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James Joseph Dolan
Born in Clonfort, Ireland, on April 22, 1848, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1854, and soon began working in a New York City dry goods store. Dolan left it in 1863 to enlist in the U. S. military. Discharged in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1865, he reenlisted in 1866 and served at Ft. Riley, Kansas. After Dolan was discharged at Ft. Stanton in April, 1869, he got a job clerking for L. G. Murphy & Co.
He proved to be a fast learner, a smooth talker, and could think on his feet. He soon became Murphy's clandestine negotiator. Behind his bravado, though, Dolan was a heavy drinker, and when he drank, he flashed a volatile temper. He was less than five feet, three inches tall, and his small size may have made him seem an easy mark. Dolan was anything but.
Dolan's temper got the L. G. Murphy & Co. kicked out of Ft. Stanton in September, 1873. There he'd fired a shot at Capt. James Randlett earlier that May after the officer had tried to stop him from bullying future partner, John H. Riley.
His temper flared again in May, 1877, when Dolan shot and killed an employee. He cited self-defense, and that the man had come at him with a knife.
Once the ailing Fritz began to take a back seat to the day-to-day affairs of L. G. Murphy & Co., Dolan saw his chance. He quickly became Murphy's protégé. After Fritz's death in August, 1874, Murphy asked him to become L. G. Murphy & Co.'s junior partner. After Murphy stepped aside in March, 1877, Dolan took over the firm (renaming it J. J. Dolan & Co.), took in a new partner (Riley), and took on Tunstall and McSween. Denied a $78,000 claim from the Fritz estate in January, 1878, he mortgaged the firm to the hilt. When Dolan couldn't repay the loan, J. J. Dolan and Co. declared bankruptcy in May, 1878. The demise of the Big Store was almost an after thought amid the din of the Lincoln County War.
In February, 1879, Billy Campbell and Dolan shattered the fragile peace of New Mexico Gov. Lew Wallace's three-month-old amnesty when they shot and killed the widow McSween's hostile lawyer, Huston Chapman, in Lincoln. After the grand jury in Lincoln's District Court that April issued indictments against him for Tunstall's and Chapman's murders, Dolan was tracked down and arrested in June, and jailed at Ft. Stanton.
He pulled strings and soon got himself taken under guard to District Court in friendly La Mesilla. There Judge Warren A. Bristol not only granted him bail (Dolan posted $3,000), but okayed a change of venue as well as a continuance. So instead of a July trial in unfriendly Lincoln, Dolan faced a trial in Socorro in August. During the interim, the smooth Dolan married Caroline Fritz (the late Emil Fritz's niece) in Hondo in July, 1879. After his honeymoon, he went to Socorro, stood trial, and was acquitted on both counts. The nimble Dolan had landed on his feet.
But his marriage turned tragic. Although the Dolans had four children, two of them died very young. Caroline died, too, shortly after giving birth to a third daughter in September, 1886. Since Caroline had inherited the Spring Ranch from her father, Charlie (after his death in December, 1885) as well as the old Tunstall Store (which Fritz had acquired from the Tunstall estate in 1882), Dolan (who had reopened the store in 1883 and built a family home across the street in 1884) found himself owner of the valuable Fritz ranch as well as the old Tunstall mercantile. He held onto the store until 1891, when he sold it to a Las Cruces businessman.
Financially secure and politically connected, Dolan fared better in public life. He was easily elected Lincoln County Treasurer in 1884 and a state Senator in 1888. In June, 1889, Dolan wangled an appointment to a two-year term as a Receiver in the Federal Land Office in Las Cruces.
In 1888, widower Dolan remarried. The Lincoln wedding seemed a matter of convenience; it was to his children's longtime nurse, Maria Eva Whitlock. They had no children. By the time of his second marriage, he had already acquired Tunstall's old ranch on the Rio Feliz, where he built a home in 1894. Dolan died there of a cerebral hemorrhage on Febraury 26, 1898, and was buried at his Spring Ranch in the Fritz family plot.
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