JIMMY DOLAN'S FINALE

jeremiahslatten
Apr 6, 2023
2 min read

James J. Dolan and his wife, Maria Whitlock Dolan. Taken in 1897, one year before he died- he was 49 years old.

By Ben Doss

To put it mildly, the Lincoln County War ruined Jimmy Dolan and the rest of his life was littered with misfortune. In 1882, his first child named Emil, died at only the age of two. Four years later, a few days after giving birth to a daughter named Bessie, his wife Caroline Fritz Dolan died at the age of twenty-five. On February 20th, 1888, Dolan married Eva Maria Whitlock, aged 30, who had been the children's nurse. It was to prove an unhappy marriage. In a letter from Susan Barber McSween to Maurice Fulton on May 27th 1927, indicates it was a general known fact that Dolan mistreated his wife. His tribulations were still not over; a year after Dolan's marriage, his daughter Louise who was not yet six, passed away.

Dolan had far better luck as a businessman, and he was genuinely well liked. He ended up appropriating Tunstall's land on the Feliz and built a strong house not far from the Englishman's original choza; it is still there. He would also become the owner of the Tunstall store, and he regained clout in the mercantile business before selling to Rosenthal & Co. In 1882, he joined William Rynerson in a cattle raising operation on the Feliz range that later became the Feliz Land and Cattle Company, forerunner of today's Flying H ranch.

He was a member of the territorial Senate in 1888 and the following year he was appointed receiver of the Land Office. But one last misfortune would solidify Dolan's ultimate bad luck. In 1893, Frank Lesnett, Dolan's successor as receiver and later a member of the Roswell board of trustees, disappeared leaving his accounts ten thousand dollars short; Dolan had to even the deficit. Jimmy Dolan, in so many words, drank himself death. On February 26th, 1898, he collapsed and died at the ranch on the Feliz; there was not even time to call a priest. The cause of death that was entered in the family bible was "hemorrhage of stomach." But Frank Coe's diagnosis was far more brutal-- delirium tremens.