Luis Terrazas: The Chihuahua Governor Whose Ranches Spanned Millions of Acres

Who Was Luis Terrazas?

José Luis Gonzaga Jesús Daniel Terrazas Fuentes was born in Chihuahua on 20 July 1829 and died there in 1923, aged 93. The Wikipedia biography gives his death as 18 June, while the Encyclopedia.com entry says 15 June, so sources differ by a few days.

He was at once a soldier, politician, banker and rancher. For much of the period from 1860 to 1910 he was the political boss of Chihuahua, and the cattle ranches he and his family assembled became the largest in northern Mexico.

His Years as Governor of Chihuahua

Sources differ on the exact terms. Encyclopedia.com lists him as governor in 1860-1873, 1879-1884 and 1903-1904, while Wikipedia's infobox lists 1879-1880, 1881-1882, 1883-1884 and 1903-1904 and says he was first elected in 1858. All agree that he held the office repeatedly over several decades.

He is remembered as a hero of the wars against northern Indigenous groups and the French Intervention of 1861 to 1867. During the French occupation he hosted and advised Benito Juarez when Juarez's cabinet sat in exile in Chihuahua City from 1864 to 1866, and he led forces that pushed the French out of the state. He later defended Juarez against Porfirio Diaz's La Noria revolt in 1872.

How He Built a Cattle Empire

Terrazas's ranches reportedly totaled more than seven million acres at their largest. Encyclopedia.com puts the family's land at more than ten million acres with about half a million head of cattle, and the family overall controlled around 50 haciendas and ranches, with estimates of 8 to 15 million acres. Numbers like these come from estimates after the fact, so treat them as ranges rather than audited totals.

Wikipedia adds one mechanism: as governor he could move armed forces in and out of parts of the state, which unsettled land prices and let him buy rangeland cheaply. He was also one of Mexico's leading bankers and industrialists, so credit and land purchases fed each other.

Hacienda de Encinillas

The family's largest hacienda was Encinillas, north of Chihuahua City. It covered about 1,300,000 acres and employed roughly 2,000 peons, according to the article on the Creel-Terrazas family. The same page puts the family's livestock at more than a million cattle, 225,000 sheep, 250,000 horses and 50,000 mules, which is a much larger count than Encyclopedia.com gives.

In 1902 Terrazas sold Hacienda Humboldt, at Julimes near Delicias, to sponsors organized by Theodore Roosevelt for a colony of South African Boer refugees, a sign that the family bought and sold land as well as grazing it.

Revolution, Confiscation and Return

Diaz pushed Terrazas out of power from 1884 to 1892, but the family economy was too strong to dislodge. After the two reconciled, Terrazas returned to the governorship in 1903. Then the Revolution came. Terrazas reportedly confronted Pancho Villa early in the fighting after suspecting Villa of rustling his cattle, and the two were enemies thereafter.

Terrazas fled to the United States. Villa confiscated his properties in 1913. He returned to Mexico in 1920, and in 1922 the federal government paid him 13 million pesos for his lost lands, according to Encyclopedia.com. He died the next year. Villa, in a coincidence noted by Wikipedia, died in 1923 as well.

Where to Read More

Historians point to Mark Wasserman's study of the Terrazas era, Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution, and to a biography by Jose Fuentes Mares, both listed in the Encyclopedia.com bibliography. For ranching stories from other regions, visit the ranching pages on farm.FM or read a farm.FM story about ranching in northern Mexico.