Susan McSween Barber

She came out of the war with almost nothing. Susan McSween was granted safe passage from her burning house in Lincoln on the night her husband was killed in July 1878. After she married George Barber, a surveyor for John Chisum, Chisum gave her forty head of cattle, worth about $400, and from those she built the Three Rivers herd. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1902 she sold out and moved to White Oaks, by then a fading boomtown, where she died poor, of pneumonia, on January 3, 1931, at eighty-five.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Smokey Bear Historical Park — 17 mi
  The small park in Capitan where the living Smokey Bear is buried, a cub found clinging to a burned tree in the Capitan Mountains in 1950, six years after the cartoon was invented.
• Lincoln Historic Site — 27 mi
  One street of adobe in the Bonito valley kept much as it was in the 1870s, where the Lincoln County War was fought over who would supply Fort Stanton and the Mescalero agency.

More markers nearby

• White Oaks — 0.7 mi
• Carrizozo — 9.3 mi
• Carrizozo — 9.6 mi
• Carrizozo — 9.9 mi