Jornada del Muerto

[2][3][4] The trail was part of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro which led northward from central colonial New Spain, present-day Mexico, to the farthest reaches of the viceroyalty in northern Nuevo México Province (the area around the upper valley of the Rio Grande).

The only reliable water source near the middle of the journey was the Ojo del Muerto, which was 6 miles (9.7 km) from the main trail and difficult to reach by wagon train.

[6] The Jornada del Muerto volcano and malpaís are located at the northern end of the desert's region and basin.

Oñate, as would later travelers, chose to cross the Jornada rather than follow the Rio Grande because the route was shorter and easier to traverse with the ox-drawn carts and livestock of the Spanish colonists.

After passing the "Jornada del Muerto" the earliest Spanish traveling north encountered the walled villages of the Pueblo dwellers, who had a well-developed agriculture and a peaceable tradition.

In 1680, during the Pueblo Revolt, 2,000 Spanish settlers, including Indians from the Isleta and Socorro Pueblos, were forced to retreat southward, across the Jornada del Muerto, The survivors resettled on the Rio Grande around and south of El Paso del Norte, 'the Pass to the North', which is now separated between the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas.

In 1692, Diego de Vargas led a new group of settlers north across the Jornada del Muerto to resettle northern New Mexico.

Leaving the Paraje de Robledo, traveling five leagues: On this day, the twelfth of the month and the sixth of the journey, we came to the Jornada del Muerto.

Somewhat later all the food for the journey was prepared, and at half past seven we left that post with considerable speed, stopping only to change horses.

The Jornada del Muerto trail was that part of the Camino Real which when traveling northward departed from the Rio Grande from the Paraje de Robledo, later the site of Fort Selden, just north of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

It passed northward up through a gap, between the Selden Hills on the west and Doña Ana Mountains to the east, on to the plain of the Jornada.

The waterless portion of the trail ends at Paraje de Fray Cristóbal on the Rio Grande, but the trail continued north along the river for five leagues, across a small portion of the Jornada del Muerto Volcano lava fields, which originally reached across the Rio Grande.

It then passed one of two ways around the Mesa, along the river or over the hills to its east, to a paraje and fords of the Rio Grande known as Val Verde from the 1780s.

In 1846, Major Philip St. George Cooke and the Mormon Battalion established a wagon road south of San Antonio on an old trail on the west bank of the Rio Grande as far as a few miles above the vicinity of modern Hatch, New Mexico, before turning west to make the route known as Cooke's Wagon Road.

On July 16, 1945 the first detonation of an atomic weapon occurred at the Trinity nuclear test site, in the northernmost part of the Jornada del Muerto Basin.