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Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis. May 2005.
Shen Fu said: I have traveled about working in government offices for thirty years now, and the only places I have never seen are Szechuan, Kueichow and Yunnan. The pity is that wheel and hoof have followed one another in such quick succession. Everywhere I have gone I have been accompanying others, so that while beautiful mountains and rivers have passed before my eyes like drifting clouds and I have been able to form some rough idea of what they are like, I have never been able to search out and explore secluded places on my own. I like to have my own opinions about things and not pay attention to other people's approval or disapproval. In talking about poetry or painting, I am always ready to ignore what others value and to take some interest in what others ignore. And so it is with the beauty of famous scenery, which lies in any case in what feels about it oneself. Thus there are famous scenic spots which I do not feel are anything extraordinary, and there are unknown places that I think are quite wonderful. This is a record of the places I have visited during my life. Shen Fu, ca. 1809 Six Records of a Floating Life The memoir of a Ming dynasty scholar-bureaucrat , (Penguin Books 1983)
--Lafayette Co. Courthouse, Oxford MS, with obligatory Confederate monument. Kent Smith/Tech-it-Out. MIDSOUTH ARCHAEOLOGY TOURISM
VACATION UPDATES Comanche National Grassland, Colorado Ft. Garland, Colorado Cucharas and Picketwire valleys, Colorado Orient Land Trust, Colorado
Pecos Pueblo National Monument, New Mexico Meteor Crater, Arizona Homol’ovi Pueblo State Park, Arizona Petroglyph National Monument, New Mexico Comanche National Grassland (Iron Springs, Thatcher vicinity, Carrizo Canyon petroglyphs, Picture Canyon petroglyphs)
The Alamo and Spanish Missions National Monument, Texas Bent’s Fort and Comanche National Grassland, Colorado
Vacation Update 2006 Comanche National Grassland, Las Animas and Baca counties CO Cucharas and Picketwire Valleys/Spanish Peaks, Huerfano and Las Animas counties CO Ft. Garland, Costilla County CO Orient Land Trust/Valley View Hot Springs, Alamosa County CO Comanche National Grassland
Typical landscape in the south-eastern part of the Grassland. Black Mesa is higher and better-watered, and so more of the land remains in private ownership. 2003. I typically approach the Comanche Grassland from the east, through Oklahoma. The panhandles region had an awful fire season last year. The playas were all dry but the grass and cottonwoods were already greening up where it had been burned over. Mostly it was as you expect, yellow grass, tumbleweed, wind and mackerel sky. I saw a lot of birds--meadow larks, killdeer, pheasants, red-wing blackbirds, prairie hens, doves, bob-o-links, and swamp hawks—and a few striped skunks. The country uses Walker irrigation (center pivot) now and folks have made windbreaks for the cattle out of the old aluminum irrigation pipe. Like everywhere else I go, folks were largely running black Angus cattle. You don’t see the Herefords, the preferred cattle of my youth, so much anymore. There were a few patches of snow in shady spots, ruts to show there had been a little moisture, and lots of bare ground—easy for wind erosion. Ever so often you see a piece of old farm equipment half-buried out on the prairie where somebody got to the end of the row and said ‘the hell with this insanity’ and walked off. The northern edge of the Comanche National Grassland is the Arkansas River valley (“lower valley” to them, “upper” to me). The river has a Corps of Engineers dam (John Martin Reservoir), so most folks that come here are coming for fishing, but you should see the surrounding upland too to really appreciate the value of all that water (well, it was pretty low the last couple of years). The land breaks as you approach the valley, with lots of cedar brush and more settlement as you approach towns like La Junta. This is mostly a grey Cretaceous limestone and shale landscape, with canyons sometimes cutting into the Permian/Triassic and even down to the Permian redbeds (see the Purgatoire Canyon walls on Pinon Canyon Maneuvers Area in my 2006 Annual Report). The valley itself was once an important truck farming region, growing a lot of onions and such. They still produce a lot of melons, but are loosing more and more water to the city of Pueblo. I like La Junta and would probably move there if I could find work. The roads are cracked up and the alleys are dirt with plank fences around yards and trailers. It’s a lot bigger than my town, with a post office, library, gas stations, junior college, city park/swimming pool, lots of stores and a selection of hotels and roadhouses. I reckon the main thing keeping it going is the Walmart, drawing on a 100 mile radius (the next one being in Starkville, just north of the Boca Raton). There are lots of boarded up stores, too, and most of the trucks on the highway seem to be just passing through. The railroad yard stays busy and the livestock sale is on Tuesdays. Like ours, the phone book serves for several counties and combines what I think of as big towns (Pueblo, the trading center; Walsenburg; Trinidad; Lamar). Timpas Creek Picnic area has, as I think I have mentioned before (see below), the very finest outhouse I have ever seen. I wish I had a photo of it. It is one sho-nuff fine outhouse. They (USDA-FS) have been working on the site of the1938 Soil Conservation Service work camp here, and now have picnic tables/shelters and piped water. (The SCS was the Department of Agriculture agency now known as the NRCS.) The picnic area is just north of the railroad along 350 Highway between Trinidad and La Junta at the ghost town of Timpas. There is plenty of ground to walk around on here and stuff to see if you know what you’re looking for, and the picnic area is one terminus of a short section of the Santa Fe trail the public can walk on (if you can’t see the ruts, there are rock posts).
Homestead on Timpas Creek Las Animas Co. CO. March 2006.
Abandoned box frame houses at Timpas, south of Highway 350. 2005. There is also a ca. 1920+10 short-term homestead at the Timpas picnic area. At least part of the occupation pre-dates the Volstead Act (there was a suction moulded whiskey pint bottle) and the terminal date should be during the Dust Bowl. I guess it was a small irrigation farmstead/ranch, if the posts from what I interpret as a catch pen/loading chute are contemporary. I consider it an irrigation farmstead as it’s along the creek, and there are several other homesteads too nearby for it to be anything else. Somewhere in a previous year’s report (below) is a picture of the brick school here. Artifacts I observed include 1) architecture—wire nails, porcelain post-type “Brunt” insulators, and flue tile; 2)Kitchen—red-body coarse earthenware with clear exterior and white interior glaze, plain white refined earthenware plate, thick semiporcelain flatware, porcelain teacup; clear, solarized (“desert” or purpled), amber, light green tint and bright green bottle glass with screw tops and steel soda bottle crowns (milk, beer, “Nu-Grape” and “Coca-Cola”); a white glass canning jar lid seal, and screw-top fuel cans; 3) Clothing—4-hole porcelain button and overalls suspenders slide; 4) Tobacco--steel cans; and 5) Activities—barbed wire, fence staples, cut brass scrap and coal slag. You can see abandoned box houses that must have been very similar right across the road. Considering that this was evidently a fairly short occupation, there is an awful lot of material on the surface, and a lot more bottle glass than ceramics. They were spending some money (or at least credit). This artifact density is in marked contrast to the late 19th century sites on the upland and canyon parts of the Comanche Grassland, where you scarcely see any sherds or glass, indicating that they lived at home, off their sheep, cattle and hunting.
Early 20th century cabin chimney at Vogel Canyon on Comanche National Grassland. 2003.
Adobe, rock and board-and-batten cabin, Baca County. 2003.
Cucharas and Picketwire Valleys/Spanish Peaks
Radial dyke in Spanish Peaks district. March 2006. The Cuchara-Guajatoya Valley in Huerfano County CO is chaparral country along the eastern front of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There are lots of dude ranches and ski resorts there, so I guess this highway gets considerable traffic. It had snowed, but the county had the road cleaned up the next day. That was some of the only snow they got in 2004-05, which hurt the whole tourism economy considerably, but was good for ranches because they were hurting for hay.
Gomer Butte volcanic plug south of La Veta. March 2006. Goemmer’s Butte is a volcanic plug (the sealed throat of a forming volcano that never erupted). This feature is visible from 160 Highway as you head over La Veta pass, but the better view is from the east along #12 Highway through the town of La Veta. This is one of several volcanic features to look out for along the Huajatolla (the Utes’ Breasts of the World) or Spanish Peaks Mountains. The east and west Spanish Peaks are stocks (medium-sized igneous intrusions) forced up through Cretaceous and Tertiary lime, silt and sandstones. To the north of 160, ascending to the 9400 La Veta Passes (try the old gravel road south of the highway) is the large, round and mostly bald Mount Mesetas. Mt. Mesetas is a micro-crystalline granite pluton (pluton meaning it did not reach the then surface before slowly solidifying). The dykes are magma masses that also solidified subsurface 25mya (Oligocene), and so were only exposed and made mountains by subsequent erosion of softer surrounding materials of the Spanish Peaks. As the magma moved up, it filled cracks in the overlying igneous strata, resulting in one of the premier examples of radial dykes. You also see some of the Spanish peaks sills (horizontal shelf rather than vertical ridge) and dykes as far east as I-25 between Walsenburg and Trinidad. There is a road-side geology stop south of La Veta, with maps, that explains this very well.
Mt. Meseta, granitic pluton. November 2005.
View into Purgatoire Valley from Cucharas Pass. March 2006. Further on down the road, over the Cucharas Pass into Las Animas County, is the famous Stonewall. Here Highway 12 makes a right-angle turn east. I had incorrectly thought the Stonewall was a dyke when I first saw it, but it is actually a ledge of upturned sedimentary rock (Cretaceous Dakota sandstone, the same rock forming the caprock of the canyon country to the east).
The Stonewall, tilted Dakota sandstone. 2005. The narrow but steep and ragged sierra to the west, the Culebra and Sangre de Christo mountains are composed primarily of much older, Paleozoic rock, which was tilted and thrust-faulted much more recently. Guajatoya creek is tributary to the Purgatoire River, which runs east to the dam at Trinidad (Trinidad State Recreation Area, expensive but unnecessary as there are many National Forest campgrounds around) and then through plains canyon lands to the Arkansas at La Junta. Running back east along #12 Highway, thru the “Picketwire” (as Anglos heard “Purgatoire”) valley are a string of small picturesque settlements that retain a lot of their original Spanish character: Zamora, Vigil, Cordova Plaza, Velazquez Plaza, Segundo and Tijeras; and Oso State Wildlife hunting area.
Purgatoire Valley and San Isidro church, Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance. 2005.
St. Ignatius Church, Segundo. March 2005. It’s a very pretty but narrow valley with the mountains of the Ute Hills close on either side. In a way it reminds me of my own country. As I drive through these places I always think that when a town looses its school, post office and (there) priest it’s hard to call it a town anymore. The bars and stores get converted into antique stores for tourists and when the original families are gone or diluted, it’s not even a community, just a settlement. The valley was settled by New Mexico Spanish coal miners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is a fairly dangerous section of road because of the coal trucks from the remaining mines, which may be why there is a road-side shrine in a niche in the roadcut.
Shrine along Highway 12 west of Trinidad. March 2006. Also worth seeing is the extinct mining town and mills of Cokedale. Someday I hope to explore and photograph this National Register of Historic Places site and tell about it too. My geology book says you can see a 1” iridium-enriched ash-derived white clay layer overlain by coal that is the K-T boundary along the south side of Trinidad Lake; I’d like to go look for that, too. I think it’s probably shown in the photo below, tho I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I took the photo. Otherwise the Tertiary deposits continue the Cretaceous sequence of transgressive and regressive events that resulted in sandstones from beaches and off-shore bars, deltaic siltstones and claystones, and coal measures from lowland swamps.
K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary? Highway 12 between Segundo and Trinidad. March 2006.
Ft. Garland, Costilla County CO
When you come over the La Veta passes from the east you are in Costilla County CO (the Huerfano-Costilla county line follows the 10500’ dividing ridge between the Arkansas-Mississippi and Rio Grande-Pecos basins). At the western foot of the mountains are the towns of Ft. Garland and Blanca. The historical monument and museum are just south of 160 Highway. There is enough to see to occupy most of a day, including a Kit Carson memorial, and displays on the Civil War, buffalo soldiers, the Civil War, and the Spanish settlement that occupied the plaza after the army left. There are many dioramas and the collections include gear like irons, spurs, riatas and taps; hats, clothes and colchas (bedcovers); munitions, tools and arms; and even some tin-can retablos and a ca. 1875-85 bulto of San Isidro carved by Diego Sandoval. They have an extensive archaeological collection, as Adams State College has been conducting research here since 1991, and a large local history collection in the Milton Mueller Memorial Research Library. Personal effects in the Kit Carson shrine. Heavily repaired + .40 caplock rifle, sword cane with cane case, pocketknife. Passed down in the family. James Garland of Virginia was a career army man, commissioned Lt. in 1815, Capt. in 1818 and brevetted Gen. 1847, but retired Col. 1849 after fighting at Palo Alto and other battles in the invasion of Mexico and commanding the Department of New Mexico. The first U.S. post, Ft. Massachusetts (1852-58), was a pine pole stockade south of the historic site. The San Luis valley’s Mohauche Utes and Jicarilla Apaches were conquered from Ft. Massachusetts.
Sketch of plan of Ft. Garland,1877. The adobe fort that still stands was built in 1858 and abandoned by the military in 1883. The surrounding land was part of the Tricheras or Sangre de Cristo grant. The post’s 2 companies (100 men) defeated Sibley’s Confederate rebels advancing on Santa Fe in the 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass by falling on their supply train from the rear. The Yankee Coloradoans were commanded by Chivington, also the commander of state militia at the 1864 Sand Creek massacre of the Cheyenne winter camp. Ft. Garland has the first Starr 1858 carbine I ever saw (manufactured by, I assume, a descendant of the New England Puritan Starrs, not my ancestors the Maryland and Pennsylvania Irish Quaker Starrs). It is one of the many early metallic rimfire cartridge breech-loaders used by Federal cavalry. With a very heavy lock it looks like a good saddle gun. They also have McClelland’s field desk and kit, and mid-19th century buggies, caissons, an ambulance and one of Sibley’s 12-pound brass mountain howitzers discovered where it was buried during their retreat. These guns took 4 mules—1 for the canon, 1 for the wheels and ram and swab rods, 1 for ammunition and 1 for the carriage. There were some volunteer regiments stationed at Ft. Garland until the regulars returned under Kit Carson 1866-67. After the White River Agency or Meeker massacre, the garrison was strengthened until the Ute removal. The 9th Cav. USCTs (Colored Troops, popularly known by the Indian-bestowed epithet “buffalo soldiers,” referring to the black men’s wooly heads) were at Ft. Garland 1875-1879, providing security for the miners. The buffalo soldier display is particularly elaborate and informative: colored troops had the highest rate of re-enlistment and lowest rate of alcoholism and desertion. They were a fifth of the US cavalry in the post-war West. With the close of the Civil War, the US regular army was reduced to 30,000 men, mostly garrisoning the South. Within a few months, Congress authorized 6 new regiments for the West, including the all-black 9th and 10th cavalry and 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st infantry (consolidated in 1869 to the 24th and 25th inf.) This was of course a cost-conservative measure, as CTs were paid $13/month.
Ft. Garland officers quarters, Wet Mountains to the north. 1 April 2006. The fort was bought by the San Luis Valley-Ft. Garland Historic Fair Association in 1928 and donated to the state historical association in 1945. The adobe plaza is well-maintained, with picnic tables, and when I was there in the spring of 2006 appropriately cold, dry and dusty. The interpretive program is excellent and there is a well-stocked bookstore. There is also a museum at Adams State College in Alamosa, the trading center of the valley, and numerous cafes and restaurants (I recommend the Chinese-Vietnamese Mei Hua over the greasy Americanized Hunan buffet) and even internet cafes for those who can’t quit working even on vacation.
Orient Land Trust/Valley View Hot Springs North end of the San Luis Valley. November 2005. There are numerous hot springs along the east wall of the San Luis Valley that can be reached along Highway 17. The Great Sand Dunes National Monument is the main tourist attraction, but there is a lot else to see and do around the area. The thermal springs exist because the Rio Grande Rift is still active. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains along the east side of the valley and the San Juan Mountains along the west wall are the borders of a fault-block graben. The valley floor is filled with 10,000’ of Tertiary and Quaternary ash and volcanic flows as well as gravels and sandy alluvium derived from the igneous mountains. As you approach Orient, you can see the scarps at the bases of the mountains formed by continued shifting along these faults. The rising hot water has also geothermaly altered the Proterozoic (Precambrian) volcanic rocks, and you can see patches of green epidote like that found on Le Veta Pass on rock fracture surfaces. The Valley View springs are less than 10 miles from the Arkansas Canyon, but over 11,000 mountains at Hayden Pass; considerably further over the easy 9000’ Poncha Pass at the north end of the San Luis Valley near Salida.
Hay equipment and large square bales, November 2005. The northern San Luis valley is a bolson (“pocket” or internal drainage) at the head of the Rio Grande valley. The valley floor appears fairly level, but there is a slight rise in the midst of the valley, cutting drainage from the upper end off from the Rio Grande. In the wet late Pleistocene, this created a lake and marsh environment, now a major locality for Paleo-Indian finds. Today the land is salt scrub that you could call puna (high desert). In the 19th century, mountain run-off surface water was used for irrigation, resulting in water-logging of the alluvial soils, accompanied with deposition of rising salt. As a remedy, deep artesian wells were drilled and today fields are bordered with drainage ditches to lower the water table below the root zone and allow salt to be flushed; the rye, white potatoes, etc. are then shallowly irrigated with center-pivot sprinklers.
Orient Land Trust/Valley View Hot Springs campground. March 2006. The main attraction at Orient, for me, besides the hippies, is the finest sauna I ever saw. It even has a built in pool. Most folks, who evidently like water more than I do, come for the hot springs themselves. There is a regular swimming pool for the faint-hearted, but the other pools along the foot of the mountain are pretty close to their natural state—you can sit in the rocks and algae while there is snow all around. There are a main house with kitchen, rental cabins and open camping spots with firewood and picnic tables. Other attractions are the abandoned mine, which they say is a bat roost in the summer and plenty of land for hiking and lying about. All the power used on the place is generated by a turbine turned by the creek coming from the springs. It has only been trust land a short while, and the owners and old-time members are to be greatly thanked for welcoming a wider group of visitors. Since the ranch land of the vicinity is rapidly going into housing projects, they have bought up some surrounding land as to provide a development buffer by keeping the land in production, and contributions to the mortgage are needed. www.otl.com
Rental cabins are remains of the early 20th century Orient mining town. March 2006. Bibliography Chronic, Halka and Felice Williams 2002 Roadside Geology of Colorado. Mountain Press Publishing Co., Missoula. Greene, Jerome A. and Douglas D. Scott 2006 Finding Sand Creek: history, archeology and the 1864 massacre site. University of Oklahoma Press. McChristian, Douglas 2006 The U.S. Army in the West, 1870-1880: uniforms, weapons and equipment. University of Oklahoma Press.
VACATION UPDATE 2005 July 2005 - I took my niece Christian to visit my sister Joanna and brother-in-law Rich in Arizona. Here are some interesting sites from along the way.
We camped at the nearby
Meteor Crater (Arizona)
Homol’ovi
In July I went with my family to see one of the Homolovi ruins on our way to the meteor crater. We only saw a little of what there is on the site and in the small museum, because there was a lecture and demonstration of modern Hopi art potters. If the Setalla family is any indication, the Hopi are some mighty nice folks. Having tried with varying degrees of success to open-fire pottery made out of lots of different clays, I found the talk very interesting. The pottery is coiled and scraped with gourds and polished with pebbles, like prehistoric southeastern pottery. The ware is light yellow, and painting done with yucca brushes uses mineral and organic paints (hematite, limonite, and spinach juice/beeflower carbon). The description of making the black by boiling it down and drying it in shucks reminded me of something I read recently on a Chinese ink stick factory’s website. They also say that the older, the better. The firing (done on a car hood) appears to have used a bed of coals, covered with sherds, to place the stack of pots on. The pots were covered with old tin, all of which were then covered with sheep dung and let to bake down for several hours. The ware comes out well oxidized, with few fireclouds, and has a ring indicative of very high temperature firing (for open firing). I asked what was used before the Navajo got sheep—coal. The Hopi nation are around 10,000 surrounded on all sides by around 100,000 Navajo, and some other of the necessary potting materials also come from off the Hopi reservation. This is a famous long-term conflict resulting from colonial powers ignoring preexisting intertribal politics. While we were there at my sister’s house (she works for Navajo County AZ), the local Indian newspaper carried a story from the multi-generational Peabody Coal issue, about refiling a discrimination suit alleging Peabody coal and the Navajo nation collude to discriminate against non-Navajos (i.e. Hopis) in mine hiring. HCR Winslow AZ 86047-9402 928-289-4106
Comanche National Grassland, USDA (Baca and La Animas
counties,
Comanche National Grassland, USDA, Baca and La Animas
counties, It may sound funny, but the
Comanche Grassland is one of my favorite vacation spots. I mention it in last
years’ summary, too. Maybe I shouldn’t say I like it, because I am
evidently one of the only people that feels this way, and
I usually have the place to myself. The public access areas are low-use,
and widely scattered among leased pasture lands. Ranch headquarters are
generally several miles apart on the grid of county gravel roads. This USDA-FS
range area is mostly rolling high plains prairie, but it has a number of canyons
at the heads of tributaries of the
There are some free dry (and fire ban) camps/picnic areas on the
Grassland. One might want to consider free USDA camping on Colorado National
Grasslands or National Forests, given the exorbitant rates at
Also nearby is the Apishpa State Wildlife Area. This is a deer
hunting area surrounded by ranches in a cedar brakes area. The
The remains of an early 20th
century homestead north of Iron
Spring. I saw wire nails and aqua bottle glass, a few
Iron bridge over Timpas Creek, Comanche
National Grasslands.
This bridge is near the old cut for
the
Carrizo Creek. This is a mighty nice little creek. It looks to run high on occasion. In Mexican, carrizo, is ‘reed’. Mostly what I saw was willow brush and cattail, seen in foreground. There were lots of kingfishers and hummingbirds around this water hole in June. In December, the creek was backed up by beavers.
There is some fair pasture around here. Like everywhere
else I saw, mostly they run Herefords.
Abandoned Post Office of Kirkman CO. Petrogyphs at Picture Canon on Comanche National Grassland
(southeast Soft sandstone walls form high cliffs with a little overhang. These face north. Two long stretches of smooth wall are covered with carved 20th century signatures that have partially eradicated the Native American pictorial style drawings (stylistically related to the late 19th century ledger art, but perhaps as early as the 17th cen.). There is debitage in the talus slope down towards the spring. Beaucoup rabbits and rats and mice. Across the valley on the opposite wall is an historic homestead. These contact period images commonly include horses, bear, buffalo and warriors. There are longer trails here to see very interesting erosional topography.
Others were eroded and heavily disturbed by Anglo inscriptions.
The “ticks” or “tallies” appear in several places.
both engraved and outlined with black (charcoal, I reckon).
View towards the cliff over
the red petroglyps. Drawings occur behind the boulders and brush (barberry
briars). The floor of the canon is about 100 m wide, and there is a spring with
cattails in the center where two canyons join. Across from the picture canon is
a rock-built homestead ruin, with two buildings, one with a fireplace and
exterior chimney and one attached to a stone wall corral. The homestead backs
up to the wall at a deep crack, which is sadly closed by a iron grate. Since it
includes what looks like a sheep-pen (being so low) and has almost no artifacts,
I am going to interpret this one as a mid
19th cen. Spanish site, even though the chimney makes me a little
dubious about this interpretation. Unlike many homesteads, the rock hasn't been
salvaged for reuse. I don’t know how much archaeology has been done out here,
but I wish they had a little more interpretation of what little is open to the
public.
Buffalo Gourd, the highly
fetid wild gourd of the Trans-Mississippi South. I’m trying to teach my niece
Christian this plant since I think of it as really distinctive about the Red and
the Text
and Photos by Mary Evelyn Starr BIBLIOGRAPHY
1987
Roadside Geology of 2004
A Field Guide to the American Prairie. The Peterson Field Guide Series. Houghton
Mifflin Co, Has an entry on the Comanche
National Grassland, including a photo of the horse I show here. Focuses on
plants and animals throughout the Little,
Elbert L. 1980
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Western Region.
Alfred A. Knopf, I bought this book last year
when I was in west McHuge,
Tom
1972
The Time of the Nostrand,
Richard L. 1992
The Hispano Homeland. Walker, William H. 1996
Homol’ovi: A Cultural Crossroads. Webb,
Walter Prescott 1931,
1959 [1981] The Weber,
Daniel J. The
Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under This academic volume
considers events in three northern frontier areas: Alta California, New Mexico
and Texas, from the collapse of the missions and the asault of the nomadic
tribes, through the social and economic organization of the old colonies
colonies to the ill-fated granting of large territories to Anglo-American
empresarios who were to populate the Indian frontier as a buffer from Mexico
proper.
VACATION UPDATE 2004
The Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero, San Antonio TX) JULY 2001--I recently took a trip to east and central Texas, Oklahoma, and southeast Colorado, and I'd like to share some of my more archaeological experiences with y'all in hopes that some other Mississippians will visit these sites. A Trip to the San Antonio, Texas, Missions I spent most of the time I was in Texas lying up at a friend's house, only venturing out after dark, which seems to be the habit of Austin. That must have something to do with why so many people wear black-they're trying to stay cool. Austin is pretty enough in its own way, a rich, fancy, neon-infested, smoggy way, by my tastes, but I got a chance to look up some old acquaintances and practice my Mexican at the neighborhood panderia (bakery, i.e cookie wonderland). And, while it's not exactly archaeological, I did go see the bats fly out from under the downtown bridge over the Colorado River of the East, required for all visitors, as well as the state capitol building and the wonderful library at the University of Texas. My favorite part of any trip to Texas is San Antonio, a slower-paced city that reminds me of other cities that got left by the wayside in the last century, like Savannah and Charleston. While I was there I as usual spent a while visiting the eighteenth century Spanish missions. Most folks have heard of the Alamo, and perhaps realize it was a parish church before it was fortified by the Anglo and Hispanic rebels. The Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero, or St. Anthony of Valero's) alone is a nice tourist venture, a partially-reconstructed grey and yellow limestone compound on a little crooked square in the heart of down-town San Antonio. A visit there is educational, but the Alamo is only one of a series of mission compounds still standing, and in most cases still active parishes or monasteries. The remainder of the chain of missions lies along a little irrigation ditch they call the Rio San Antonio stretching to the southern outskirts of the city. The mission sites, along with old waterworks (acequias or aqueducts), early ranchlands, and related trails, are administered by the National Park Service. The other missions are Mission Conception, Mission San Jose, Mission San Juan, and Mission Espada. The grounds of the missions are well-maintained parks in neighborhood settings. A Gulf Coast mix of palms, live oaks, and pecans meets the more western cottonwoods and mesquite in this part of east-central Texas. Mission de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Conception de Acuna (Our Lady of the Purest Conception of Acunya), completed in 1755, has stabilized ruins of the original compound around a still-active small cross-shaped church. Mission Conception has a white dome over the alter and two front belfry towers flanking a detailed facade. This mission also preserves some original red, yellow, and blue wall and ceiling painting believed to have been executed by the neophyte Coahuilteco Indians who manned these missions, where they were taught Spanish military drill, stock-raising, weaving and other skills, in addition to Catholic religion, that would allow them to become full-fledged citizens of Spain. The actual Spanish-Mexican contingents were quite small, a few priests and, when they could be spared, a few soldiers with a sergeant or corporal in command. Their main crops were corn, beans, lentils, melons, peaches, white and sweet potatoes, and sugar cane, and the region's main exports were livestock on the hoof or products such as hides and tallow.
Nuestra Senora, San Antonio TX Mission San Jose and San Miguel de Aguayo (St. Joseph's and St. Michael's) is the best-preserved of the compounds. The site consists of a large (several acre) walled square that once sheltered along its walls the quarters and shops of the Indian converts. The highly detailed facade of the still-active church, established in 1720, preserves on its outer towers red and yellow geometric frescos that are, like so much of Spanish art including ceramics, ultimately derived from Moorish and Arabic art. Originally founded by the Benedictines, it is today home to a Franciscan convent. San Jose also has the main museum for the NPS missions, where many traditional tools and arms are displayed and interpreted in English and Spanish. The compound's high walls include many loop-holes and bastions for defense against still-nomadic tribes such as the Apache, and then later the Comanche, who were moving south across the undefined and ill-defended Mexican frontier. San Juan de Capistrano (St. John's) was established in 1731 by the Franciscans, and it, too, is still a parish church. Stabilization work was being undertaken when I was there in June, and little remains above ground of the original Indian quarters. The church, of white limestone, has a series of buttresses and a tall wall of arches (an espadana, or one-wall belfry), the original place of a series of bells. Mission Espada was first located in east Texas in 1690, and moved to San Antonio was part of the contracting frontier in 1731. This large walled square compound is also home to a modern monastery. The stone-work here is somewhat cruder, but the brick and plasterwork is still visible in the ruined quarters and the small museum features saddles, spurs, and other livestock raising equipment of early Texas. The missions have many interesting architectural features, such as well-worked stone, wrought iron, repousee tin candle-reflectors, flat roofs with canales (projecting drains to prevent erosion of adobe), and heavy doors and tiny windows made of many small pieces of the dark and fat juniper wood pegged and bradded together. The Alamo, administered by the Daughters of the Texas Revolution, has a number of displays of archaeological and historical collections. I found the Mexican ceramics particularly interesting. These wares include Puebla Blue-on White, a tin-glazed earthenware with bold cobalt blue designs related to French faience, English and Dutch delft, and Italian and Spanish majolica. In addition to Mexican-made coarse, lead-glazed earthenwares, the region obtained Chinese porcelain and English refined white ceramics via Mexico's extensive Pacific and Atlantic trade. The Alamo also has a large collection of American-made flint-lock longrifles, generally reputed to have been used in the Anglo-led revolt against Mexico. The NPS museums include the arms of the Spanish frontier militia cavalryman (rawhide-tied saddle; horsehair ropes; spurs; branding irons; smoothbore flintlock carbine (escopeta); lance; dagger or skinning knife; fire-steel (encendedores) in Spanish, Mexican and French styles; and the machete-like short sword). The common working tools are also displayed: carved ox-yokes (yuntas) and ox-prods (aguijadas de bueys, used instead of the Americano's bull-whip), froes (henedors) for reiving shingles and barrel staves and other simple carpenter's and metalworker's tools, spinning wheels, wool cards and looms. All the displays are bilingual, and Spaniards, Mexicans, and other Spanish-speaking people now make up much of San Antonio's tourist trade.
On Through Oklahoma to Colorado I left Miami, Oklahoma, Sunday afternoon, after the Quapaw Fourth of July Pow-Wow wound down, and since the old truck seemed to be running so well, I thought I would drive all night across Oklahoma, following, roughly the route of the Cimmaron cattle trail through the panhandle. I woke up at Black Mesa State Park, in the last county in Oklahoma, in the real West-not the want-to-be- west of east-central Texas, but the West of cholla cactus, beargrass, sagebrush, juniper, tamarisk bush, scorpions, grasshoppers, magpies, scissors-tail flycatchers, and half-breed longhorn cattle. The weather was great with temperatures in the mid-90s, but 20% humidity and 20 mile per hour winds. This is the sort of heat that is dangerous to Southerners, because you don't notice how hot it really is. I followed the front of the Sangre de Cristo range over New Mexico's Boca Raton and into Trinidad and Pueblo, with views of pine-clad mountains and cool, dark creeks in narrow canyons. Since Denver was flooded (!), I turned back onto the plains and made my way down to La Junta, where the truck chose to break down in between the garage, and, thankfully, the town's cheapest motel. So I got to spend a few days in a place that had always intrigued me, the Southern High Plains section of the Arkansas River Valley. To some people, this might sound like the middle of nowhere, but I'm a flatlander and I like it just fine. From the rolling hilltops you can see for miles, and the air is very clear. During July, the remnants of the Pacific monsoons that water western Mexico and California make their way over the Rocky Mountains and provide evening thunderstorms. In many cases, the water never makes it to the ground, and the clouds continually form, shower, evaporate, and re-form to move on east. It is a grand scene to watch, and quite welcome when and where it does rain. The valley of the Arkansas is about 5 miles wide in this area, with pronounced hills along both sides of the valley. The valley floor is crossed by many irrigation canals, with alfalfa hay being the main crop, but sugar beets, melons, and other truck produce like onions are also grown. Some of the old farmsteads have a few gnarled apple trees, but the weather, particularly summer hailstorms, are more than real orchards will bear. The West's first irrigation works, of course, were instituted by the Pueblos and other settled, agricultural tribes of the Rio Grande and Colorado of the West. These works were taken over and expanded upon by the Spanish and mestizo settlers making their way north from Mexico. As the British Americans followed the French Americans into the west, it was realized by such long-sighted planners as Illinois' John Wesley Powell (of both the Smithsonian Institution's anthropology/archaeology program and of the U.S. Geological Survey) that the traditional quarter, half, or even full section farmsteads that prospered in the lands east of the 100th parallel would never be suitable in the West. In the Great American Desert, as the entire region was then called, land meant nothing without water. Even today, while it's nice to look at, I wouldn't give as much for an acre of that ground as I would for the half or quarter of a cow it will support. The main archaeological attraction of the area is Bent's Old Fort National Historic Monument, on the north bank of the Arkansas River between La Junta and Las Animas, in Otero County, Colorado. This is a huge adobe structure, built on the site of the original 1830s-1840s trading post that lay on the Santa Fe trail, at what was then the U.S-Mexico border. The site overlooks the floodplain of the Arkansas, populated mostly by cottonwoods and cattail marshes, with many chances for wildlife encounters. Having worked on or near several of these "reconstructions" or, as some folks call them, history theme parks, I am always at least somewhat leery of these efforts. However, I had heard that Bent's Old Fort is an excellent example of the genre and I will have to agree. The NPS did a masterful job when they built this adobe castle for the U.S. Bicentennial/Colorado Centennial. The park was authentic down to the plank-wheel cart and the ox (well, the ox and the mule were a little too fat for authenticity's sake). I also spent some time hiking on the Comanche National Grassland. Part of this public land is level to rolling pasture lease lands, but parts of it are quite rough canyon land, locally known as "cedar breaks." Besides many ruins of Hispanic and Anglo homesteads and sheep or cattle camps, the area also has numerous rock art sites. These are generally found in the lower, deeper parts of the canyons, on high rock faces near springs. If you are interested in hiking the Comanche National Grassland, detailed U.S. Forest Service maps, directions to the rock art sites, relevant books and other information are available at the district office in La Junta. The most accessible rock art sites are Vogel Canyon, south of La Junta, and Carrizo and Picture canyons, southwest of Springfield, where there are short hiking, mountain bike, and riding trails into the canyon floors. By comparison of the black stain called "desert varnish" that the simple, abstract symbols are pecked through with the stain that subsequently developed in the pecked or grooved lines themselves, it has been ascertained that these carvings were made up to 5,000 years ago. Others are attributed to the semi-sedentary late prehistoric (ca. AD 1000) Apishpa culture. One of the primary early motifs is a small circle bisected by a vertical line. Like the "bilobed arrow" motifs seen on our Marksville pottery and Mississippian copper plates, this motif is commonly interpreted as a loop-handled spearthrower with a dart. Others, forming complex meanders, branches and "pretzel-shapes" are interpreted as prehistoric maps, and some investigators believe they can read these shapes in terms of the local topography. There are also, of course, many later ones, in the more pictorial styles of the Plains tribes of the region (Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche) as well as nineteenth and early twentieth century signatures, dates and cartoons left by Hispanic and Anglo travelers and herdsmen. Unfortunately, many of the locations have been marred by spray paint and use as targets. The Forest Service recommends that you don't hike alone, wear good boots, and carry a compass, first aid kit and about 20 pounds of other gear. Well, I had to ignore the first, and a first aid kit to me means a bandanna and pocket knife, along with a compass and map. I was wearing slick moccasins, which I can't recommend to anyone coming behind me, due to the seeds and burrs that get in your feet. I was drinking several liters of water a day while hiking, and this is definitely recommended. The solitude is available if you seek it out, otherwise, look out for the bicyclists whizzing (or puffing) by on the main trails. You can overnight at the main picnic areas overlooking these canyons, but these are dry camps-no showers, water, or firewood. Bibliography The Archaeology of Colorado, by E. Steve Cassels. Before I set out, I pulled down some of my old books on the archaeology of the West. I would recommend reading up on the subject to anyone who plans serious archaeological tourism in the West; their culture history is quite different from ours in the Eastern Woodlands. I believe this book is now available in a second, revised edition. Archaeology of the Southwest, second edition, by Linda Cordell. Published in 1997 by Academic Press (but available in paperback, for those of you who can't conscience paying Academic Press prices). Petroglyphs of Southeast Colorado and the Oklahoma Panhandle, by Bill McGlone, Ted Parker, and Phil Leonard. Published in 1994 by Publishers Press, Salt Lake City. "Petroglyphs" is a fancy way of saying "rock art" and despite the fancy name, the book is written in a down-to-earth style. The Exploration of the Colorado and Its Canyons, by J.W. Powell. Originally Canyons of the Colorado, enlarged edition published 1895, reissued in facsimile in 1961 by Dover books. The Dover edition retains the many photos and line drawings of the original. This extensive description of the Powell party's 1869 first running of the Colorado River from the "parks" back of the Front Range, already known from the 1820s and 1830s trappers, through the rapids of the Grand Canyon, to the head of navigation at the lower Mormon settlements of what is now Nevada. It is written with the characteristic gentle humor and good grace of the best nineteenth century authors, and contains many descriptions of the nomadic Ute and settled Moqui tribes as well as the stupendous scenery of the region. Historical Atlas of Texas, by A. Ray Stephens and William M. Holmes. Published in 1989 by the University of Oklahoma Press. The Oregon Trail; Sketches of the Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, by Francis Parkman. Originally published as a serial 1847-1849, Macmillan Co. copyright 1910. This thoroughly racist and elitist account is a valuable counterpoint to Powell's writing a generation later. Parkman excoriates most of the inhabitants of the West-Indians, Mexicans, French laborers and carters, and Southern hunter/trappers and freebooters, reserving most of his praise for fellow New Englanders and their Morman descendants-the Americans. His account is one of the brief primary sources for Bent's Fort. Parkman visited the trading post immediately after the U.S. army invading Mexico, and reported that the army livestock had destroyed the fort's pasture and that their men had reduced the supplies so that he could not obtain the materials he wanted. Parkman was received by the head clerk in residence, Holt, and treated to dinner, seated in chairs around a table with a white cloth. Most of the post's mid-summer contingent consisted of invalid soldiers left behind by the army who lay in little adobe rooms on buffalo hides and Mexican wranglers who exchanged fresh mules for travelers' exhausted horses. Parkman describes Bent's Fort as made of white clay, and notes the pantry cellar where the original adobe is still preserved: "[The quartermaster produced] a rusty key, he opened a low door which led to a half-subterranean apartment, into which the two disappeared together. After some time they came out again, Tete Rouge greatly embarrassed by a multiplicity of paper parcels containing the different articles of his forty days' rations (pp. 275-276)". The Man Who Rediscovered America; A Biography of John Wesley Powell, by John Upton Terrell. Published in 1969 by Weybright and Talley. There are a number of biographies of "Wes" Powell, but this is one of my favorites. Terrell wrote biographies of many important figures in the exploration of the west, including La Salle, Zebulon Pike, and Cabeza de Vaca and Estevanico the Moor, two of the survivors of a disastrous sixteenth century Spanish expedition to Florida, who eventually walked into western Mexico. The Powell biography covers his life from the Ohio Valley frontier, through is military service as one of Grant's artillery captains and the famous Colorado River expedition, but focuses on his later life in Washington and his efforts to reform land and water laws through his sadly neglected Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States, better known simply as "Arid Lands." Powell is a personal hero of mine, as a self-taught natural scientist, despite his roles in the battle of Shiloh (where he lost an arm) and the siege of Vicksburg (where he searched sandbars for fossils). He believed, after the example of the Mormons who had successfully colonized the desert, that it was better to talk to Indians and offer them jobs than to kill them outright. Among his roles in the Bureau of Ethnology, he compiled one of the earliest systematic studies of North American languages (still basic reading), and at the organization of the U.S. Geological Survey, led some of the mapping parties who covered the land west of the Rocky Mountains.
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Contact: Mary Evelyn StarrBox 39, Sledge MS 38670Phone (662) 444-5254
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