Tales from the Journey of the Dead: Ten Thousand Years on an American Desert

9. The Viejo

86 9. The Viejo Because of his service and his knowledge of New Mexico, Facundo Malgares was appointed governor of Spain’s northern frontier. In 1819, a dozen years after the incident with Pike, Governor Malgares received a request for a land grant from a tax collector living in the village of San Elizario, eighty miles south of the Jornada. Recently retired from his position as a first lieutenant in the town’s garrison, Pedro Ascue de Armendaris was asking to be honored for his years of service fighting Apaches by being given a large tract of land on the Jornada del Muerto. Such petitions were customary, and Malgares granted the request. A few months later Armendaris was given an additional tract so that by 1820 he owned nearly half a million acres. In his petition Armendaris promised to build an estancia that would service travelers along the Camino Real. The land grant skirted both sides of the Rio Grande and included the Jornada’s richest grasslands as well as an entire mountain range. Armendaris built his combination home, ranch headquarters, hostel, and stage stop near one of the Jornada’s most dominate features, Black Mesa, a low but massive flat-topped mountain that rises from the floodplain of the Rio Grande. Subtler and far more imposing in its own way is the perfectly concave bowl at the mesa’s eastern side where Armendaris chose to build his home. Even in winter the emerald tinge of vegetation colors the valley, setting it in stark contrast to the desert surrounding it. Cut into the same broad plateau from which Black Mesa rises, Valverde seems the mirror opposite of the neighboring mesa. It is as if a ragged knife had cut the rough circle of the valley and the remains had been flung down at its side to form the mesa. The Viejo 87 All traces of Armendaris’s original rancho at Valverde are gone, as are most of the remnants of a late-nineteenth-century ranching village that grew up nearby. The spot, which lies hidden in the cool shadows of Black Mesa, is now chiefly known as the location of a vicious Civil War battle. For several years Armendaris managed his land from his hacienda on the banks of the Rio Grande. During those years his home also served as a station for caravans moving in or out of the Jornada. He tended a large flock of sheep and improved the land by irrigating his fields with water from the Rio Grande. His family likely harvested local berries and grapes to make wine and aguardiente (brandy). Those and other improvements have strengthened Mexico’s claim to priority rights to water from the Rio Grande. Soon after Mexico won its independence from Spain, repeated attacks by Apaches forced Armendaris and his family to abandon Valverde . Armendaris died without returning to Valverde. His land was unoccupied when the United States acquired jurisdiction over the area as a result of the Mexican-American War. Because of the di≈culty in trying to superimpose an Anglo-American system of land law upon a Spanish and Mexican system, problems regarding the ownership of the land arose. The troubles began when the man who had married Pedro Armendaris’s only daughter claimed to be the single heir. The Spanish custom was that the oldest son inherited his father’s land, while the daughter – and far worse, the daughter’s husband – should not do so. All of this was complicated by the fact that the United States had already built and occupied Fort Craig – a strategic military base in the rising war against the Apaches – on the Armendaris grant. Throw into the mix a couple of shady lawyers from Santa Fe, and add the fact that there were new settlers – members of Colorado volunteers who held claims on the land grant as compensation for their military service – and you get a rough idea of the complexity of the problem. By the late nineteenth century the Armendaris grant became a part of the Bell Ranch holdings – a cattle operation so huge that its ‘‘southern pastures’’ encompassed nearly all of the massive ‘‘boot heel’’ of the state of New Mexico. The Armendaris grant was used as that ranch’s 88 The Viejo ‘‘summer pasture,’’ and cattle occasionally grazed on the grasslands of the grant. From then until the early 1990s, when businessman Ted Turner took possession...