by Dale L. Walker
The White Sands Mystery
The disappearance of Albert Fountain was a case that even the legendary Pat Garret couldn't crack.

Albert Jennings Fountain had enemies and knew who they were when on a late-January morning in 1896 he stepped out of his big adobe home in Las Cruces, New Mexico Territory, and loaded up his buckboard.

Inside the house, his wife, Mariana, bundled up their 9-year-old son Henry, who was accompanying Fountain to court in Lincoln. She had suggested Henry go along for company despite the fact that Albert had received death threats over his relentless pursuit of cattle thieves. Mariana told her friends that nobody would harm her husband while a child was with him.

The son of a sea captain, Fountain was born on Staten Island in 1838 and educated at Columbia College. In his footloose teens he traveled to California, read law, and was admitted to state bar in 1861. That year he enlisted in the First California Infantry Volunteers and advanced from private to colonel in the regiment as it marched from San Diego to the Rio Grande as part of the Union’s occupation force in New Mexico and Arizona Territories.

Find the rest of this exciting article and more in the March/April 2005 issue of American Cowboy magazine...