All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s

5: The Town Down The Tracks: Santa Fe's Rival—Albuquerque

Chapter Five THE TOWN DOWN THE TRACKS: SANTA FE’S RIVAL—ALBUQUERQUE Albuquerque When the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe first made its way through the northern half of New Mexico, surveyors had determined to bypass Santa Fe because of its location on a high plateau at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The railroad decided the best route for its track would be down the Galisteo Basin to the Rio Grande Valley, leaving Santa Fe on a spur eighteen miles to the north and putting Albuquerque on the main line. In many respects, Albuquerque resembled Santa Fe before the coming of the railroad. Before the intrusion from Europeans, the Rio Grande Valley was home to several Pueblos. Natives supported themselves largely through farming and by trading with local Pueblo residents and nomads who traveled along the Rio Grande down into Mexico. In , fully  years after Coronado first walked through the valley and spent the winter of , Spaniards first colonized the vicinity of current-day Albuquerque with  men, women, and children . The villa of Alburqurque (the first r was dropped a century later) was founded by Governor Francisco Fernández Cuervo y Valdés, who named the town after the viceroy of New Spain, Duke of 79 Alburqurque, who had appointed Cuervo to his post. The new villa was established almost one hundred years after the colonization of Santa Fe. Situated sixty miles south of Santa Fe, Albuquerque lay in a wide valley along the banks of the Rio Grande, where it was possible to ford the river. Like Santa Fe, Albuquerque was a stopover for people traveling the Santa Fe Trail. Unlike Santa Fe, however, it was neither a main point of entry nor the end of the trail. Santa Fe retained its dominance as the trade and political seat in the territory. Still, much trade from the east continued out of Santa Fe into Albuquerque by way of the Guadalupe Trail, later to be known as the Santa Fe Trail. The main trading items consisted of finished wool textiles and piñon nuts. Also known as a farming and ranching community, Albuquerque produced a variety of delicious fruits and vegetables. Sheep were the preferred livestock raised by ranchers. Because Albuquerque sits at roughly five thousand feet elevation , some twelve hundred feet below Santa Fe, it generally is five to ten degrees warmer in the summer and ten to thirty degrees warmer in the winter, contributing to a somewhat longer growing season. 80 CHAPTER FIVE Figure : Cathedral and Plaza, Albuquerque, New Mexico, ca. . Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society, call no. CHS J. The plaza of Albuquerque sat less than one mile from the river; family land plots, however, were adjacent to the river and used for agricultural purposes. Like Santa Fe, Old Town Albuquerque was laid out around a plaza with calles (roads) radiating outward like a spider’s web. Construction of San Felipe Neri began in , and this historic church still dominates the north side of Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza and remains one of Old Town’s chief tourist attractions. One of Albuquerque’s founding families was that of Vicente Ferrer Armijo, who had migrated from Zacatecas, Mexico. His grandson Manuel, youngest of eight children, participated in the Santa Fe trade and later became involved in politics; he served three terms as governor of Nuevo Mexico. Armijo resided in the territorial capital of Santa Fe. His first term (–) ended prematurely when he resigned to avoid investigations for malfeasance, retiring to his hacienda near Albuquerque until , when he returned to the post of governor in Santa Fe. While Armijo was serving his third term, the Mexican-American War broke out. Armijo surrendered to General Stephen Watts Kearny of the United States Army, and fled to Mexico. Congress subsequently established New Mexico as a United States territory, with Santa Fe as its capital, and Albuquerque continued as a stopover on the Santa Fe Trail. After New Mexico’s entry into the Union in , the population of Albuquerque began to change dramatically, with the influx of American citizens from the eastern states. Native woolen mills were modernized with metal parts transported over the Santa Fe Trail. In the s, Simon Rosenstein and Franz Huning came to Albuquerque and became prosperous businessmen, contributing to Albuquerque’s economic growth. Even before the arrival of the railroad, Albuquerque played an important role as a military outpost. The...