Albert Tison Mora County, New Mexico

Albert Tison, who owns and conducts a ranch at Wagon Mound, dates his residence in the Territory from June, 1859. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri. January 8, 1839, and was educated in the public schools of Chicago, Illinois. When a young man of twenty years he started to Pike's Peak, but met one thousand wagons and three thousand people returning from the Colorado gold fields and giving unfavorable reports of mining conditions there. In consequence he changed the course of his travel at Fort Mann and made his way to New Mexico, on the old Santa Fe Trail. He located in Taos, where he engaged in clerking in the general mercantile store of Ferdinand Maxwell for two years. He afterward returned to "the states," where he remained until the Civil war was ended, his attention being given to general agricultural pursuits in St. Louis County, Missouri.

In 1865 Mr. Tison again came to the Territory of New Mexico and has since been engaged in cattle raising, ranching and general livestock business. He first followed ranching near Cimarron on the Maxwell grant and in 1884 took up his present ranch two and a half miles northwest of Wagon Mound, where he has three hundred and twenty acres of patented land with a large public range. He runs about one hundred head of cattle on an average throughout the year. He cuts sixty acres of hay and has one hundred and twenty acres of cultivated land. In 1882 he engaged in the saloon business at Wagon Mound, which he continued for four or five years, but his attention is now given entirely to his ranching interests.

In 1873 Mr. Tison was married at Cimarron to Miss Frances Ocosta, of Santa Fe. He is thoroughly familiar with pioneer experiences in the Territory and in the west. He crossed the plains a number of times during the '60s, but had no trouble with the Indians. He was deputy sheriff of Colfax County in an early day filling the office during the time of the noted trouble over the Tolby murder. In politics he has always been a stalwart Democrat.

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Source: History of New Mexico, Its Resources and People, Volume II, Pacific States Publishing Co., 1907.