 |
The Passion and Culture of the Great Southwest
By Susan Huetteman
Entrance
A strong and determined people left the Asian Steppes, crossing the land mass known as the Bering Strait into prehistoric North America. In their search for survival,
they created the passion and culture of the Great Southwest. They were the Ancient Ones, a nomadic people seeking new routes to food and shelter. Some hunted the great whales. Others sought
respite in the forested Northwest, while more pushed southward. Slowly, their descendents conquered the strength of the towering mountains to find the splendor of the great Southwest basin that awaited them on the
other side.
The Anasazi culture reached what is now Colorado prior to 10,000 BC. They built cliff dwellings and prehistoric apartment houses, while the Folsom culture fashioned spearheads in New Mexico. The
Lovelock culture briefly settled the Humbolt Range of Nevada near Lake Lahontan, and hunted bison, woolly mammoth, and mastodon. Migrating north from Mexico, the Hohokam built canals and raised corn, beans,
squash, tobacco, and cotton. They were weavers, potters, and sculptors.
These groups, as a whole, formed the desert cultures—the Paleo-Indians. They created the epic of the vast land that would
compose the major Southwest areas: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.
Vermilion plateaus banded the sandstone ledges rising above the desert plains, sculpted by seasonal cycles and untamed
winds. Small game ran among cottonwood and cacti. Deep canyons carved by rushing rivers exposed their layered evidence of evolution against the clear blue sky. With little rain and fragile springs,
plant and wild life were a testimony to desert survival. The Ancient Ones—Anasazi, Hohokam, Folsom, Mogollon, and Fremont—were home. It was 400 AD.
Settlement and Disappearance
Adapting to desert life, they developed dams to
store spring water and constructed irrigation canals. They gathered and planted seeds to ensure their food supply during the drought and winter. Intricately woven basketry held grains and water and carried
infants. They fashioned sandals to protect their feet from the intense summer heat of the mesas. Developing a high level of artistry, they created kiln-dried pottery and patterned great coats of
feathers from the turkeys they kept.
Permanent communal units were built under the cliff overhangs, protecting them from weather and predators. Mixing reeds with the earth from soft muddy deposits,
the men fashioned square and ball-shaped adobe bricks to dry in the arid climate. These bricks were used to construct their homes, also called adobes.
These adobe family units were connected, some
reaching six stories high and housing hundreds of people. Arizona's Canyon de Chelly, the Cliff Palace of Colorado's Mesa Verde, and Acoma's Sky City in New Mexico voice the eloquent testimony of an ingenious and
lasting architecture.
These dwellings had a single outside door that allowed the patterns of the sun to signal the time of day and season. The shafts of light fell upon plaster walls and reddened floors,
pounded hard by the women with a mixture of animal blood and clay. The living areas surrounded cool and dark storage rooms filled with dried grains, berries, and meats.
Irrigation canals enabled the women to plant small gardens of beans, squash and maize, a colorful small corn. The corn was ground by hand using lava metates and manos and made into cornmeal, the
staple of the Southwest.
In this society, women prepared the food and raised the children, and the men hunted and fashioned tools. The men built the outer structure of the dwelling and stood in the doorway
playing the flute as women finished the interior. Yet, the division of labor was interestingly balanced between them. Both raised crops, domesticated animals and developed basket art.
It
was a matriarchal society. When a son married, he joined the bride's family. But the Kiva, underground buildings where men gathered, was the center for spiritualism. Assembled in the Kivas, the men slept
apart from the women and children. It was a place for evaluation, strategy, and spirituality. When the families gathered in the Kivas, it was to honor the great spirits that guided them from the nether
regions to mother earth. They entered through an opening in the ceiling from which extended a timber ladder reaching high toward the heavens. Smoke from the fire pit in the center of the floor honored the
great spirits, rising through the opening, and purifying the entrance. During celebrations and sacred dance rituals, the women and children gathered on benches along the walls of the Kiva, where notches in the
walls held sacred items and later, Kachina dolls—symbols of guiding spirits.
Whether seeking refuge from the desert heat, a safe haven from danger, or following the bighorn sheep's rhythmic movement between
summer and winter, the Anasazi abandoned the pueblos of the mesa. They scaled the inaccessible mountain cliffs, digging family rooms into the porous soft sandstone exterior.
In the late 13th century AD, a
great drought came and by 1300 the Ancient Ones had disappeared. The ruins of their ancient cliff dwellings and pueblos survive today in tribute to a courageous people. The indefatigable adobe
continues to influence the architecture of the Southwest today.
Exploration and Rebellion
Unlike the Native Americans who came in search of food and shelter, the Spanish Conquistadors were driven by a lust for the gold and riches to be found in the
legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. To aid in this search, King Ferdinand dispatched explorers to conquer and claim for Spain all lands from Cape Horn up through the Rio Grande and beyond the Florida coastline.
Kiowa legend says the Great Spirit gave the buffalo to the Indian. It was the Spanish who introduced the horse. In Utah, the hunter-gathering Paiutes and Utes quickly adopted the horse for hunting
buffalo, as did the dynamic Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche in Colorado and the Navajo of Arizona and New Mexico. (Today, the Navajos are among our nation's largest native groups, a testimony to a pastoral
society of sheepherders, weavers, and artisans who survived the legacy of Spanish conquest and slavery.)
The Southwest in the 16th century was home to nineteen New Mexican Pueblo groups, including Zuni, San
Ildefonso, and Laguna, while the Shoshonean speakers, Paiutes, and Utes, including the Gosuite of the western desert had migrated from southern California. The armored Spanish explorers—Coronado, de Niza,
Cardenas, and de Vaca—were accompanied by friars determined to convert the pagans to Catholicism. The friars created missions, demanded conversion, and enforced education, taking the native children from their
families and their traditions.
The natives shared methods of farming tobacco, corn, chili, melon, squash and beans with Spanish friars who planted peach trees and introduced sheep herding and European farming
techniques. The harvest, however, was reaped only for the church.
In 1582 Antonio de Espejo brought his wife and children into New Mexico. By 1598 the first Spanish settlements were established in New
Mexico.
All the while, resentment of Indian slavery increased. Apaches and other native groups remained resistant to assimilation, raiding both invaders and natives. Some slaves escaped, joining the
Apaches in Santa Fe. Pope', a San Juan Indian, fled to Taos to mastermind a secret uprising. Pope' appeared in Santa Fe, giving Governor Otermin a choice: a red cross for war or a white cross for
peace. The governor chose war. The Great Rebellion of 1680 lasted only five days. The Spanish found so many Indian strongholds abandoned that they retreated in frustration to Mexico.
In the
years that followed, waves of exploration by France, followed by the return of the Spanish, accelerated native uprisings. Undaunted Anglo settlements grew and trade thrived. With the Louisiana Purchase of
1803, the United States bought all of New Orleans and eastern Colorado from the French. The face of the Southwest was changing as rapidly as the desert in an August rain.
After Mexico won independence from Spain
in 1812, William Becknell opened the Santa Fe Trail, leading the first wagon train from Missouri. Brigham Young left Illinois in 1844 with his Quorum of Twelve Apostles to establish the Mormon Church in
Utah. By 1847 the first English-language newspaper was printed, The Santa Fe Republican.
For nearly a decade Texas sought protection from Mexico. In 1845 Texas was annexed to the
United States and President Polk offered to purchase New Mexico and California. Mexico refused and in 1846 Polk declared war. The Mexican-American War affected a vast territory: California, Nevada, Utah,
Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.
The war ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, establishing all American boundaries, but two. The boundaries between Mexico and Southern California
and New Mexico were settled not by war, but with money—the Gadsen Purchase.
Following the two-year Mexican-American War, Mexico left Santa Fe. Three years later, in 1851, the first permanent white
settlement in Colorado was found in San Luis on the Culebra River. Ironically, the Spanish left the Southwest without knowing the gold that they sought was there, waiting to be found.
Expansion
The United States obtained the vast western territory with the
intention of amassing states. Although many priests remained to assist redevelopment, these areas did not have a sufficient native population to qualify for territorial status. However, the discovery of gold
in 1848 at Sutter's Mill on the American River in the Sacramento Valley created frenzy in California and a new determination for statehood. With President Tyler's blessing in 1850, California declared statehood
and prohibited slavery.
It was ten years before gold was discovered in Cherry Creek, Colorado. The quiet desert was jarred by the new sound of thousands of horses and wagons.
The Gold Rush of 1858
brought prospectors and settlers seeking routes to mining riches. This immigration brought new dreams, new religions, and a white culture. Despite retaliatory raids by the natives, change was
inevitable. Territories became states, and in 1869 railroads opened the West and as a result, the Southwest exploded with expansion.
Settlers filled the mountains and basins. Towns sprung up
overnight. Where once gentle natives hunted mule deer, now rugged cowboys herded cattle to market.
As if the great spirits were shaken, unrest continued during the expansion into the Southwest.
Railroad workers argued and fought, unions organized revolts, and outlaws sought to take the riches from the banks and railroads. Buffalo herds were depleted. Gold fever consumed the Southwest. Then
suddenly, droughts followed a drop in silver and gold prices. Gold no longer tumbled down sluices so fortunes were made and lost. As quickly as towns were built, they were abandoned. Moreover, the
Southwest was about to be thrust into a civil war, dividing the nation on the issue of slavery.
Division and War
Since 1783, the African slave trade was prohibited in all the northern states, including Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Yet, slaves were kept even in the
nation's capitol. When Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency, South Carolina declared its intent to dissolve from the union. President Buchanan had one month left in his term and had the power to
override South Carolina, but he did not.
South Carolina seceded and formed the Confederate States of America with Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Florida. Now a nation was divided by a
line drawn between free and slave territories. Lincoln became president in March declaring a philosophical war on slavery. In April, resisting federal control of state rights, confederate soldiers fired on
federal troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The Civil War began.
While the war drew the military away from southwestern forts to fight for the Union, Indian unrest briefly stirred, but quickly
faded. On April 9, 1865 Lee surrendered the South to Grant, and the war ended. On April 14 Lincoln was assassinated. The thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but civil rights would be left for the
20th century.
After the war, the
pace of life in the Southwest was escalating. Gold fever paled with the discovery of oil in 1907. National issues became international with World War I. The drought of 1929–37 and the subsequent Great
Depression of 1929 choked the Southwest with walls of dust and despair, only to be followed by another world war.
From the vast desert of Nevada, the world would be forever changed. On July 16, 1945 a new
sun exploded above the heart of the desert. J. Robert Oppenheimer developed the atom bomb at the Los Alamos Ranch School outside Santa Fe in 1942. The Manhattan Project tested the first atomic bomb near
Alamogordo.
With dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, World War II came to an end and the age of technology began. Testing continued on the southwestern desert until 1963, when the Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty moved atomic testing underground. The fallout of the new frontier was radical change and enterprise.
Enterprise
The romance of the Southwest, the great history of its people, and the beauty and grandeur of its mountains and deserts were on the fast
lane of the 20th century. Where once the heart beat to the simple drumming of praise to the great spirits in mother earth, Casinos now pulsated to the jangle of the slot machine. Skiers found routes down
once impassable mountains top and the canyon rapids of the mighty Colorado River tested the endurance of raft and oar. With government installations and service industries came opportunity, employment and a
diversity of people and religions. Along with prosperity and disposable income came tourists to purchase native arts and goods.
Museums and arts and educational institutions were founded. Native
festivals were celebrated and native art became fine art and commercial enterprises. The world discovered the southwestern culture, but with it an unexpected price to be paid.
Rapid growth encroached on the
limited water supply of the desert. Irrigation canals begun by the Ancient Ones gave way to the roar of great dams and vast reservoirs.
Expectation
The ecology changed. National environmental groups formed
to restore endangered species and ensure the delicate balance of desert and mountain. The 20th century would return the first wild lynx to Colorado, joining the gray wolf in Yellowstone, the condor in California,
and the elk and the peregrine falcon. The hope was raised that these animal spirits might once again be free to thrive in the grandeur of the great Southwest.
Susan Huetteman is a retired teacher from Rhode Island. |
