Discover West Texas'
Northern Chihuahuan Desert

by Jay Sharp

>>Continued from page 1

Prehistory

In northwestern Chihuahua, with archaeologist friends, we explored strange prehistoric ruins in the canyon recesses of Valle de los Cuevos in the Sierra Madre and the late prehistoric pueblo ruin of Paquime, near the town of Casas Grandes.

Around Phoenix and Tucson, in Arizona, we visited Hohokam Puebloan ruins, where we saw unmistakable evidence - in large earthen platform mounds and excavated ball courts - of cultural influences from the great city states of southern Mexico. At Globe, in southeastern Arizona, we visited Salado pueblo ruins, which held unclear evidence of the people’s cultural affiliations. At Springerville, near the Arizona/New Mexico border, we explored Mogollon pueblo ruins, which pointed to cultural connections with peoples to the east.

In the heart of the Gila Wilderness, north of New Mexico’s Silver City, we visited the Gila Cliff Dwellings, another Mogollon pueblo tradition ruin, and across southern New Mexico and western Texas - the heart of the Mogollon tradition - we discovered, documented and excavated - with professional archaeologists - many Mogollon (and earlier) sites.

We soon learned that the Mogollon tradition left its cultural signature, not so much in structures like those of Arizona’s Hohokam or the Four Corner’s Anasazi Puebloan traditions, but more in images on stone and ceramics. For example, at Hueco Tanks, now a state historic park 35 miles east of El Paso, a few miles north of U.S. Highway 62/180, Mogollon shamans (those who have the ability to commune with the spirit world) painted a gallery of mystic symbols, figures and masks on the surfaces of secluded stone recesses. At south central New Mexico’s Three Rivers site, east of Highway 54 between the small communities of Tularosa and Carrizozo, Mogollon shamans chiseled and scribed some 22,000 images of ceremonial figures, animals, birds, insects and symbols, making it a world-class rock art site. In southwestern New Mexico nearly a millennium ago, artisans of the Mimbres branch of the Mogollon tradition produced what are now the most famous ceramics of the prehistoric Southwest, decorating the surfaces of black and white funereal bowls with exquisitely executed images of ceremonies, mythological figures, sacred symbols and geometric designs. Their work appears today in exhibits at the Western New Mexico University Museum in Silver City, the Luna Mimbres Museum in Deming, the Geronimo Springs Museum in Truth or Consequences and other museums across the region.

History

Taught history through textbooks and curricula produced by educators with an eastern point of view of our nation’s past, we discovered, in the Southwest, that the story of America greatly transcended the personalities, events and institutions of the Atlantic Coast.

We learned of the role of Spanish-speaking peoples - with cultural values forged in the crucible of seven centuries of warfare against the Moors - in the colonization of the Southwest. We visited pueblo ruins in the northernmost reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, near the Rio Grande, where archaeologists have found Spanish artifacts that suggest visits by conquistadors from Coronado’s 1540 expedition, eight decades before the English touched our eastern shore at Plymouth Rock. We visited the Rio Grande ford, between El Paso and Juarez, where the conquistador Juan de Oñate crossed with the first successful European colonizing expedition into the Southwest in 1598. (Sadly, the ford - in effect, the Plymouth Rock of the Southwest - now lies in a neglected and rundown area where the U. S. Border Patrol struggles to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants.) We have visited the Spanish Franciscan mission and presidio churches in Rio Grande Hispanic and Puebloan communities, at isolated pueblo ruins, and in Mexican mining and trading posts and the Jesuit churches in southern Arizona and Mexico’s northern Sonora. Whether in ruins or still in service, the Spanish churches inevitably evoke a sense of spirituality and peace, a quiet loveliness, including even the storied old Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe mission church, which lies in the heart of the wildly hectic and crowded city of Juarez.

We discovered the charm of the Southwest’s Hispanic culture (freed from Spain in 1821), with its mix of Spanish, African and Native American roots. We took delight in Hispanic folklore, humor, dichos (“sayings”) and mysticism. We discovered the appeal of humble, hand-crafted adobe (mud brick-, thick-walled) homes and buildings with their unfinished heavy beams (called “vigas”), their roof lathing (called “latillas”), and their inevitable charm. We felt drawn to the Hispanic craftsmanship - the hand-hewn furniture, textiles, ceramics, tiles, paper mache and clay figures, wood carvings and tin paintings. We became addicted to green chili, corn tortillas, guacamole and flan. We could hear, in the Hispanic music, the sounds of Spain, perhaps our favorite country in Europe, in the guitars and the beat of Africa in the rhythms. In communities along the border, we experienced the joy of life in the fiestas drawn from the heart of Mexico - Cinco de Mayo (5th of May), that day, in 1862, when a rag tag Mexican militia defeated a formidable French force in the Battle of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City; Diez y Seis de Septiembre (16th of September), the day, in 1810, when the Franciscan Padre Hidalgo issued his famous El Grito (the “Cry”), in Dolores Hidalgo, for independence from Spain; Dias de los Muertos (the Days of the Dead, on November 1 and 2), an Mexican Indian/Catholic remembrance of the dead and celebration of life.

We explored ruins of forts, some open for tourists, others abandoned in the desert, built by the brawny young nation that seized the Southwest from Mexico in the Mexican-American war of 1846 to 1848 and in the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. We visited the forts - and the desert graves - of frontier soldiers, including the famed Buffalo Soldiers, who fought the Apaches and Navajos in engagements in the hard desert land across our region and into northern Mexico. In an especially personal experience, we visited the Val Verde Battlefield, on the east banks of the Rio Grande, in central New Mexico, where my wife’s great grandfather fought as an 18-year-old private with General Sibley’s Confederate force from Texas against Colonel Canby’s Union force from nearby Fort Craig. We followed the trail of Billy the Kid, from his boyhood home in Silver City, at the edge of the Gila Wilderness, to his grave at Fort Sumner, on the Pecos River in east-central New Mexico, and we visited the archaeological excavation of the McSween home in Lincoln, New Mexico, where the Kid escaped a fiery battle during the infamous Lincoln County Wars. We tracked down the notorious Roy Bean, including the El Patio Bar (which is still serving patrons) in Mesilla, where Roy stole a cache of community valuables and headed for Texas; the merchant store in Pinos Altos (near Silver City), a site that Roy and his brother Sam abandoned and fled to escape the threat of Chiricahua Apaches; and the Jersey Lilly in Big Bend’s Langtry, where Roy declared himself the judge of the region and held court in his tawdry establishment. We wandered the streets and monuments of Columbus, near the Mexican border, where Pancho Villa attacked the U. S. in 1916 and triggered a cross-border, fruitless military pursuit by General John J. Pershing (although it marked the beginning of mechanized warfare).

We retraced segments of famous old trails, including the Comanche War Trail from the Pecos River ford (on the eastern side of the northern Chihuahuan Desert) southwestward through the Big Bend National Park and to the Rio Grande, where, in September of the year, Comanche and Kiowa war parties returned from raids into Chihuahua with terrified captives, primarily women and children, and stolen horses, now run nearly to death. We followed segments of the earliest route of John Butterfield’s Missouri-to-California mail and passenger stagecoach service, which ran through the Chihuahuan Desert south of the Guadalupe National Park, northwest to New Mexico’s Cornudas Mountains, southwest to the Hueco Tanks, west to El Paso, north - up the Rio Grande - to Mesilla, then westward across New Mexico and into Arizona headed for California. We visited Mexican and U. S. sites, both prehistoric and historic, along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (the Royal Road to the Interior) which ran from Mexico City northward through El Paso and up to Santa Fe and Espa–ola. The trail holds such historic importance - with its fabled fords, pueblos, Spanish mission and presidio churches, forts, battlefields and trail communities - that Spain, Mexico and the U. S. have nominated it for World Heritage recognition.

Hospitality

As we have explored the northern Chihuahuan Desert over nearly three decades, my wife and I have also discovered a number of historic restaurants, hotels, B&B’s and inns. Many range in age from the Mexican period through the Territorial period through the Victorian period. Elegant to charming to simply plain, they offer warm service, good food, decent regional wines, comfortable accommodations, a rich atmosphere and some personable ghosts.

Inevitably, they (the owners and staff, not the ghosts) beckon you to return.

Coming Home

When I began to think of retirement several years ago, my wife and I thought it might be nice to take up residence again on the Texas Gulf Coast, with its lush green vegetation, salt-water fishing and fine sea food. In mid- summer, we flew into Corpus Christi, planning to investigate small retirement communities along the coastal waters. Two desert rats, we got off the plane and walked into 98 percent humidity and 98 degree temperature. We immediately suffered from environmental shock. We knew we would miss green chili, Gambel’s Quail, mountain hikes, desert thunderstorms, diverse history, isolated ruins, and even skunks and old Roy Bean. So we came home.

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