Monday - Albuquerque to Cimarron

NOTE: In an effort to get my memories recorded I have decided to postpone pictures until I return.

Monday – March 21, 2016

Albuquerque to Cimarron

Today I started to follow the Santa Fe Trail. I left Albuquerque for Santa Fe about 0730.  My first task in Santa Fe was to buy a new battery for my Nikon digital SLR. I went to Target, Office Max, Best Buy, and a store that specializes in batteries, but to no avail. I have one battery, but the other has stopped accepting charges so I guess I’ll just have to be careful not to take too many pictures with the GPS sensor on since that uses a lot of battery juice.

Anyway, I finally headed North on IS 25 which basically follows the Santa Fe trail, but in the area between Cimarron and Santa Fe the actual route of the Santa Fe trail does not exactly parallel IS25 but is quite a way west.  The trail goes through Ft. Union, which is not on the map but is a National Historic Monument that I visited a couple of yes ago, and then heads directly for Santa Fe. Santa Fe was the actual intended final destination until the Mexican War broke out and Fort Union became the supply depot for the Indian Wars in the Southwest.

 

 As I proceeded along IS25 between Albuquerque and Santa Fe I saw a sign reading “Mormon Battalion Monument” - of course I turned off and retraced my steps along the frontage road and finally came to a rather impressive monument on the roadside.  I stopped to read the brass plaque and take a picture.  The inscription on the plaque had been vandalized. It reads, from an official document written by Lt. Col. P. St. George Cook in 1847 when he arrived in San Diego, “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry. Half of it has been through a wilderness where nothing but [word defaced] and wild beasts are found. . .”  I guess that Lt. Colonel Cook was unaware of the tens of thousands of Native American who live in that wilderness, or of the hundreds of wagon trains which had carried trade goods between St. Louis and Santa Fe since 1821. There trek across the Jornada, following more or less the same route I drove in 2013 from Southern Missouri, and then through Oklahoma and the western portion of the Texas panhandle was indeed impressive.  It is not surprising that an alternative had been developed and was in active use for 25 years before his march.

The next thing I ran across as I was traveling past Santa Fe was a sign for the Pecos National Historic Park.  (A National Park encompasses a greater amount of land and often several sites, as does the Pecos NHP.)  This park is a monument to the Native People that live in the Pecos Valley which is in a cross roads in an area that is bordered by the Sangre De Christo mountains. Plains Indians and Pueblo Indians could meet in this area and exchange items that were desired by both groups – buffalo hides from the plains and clothing, food, and pottery from the fields and workshops in the Pueblos.

Excavations in the 1920s by the archaeologist A.V. Kidder revealed a remarkable site including an immense Pueblos, also described by early Spanish visitors, or multi-room dwellings, attached together and rising several stories high. Pueblos and Kivas (pits) were excavated by Kidder and his crews, and outlines of the original walls and foundations, in some cases the Kivas, are at the main site of the Pecos NHP.

The Spanish, in their never-satisfied thirst for gold and silver, appeared in the area as early as the mid 16^th Century, but were not well received by the Natives. One Native, a Plains Indian captive, agreed to escort Fernando Vasquez De Coronado to the plains areas where, he assured Coronado, silver and gold would be found.  In 1841 Coronado and his men set out to find the gold. After hunting fruitlessly for the treasure his Indian guide admitted that he had just lured Coronado into the trip, hoping to exhaust him and his men so that he could murder them. Coronado was not pleased and had the guide strangled. He and his men ultimately staggered back to Mexico City, empty handed and exhausted.

The Spaniards were not to be discouraged, however. They continue to press forward in their search for riches for their king and their own pocketbooks. Prospectors arrived in the Pecos area in 1581, and were shortly followed by Franciscan priests. The Indians and the Priests did not always get along well, but finally Fray Andres Juarez arrived in 1621. Under is direction a large mission was built. Following a few years of generally harmonious relations between the natives and Spanish their relations began to turn sour and in 1680 a revolt occurred, which include killing some priests and destroying the church.

Over the next 100 years the Spanish were not easily dissuaded from their goals, either wealth or religious. There was some moderation of the Franciscans treatment of the Natives, but by 1780 illness, warfare with other Indian tribes, and emigration to other areas had reduced the population of the Pueblos to under 300 (originally it was estimated that 2000 people lived in the Pueblos – maybe more).  In 1830 the Pueblo and the rebuilt church, a fraction of the former church, had been abandoned.

Returning to IS25 I traveled on through Santa Fe and to Las Vegas where I turned off and took some of the back roads that more closely approximate the Spanish Trail route. Other than a few signs saying “Santa Fe Trail auto route” or, in a couple of cases, “Santa Fe Trail – Auto Route” I saw no signs of the Santa Fe Trail.  Most of the land in the area is part of a few land grants – some well over a million acres.  These land grants, like the Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in California, were protected by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But, as was the case in California that did not necessarily mean that they became public property. Much of the trail in the high plateau areas (6000 ft) between Las Vegas and Cimarron I on private property. In fact, I did not come across a single place where there was any actual evidence of the trail except at the Pecos NHP where there a small wooden bridge and a sign that said “Santa Fe Trail crossing (trail ruts).”

After spending a couple of hours on the back country roads, and meeting less than 6 cars in the process, the road reconnected with IS25 for a short distance to Stirling. At Stirling I turned off on New Mexico 58 and headed for Cimarron and the Hotel St. James where I was going to spend the night.