History of New Mexico
By about 700 to 900 CE, the Pueblo people began to abandon ancient pit houses dug in cliffs and build apartment-like structures with rectangular rooms.
These villages were often constructed on defensive sites—on rocky outcrops, flat summits, or steep-sided mesas, locations that would afford the people protection from their northern enemies.
Long before the Spanish arrival, descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) were using irrigation canals, check dams and hillside terracing as techniques for bringing water to what was an arid, agriculturally marginal area.
The historic peoples encountered by the Europeans did not make up unified tribes in the modern sense, as they were highly decentralized, operating in bands of a size adapted to their semi-nomadic cultures.
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, the European explorers, missionaries, traders and settlers referred to the different groups of Apache and Navajo by various names, often associated with distinctions of language or geography.
Oñate pioneered El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, "The Royal Road of the Interior Land," a 700-mile (1,100 km) trail from the rest of New Spain to his remote colony.
In battles with the Acomas, Oñate lost 11 soldiers and two servants, killed hundreds of Indigenous peoples, and punished every man over 25 years of age by the amputation of their left foot.
[15] The exploitative nature of Spanish rule resulted in their conducting nearly continuous slave raids and reprisals against the nomadic Indian tribes on the borders, especially the Apache and Navajo.
The isolated colony of New Mexico was characterized by "elaborate webs of ethnic tension, friendship, conflict, and kinship" among Indigenous groups and Spanish colonists.
In July 1692, Diego de Vargas led Spanish forces that surrounded Santa Fe, where he called on the Indians to surrender, promising clemency if they would swear allegiance to the king of Spain and return to the Christian faith.
[20] While the Pueblo had only achieved a short-lived independence from the Spaniards, they gained a measure of freedom from future Spanish efforts to impose their culture and religion following the reconquest.
In 1807, when Pike and his party crossed into the San Luis Valley of northern New Mexico they were arrested and taken to Santa Fe, and then sent south to Chihuahua where they appeared before the Commandant General Salcedo.
Most New Mexicans distrusted the central government by now but that soon turned to fury when, one year into his reign, Martinez sparked a needless war with a neighboring Indigenous tribe out of incompetence and naïveté.
The wagon train, supplied for a journey of about half the actual distance between Austin and Santa Fe, followed the wrong river, back-tracked, and arrived in New Mexico to find the Mexican governor restored and hostile.
He then divided his forces into four commands: one, under Colonel Sterling Price, appointed military governor, was to occupy and maintain order in New Mexico with his approximately 800 troops; a second group under Colonel Alexander William Doniphan, with a little over 800 troops was ordered to capture El Paso, in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico and then join up with General Wool;[36] the third, of about 300 dragoons mounted on mules, Kearny led under his command to California.
The Mormon Battalion, mostly marching on foot under Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke, was directed to follow Kearny with wagons to establish a new southern route to California.
Provisional governor Charles Bent, a longtime resident of New Mexico, implored U.S. army officers to "respect the rights of the inhabitants" and predicted "serious consequences" if measures were not taken to prevent abuses.
During the American Civil War, Confederate troops from Texas commanded by Gen. Henry Sibley briefly occupied southern New Mexico in July 1861, pushing up the Rio Grande valley as far as Santa Fe by February 1862.
As Union troops were withdrawn to fight elsewhere, Kit Carson helped to organize and command the 1st New Mexican Volunteers to engage in campaigns against the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche in New Mexico and Texas as well as participating in the Battle of Valverde against the Confederates.
The Colfax County War from 1873 to 1888 featured disputes, including several murders and armed confrontations, between settlers, Anglo and Hispanic, within the borders of the Maxwell Land Grant, owned by foreign investors.
[48][49] In San Miguel County, the night-riding Las Gorras Blancas (The White Hats) were a response to the land grabs of the Anglo Americans and the Santa Fe Ring.
From 1919 to 1924 night riders associated with a shadowy organization called La Mano Negra ("Black Hand") cut fences, burned barns, and threatened the new owners of the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant.
[55] To provide the forts and reservations with food, the federal government contracted for thousands of head of cattle, and Texas cattlemen began entering New Mexico with their herds.
In 1916 Mexican military leader Pancho Villa led an invasion across the border into Columbus, New Mexico, where they burned some homes and killed several Americans.
In the 20th century, American and British artists and writers, and retirees were attracted to the cultural richness of the area, the beauty of the landscapes, and dry warm climate.
Nuevomexicano politicians and community leaders recruited the rural masses into the war cause overseas and on the home front, including the struggle for woman suffrage.
For Spanish speakers, it evoked Spain, not Mexico, recalling images of a romantic colonial past and suggesting a future of equality in Anglo-dominated America.
They included Midwestern farmers who tried to cultivate humid-area crops to the desert climate, Texas oilmen, tuberculosis patients who sought healing in the dry air (before an appropriate antibiotic was discovered),[62] artists who made Taos a national cultural center, New Dealers who sought to modernize the state as fast as possible and improve infrastructure, soldiers and airmen from all over who came for training at the many military bases, noted scientists who came to Los Alamos to build a super weapon, and stayed on, and retirees from colder climes.
After it passed, there was quickly a dramatic increase in political participation by both Anglo and Hispanic women, as well as strong mobilization efforts by the major parties to gain the support of the female voters.
The Sandia National Laboratories, founded in 1949, carried out nuclear research and special weapons development at Kirtland Air Force Base just south of Albuquerque.
