Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
On this date …
1906: Portales and railroad officials were looking for those responsible for the theft of the Saturday night mail sack.
It had contained about 1,000 letters, officials estimated.
The mail sack was located late Sunday afternoon, but only a dozen letters remained inside.
“It seems it must have been a deliberate plot to rob the sack and the robbers must have been laying for it,” the Portales Times reported on Dec. 15, one week after the heist. “This is shown by the fact that they only took the sack a short distance and emptied it, and to have carried that bulk of mail off they must have had another sack or something ready to dump it into.”
The paper reported 10-15 letters were found scattered on a nearby street and inside an empty coach.
“It was the south bound mail which came in at 10:05 and was taken just after it had been thrown off the mail car and before the agent's assistant went to take it into the depot,” the newspaper reported.
“The sack was missed at once … No real clue as to who committed the theft is known.”
Pages Past is compiled by David Stevens. Contact:
Do you have a question?
A comment you'd like to see published?
Or maybe a story idea for a future edition?
— Please email the publisher: [email protected]
