Human habitation in Colorado and New Mexicoʹs San Luis Valley stretches back to distant time. Ancient peoples lived here thousands of years ago, as did the Utes, who claim the valley has been theirs forever. Other native peoples—Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Pueblos, Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes—knew the valley, too. So did Europeans. Don Juan de Oñate claimed the valley for King Phillip II of Spain in 1598, although neither he nor any other of the kingʹs men had yet seen it. Not to be outdone by their European rivals, French traders indicated an abiding interest in the region by spreading...

Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike wrote this first English description of the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado in 1807. Despite the intrusions of manʹs handiworks since then, this intermontane basin remains a ʺterrestrial paradise.ʺ The great sweep of the valley shimmers beneath its soaring rim of peaks, the over-all magnitude of the scene bestowing a sense of solidity to its mystic beauty.

Pikeʹs first view was from Medano Pass in the Sangre de Cristo Range. His midwinter crossing followed a well-worn trail used by Indians and Spaniards of Nuevo Mexico to enter and to leave the valley.

The San Luis...

During the winter solstice, at ʺthe time when the sun stands still,ʺ Indian priests chant songs which tell of the origin of the earth, the ordaining of the seasons, the coming of animals, and the birth of human beings—the genesis when all was set in order.¹ From tribe to tribe many of these myths describe the emergence of the first creatures from the underworld through a small hole, known as the Sipapu.

A Tewa Pueblo legend says that the first humans, after their birth in the underworld, climbed a tree to a lake called Sipʹophe, the Sipapu, and from...

On April 30, 1598, Don Juan de Oñate took possession of New Mexico in Tierra Nueva, the Spanish New World, claiming the land ʺfrom the leaves of the trees in the forest to the stones and sands of the river,ʺ the Rio del Norte.¹ Thereby, all territory drained by the Rio Grande, including the San Luis Valley, became the possession of King Phillip II of Spain, and the people in it were considered his subjects.

That spring day in 1598 was only a century after Columbusʹs discovery of America. It was about eighty years since Cortez had entered Mexico City....

After 1800 the San Luis Valley was to emerge from its long seclusion, and the early years of the nineteenth century would witness the first official expedition of Americans into the valley.

After Spain had acquired French claims to Louisiana in 1762, the Spanish government had awakened to the possibilities of territorial exploitation. A Spanish fur trade developed with its center in St. Louis and with field personnel consisting largely of French and American trappers. Hoping to locate a route by which they could compete with other fur enterprises, the Spaniards even offered rewards for locating a northwest passage to...

For two centuries French voyageurs and Indians with whom they traded harvested millions of beaver pelts from the upper regions of North America to feed the international fur market. Yet, for only a quarter of a century did ʺmountain menʺ trap in the San Luis Valley before the beaver industry died out. During its brief heyday in the Southern Rockies trapping was neither the large-scale economic venture nor the same kind of experience which it had been on the rivers of the North. But what the southern beaver industry lacked in durability, profit, and birch bark canoes, it made up...

A preacher is expected to guide his followers to the portals of heaven, but Parson Bill Williams led thirty-two men straight into the gates of hell in the winter of 1848–49. William Sherley Williams had given up a pulpit in the States many years prior to this disaster and had trapped all over the West with Jedediah Smith. Assuming the ways of the land like many other mountain men, Williams had taken Indian women as wives and had stayed in the West when the fur trade waned. When John Charles Frémont met him at the trading post at Pueblo...

The fulfillment of Americaʹs ʺmanifest destiny,ʺ westward expansion, owes an enormous debt to that inglorious beast the mule. Exploration of western territories frequently depended on the availability and the stamina of this long-eared symbol of stubbornness. When a mule was ready to give up, his human counterpart also was apt to be in desperate straits. Thus, the mule often was called upon to make one more sacrifice—to be eaten—as Frémontʹs expedition proved. Others would do the same.

In the year when the ʺPathfinderʺ from Missouri had left the bones of 120 mules in the San Juans, all of...

Sun-baked plazas, flat-roofed adobe homes with hollyhocks and squash and peach trees growing in grassless yards, irrigation ditches lining unpaved streets, crosses crowning church spires and desolate cemeteries, stores built of adobe, schools built of adobe. These could belong to Spanish-speaking communities anywhere in Old Mexico, West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California, or even the San Luis Valley of Colorado.

The first permanent settlements in what is now Colorado were in the San Luis Valley, and they are towns such as these. The pioneer builders of homes and tillers of fields came from the area of Taos, Santa Fe,...

By the late 1850s, with settlement in the valley accelerating and the rush to the gold fields of the Rocky Mountains under way, the presence of Indians, however peaceful some of them might be, was an obstacle to expansion that would not long be tolerated. Because Indians still roamed through the valley and the Central Rockies as a whole, they were fated to become witnesses, opponents, and victims in turn while the invasion of their homelands took place. Waves and ripples of antagonism were felt in the San Luis Valley as settlers, itinerant miners, promoters, and government officials all increased...

Major changes in patterns of settlement occurred in the San Luis Valley in the 1860s. Causes of these changes were publicity attending the gold rush, a change in territorial jurisdiction, enactment of legislation to enable homesteading, and the presence of Civil War veterans who were eager to farm and develop the territory.

It was 260 years after Don Juan de Oñate took possession of New Mexico ʺfrom the leaves of the trees in the forest to the stones and sands of the riverʺ that the Pikes Peak gold rush began, and Colorado was occupied by Americans as it never had...

With change came disorientation and frustration for many of the San Luis Valleyʹs settlers. In a few instances the reaction was violent.

In 1863 a series of crimes were committed by members of a San Rafael family, the Espinosas, against their enemies-at-large, the newcomers in Colorado Territory. Although the Espinosasʹ violence has been attributed loosely to a malaise of the mind, it seems quite possible that the family had suffered wrongs perpetrated by Americans and were bent upon avenging these wrongs.

According to one story, while the Espinosas were living in northern New Mexico, Americans had run off their sheep...

At the close of the Civil War great energy was turned to another dream of empire, this one built on iron rails. Railroads were deemed the form of transportation best suited to serve the new centers of population in the West, but, just as railroad builders might produce fortunes, they also required large investments. Even while Gilpinʹs grandiose land speculations were faltering, another dreamer of empire, William Jackson Palmer, caught the attention of Gilpinʹs backers. Palmerʹs undertaking, the Denver and Rio Grande Railway, eventually was more successful than the U.S. Freehold and Emigration Company but not without great sacrifice.

Projects...

From the first conquistadores looking for Cibola and Quivera to the last tattered miners working for wages, the silvery mountains ringing the San Luis Valley have beckoned and often taunted those who sought minerals there. The stubborn hope of striking pay dirt has survived for nearly four hundred years through the fact that a few did find gold. And if not gold, silver. Or if not silver, maybe lead, iron, copper, or even uranium.

When early Spanish explorers came seeking mines in the Sangre de Cristos, they reported finding some gold between Culebra and Trinchera creeks. Much later William Gilpin...

Shortly after Cary French and his companions found gold on South Mountain in 1870, one of them, who was taking out his rifle to shoot a beaver, accidentally shattered Frenchʹs leg with a stray bullet. French was taken down to old Lorna, where a Mexican woman, Juanita Lobato, cared for him for about three months, but the wound did not heal. Finally Juanita had her son take French to Fort Garland, where the army surgeon took over. From there the recovering prospector went home to Kansas for the winter, but he returned in the early summer of 1871 to rejoin...

Miner and merchant, road builder and teamster, banker and preacher, soldier and suffragette—these and many more played roles in the changing scene of the San Luis Valley during the 1870s. However, the main characters proved to be not these but the undramatic farmers and ranchers who settled in the valley during this and the ensuing decades.

Development of agriculture progressed rapidly in the San Luis Valley during the 1870s for several reasons. The Homestead Act had encouraged settlement of public lands. The end of the Civil War had provided both the opportunity and the necessity for war veterans and...

In the short time that Spanish-speaking people lived in the valley before newcomers of different heritage arrived, the earliest colonizers attempted to establish their lives according to patterns they had known previously. They gave the names of their former homes to their new settlements, and they lived in traditional ways, though with even fewer amenities. Most, though not all, of the Hispaños were poor and unprepared to compete with the more progressive agricultural and commercial practices of Anglo newcomers, when they arrived within only a decade or two. For example, the Hispanic farmers still were tilling their small plots with...

On the church at La Garita is a cross. This is not the usual religious emblem with arms pointing in only two directions from the central support. The cross at La Garita has two additional horizontal arms, set at right angles to the others, so that one sees a complete cross from any side of the structure.

One wooden arm extends toward the hazy hills and mountain passes beyond Saguache. Another points across the churchyardʹs picket fence to the lonely cemetery and the Sangre de Cristos, shimmering far across the valley. Southward pastures and potato fields are sighing in the...