Crossroads of Change: An Environmental History of Pecos ...

Crossroads of Change: An Environmental History of Pecos National Historical Park

Volume I

Public Lands History Center Colorado State University August 2010

By Cori Knudten and Maren Bzdek Forward by Dr. Mark Fiege

Table of Contents Foreword ........................................................................................................................................ iv Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One

Creating a Cultural Landscape, Prehistory-1598 ........................................................................ 6 Chapter Two

A New Way of Life, 1598-1680 ............................................................................................... 21 Chapter Three

A Comanche Borderland, 1680-1821 ....................................................................................... 35 Chapter Four

The Expanding American Empire, 1821-1861 ......................................................................... 53 Chapter Five

Contesting the Future of the West, 1861-1880 ......................................................................... 69

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Figures Figure 1. Upper Pecos Valley and surrounding area, .................................................................... 3 Figure 2. Locations of prehistoric settlement sites in Pecos valley. ............................................. 13 Figure 3. The Kozlowskis Trading Post as it appeared circa 1900. ........................................... 53 Figure 4. Sites with Euro-American artifact assemblages. .......................................................... 58 Figure 5. Section of 1850 map showing road over Glorieta Mesa to Galisteo. ........................... 78 Figure 6. Pigeons Ranch, June 1880, looking north from Sharpshooters Ridge........................ 79 Figure 7. Pigeons Ranch, circa late 1800s, looking northeast. ................................................. 80

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Foreword

Of the nearly 400 units that make up the U.S. national park system, surely one of the most unusual stretches across some 6,670 acres of a high valley in northern New Mexico. Pecos National Historical Park is an apt name for the place, because it encompasses a splendid concentration of sites with exceptional cultural value: a centuries-old pueblo, a Spanish colonial mission church, a portion of the Santa Fe Trail, a Civil War battlefield, and a ranch that once belonged to a Hollywood movie star. These remarkable features alone make Pecos worthy of national park status--and yet by themselves, they do not account for the unique appeal of this place. What also makes Pecos alluring is its setting: pi?on-juniper forest, grassland, the cottonwood riparian corridor of an important western river, all lying below mesas, mountain peaks, and the dramatic New Mexico sky. But even these striking natural features do not make Pecos complete. Rather, what makes Pecos such a fascinating and satisfying park is neither its history nor its environment but its remarkable combination of the two. Every chapter of the Pecos story unfolded in relation to--indeed, because of--the distinctive environmental characteristics of the place: its proximity to Glorieta Pass along a major travel route between mountains and plains; its soils, water, and plants; its wildlife, habitat, and livestock forage; its spectacular vistas stretching to the horizon.

It is this story--this environmental history--that Cori Knudten and Maren Bzdek seek to tell. Environmental history as practiced by Knudten and Bzdek resists the powerful temptation to divide the world into the categories of human and non-human, artificial and natural, domestic and wild. However useful such casual distinctions may be in everyday life, they break down on close examination. Even in national parks established primarily for their non-human natural values, the interplay of humans and their environment has caused change and created a history. At Pecos the importance of culture in environmental change stretches back for centuries. A succession of people came and erected buildings, produced food, raised children, told stories, practiced religion, fought wars, and imposed distinctive names on the land. Yet none of these activities occurred apart from the biophysical substance--the soil, rock, water, wood, and flesh--that composed the place. Inhabitants and newcomers molded the warm brown earth into dwellings and religious structures, consumed wood in fires, raised new plants such as corn, hunted and fished, and introduced a powerful agent of biological change--the horse. As the people traded, fought, cooperated, and reshaped their environment, they, too, changed. Their tools, clothing, foods, families, beliefs, even their very bodies, took new forms in relation to the retreat and regeneration of the forest, the growth and contraction of the buffalo herds, the pain and destruction of epidemics, and a host of other transformations.

Knudten and Bzdek are well-suited to piecing together and telling the Pecos environmental history. Both have considerable experience in the scholarly study of western national parks and other sites. Both are attuned, by academic training and personal inclination, to recognize that the historical record inheres in plants and animals, rock and soil--the land itself--as well as in the memories that people relate and in the paper documents kept in our libraries and archives. And both, perhaps most important, know how to tell a good story.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of environmental history--and beautifully demonstrated in this volume--is that it synthesizes facts about the past into a compelling account, or narrative, of change over time. No other scholarly discipline is quite the same in this regard; no other discipline places such importance on conveying meaning and emotion in a fact-based narrative

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of the intricate interplay of people and land through time. As you read about Pecos and its environmental history, note how the authors enable you to glimpse the past through the eyes of an Indian woman, a Franciscan friar, an Anglo trader, a Confederate soldier, a dude rancher, or an actress. Although the primary purpose of this history is to assist the National Park Service in its stewardship of a single cultural and natural landscape, ultimately it offers to all readers a deeply human story of life in an extraordinarily significant place.

People and place, culture and environment, human and non-human nature: this indivisible strand conveys the history of land and life across five centuries and more at Pecos National Historical Park. Mark Fiege Public Lands History Center Colorado State University, Fort Collins August 2010

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