(2 of 2)
In a last desperate effort to educate his sons, Merchant Otero sent them to Notre Dame, again to St. Louis University, where they enjoyed the city but did not attend classes. When 19-year-old Miguel returned to New Mexico, armed warfare had broken out between the Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroads, fighting for the Chicken Creek Route in strategic Raton Pass. Still quarreling with his father's partner, Miguel left the company, visited Denver, saw Leadville at the peak of its boom, became a member of the Chaffee Light Artillery of Colorado and served during the railroad strike of 1879, when the strikers took the roundhouse at Pueblo. Then he settled down, aged 20, to a quiet life in Las Vegas, where there were 29 killings in one month, 18 in another ten weeks, and where, as he remembered it, "one of the important events of . . . 1880 was the opening of a new saloon."