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Stories: La Llorona, Elfego Baca
The Weeping Woman (La Llorona)
This is a story that the old ones have been telling to children for hundreds of years. It is a sad tale with a lesson, but it lives strong in the memories of the people, and there are many who swear that it is true.
Long years ago in a humble little village there lived a fine looking girl named Maria Some say she was the most beautiful girl in the world! And because she was so beautiful, Maria thought she was better than everyone else.
As Maria grew older, her beauty increased And her pride in her beauty grew too When she was a young woman, she would not even look at the young men from her village. They weren't good enough for her! "When I marry," Maria would say, "I will marry the most handsome man in the world."
And then one day, into Maria's village rode a man who seemed to be just the one she had been talking about. He was a dashing young ranchero, the son of a wealthy rancher from the southern plains. He could ride like a Comanche! In fact, if he owned a horse, and it grew tame, he would give it away and go rope a wild horse from the plains. He thought it wasn't manly to ride a horse if it wasn't half wild.
He was handsome! And he could play the guitar and sing beautifully. Maria made up her mind-that was, the man for her! She knew just the tricks to win his attention.
If the ranchero spoke when they met on the pathway, she would turn her head away. When he came to her house in the evening to play his guitar and serenade her, she wouldn't even come to the window. She refused all his costly gifts. The young man fell for her tricks. "That haughty girl, Maria, Maria! " he said to himself. "I know I can win her heart. I swear I'll marry that girl."
And so everything turned out as Maria planned. Before long, she and the ranchero became engaged and soon they were married. At first, things were fine. They had two children and they seemed to be a happy family together. But after a few years, the ranchero went back to the wild life of the prairies. He would 
leave town and be gone for months at a time. And when he returned home, it was only to visit his children. He seemed to care nothing for the beautiful Maria. He even talked of setting Maria aside and marrying a woman of his own wealthy class.
As proud as Maria was, of course she became very angry with the ranchero. She also began to feel anger toward her children, because he paid attention to them, but just ignored her.
One evening, as Maria was strolling with her two children on the shady pathway near the river, the ranchero came by in a carriage. An elegant lady sat on the seat beside him. He stopped and spoke to his children, but he didn't even look at Maria. He whipped the horses on up the street.
When she saw that, a terrible rage filled Maria, and it all turned against her children. And although it is sad to tell, the story says that in her anger Maria seized her two children and threw them into the river! But as they disappeared down the stream, she realized what she had done! She ran down the bank of the river, reaching out her arms to them. But they were long gone.
The next morning, a traveler brought word to the villagers that a beautiful woman lay dead on the bank of the river. That is where they found Maria, and they laid her to rest where she had fallen.
But the first night Maria was in the grave, the villagers heard the sound of crying down by the river. It was not the wind, it was La Llorona crying. "Where are my children?" And they saw a woman walking up and down the bank of the river, dressed in a long white robe, the way they had dressed Maria for burial. On many a dark night they saw her walk the river bank and cry for her children. And so they no longer spoke of her as Maria. They called her La Llorona, the weeping woman. And by that name she is known to this day. Children are warned not to go out in the dark, for, La Llorona might snatch them and never return them.
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Elfego Baca
Elfego Baca (February 10, 1865 – August 27, 1945) was a lawman, lawyer, and politician in the closing days of the American wild west. Baca was born in Socorro, New Mexico just before the end of the American Civil War to Francisco and Juana Maria Baca. His family later moved to Topeka, Kansas when he was a young child. Upon his mother’s death in 1880, Baca returned with his father to Belen, New Mexico where his father became a marshal.
In 1884, at age 19, Baca stole some guns, bought a mail-order sheriff’s badge, and more or less appointed himself deputy sheriff in Socorro County, New Mexico.
His goal in life was to be a peace officer. He wanted, he said, “the outlaws to hear my steps a block away.” Southwestern New Mexico at the time was still relatively sparsely settled cattle ranching country. Cowboys roamed the land and did as they pleased. They might come into a town, drink at the saloon, harass the local Mexican-Americans, and then shoot up the town out of boredom. Baca meant to put an end to that.
In October,1884, in the town of Lower San Francisco Plaza (now Reserve, NM), Elfego Baca arrested a drunk cowboy named Charlie McCarty. Baca flashed his badge at McCarty after deputizing himself as a peace officer and took Charlie's gun. After Bill Milligan, the owner of the bar, refused to press charges against Charlie, Baca took him hostage. The McCarty's fellow cowboys attempted a peaceful negotiation of his release, but Baca refused and opened fire on the negotiator, the foreman to the Jon Slaughter Ranch, and killed him. Baca took refuge in the house of Geronimo Armijo. After bringing in Deputies and Justices of the peace from surrounding towns, Baca was forced to bring Charlie back to the Justice of the peace for a trial and in turn was the assurance of Baca's safety. Justice of the peace Ted White granted Charlie's freedom. After the verdict, Elfego Baca ran out of the courtroom still in possession of McCarty's gun. Bert Hearne, a rancher from Spur Lake Ranch, was summoned to bring Baca back to the Justice for questioning in the murder of Jon Slaughter's foreman. After Baca refused to come out of the adobe jacal, Hearne broke down the door and commanded Baca come out with his hands up. Not soon after that, shots volleyed from the jacal and hit Hearne in the stomach, resulting in death. A standoff with the cowboys ensued and some 80 cowboys gathered to attack the house. Allegedly, the cowboys fired more than 4,000 shots into the house, until the adobe building looked like Swiss cheese. Incredibly, not one of the bullets struck Baca. (The floor of the home is said to have been slightly lower than ground level; thus Baca was able to escape injury.) During the siege, Baca shot and killed four of his attackers and wounded eight others. After about 33 hours,and roughly 1,000 rounds of open fire, the battle ended when a friend convinced Baca to surrender. When they had left, Baca walked out of the house unharmed.
In May 1885, Baca was charged with murder for the death of the one of the Jon Slaughter's foreman and Bert Hearne. He was jailed to await his trial. In August 1885, Baca was acquitted after the door of Armijo’s house was entered as evidence. It had more than 400 bullet holes in it. The incident became known as the Frisco Shootout. Rumor has it that Elfego Baca's defense attorney had false documentation proving Baca's legal deputization because Baca's biography suggests he deputized himself just before the arrest of Charlie McCarty.
Baca officially became the sheriff of Socorro County and secured indictments for the arrest of the area's lawbreakers. Instead of ordering his deputies to pursue the wanted men, he sent each of the accused a letter. It said, "I have a warrant here for your arrest. Please come in by March 15 and give yourself up. If you don’t, I’ll know you intend to resist arrest, and I will feel justified in shooting you on sight when I come after you." Most of the offenders turned themselves in voluntarily.
In 1888, Baca became a U.S. Marshal. He served for two years and then began studying law. In December 1894, he was admitted to the bar and joined a Socorro law firm. He practiced law on San Antonio Street in El Paso between 1902 and 1904.
Baca held a succession of public offices, including county clerk, mayor and school superintendent of Socorro County, and district attorney for Socorro and Sierra Counties. In his book The Shooters, Leon Metz writes that “most reports say he was the best peace officer Socorro ever had.”
From 1913 to 1916, Baca served as the official representative in the U.S. of Victoriano Huerta's government during the Mexican Revolution, a post which earned Baca an indictment for criminal conspiracy when Mexican general José Inés Salazar escaped from prison. Successfully defended by the New Mexican lawyer and politician Octaviano Larrazolo, Baca's reputation grew among Southwestern residents.
When New Mexico became a state in 1912, Baca unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Republican. Nevertheless, he remained a valued political figure because of his ability to turn out the vote among the Hispanic population. Working at times as a private detective, Baca also took a job as a bouncer in a casino across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Baca worked closely with New Mexico’s longtime Senator Bronson Cutting as a political investigator and wrote a weekly column in Spanish praising Cutting’s work on behalf of local Hispanics. Baca considered running for governor despite his declining health, but he failed to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for district attorney in 1944.
Metz, his biographer, wrote: “Elfego was, and is, controversial. He drank too much; talked too much ... he had a weakness for wild women. He was often arrogant and, of course, he showed no compunction about killing people.” On his 75th birthday, Baca told the Albuquerque Tribune that as a lawyer he had defended 30 people charged with murder, and only one went to the penitentiary.
In July 1936, several years before his death, Janet Smith conducted an interview with Elfego Baca. Her notes can be found in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection. Baca told Smith, “I never wanted to kill anybody, but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.”
Another legend says that Baca stole a pistol from Pancho Villa, and the angry Villa put a price of $30,000 on Baca’s head. Obviously, it was never collected.
One often told story says that once when he was practicing law in Albuquerque, Baca received a telegram from a client in El Paso, Texas. "Need you at once," it said, "Have just been charged with murder." To which Baca is supposed to have responded with a telegram saying, "Leaving at once with three eyewitnesses."
In 1958, Walt Disney Studios released a television miniseries titled The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca and starring Robert Loggia in the title role. Episodes of the series were later edited into a movie titled Elfego Baca: Six Gun Law, which was released in 1962.
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