If slaves had been able to be put to profitable use in the New Mexico territory, a lot more of them would have been brought to the territory. They weren’t. Its dry as a bone out there. The engineering to irrigate much of anything out there did not exist in the mid 19th century. Hell, even in the 20th century not much other than the Valley of the Sun in Arizona was irrigated. Plantations, cash crops, etc just could not have been done there.
FLT-bird:
"If slaves had been able to be put to profitable use in the New Mexico territory, a lot more of them would have been brought to the territory." Read my post #264 again.
In 1860 there were thousands of slaves in New Mexico territory.
Very few were of African descent.
The last reports of slavery in New Mexico came from 1909.
FLT-bird:
"If slaves had been able to be put to profitable use in the New Mexico territory, a lot more of them would have been brought to the territory.
They weren’t.
Its dry as a bone out there. " And so, as per usual, you seem to ignore the actual facts, which tell us there were thousands of slaves in New Mexico, some persisting into the early 1900s.
Instead, you focus on claims that only a handful of these were African slaves, and pretend the others were not actual slaves.
As it happens, I lived in New Mexico, briefly, when I was a young man, traveled over a lot of the state and can confirm it is generally pretty dry.
But there is lots of water there, in the Rio Grande and Peco River watersheds.
Pecos River (left) and Rio Grande (right), northern New Mexico:
Map of New Mexico watersheds:
