Some sheriffs missing
Deputy seeks photos of former law enforcement officers

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — McKinley County is missing some of its sheriffs.In fact, six sheriffs — or at least their photos — are missing from a gallery which is now in place in the reception area outside the office of the county’s current sheriff, Frank Gonzales.

For the past three years, Lt. John Kendall has pursued a personal goal of finding photos of every sheriff who has served in McKinley County since the Territorial Days that began in 1901. The ones he is missing are the first six — William A. Smith, J. H. (Harry) Coddington, Tom P. Talle, R. L. Roberts, J.H. McCamant and Lou Meyers.

Kendall, now approaching his 20th year in law enforcement in September, said he took on the project to give young deputies a better sense of their history as McKinley County deputies.

“We’ve had a longer history than either the FBI and the state police,” he said. Both the FBI and the state police date back to 1935. During the past 107 years, the sheriffs have been involved in everything from shootings to riots. One of them, Mack Carmichael, was shot and died in office.

“He is the only person in the sheriff’s department in all of those years who has died in office,” said Kendall, “although we have had a couple of others who were wounded.”

Carmichael was escorting a prisoner to the county jail during the infamous Gallup riot on April 4, 1935, when he was shot in the face, apparently by the brother of the man he was escorting. He died instantly. Another man who would become a sheriff in the future, L.E. “Bobcat” Wilson, was a deputy and was wounded in the melee that followed. Another future sheriff, D.W. “Dee” Roberts, was on the other side of the prisoner, helping escort him to the jail.

Another sheriff, Kelsey Presley, during a time when he was Gallup’s chief of police, was there when the only FBI agent killed in New Mexico died. Ironically, the FBI agent, Truett Eugene Rowe, had tried to get the county’s sheriff, who was Roberts, to help him track down a suspect but Roberts was in the Ramah area fishing.

In the early days, Kendall said, it wasn’t uncommon for sheriffs and undersheriffs to switch off because of term limits, with one serving as sheriff while the other served as undersheriff for awhile and then the reverse when term limits forced a sheriff to step down.

“There are some amazing stories connected with the sheriff’s office over the years and I wanted to give new recruits a chance to learn some of this,” Kendall said. So he began the project of tracking down the names of everyone who served as sheriff and then getting a photo of each.

It proved to be a lot harder than anyone expected.

Getting the names of the territorial sheriffs wasn’t hard — he got that from a book called “Territorial Sheriffs of New Mexico.”

But getting the names of those who served as sheriff after New Mexico became a state was a different matter.

He first went to the county clerk’s office and found out there were no records of who served in elected position in the county in its early years. So then he wrote to the secretary of state’s office and got a list from them. After that he started the task of trying to track down photos to put in special frames purchased by the sheriff’s department.

The recent sheriffs weren’t a problem but for the earlier ones, he had to contact family members, who would go through their family albums and sometimes call others to track down the photos he wanted. In one case, family members of Carmichael pointed Kendall to a photo that was in the Denver Post, and that’s the photo that now graces the receptionist’s wall.

Kendall hasn’t given up on getting the other photos and is now in the process of tracking down their family members. One family member is now in Italy and is scheduled to get back in August which may mean that the list of six will dwindle down one more.

There’s no deadline for getting the project completed but Kendall has set his own: a year of so from now when the new county/city public safety building is opened.