Two lives, joined in a Colorado mining town in the summer of 1910, carried the McWenie name from the mountains of Clear Creek County into the frontier city of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Muriel Beveridge Hill came to that marriage as a schoolteacher of ambition and education; Edward John McWenie Sr. came to it as a young banker and former college quarterback already deeply rooted in the New Mexico town where he had spent his boyhood. Their story unfolds against a Las Vegas still shedding its frontier past for the settled life of a modern city.
Muriel Beveridge Hill
By 1900 the Hill family had settled in Idaho Springs, a mining town in Clear Creek County, Colorado, where Muriel spent her adolescence. She was fortunate in an era when higher education for women was far from universal: she went on to attend Colorado College in Colorado Springs, enrolling in 1901 and residing there by 1903. For a young woman of her generation, a college education marked her family as one of ambition and means, and it opened the door to the professional life she would build.
After graduation, Muriel turned her education toward a career in the classroom. She came to Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1907, and there she found her vocation. She served as principal of a high school and, over the course of her working life, taught for some twenty-five years in the city's schools. Teaching was one of the few professions genuinely open to educated women of her time, and Muriel made a lasting place for herself in the educational life of the town.
Her talents were not confined to the schoolroom. She also worked as society editor of the Las Vegas Daily Optic, a role that placed her at the center of the town's social and civic doings. To edit the society pages of a local newspaper was to be a chronicler of a community — recording its weddings, its visitors, its gatherings and mournings — and it required both a facile pen and a deep familiarity with the people of the place. Muriel, a prominent resident, was well suited to both her callings.
Edward John McWenie Sr
The man Muriel would marry had come west as a boy of five, sent for by his father's sister in Las Vegas, and had grown up in a town still very much a frontier settlement. His schooling reflected the raw, half-formed condition of Las Vegas in the 1880s and 1890s. The first public school in East Las Vegas opened its doors, but the city ran out of money and the term lasted only four months; he finished the year at the Brothers School in West Las Vegas. Year after year followed this uncertain pattern, with stretches at the Presbyterian Academy and classes held on the upper floor of the City Hall, until the Normal School, opening in 1898, at last solved the problem for both the city and the boy. His father, meanwhile, had built the town's first cigar factory into a state-wide business before growing tired of the West and returning to New York state; Edward remained behind, raised by his aunt, Mrs. W. T. Reed.
The dangers of that frontier boyhood left vivid impressions. Edward remembered the night Bridge Street "roared with gunfire and boiled with bullets" as outlaws tried to shoot Billy Green and his brothers out of their restaurant, and how federal troops were called out to fix bayonets and charge up the street until the raiders "melted away" into the shadows. He recalled the terrifying fire of 1892 that consumed a whole block of the East Las Vegas business district — Fetter's Candy Store, Greenburg's clothing store, and their neighbors — and the nighttime parade of the notorious "Whitecaps," masked, sheeted riders who cut fences and terrorized the region, a procession that took two full hours to pass a given point. As a boy he was delighted by the country itself, driving a three-seated mountain spring wagon some twenty miles up into the Sangre de Cristo range to his Aunt Maggie Holland's fifteen-room summer resort hotel in the Mineral Hill mining district, through "hills full of holes" dug by miners in the boom days.
When the Normal School — chartered as the New Mexico Normal University and later known as Highlands University — opened, Edward became one of thirteen members of its first graduating class in 1901. He earned distinction not only as a student but as quarterback on the football team, part of a squad that, by his own proud recollection, "licked both the University of New Mexico, New Mexico A. and M. and everybody else." He played second base on the baseball nine as well. It was a mischievous era of youth: he and his companions once ambushed the school's president, Edgar L. Hewett — later one of the world's great anthropologists — squarely in the face with baking powder, an act that nearly ended his athletic career before it began, though Hewett proved a forgiving man.
In April of 1901, before his June graduation, McWenie took a position at the First National Bank of Las Vegas as a collector, riding a bicycle daily through the new town to gather money and drafts from depositors. It was the beginning of a long banking career. He worked for the First National Bank from 1901 until 1919, when it consolidated with the San Miguel Bank, and continued as cashier of the combined institution until 1925, when the First National closed its doors in a failure. His enterprises were not confined to banking. For a time he held the unusual distinction of being both a banker and a miller, owning the Las Vegas Roller Mills between 1908 and 1919 while also working for the Plaza Trust and Savings Bank. He remembered as many as fifty wagons waiting at the mill platform — folks from Anton Chico hauling fruit to Mora to trade for wheat, then coming to the mill to trade for flour, a barter economy in which "not much money" changed hands but "everybody got what he wanted in the deal."
A Marriage and a Home in New Mexico
On 10 August 1910, at Idaho Springs in Clear Creek County, Colorado, Muriel Beveridge Hill married Edward John McWenie. The census records of that year catch her in a moment of transition, associated with both Idaho Springs and Las Vegas as her life shifted permanently to New Mexico. From then forward, Las Vegas was the whole geography of her adult life, and the couple's fortunes were bound to the town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
They made their home at the corner of Baer and Seventh streets from 1920 onward, part of a stable middle class anchored in banking, education, and civic life. The census traces Muriel's steadfast presence in San Miguel County decade after decade — 1920, 1930, 1935, and 1940 all find her there. Having arrived in 1907 as a young teacher, she remained for more than four decades, a fixture of the community through the years of two world wars and the Great Depression, her name familiar in households across the community she taught and wrote about.
Few men were more closely bound to the civic life of the town than her husband. A member of the Catholic Church, McWenie was initiated into the local Elks Lodge No. 408 on 2 April 1906 and served as its Exalted Ruler from 1917 to 1920, holding until his death the distinction of being the oldest living past Exalted Ruler in New Mexico. He was a charter member of the Rotary Club organized in Las Vegas on 27 February 1920 and served as its second president, and he belonged to the old Commercial Club and the Chamber of Commerce. He had served as an officer of Troop A of the National Guard, taking part in the first state-wide encampment at Camp Luna in 1903. He carried a lifetime of Las Vegas memories — the first Cowboys Reunion, when he worked as a ticket-taker and helped raise the modest prize money in a couple of afternoons; the Rough Riders' first reunion in 1901, cut short by a terrible rainstorm that sent the crowd racing for shelter and left women's faces streaked with color from their hats and veils; and the laying of the first pavement around 1915, a strip that crossed the bridge, swung down to Douglas Avenue, and wound up at the Castaneda Hotel.
After the bank's failure in 1925, Edward spent twenty-four years as a sales representative for the Pet Milk Company of St. Louis, covering all of New Mexico and southern Colorado — a trade that kept him often on the road while Muriel remained anchored to home, career, and children in Las Vegas. He retired from that work in June of 1949.
The Children of the House
The couple raised two children. Their son, Edward John McWenie Jr., was born in December 1911. Their daughter, Margaret Beveridge McWenie, was born on 5 May 1924 — her middle name carrying forward the Beveridge line that Muriel herself bore. In time, Margaret married Dr. Henry C. Hosford, a physician, and settled in St. Louis; Edward Jr. would make his home in Tucson, Arizona. Both children left New Mexico as adults, scattering to the wider West and Midwest in the way of many American families of the early twentieth century, while their parents stayed rooted in the town that had become the whole geography of Muriel's life.
Later Years
Muriel was sixty-five years old when she died on 2 November 1948, in Las Vegas — stricken by a heart attack while casting her ballot at the polls on Election Day. The suddenness of it made the news, carried by the Associated Press: a prominent local woman, wife of a traveling salesman, former society editor of the Daily Optic, and teacher of a generation of the city's children, gone in a moment while exercising the right to vote. She was survived by her husband, Edward; by her son in Tucson; and by her daughter in St. Louis. She was buried that same year in Las Vegas, the New Mexico town that had been her home for forty-one years.
Edward outlived her by nearly two decades. The year after her death he sold the family home, and in the years that followed he lived temporarily in California, southern New Mexico, and Arizona, but he always preferred the Las Vegas climate and made his home at the Elks Club, where he became the "dean" of the club's roomers. Civic service claimed him once more when he became city clerk in 1951 under Mayor Tom Kindell, serving through two terms under Mayor Ivan Hilton and half a year under Mayor Bob Wester before retiring in 1955. A devoted sports fan, "Mr. Mac" spent his late winters traveling to Arizona to watch baseball teams in spring training, following the Cleveland Indians at Tucson. He never failed to assure anyone he met that Las Vegas had "a summer climate that can't be beat anywhere."
Edward John McWenie Sr. died on 16 March 1967 in a Las Vegas hospital, at the age of eighty-five, following an extended illness. He was buried that year in Las Vegas, San Miguel County, New Mexico. He was survived by his son Edward, his daughter Margaret, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Edward John McWenie Jr.
The elder son of that Las Vegas household carried his father's name into the next generation. Edward John McWenie Jr. was born in December 1911 in Las Vegas, the first child of Edward and Muriel, and grew up in the family home at the corner of Baer and Seventh streets. As a young man he left New Mexico for Tucson, Arizona, where he made his home — the beginning of a life whose fuller course belongs to the chapters that follow.