On the Edge of Purgatory: An Archaeology of Place in Hispanic Colorado

Introduction: Finding Purgatory

xv Introduction: Finding Purgatory We made our way across the lonely plain, like one returning to a lost pathway. Dante, Purgatorio The identity of the Spanish-speaking explorer who named the Purgatoire River has been lost to time, but he chose well to evoke a kingdom that is neither heaven nor hell. The river flows through a region of southeastern Colorado that remains an in-between place, one of contested and shifting territories. That character is reflected in the name of the river itself. The Spanish first called it El Río de Las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio (The River of Souls Lost in Purgatory). French fur traders shortened it to Purgatoire, a word that became “Picketwire” in the mouths of later AngloAmerican settlers. Although the U.S. Geological Service chose “Purgatoire ” as the official name for the river, many locals (Keck 2001) and even some maps refer to it as the Purgatory. Its original Spanish name is the most evocative and perhaps the most fitting. The region was so sparsely populated in the 1980s that the U.S. Department of Defense purchased nearly a quarter of a million acres here from only 12 landowners (Loendorf 1997). One of the ranchers displaced when the army used that land to create the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (pcms) was Bob Hill. He too saw it as a place apart. When asked by historians about the area, he observed that it is “a piece of land that is part of history. You don’t tame this land” (Loendorf and Clise 1997:Tape 13, Side E, Page 6). My introduction to Hill’s untamed land came in the summer of 1993. At the time of my work there, the pcms was serving as an approximately 236,000-acre field training facility for army tank infantry. The parcel included much of the lower Purgatoire River region between Trinidad and La Junta, Colorado (Map 1). By the time I arrived, archaeologists and architectural historians had been surveying the pcms off and on for over a decade. Earlier that summer researchers had performed a helicopter survey, looking for historic sites visible from the air because they had at least some standing architecture. I was part of the archaeology crew tasked with locating those sites on the ground, a job much more difficult in the days before global positioning systems. We spent the summer Introduction xvi scrambling over rocks, sketching historic structures, and taking notes on artifacts. We even stayed at one of the historic sheep ranches, sharing chores like the former hired hands. That summer was my first introduction to the cultural landscape of the Purgatory. Like many of the areas in southern Colorado and northern Map 1. Regional topographic map indicating location of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (pcms), current towns, highways, and waterways. (Map by David Scheer.) Introduction xvii New Mexico where I have done archaeology, it offers a fascinating and infuriating material record of the many peoples who have historically made this region home: settled and nomadic Native Americans, Hispanics , and Anglo-Americans of various ethnic groups. In the summer of 2000, I returned to the region to begin dissertation research. What drew me back were the ghosts of the Purgatory and the clues they had left behind: stone walls, worn footpaths, lost and discarded items. What follows is the result of my research on two of those places lost to history, but they tell the story of many more sites yet to be rediscovered. This book explores Hispanic Colorado, which is both a place and a people. The place was once on the far northern reaches of New Spain, then Mexico, and then New Mexico before finally becoming the southern third of Colorado. The people are those residents who trace their roots to Spanish America—to the colonists who followed the Rio Grande north to the American Southwest. In the course of 300 years of raiding and trading, these colonists interwove with the local indigenous peoples— both nomadic groups such as the Apaches and Utes as well as the settled Pueblo peoples. Many of this group currently prefer to self-identify as Hispano or in English, Hispanic. There are many other terms to choose from. In New Mexico, people of the same ancestry often call themselves Nuevomexicanos, many among the group identify as Chicanos, while others see themselves as simply La Gente (the people). The actions of faroff politicians marooned the...