Cocoposts

Butchery of Equines in History

What started the 1540 Tiguex War in what is now the Albuquerque area was what ended the Battle of Glorieta during the Civil War - butchery of innocent equines.

At Glorieta Union soldiers snuck to Confederate supply wagons and killed all the mules.  In the fields along the Rio Grande the Tiguex killed the Spaniards' mules and horses.

They were the first the Tiguex had ever seen. The superiority afforded the Spanish mounted on the new beasts played into the massacre no doubt, as did the horses' offense of being allowed by their Spanish masters to graze and trample Tiguex fields that terrible winter. The horses were priceless to the Spanish and no doubt highly trained, carefully bred and valued above nearly all else.

It was a turn-key event. Sad to imagine but no less part of the history that "started badly and stayed that way a long time."

It's still not so great for Spanish horses. 

Tiguex War

Events surrounding Coronado's first contact with the Tiguex people in what's now the Albuquerque area are among the most dramatic in North American history. Clay Mathers, expert in all things Spanish Colonial Archaeology, thinks so and this amateur is inclined to agree with him. Mathers spoke about Coronado and his new book at the Old Albuquerque Library Saturday morning.

For one thing, the 1540 entrada was huge - an estimated 2800 people, maybe more, traveling with 7000 animals at one point. The size of this military expedition alone had big consequences. Natives didn't have a  food surplus and were not expecting thousands of guests and their animals. As Mathers puts it, things started badly and stayed that way.  .

Tiguex resistance was immediate and long running. The war waged against them was called "savage and without mercy" by a chronicler at the time. That's saying something given the general savage and merciless treatment of other natives that same year, like the Zuni.

Mathers gave an overview of the larger forces at work during the time of Coronado's entrada, like global trade and political positioning.  He also notes the impact of  native resistance against the Spanish here and other places. Coronado's extended absence from his own home in Mexico, for example, was occasioned by a native uprising.  And the Chichimec war stymied Spanish settlement of Northern Mexico for 50 years.

Mathers notes significant long term consequences of the Tiguex War and Coronado's little visit to the Middle Rio Grande. Most notable among them was Don Juan de Oñate's choice to just keep riding when he got here. Seething resentment among the Tiguex was still evident 58 years later and enfluenced his choice for a capital much much further north at San Gabriel.

Kuaua Painted Kiva

 

 

Edgar Lee Hewitt led the first excavations at what is now Coronado Monument in the summer of 1934. In trenching the following year they discovered the painted kiva.

Hewitt originally wanted the entire site exposed for visitors to see and intended to rebuild the pueblo as it would have looked when occupied - a Tiguex Williamsburg in time for the 400th Anniversary of Coronado’s arrival. But the deadline loomed and he ran out of money.

Only two structures were replicated: a one story room block that no longer exists and the square painted kiva. Restoration of this replica kiva and its murals was the subject of the lecture April 21, 2013 sponsored by the Friends of Coronado Monument.

Preservation History of the WPA Era Painted Kiva murals at Kuaua

Richard Reycraft, Cultural Resources Program Manager, New Mexico State Monuments.*

Puaray LA 717

The  pueblo called Puaray was large at the time of Coronado's 1540 entrada. It was in the northern portion of a collection of at least a dozen villages in and along the Rio Grande in the Albuquerque area. With the notable and treasured exception of Kuaua at Coronado Monument, almost all of the Tiguex ruins are lost.

Puaray and another pueblo ruin called Maigua were both close to Alameda, site of yet another large Tiwa pueblo located where the elementary school is today. Like elsewhere in the valley, remnants of Alameda pueblo were used as road base in the 1930’s and largely forgotten or disregarded thereafter.

 

Gravel mining destroyed any archaeological or paleontological sites ever located along the eastern edge of the Rio Grande.  A quick comparison of aerials shows the massive extent of earth removal and rearrangement. As the area where “Renaissance Center” Costco is located at Montano Road was mined in the 1970s, fossil hunters prowled the area. I also remember a man who discovered tiny ancient hand-made beads on his gravel roof and was forever thereafter obsessed with the search for more.

 

Site grading for new buildings, trenching for pipelines and utilities and excavation for drainage ponds ::coughBernalilloCountycough:: has completely altered physical history of the once great Tiguex Provencia as well.

 

Puaray, like so many other pueblo ruins in the vicinity of today's Albuquerque, is gone, gone, gone.

Boy that was a different place. Everyone can see the current photo of this place at present by zooming in on north Albuquerque from current imagery.

1. The MAGIC map room really is just that.
2. Shocking how much dirt has been moved in fifty years.

When I moved to the valley...

Lessons from the 2013 #nmleg

The capitol building itself is a wondrous place. This year again I found myself walking round and round looking for a committee room that had disappeared. A friend remarked it would be a bad place for a bad acid trip. Look! That buffalo is coming out of the wall!

The final days of the session were a little stale and sad - like the last weekend of the State Fair when all the grass is brown and the animals are gone. The bills are like those 4-H livestock projects. A whole lot of work. Few trophies. They die.

Sitting in committee hearing rooms turned up interesting details and occasional spontaneous outbursts of sincere emotion. No less interesting were instances of calculated misdirection or omissions in testimony -  and the potent questions left hanging

How much gas or oil do we get for all that fresh groundwater?

And shouldn't water be worth more than oil? 

The major things:

1. New Mexico consistently overvalues engineers, businessmen and big construction projects and undervalues artists, teachers and intangible natural assets. It's all about the money. No less at the legislature. Probably more so. Treatment of water in a drought is one example. Water rights market wheeling and dealing is very hot right now. Many predict those who can not pay for water lawyers and hydro-geologists will be left high and dry. Small farmers. Small fish. Meanwhile big water pipeline projects with fat construction contracts will be justified with magical incantations.* Gila River? Go Fish.
 
2. The negative impacts of the oil and gas industry are denied, ignored and suppressed. To use water as an example again, the industry uses veritable buttloads of water and pollutes it as fast as they can frack. But the state doesn't track this water use at all. Nor do they know what's in it before it's disposed. Any bill considered 'unfavorable' to the industry is met with exhortations to stop 'antagonizing' oil and gas. This from legislators who proudly hail intimate ties to the business.

The sign by the door of the Senate press room calls it the 'Print Media Gallery' which could imply exclusion of a blogger or social mediaist. But like a lot of other things in the Roundhouse the sign does not reflect reality or truth. Or it would read, 'Senate Staff Lunch Gallery.'

*Jobs, jobs, jobs- the magic words for any proposal that might otherwise lack merit.

Coyote in the Schoolyard - Oil and Gas

The metaphor of the fox in the hen house is overused. Self-policing by the oil and gas industry is more like a coyote in the school yard. He pays for the place. He can go where he wants and do what he likes.

Loosely regulated and in the driver’s seat of the economy, oil and gas dominates the Roundhouse. Efforts to restrain, regulate or alter New Mexico’s relationship with the industry are met with a collective moan from lobbyists who swat at bills like antagonizing flies. They use terms like, ‘industry economics demand’ and have some ‘business friendly’ Democrats on their side.

The problem with being ‘business friendly’ is that it nearly always means being unfriendly to someone or something else. Like employees or the environment.

Senator Soules bill SB 547 to ban fracking was tabled in Senate Conservation on 8-2 vote. Opponents to this and other ‘unfriendly’ bills testified there are ‘no verified cases of drinking water contamination’ and that oil and gas are the ‘lifeblood’ of the state and crucial to our economy and schools in particular. Dependence on tax revenue from non-renewables is never posed by industry advocates as regrettable. It’s a fact of life. A fact that conveniently dampens criticism.

We are further led to believe by the oil and gas industry proponents that frantic unregulated drilling is absolutely necessary to heat our homes. This is getting a little harder to dish out in light of renewables, but it is easy to consume without thinking. We do it with water too. We are sheltered from costs we don’t pay. Again, this is not a bad thing for oil and gas.

Senator Smith's Pipe Dream

Senator Wirth has said there are no silver bullets for the water problem. But Senator Smith has a silver pipeline in mind. He's said he’s just sending a message with his capital bill to pipe the Gila River to Las Cruces. He told the Las Cruces Sun, "In the event they don't come to a consensus, I'm going to look at the prospects of transferring that over to the Rio Grande."

Shorter Senator Smith: Either everybody agrees or I’ll decide for you.

He’s referring to a ‘consensus plan’ among multiple interests in four counties on how to use water rights from a  2004 federal Gila River settlement. There’s a 2014 deadline for some federal money attached to the settlement and that’s what has Smith worried - dangling dollars.

In a letter to the New Mexico Senate Finance Committee dated February 27, 2013, Las Cruces Mayor Pro Tem Sharon Thomas, City Councillors Nathan Small and Gill Sorg and Doña Ana County Commissioners Billy Garrett and Wayne Hancock, express their strong opposition to both Smith’s pipe project and Senator Cervantes’s SB440 and strong support for water planning funding. (Letter after the fold.)

SB440 was passed out of the Senate Conservation Committee with 'No Recommendation' after an unusual closed session to discuss the pending litigation with Texas. I'm betting lawyers told the Senators mostly the same thing that's in the FIR for the bill. La Jicarita has excellent coverage of this and other water issues.

Fine Fine New Mexico - HB286

The Texas Legislature is considering raising their penalties for oil and gas violations from $10,000 per day to $200,000. New Mexico's HB286 would raise the daily maximum penalty from $1000 to $10,000. I dislike Texas comparisons as much as the next New Mexican, but come on. That makes a fine of $1000 per day for violators that pollute land and water a new new low.

HB286 is scheduled to be heard by the House Judiciary Committee this morning.

Can’t Buy It Back - Water Update

I still don’t get how you can buy your way out of drought. Seems like that’s what a couple of bills are about. SB440 is for $120 million for the lower Rio Grande and SB462 would give the Carlsbad Irrigation District $2.5 million . But let's face it. No amount of money for water rights is going to make it rain. Unhappily for all of us, whether we’re in denial or not, climate change means we should set policy for big water use reductions and super-efficiencies.

It might help if we didn't pollute so much of it.

Water Right - Land Grant Parallel

Water rights remind me of land grants in that similar frantic profiteering kind of way. The legal maneuvering and gamesmanship over land in 19th century New Mexico is legendary. Multiple deals over many years gradually and nearly invisibly severed the resource from communities in the interest of privatization, subdivision and sale.  

Though historic community ditches and acequias are exempt from such administration, the result of other water transfer profiteering and speculation in the end could be the same as the land grant outcome - incremental distancing and eventual alientation of existing and future communities from what it takes to survive. Land. Water.

Cranes on Weed Ranch this morning.

Irrational Fullness of Life

The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even if it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is disquieting and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude and peace do not lead to discoveries.

CG Jung - introduction to a 1949 edition of The I Ching

Roundhouse of Cards

Damn it. I just love pecans.

Surface water users and the river itself, are the first to get screwed in a drought. Shortfalls are already hitting farmers and the river ecosystem on the lower Rio Grande. They’ve been making up the difference with three solid years of heavy groundwater pumping to keep the pecan trees alive. The pumping is further reducing flows required downstream. That’s very serious and has everyone in a Texas-sized tizzy.


Reducing city use isn’t on the table. It isn’t even in the kitchen. None of the legislative proposals to meet drought challenges specifically include reducing municipal or industrial demand. On the contrary, those are viewed almost unquestioningly as economic engines of the state. The State Engineer is empowered to speed such water transfers.

There is a fundamental bias against desert agriculture, even agriculture in the river valley where it has existed for thousands of years. The ‘antiquated agriculture” construct is at the heart of water right transfers. The belief says we don’t need local food and it isn’t economic to grow it. This view nests nicely with memes like how new construction equals economic development and people are more important than a tiny fish.   

Suggestions to “live within our means” and become more accountable for water use and misuse are met with a metaphoric snort of derision, like a Memorial maybe. Meanwhile elaborate pipeline schemes gain momentum.

Attempting to move more water when there is less water to move, seems foolhardy. As do some of our assumptions about what constitutes a healthy economy. Have the building industry and water marketeers dominated the water transfer conversation to the detriment of agricultural interests and native river ecosystems?

You might well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.