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Published: September 15th 2012
El Morro
El Morro, historic southwestern stopping pointThis morning, it’s raining.
Normally, this doesn’t matter much.
Today, that rain is falling in a desert, where it can wreak havoc with travel.
Large amounts of rain can also ruin some things I have coming up that I won’t be able to rearrange, unlike Chaco Canyon.
Zuni Pueblo
Gallup sits on the western edge of the
Pueblo Indian reservations in New Mexico, so that is where I ultimately went.
These reservations, like other Native American reservations, have widely ranging policies on visitors.
Some welcome them, some ban them completely, most are in between.
The pueblos themselves range from sites that clearly evoke the past as seen at Mesa Verde to ones that look downright dull.
Before visiting, it’s important to study the history.
That certainly applies at my first site,
Zuni.
Zuni is highly unusual in the pueblo world.
Most pueblos speak one of a set of related languages.
Zuni has its own spoken nowhere else.
It’s also located far west of most of the pueblos along the Rio Grande, with only the villages of the Hopi further west.
Their ancestry differs from
El Morro waterhole
The water hole that made El Morro such an important place most of the others.
Zuni is really significant thanks to events that happened in 1539.
The
first Spanish expedition entered what is now New Mexico, and encountered the Zuni.
At the time, they lived in a set of closely spaced villages.
An African named Esteban was the first to enter any pueblo village.
The Zuni killed him.
The Spanish fled.
Spanish soldiers had long believed in the
Seven Cities of Antilia, mythical golden cities supposedly founded by wandering saints.
A friar on the expedition told Spanish leaders they had found the
Seven Cities of Cibola, garbling the Zuni name of their homeland.
The Spanish returned a few decades later, and things became very bad for the pueblo Indians soon afterward.
The drive in, for the most part, is uneventful, passing through flat desert plains covered in scrub and bushes.
The road eventually enters an area of low mesas.
The main town appears soon afterward.
These days it’s a normal desert village except for some adobe buildings here and there.
With a few exceptions, all of it is closed to visitors not
accompanied by a guide.
The pueblo
Diego de Vargas
Enscription from Diego de Vargas, who reconquered the pueblos in 1692, above a much later one from a US Army officer also prohibits photographs.
One of those exceptions is where I went, the
Ashiwi Awan Museum and Heritage Center.
The museum tells the
history of the pueblo from their point of view.
It opens with a series of origin legends.
These are deliberately rather vague.
The basic story matches what I heard in Mesa Verde (see
Ancient Civilization), people were guided to a hole in the sky by a sacred deity, emerged into this world through a hole in the ground and then wandered.
They were forced to wander as punishment.
Deities tried to teach the tribes lessons, but the tribes ultimately forgot them, over and over.
Life changed irrevocably when the Spanish arrived.
The Zuni had never seen humans like this before.
According to the display, they believed that the dark skinned Esteban was a medicine man from a far away land, which is why they let him in the settlement.
He then starting demanding things that no real medicine man would, like food and other supplies.
Tribal leaders decided he was an evil spirit and killed him to purify the land.
The Spanish came
Petroglyphs
Ancient Pueblo Indians passed this way too, and left their marks behind back in 1598 and attacked the pueblo.
Tribal members retreated to one of the mesas I saw on the drive in, Corn Mesa.
The mesa is sacred, so the museum does not say which one.
Spanish soldiers ultimately conquered the Zuni, along with all the other pueblos in New Mexico.
In 1680, pueblo leader Pope organized the pueblos in a
revolt against the Spanish.
It succeeded in driving them away, for a while.
Twelve years later, four years after Pope’s death, the Spanish government returned with a huge military force and forcibly reconquered the area.
The Zuni once again retreated to Corn Mesa as the Spanish destroyed their villages.
Afterward, the tribe founded the modern Zuni Pueblo.
Pueblo Indians in general hoped things would improve when the Americans took over from the Mexicans in 1848.
It was not to be.
They favored new settlers just as the Spanish had.
The New Mexico territorial government forced the Zuni to sign a series of one sided treaties that took away nearly all of their farm land.
The museum shows the effect of each one.
Ramon Garcia Jurado
Spanish inscription from 1709. Note how dark it is, from an early park superintendent running over the writing with a pencil Even worse, the Americans brought
Indian schools and anthropologists.
As noted back with the Lakota (see
Tourists in a Sacred Land), the purpose of these schools was to assimilate Native Americans into the dominant Anglo culture.
They were infamous for their abuse, such as hitting students for speaking in their native languages.
The
anthropologists studied the culture the schools were trying to kill, documenting it like some lost civilization.
Most important from the tribe’s point of view, they dug up thousands of artifacts on the reservation and shipped them to eastern museums.
Most of those from Zuni ended up at the
National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.
From the Zuni’s point of view, these people were looting their heritage, legally.
The situation slowly changed starting in the 1920s.
Native Americans gained citizenship in 1924 and with it the right to sue.
The Zuni promptly sued to get their artifacts back.
It launched a long campaign.
When the previously private museum merged with the Smithsonian, the Zuni started applying political pressure as well.
It took over fifty years, but the Smithsonian finally agreed to
repartitions in 1991.
Those artifacts form the
Century old graffiti removal
An early park manager sanded off marks from visitors early in this century, leading to blank spots like this core of the cultural center’s collection.
Casual visitors are not allowed to see the site of the former pueblo where the Zuni first met the Spanish, because it’s sacred.
What people can see is the view from the road heading east from the pueblo, which looks sort of similar past the mesas.
The view shows scrub filled desert plains stretching into the distance.
The vegetation is different to the grass that existed when the Spanish arrived.
Still, with some imagination, it’s possible to visualize just how shocked each side must have been seeing the other for the first time.
El Morro
Driving east, the vegetation abruptly changes at the pueblo boundary.
Desert scrub turns into irrigated farms and ranches.
The scenery now looks like that further north, and about as empty.
The exceptions are the yellow sandstone buttes that appear in the distance.
The road ultimately swings very close to one, a long thin wall.
This is one of the southwest’s most important Spanish colonial historic sites,
El Morro.
The first thing people see, sadly, is a large scratched
Union Pacific Railroad survey team
Names froma survey team for the Union Pacific Railroad, the last marks before the Monument was established and adding more became illegal stone near the parking lot.
El Morrow is composed of weakly bonded sandstone.
The sandstone can be scratched very easily.
Historically, those scratches are the reason
this place is important.
The modern version of that behavior is called “desecration of a national historic site” and punishable with a fine.
I find this somewhat ironic.
The stone exists so people can get it out of their system before seeing El Morro proper.
It also shows just how crumbly the rock is.
A
trail runs from the parking lot along the base of the butte.
It first reaches the reason this place became so popular in the 1600s, a
large perennial pool.
It’s the only dependable water for hundreds of miles.
An algae streak above on the sandstone shows the waterfall that appears when it rains.
The rain has stopped by this point, so I didn’t get to see it.
The pool is surrounded by wildflowers.
Travelers who stopped to get water could not resist carving their names in the sandstone.
The names can hard to spot because they are small relative to the size of the butte.
The trail goes by a large number of them.
Some are just scratches, while others are formal script that took some time to do.
Many of the older ones are faded from weathering.
An early park superintendent
tried to fix this by running over the names in pencil, making them look dark.
The sandstone also has flat blank spots.
That same superintendent tried to deal with more modern graffiti by sanding it off the cliff!
The names on El Morro cover almost four hundred years of European settlement of the southwest.
First is
Don Juan de Onate, the leader of the Spanish force that conquered the pueblos in 1598.
He carved his name on a later expedition in 1607, along with an account of his travels.
Manuel de Silva Nieto carved an entire poem into the cliff in 1629.
Also here is
Diego de Vargas in 1692, who lead the armies that reconquered the pueblos after the revolt.
After the Americans took over, they continued carving names.
Several workers who surveyed the area for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868 appear, the last “official” names on the cliff.
The railroad, of course, ended the wagon travel that made the spring an essential stop (the Union Pacific was ultimately beat to the route by the Sante Fe Railroad through Gallup).
East of El Morro, the highway slowly climbs.
It finally reaches the top of a wide tableland that is utterly unremarkable.
I wouldn’t even have noticed it, except for the sign marking another crossing of the Continental Divide, which I last saw in Yellowstone (see
Those peaks).
Crossing the Divide in the Rocky Mountains can be underwhelming, but here it’s barely noticeable.
Heading down, the road passes through a wide area covered in black lava flows, which I last saw at the Devil’s Acre in Idaho (see
Hell’s Acre).
This particular set came from a relatively recent volcano called
El Malpais.
Further east the highway crosses a stretch of flat desert with the worst hazard sign I have ever seen: “Warning visibility may suddenly become zero”!
Acoma Sky City
I finally crossed into
Acoma, another pueblo.
It’s one of the most atmospheric in the southwest, although relatively few people have seen it.
The tribe, like many,
strictly limits photography.
If at all possible, drive to this one from the west.
The first part passes through unremarkable desert scrub.
Suddenly, the road reaches an overlook of a wide desert canyon.
A big butte sits in the middle, with the pueblo on top.
In the afternoon sun, when everything glows yellow, the reason for the huge “no photography” sign becomes frustratingly obvious.
The pueblo can only be seen on
guided tours, which leave from the cultural center at the base of the mesa.
The website lists the official tour times each day.
Frustratingly, some managers take these as guidelines only, and send up groups when they feel like it.
For me, that meant I had a very long wait to get on a tour.
The cultural center has a
small museum on the pueblo.
The tribe traces its
history to Chaco Canyon.
Roughly a thousand years ago, a group from Chaco founded Acoma on the mesa.
It has never been abandoned; making it one of the two oldest permanent settlements in North America (the Hopi claim the other).
The Spanish arrived in 1598, leading to one of the most notorious incidents in pueblo history.
Don Juan de Zaldivar lead a force to the mesa and demanded supplies.
What happened next is lost to history, but the final result is that the Spanish entered the pueblo believing they would be welcomed, and residents killed them.
Don Juan de Onate, the Spanish governor, was livid and sent a huge military force to
conquer the pueblo.
He then announced his punishment: all males over twenty five would lose their right foot and be enslaved!
Pueblo Indians as still so bitter about this incident that when a statue of Onate was erected in Espanola New Mexico in 1998, its
right foot disappeared within days.
The pueblo itself has a mixture of ancient and modern.
The city has no running water or electricity.
Houses are made of adobe with modern windows and doors.
Many are crammed together like building blocks.
They face southward to maximize sun exposure.
Beehive ovens sit in plazas.
The streets are bare rock and dirt.
Modern trucks sit on them, an incongruous sight.
Outhouses now sit on the edges of the mesa.
Very few families actually live full time on the mesa top currently.
Most travel here during the day.
Many of those who do live here are religious leaders, who stay apart from visitors.
The pueblo is incredibly sacred to the Acoma, who close it completely periodically for ceremonies.
One is happening this weekend.
The largest building in the pueblo, and the highlight of the tour, is the mission church,
San Esteban del Rey.
After the Spanish conquered the pueblos, they forced all of them to convert to Catholicism.
Missionaries assigned each pueblo a saint.
Acoma residents built the church under pain of death in 1640.
It is a large adobe building whose walls and roof are held up by logs carried from a mesa twenty miles away without touching the ground.
Pueblo members managed to preserve their culture by hiding it within Catholic trappings.
The church contains a large amount of symbolism members knew the Spanish would not understand.
Our guide described some of it.
The floor is dirt with no pews, to symbolize the tribe’s connection with the earth.
The walls are white, except for drawings of corn plants with blue streaks over them.
Corn is the giver of life, and the blue streaks are life giving rain.
Every plant has three ears, a sacred number, arranged in a triangle, a sacred shape.
The corn plants are found in groups of three.
The altar was deliberately sited over a buried kiva like the type seen in Mesa Verde too.
Specific Catholic trappings appear behind the altar.
The backdrop is a folk carving of Christ on the cross surrounded by various saints.
The Spanish brought this from Mexico in the early 1600s.
On the left is a large painting of Saint Joseph, who the devout believe answers prayers for rain.
Our guide did not mention something noted in my guidebook, that another pueblo borrowed this painting two hundred and fifty years ago and the tribe had to sue them two centuries later to get it back!
On the tour, walk out of the church slowly to drink in a truly amazing view.
The church has no windows and only one large door.
Sunlight floods through that door to fill the space.
It frames a view of the canyon and mesas beyond.
The only way to see this effect is in person thanks to the prohibition on photos.
The church sits next to the original cemetery.
These days it looks like a series of dirt mounds.
People were buried in tiers, one on top of the other.
The mesa top has no soil so people hauled it from below.
The soil symbolizes returning to the earth from which we all sprung.
A sandstone fence surrounds the cemetery with what look like little mounds every yard of so.
These were originally warriors carved in stone to guard the dead.
Most are so weathered their features are no longer visible.
Grants
I spent the night at
Grants, the closest town to Acoma with descent priced hotels.
It’s another old route 66 town.
The phone book in my room has a rare item, a map of the entire area in Navajo.
In the 1950s, Grants was briefly the wealthiest town per capita in New Mexico thanks to uranium mining.
Those mines have left a legacy of radiation poisoning, the reason for all the billboards for workers compensation lawyers around town.
I ate at
La Ventana, a local steakhouse, based on the recommendation of the desk clerk at my hotel.
The food was my first encounter with authentic New Mexico cooking.
People here put chillis on everything, steak included.
I’m glad some of them are made with bell peppers instead of the hot variety; otherwise I would have nothing to eat.
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