Find
businesses offering goods & services to the traveling public
Visit
our video library featuring scenes from "The Land of Enchantment"
Luz Maxwell
The dark-haired, hazel-eyed eldest daughter of a wealthy, French Canadian land owner, Charles Hipolyte Trotier, Sieur de Beaubien, and Paula Lobato of Taos, Ana Maria de la Luz Beaubien was born in Taos in 1828. She was the second of seven children. Luz married Maxwell in Taos in March, 1842, when she was not yet 14 years old, and her husband not yet 24.
She bore him nine children, three of whom failed to live to their third birthdays.
Those who reached adulthood were Pedro, born in 1848; Virginia (in 1850); Emilia (1852); Sophia (1854); Paulita (1864); and Odile (1869).
Although she had lived regally in Cimarron, Luz surrendered to a simpler life in Old Fort Sumner. When Lucien died, she was 47 years old, and still had two young daughters to raise, Paulita, then age 11, and Odile, 6.
Luz could scold Billy the Kid, as only a mother could, for firing off his pistol in Old Fort Sumner, and the Kid would immediately and obediently comply.
She was asleep in her bedroom in the Maxwell House the night that Garrett killed the Kid. Her son, Pete, had gone to her room immediately afterward to fetch a candle to see if the Kid was indeed dead on his bedroom floor.
Addressed respectfully by Hispanics as "Dona Luz", and by Billy and everybody else as "Mother Maxwell", Luz lived quietly the last 16 years of her life at her home just over a mile south of Old Ft. Sumner. There she died on July 13, 1900, and was buried alongside her husband's grave in the Old Fort Sumner Cemetery.
