NMNew Mexico History

Twelve years without Spain

In August 1680 the Pueblo towns along the upper Rio Grande rose together and threw the Spanish empire out of a North American province, and it stayed out for twelve years. The rising was coordinated by a Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh named Po'pay, who sent runners between the villages carrying knotted cords so that towns speaking five unrelated languages could strike on the same day. Around four hundred colonists died, including twenty-one of the thirty-three Franciscans in the province. The survivors walked downriver to El Paso del Norte and did not come back until Diego de Vargas began the reconquest in 1692. Nothing comparable succeeded anywhere else in colonial North America. Afterwards Spanish authorities largely gave up suppressing Pueblo ceremony, and the nineteen Pueblos governing themselves in New Mexico today trace an unbroken line through it.

Chaco, and the nations who came after it

Between roughly 850 and 1150 the canyon at Chaco held the largest buildings north of Mexico. Pueblo Bonito alone rose four and five storeys around a plaza and held several hundred rooms, and a system of wide engineered roads ran out from the canyon across the San Juan Basin toward outlying great houses. Turquoise, macaw feathers and copper bells reached it from as far as Mesoamerica. Potters of the Mimbres valley to the southwest painted bowls with human and animal figures and punched a hole through the base of each one placed in a grave.

Chaco emptied in the twelfth century and its people moved to the Rio Grande and to Hopi and Zuni country. By the time Spaniards arrived the descendant communities spoke Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Keres and Zuni, five tongues with no common ancestor, in towns of stacked adobe and stone. Athabaskan speakers, ancestors of the Diné and of the Jicarilla and Mescalero Apache, reached the region in the centuries before contact, and the Diné took up sheep and weaving once Spanish flocks arrived.

Coronado, Oñate, and the founding of Santa Fe

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado came north in 1540 chasing reports of Cibola, stormed the Zuni town of Hawikuh, found no gold and went home. Permanent colonisation waited until 1598, when Juan de Oñate led settlers, soldiers and livestock up the Rio Grande. When Acoma resisted the following winter, Oñate's punitive expedition killed hundreds and the survivors were sentenced to servitude, the men over twenty-five to the severing of a foot. Oñate was later tried in Mexico City and banished from the province he founded. In 1610 the governor Pedro de Peralta laid out a new capital at Santa Fe around a plaza and a mud-walled Palace of the Governors, which is still standing and still the oldest continuously used seat of government in the United States.

Three flags in twenty-five years

Mexico won independence in 1821, and that same autumn a Missouri trader named William Becknell brought a pack train into Santa Fe and found the new government willing to buy. The Santa Fe Trail followed, and within a generation the province's commerce ran east to Missouri rather than south to Chihuahua. In August 1846, during the war with Mexico, Stephen Watts Kearny marched the Army of the West into Santa Fe and took it without a shot fired. Resistance came five months later at Taos, where an uprising killed the American governor Charles Bent in his own house. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the region in February 1848, and the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 bought the strip south of the Gila River to give a southern railroad a level route, adding the Mesilla valley and the bootheel.

Glorieta Pass and a sixty-two year wait

The Confederacy wanted New Mexico as a corridor to California and the Colorado goldfields. Henry Hopkins Sibley's Texans beat a Union force at Valverde in February 1862 and occupied Santa Fe. Everything turned at Glorieta Pass on 26 to 28 March 1862, where the fighting itself was inconclusive but a detachment of Colorado volunteers, guided over the mesa by the New Mexican rancher Manuel Chaves, came down behind the Confederate line and burned the entire supply train at Johnson's Ranch. Sibley's brigade had to retreat to Texas, and the Southwest was settled. Two years later Union forces under Kit Carson destroyed Diné crops and orchards and forced some eight thousand people on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, where a quarter died before the treaty of 1868 let them return.

New Mexico became a territory in 1850 and waited sixty-two years for statehood, longer than any other part of the contiguous United States. Congress balked repeatedly at admitting a territory with a Spanish-speaking Catholic majority. A 1906 scheme to admit New Mexico and Arizona as a single state collapsed when New Mexican voters approved it and Arizonans refused. Admission finally came on 6 January 1912, as the forty-seventh state, and the constitution written for it guaranteed that men who could not read English would not lose the vote and that the state would train teachers in Spanish.

Columbus, Trinity, and the fight over the land grants

On 9 March 1916 Pancho Villa's men crossed the line and shot up the town of Columbus, the last hostile foreign incursion into the continental United States, and John J. Pershing chased him into Chihuahua for eleven months without catching him. In 1943 the Army took over a boys' ranch school on the Pajarito Plateau and turned it into Site Y, the laboratory at Los Alamos, and on 16 July 1945 the first nuclear device was detonated in the Jornada del Muerto south of Socorro. Ranching families downwind were told nothing. Two years later an army press officer at Roswell announced the recovery of a flying disc, later identified as a balloon train from the classified Project Mogul, and the retraction never caught up with the story.

Land taken from Spanish and Mexican community grants after 1848 stayed a live grievance, and in June 1967 Reies López Tijerina and members of his Alianza raided the courthouse at Tierra Amarilla, touching off a manhunt with tanks and the National Guard. On 16 July 1979, thirty-four years to the day after Trinity, a tailings dam at the Church Rock uranium mill failed and sent more than ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid down the Puerco, the largest accidental release of radioactive material by volume in American history. Drilling in the New Mexico share of the Permian Basin has since made the state second only to Texas in crude oil output.

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