with sen­tences to be served con­sec­u­tive­ly. With his case on appeal, Gol­u­bin relo­cat­ed to San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia, where he took up a job as a used car sales­man. How­ev­er, in March 1966, he was stopped for a rou­tine traf­fic vio­la­tion in his home state of Cal­i­for­nia where sep­a­rate war­rants per­tain­ing to land fraud in Cal­i­for­nia came to light. As a dis­tinct case, sep­a­rate from the fed­er­al indict­ment in New Mex­i­co, a Cal­i­for­nia com­mis­sion­er pressed charges and Gol­u­bin pled guilty to var­i­ous Busi­ness and Pro­fes­sions Code vio­la­tions — where he received sus­pend­ed jail sen­tences and paid fines on each count.¹¹ Two years lat­er, in 1968, a fed­er­al judge revis­it­ing the appealed mail fraud case from New Mex­i­co upheld the dis­trict court’s deci­sion, affirm­ing the six­teen counts of fraud on the grounds that Gollubin’s scheme was ​“rea­son­ably cal­cu­lat­ed to deceive per­sons of ordi­nary pru­dence and com­pre­hen­sion,” the thresh­old of pro­hi­bi­tion in the mail fraud stat­ues.¹²

The num­ber of orig­i­nal pur­chasers of lots at Tres Piedras Estates who actu­al­ly made an effort to build and relo­cate to that patch of desert is not known. How­ev­er, con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous accounts in the Taos News sug­gest that, in 1963, the year in which charges were brought, hun­dreds of would-be home­own­ers made the trek to the Tres Piedras/​Taos area to inspect their ​“free-lots.” Accord­ing to these reports, most pur­chasers were hap­py with their lots. Indeed, on the ground, the pri­ma­ry com­plaint had less to do with the qual­i­ty of land than on the Coun­ty Clerk’s inabil­i­ty to reg­is­ter war­ran­ty deeds as fast as they were being issued. Yet, dur­ing the tri­al, US Attor­ney John Quinn told a dif­fer­ent sto­ry when he quipped, ​“Peo­ple might as well have won a ¼‑acre on the moon for all the good it did them.”

Dur­ing a 1964 Con­gres­sion­al hear­ing in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., focused on inter­state mail order land sales, Tres Piedras Estates was a recur­rent point of ref­er­ence. Yet, even pro­po­nents of reg­u­la­tion and pun­ish­ment agreed that the bur­den of proof was heavy under the mail fraud statutes. Pre­sid­ing Sen­a­tor Har­ri­son Williams, Jr., of New Jer­sey point­ed to that con­di­tion when he not­ed, ​“All of the fin­gers of fraud must be shown and a lot of this is slip­pery mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, not hard and fast fraud.” Nev­er­the­less, the courts dis­agreed a year lat­er. The text of the 1965 rul­ing states,

[Gol­u­bin] dealt in deceit­ful state­ments of half truths and con­cealed mate­r­i­al facts. His actions were not those of a legit­i­mate busi­ness man engaged in the per­mis­si­ble ​“puff­ing” of his prod­ucts. The ulti­mate issue is that of intent and it was resolved against the defen­dant by the dis­trict court which found that he act­ed with intent to defraud and that the scheme was ​“rea­son­ably cal­cu­lat­ed to deceive per­sons of ordi­nary pru­dence and com­pre­hen­sion.“¹³

To this day, lots in the Tres Piedras Estates remain of dubi­ous enough prove­nance that few real estate bro­kers will list them, and no banks will lend. Yet, that is pre­cise­ly what draws many to the high desert in the first place. Now trad­ed at pub­lic auc­tion, a ¼‑acre lot can be had for as lit­tle as a few hun­dred dol­lars. Absen­tee own­ers are giv­en a cer­tain amount of time to respond to the county’s request for back-tax­es, after which time their lots are put up for auc­tion. And, while con­sol­i­da­tion of lots remains a com­mon prac­tice for those already liv­ing there, recent years have seen spir­it­ed new res­i­dents once again clear­ing the ground and test­ing their archi­tec­tur­al and social aspirations.

BOUND­ARY MAINTENANCE

There is noth­ing which so gen­er­al­ly strikes the imag­i­na­tion, and engages the affec­tions of mankind, as the right of prop­er­ty; or that sole and despot­ic domin­ion which one man claims and exer­cis­es over the exter­nal things of the world, in total exclu­sion of the right of any oth­er indi­vid­ual in the uni­verse.¹⁴

Of the near­ly 2,300 lots in the square mile of Tres Piedras Estates, there are exact­ly 38 home­steads cur­rent­ly built. Of those, only a frac­tion are inhab­it­ed. From the air, the bones of the subdivision’s grid­iron plan is still vis­i­ble, but on the ground, roads light­ly etched into the sage­brush and sand 60 years ago now dis­solve into indis­tin­guish­able lines. All serve as reminders of the post-spec­u­la­tion vac­u­um that left this stretch of high desert with a rash of encum­brances block­ing clear title to the land. This has not, how­ev­er, stopped indi­vid­u­als from devel­op­ing a spe­cif­ic and unique archi­tec­tur­al lan­guage in their efforts to con­struct shel­ter and secure privacy.

While it may be tempt­ing to see these set­tle­ments as either part of the col­lec­tivist, coun­ter­cul­tur­al projects of the 1960s or the mil­i­tant, anti-gov­ern­ment atti­tudes of the 1990s, nei­ther is a neat fit. Instead, this tract and its inhab­i­tants occu­py a more ambiva­lent space akin to Bartle­by the Scrivener’s ​“I would pre­fer not to.” These inhab­i­tants have opt­ed for a mea­sured with­draw­al, a cal­cu­lat­ed side­step of either the pure com­mu­nal­ist or vir­u­lent indi­vid­u­al­ist mod­els of alter­na­tive social order. Their way is marked, rather, by an oppor­tunis­tic approach to bound­ary main­te­nance and build­ing construction.

Each home­stead is a loose agglom­er­a­tion of build­ings, out­build­ings, aban­doned cars, piles of scrap, and cleared sage­brush. Often incor­po­rat­ing the sur­plus of oth­er build­ing projects and demo­li­tions from around the region, each ​“estate” car­ries with it an index of past ele­ments. Paint­ed sid­ing, mis-matched tim­bers, patch­es of roof­ing — this is an archi­tec­ture of the pro­vi­sion­al over the planned. At work is a range of build­ing tech­nolo­gies — from the tim­ber­frame to the dugout, from adobe bricks to tire infill. The pat­tern of home­stead improve­ment fol­lows those out­lined by own­er-built home advo­cates such as Ken Kern, the tem­po­ral stag­ing of J.B. Jack­son, and the archi­tec­tur­al insights of Bernard Rud­of­sky, where the process of home­steading usu­al­ly begins with the deliv­ery of a mobile home, a mod­i­fied school bus, or a trail­er of some sort. That rel­a­tive­ly fixed, con­tained, and weath­er­proof unit serves as the ker­nel for the home­stead in process. Some inhab­it those units for many years, while oth­ers con­tin­ue their mod­i­fi­ca­tions and are quick to remove the import­ed dwellings in favor of slight­ly more per­ma­nent and spa­cious quarters.

Mir­ror­ing this pro­vi­sion­al archi­tec­ture is a sur­pris­ing­ly lax atti­tude toward bound­aries, both legal and phys­i­cal. Some home­steads begin with a sharply defined perime­ter fence — con­struct­ed of any­thing from mud to recy­cled bot­tles to scraps of wood to the ubiq­ui­tous chain-link fence. Oth­ers, on the con­trary, sim­ply dis­solve out­ward in a gra­di­ent of sage­brush and dirt, with the locus of inhab­i­ta­tion and extent marked sim­ply by the pat­terns of use. These two mod­els could not be more at odds with one anoth­er in terms of spa­tial def­i­n­i­tion, and each can be seen as an extreme response to the open field of the land­scape. The bound­ary main­te­nance of the ​“fencers” reca­pit­u­lates the lot-log­ic of the orig­i­nal sub­di­vi­sion plat, with the 63.8’x167.9’ lots often re-inscribed by a lone perime­ter fence. Those of the ​“dis­solvers” adopt the log­ic of the sage­brush — pri­or­i­tiz­ing con­ti­nu­ity over enclo­sure. But what both rec­og­nize is that, as a land­scape type, the fence car­ries with it a broad set of asso­ci­a­tions — from enclo­sure and bound­ary main­te­nance to clar­i­ty and neigh­bor­li­ness. It is as often the site of exchange and social­i­ty as it is the site of con­fronta­tion and con­flict. And as res­i­dents of gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties, ranch­ers, and bor­der-wall advo­cates all know, the fence is a fun­da­men­tal­ly polit­i­cal architecture.

The Hide­out

The Hide­out takes a jaun­ty approach to bound­ary def­i­n­i­tion. Com­posed of frag­ments of found fences and an array of jalop­ies, the Hide­out marks a clear, aggre­gat­ed fig­ure in the sage­brush land­scape. Its fence arcs and expands as each new frag­ment is insert­ed with­in the expand­ing fron­tier log­ic of the enclo­sure. Draw­ings by Jesse Vogler and Yi-Jung Lo.

The Care­tak­er

With its two-sto­ry frame out­post, the Care­tak­er watch­es over the hori­zon of Tres Piedras. Ten­u­ous­ly held togeth­er by the accou­trements of self-suf­fi­cient liv­ing — pit toi­let, water tank, com­post heap, sauna, trail­er, and scrap piles — the Care­tak­er hosts a soli­tary dweller as its loose col­lec­tion of out­build­ings dis­ag­gre­gate across the desert floor. Draw­ings by Jesse Vogler and Yi-Jung Lo.

The Earth­ship

As the most well-estab­lished ​“estate” in the Tres Piedras sub­di­vi­sion, the Earth­ship is a play­ful meet­ing of well-known coun­ter­cul­ture build­ing tech­nolo­gies and a sort of farm-yard know-how. Bor­row­ing the earth-filled tire tech­nique from the more well-defined Earth­ship typol­o­gy just down the road, this instance eschews ide­o­log­i­cal and for­mal puri­ty in favor of the phased con­tin­gency of life that marks this con­test­ed stretch of desert. Draw­ings by Jesse Vogler and Yi-Jung Lo.

More than just a reca­pit­u­la­tion of the lot log­ic, how­ev­er, the perime­ter fence reg­u­lar­ly becomes a spa­tial agent as it is mobi­lized to dis­re­gard checker­board own­er­ship and to span across and incor­po­rate the pub­lic right-of-way in a pirat­i­cal effort to enclose ever more space. As the dia­gram above illus­trates, a fence can be used in the not-so-sub­tle incor­po­ra­tion of an un-owned tract into the body of a home­stead. Tak­ing advan­tage of both the para­dox­i­cal vis­i­bil­i­ty and dis­tance of the Tres Piedras Estates, it is com­mon prac­tice for adja­cent land-own­ers to claim own­er­ship over prop­er­ties that are not legal­ly theirs through a lib­er­al read­ing of the law of Adverse Pos­ses­sion — what are com­mon­ly referred to as squatter’s rights. Here, the pol­i­tics of the vis­i­ble prove cru­cial. The fence makes explic­it the occupier’s intent of adverse pos­ses­sion by 1. Declar­ing actu­al pos­ses­sion of the prop­er­ty, 2. Claim­ing open and noto­ri­ous use of the prop­er­ty, 3. Estab­lish­ing a claim for the con­tin­u­ous use of the prop­er­ty, and 4. Dis­tinct­ly stat­ing the exclu­sive use of the prop­er­ty. These are four of the five con­di­tions laid out in US law, with each state des­ig­nat­ing the dura­tion required for some­one to claim title through adverse pos­ses­sion. In New Mex­i­co, that dura­tion is 8 – 10 years.

What these fences make explic­it, then, is that prop­er­ty, rather than being an unam­bigu­ous object of fixed tit­u­lar ref­er­ence, is a sub­ject of reg­u­lar revi­sion and con­struc­tion — con­sti­tut­ed and re-con­sti­tut­ed in the steady process of trans­fer. Which is to say, fol­low­ing Wes­ley New­comb Hohfeld, one of the most impor­tant writ­ers on an updat­ed the­o­ry of prop­er­ty rights at the turn of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, that prop­er­ty is not a thing, but a rela­tion. Rather than a sim­ple and non-social rela­tion­ship between a per­son and a thing, it is a set of legal rela­tions between peo­ple — what has come to be known as the ​“bun­dle” of rights, pow­ers, priv­i­leges, and immu­ni­ties.¹⁵ And, while this de-cou­pling of thing and its own­er­ship has been posit­ed as a the­o­ret­i­cal mod­el, the land that has come to be known as Tres Piedras Estates has been con­sis­tent­ly revised, incor­po­rat­ed, and alien­at­ed through­out its 100-year his­to­ry of mis-reg­is­tered own­er­ship in an ongo­ing project test­ing the objec­tive sta­tus of belief.

At the heart of this belief struc­ture lies the ques­tion of prop­er­ty and the mate­r­i­al and dis­cur­sive encum­brances that stand in and per­pet­u­ate its sta­tus as real, indeli­ble, and imma­nent — in short, at the heart of this struc­ture of belief lies the sur­vey. With­in the cat­a­log of spa­tial prac­tices, the sur­vey car­ries the incom­pa­ra­ble bur­den of being at once the most spe­cif­ic as well as the most abstract doc­u­ment per­tain­ing to land. The sur­vey and the sur­vey­or qui­et­ly medi­ate, and there­by shut­tle mean­ing across, some of the more endur­ing inter­vals in west­ern thought — between the con­crete and the abstract, the self and the state, the per­son­al and the polit­i­cal, and affect and administration.

As I use it here, the sur­vey is dis­tinct from the map in one pri­ma­ry way: it fore­grounds the idea of prop­er­ty, of own­er­ship, and of use. It is, as such, not a syn­thet­ic, panop­tic whole but, rather, an inti­mate reg­is­ter of accu­mu­lat­ed sub­jec­tiv­i­ties. Where­as the map can dis­card cer­tain cul­tur­al residues in favor of nat­ur­al total­i­ties, the sur­vey clings tight­ly to the human space of inhab­i­ta­tion and val­ue. Record­ed in so many coun­ty reg­is­ters and accu­mu­lat­ing in asses­sors’ archives, sur­veys par­tic­i­pate in two key com­po­nents of state pow­er: repro­ducibil­i­ty and ver­i­fi­a­bil­i­ty. With its roots in tax­a­tion, allot­ment, and descrip­tion, the sur­vey is by its very nature a polit­i­cal instru­ment. Pol­i­tics is inte­gral to the work of the sur­vey­or, whose charge is ulti­mate­ly that of the state. The reg­istry of prop­er­ty, the cadas­tre, is at once a frag­ment of the cen­sus project and an instru­ment of ter­ri­to­r­i­al account­ing. It is no acci­dent that, in the past, to be was to be count­ed, which meant to be prop­er­tied. Until rel­a­tive­ly recent times, then, the sur­vey served to ver­i­fy one’s sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and sub­ject-hood, and, ulti­mate­ly, dis­cur­sive address­abil­i­ty (as, for exam­ple, a con­stituent unit with­in the expand­ing postal matrix of the state).

In the US, the invi­o­la­bil­i­ty of the pri­vate prop­er­ty sys­tem, unre­mark­able and near­ly invis­i­ble in the land­scape, con­sti­tutes the fun­da­men­tal, foun­da­tion­al ori­en­ta­tion and tex­ture of the built envi­ron­ment in a way that belies its own silence. Bound­aries, fences, prop­er­ty, spec­u­la­tion — these are all con­stituent parts in Max Weber’s ​“mon­strous cos­mos” of the con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ist eco­nom­ic order. Prop­er­ty rela­tions overde­ter­mine modes of socia­bil­i­ty as well as out­line a lim­it to indi­vid­ual action and affect. Yet, with­in the design dis­ci­plines, such rela­tion­ships are rarely, if ever, con­sid­ered. This reflec­tion on fences, sur­vey­ing, bound­ary main­te­nance, and spec­u­la­tive archi­tec­ture, as exem­pli­fied at Tres Piedras Estates, seeks to redress that short­com­ing by link­ing the mate­r­i­al speci­fici­ties of prop­er­ty — its his­to­ries, descrip­tions, and lim­i­ta­tions — to its abstract gen­er­al­i­ties — geom­e­try, law, and bureaucracy.

The author would like to acknowl­edge the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Gra­ham Foun­da­tion and the bril­liant founders of PLAND, an artist’s res­i­den­cy where the fore­go­ing research was undertaken.