Our Nest on Wheels

by Steve

Chaco Canyon - the center of Ancestral Puebloan culture

You may not know about Chaco Canyon or Chaco Cultural Center. But if you've traveled in the southwest United States, you will no doubt have encountered cliff dwellings or references to ancestral Puebloans. Cliff dwellings are found all over the southwest, especially in the four corners region. Mesa Verde and Chimney Rock in Colorado. Canyon de Chelley, Walnut Canyon, and Montezuma Castle in Arizona. And Hovenweep and Bears Ears in Utah. These are just a few of the hundreds of sites where ancient civilizations left their mark on the land in the form of cliff dwellings or pueblos. We've been to many of these sites over the past few years, and one of the things that they have in common is that they all make reference to Chaco Canyon as the center of Puebloan culture. Chaco Canyon is one of the oldest pueblo sites; many of the other pueblos and cliff dwellings that you can visit in the southwest were established by people from Chaco. Ancient roads connected many of these sites.

This past fall (Oct 2019) we decided to visit Chaco Canyon. Chaco Culture National Historic Park is located in northwest New Mexico, south of Farmington and northeast of Gallup. After traveling about 50 miles from Farmington (the nearest place to stay) on paved roads, you still have around 22 miles to go on dirt/gravel roads. While this doesn't sound too bad, these dirt roads turned out to be some of the roughest washboard roads we've been on. The park website advises you to check weather and road conditions before coming to the park, as rains may make some of the roads impassable.

Chaco Canyon was home to many large, multi-room pueblos. Like the one pictured above, they had hundreds of rooms and multiple large kivas. While these are not as well preserved as the ones at Mesa Verde, they are larger and the number of visitors is so much lower that you have an all-around better experience. Here you can explore on your own, staying out of places you should not go, but moving at your own desired pace. We spent an entire day here and could easily have spent more time.

 Here's a very large kiva. Could probably hold a couple hundred people.

We climbed up the canyon walls to get a better look at this large semi-circular shaped pueblo. Note the large courtyards. As you might expect, it faces south.

You may have noticed that we use the term "Ancestral Puebloans" when referring to the peoples who lived here, rather than the term "Anasazi," which had been in use for many years. There's a bit of history to this change. When Europeans moved across the west exploring this vast country, they encountered many different people groups. After meeting a tribe in one area, the Europeans would typically ask their hosts for the name of the next tribe that they would encounter on their journey.  If the two tribes were enemies, the name that the Europeans were told was typically not how the next tribe referred to themselves. Rather it was often a derogatory name, like their word for "enemy" or "idiot." Despite being incorrect, these names often stuck and were used by European settlers for a long time.

The word "Anasazi" is the Navajo term for "ancient enemy."  Not surprisingly, this is not how the people they referred to themselves. When the park service finally asked the current descendants (there are 19 Pueblo tribes; you can learn more about them here) what their ancestors should be called, the term "Ancestral Puebloan" was chosen as the best way to refer to the people groups who lived in these large pueblos all across the southwest.

We thoroughly enjoyed Chaco Culture National Historic Park. While getting there has its challenges, once you are in the park the roads and facilities are good. There is a small campground where you can stay overnight, which would be a good option for a visit of two or three days. I would not, however, recommend taking a motorhome there.

by Steve

In our last post, we highlighted two of the sites that we recently visited near to Santa Fe--Pecos National Historic Park and La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs. In this post, we'll cover two other sites that should be on your "must do" list for Santa Fe.

We heard about a fairly new National Monument, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, that is located about 30 miles from Santa Fe. Designated a National Monument in 2001, it is still managed by the Bureau of Land Management and not the National Park Service. As such, it's a bit primitive. While there are pit toilets and picnic tables, there's no visitor center nor running water. Access is limited to the number of available parking spaces, which keeps it relatively uncrowded, but also may mean that you wait in line in your car at the entrance gate on a busy day. When a car leaves, another one is allowed in.

The term "Tent Rocks" refers to these tepee-like formations. The area is made of many, many layers of volcanic ash, some harder than others, and some with boulders randomly mixed in. Over the years, water has eroded the softer layers, but the boulders protect the pumice under them from rain, leaving these cone-shaped formations, most of which still have their capstone. We were told that these rock formations exist only two places in the world: at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks near Santa Fe and in Turkey. For most Americans, the ones near Santa Fe will be easier to get to.

by Steve

It's the end of December, and we've been in Tucson since late October. But we're still playing "catch-up" with blog posts about our travels this fall. So if it looks like we're still in the middle of New Mexico, that's why.

When you cross New Mexico in Interstate-10, you see a lot of desert. But if you look closely . . . well, you'll see a lot of desert close up. But just off the beaten path are some interesting oddities, one of which is just north of Deming, NM, and is called "City of Rocks." This collection of house-sized boulders in the middle of the desert is said to be the handiwork of some ancient volcano that dumped the rocks in a pattern that sometimes seems to resemble city streets with intersecting avenues.

City of Rocks is a New Mexico state park. The state has done a great job of creating an interesting campground, using various nooks and crannies for campsites in and among the rocks. We didn't stay there, but it looked really cool, though probably better suited for smaller rigs.

Modern man is not the first to camp among these rocks. If you look closely enough in the right places, you can find where ancient people ground their corn in the rocks.

I would imagine that corn ground with rocks is a bit crunchy, and probably hard on the teeth, but you make do with what you have. I could describe this place a bit more, but I'd rather let the pictures do the "talking" so you can get a better sense of this other-worldly place.

The year was 1939. The SS Columbus was a large (775 ft) luxury liner of the German fleet, carrying passengers on cruises to the Caribbean. She was the first German cruise ship with an onboard swimming pool, and it had large dance floors, dining halls, and plenty of amenities to make her a popular ship. She left New York City on August 19, 1939, for her fourth cruise of the season to the Caribbean.

The world, however, was about to change. On August 27, the captain received orders to take the ship to Germany or, failing that, to a neutral port. On September 1, as Germany invaded Poland and World War II began, the ship off-loaded all her passengers in Havana, Cuba, and headed to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Once war had broken out, all German merchant and cruise ships were subject to seizure by the UK and i's allies, and a return trip to Germany across the Atlantic would be highly risky. German ships all over the world were all in the same predicament, something I (Steve) had not known before. 

For the next four months, the German government tried to work out a diplomatic solution to bring their civilian fleet home, but to no avail, and on December 14, the German high command gave the SS Columbus approval to attempt a run home across the Atlantic. The US, while neutral at this point in the war, tailed the ship as she made her way through Florida waters and headed out to open sea. The SS Columbus was intercepted by a British destroyer just 300 miles east of Virginia. Rather than let the ship fall into enemy hands, the crew of the Columbus opened the sea valves in the engine room and set fires on the ship to prevent anyone from boarding, and she slipped beneath the surface around midnight on December 20. The US Navy rescued the crew and transported them back to New York, where they had begun their voyage four months earlier.

The US put the crew onto Ellis Island while they tried to figure out what to do with this German crew. While the British government would not allow any men of military age to be returned to Germany, they did allow 58 older members of the crew to return. After a month of negotiations, all parties agreed that the crew could be returned to Germany via a Pacific route, thus avoiding a neutrality violation of the Atlantic blockage. So 513 crew members were loaded onto a train bound for San Francisco, where they were housed on Angel Island. After months of failed attempts to return the crew to Germany via the Pacific, and with growing anti-German sentiment in the US, it was decided that the crew could no longer stay in San Francisco, and so a more remote location was needed. A recently abandoned Civilian Conservation Corp camp at Fort Stanton was chosen. (This is the fort whose desirable supply contracts had earlier provided fuel for the Lincoln County War, which made Billy the Kid famous.)

The first group of German sailors arrive at Fort Stanton at the end of January, 1941, and began rehabbing buildings to house the entire group. By mid-March, the rest of the crew had arrived, and they had rehabbed or built barracks, a kitchen, laundry, and washrooms. During 1941, they built an entire community, including a bakery, library, general store, and even a swimming pool. The captain kept his crew active as they used their various skills to improve life around the camp. Carpenters, cooks, blacksmiths, and mechanics all continued to practice their trades and teach others as well. The captain even bought two Model-Ts and taught the crew how to drive. Money for the renovations was provided by the US government, the German government, and the NDL cruise line.

With the US entry into WWII at the end of 1941, things changed a bit for the crew. They were now classified as Enemy Aliens rather than Distressed Seamen, and there were more restrictions on their movements outside the camp. But otherwise life remained much the same for their four years in New Mexico, as they kept active and participated in hiking, concerts, swimming, boxing, tennis, and learning to drive.

Between 1942 and 1945, a number of changes happened at Fort Stanton. The INS transferred other German civilian crew members to Fort Stanton and relocated some of the SS Columbus crew to other interment camps or back to Germany via a parole program. In 1944, the US Government constructed an isolation camp at Fort Stanton to house American Nazis, which was very unpopular with the other internees. Following Germany's surrender in May 1945, the remaining German internees were all returned to Germany by the end of August. This was not the end of the camp, however, as the US government used it to house 17 Japanese Americans for 2 months until deporting them to Japan. That's right, we deported American citizens simply because they were of Japanese ancestry and were considered trouble makers.

This was not the end of Fort Stanton, as it continued to serve as a TB sanitarium until 1953. It's now a New Mexico State Historic Park and is slowly undergoing repairs and renovations, as time and limited budgets allow. I think if they really want to get it fixed up and looking good again, they're going to have to bring in a crew of German sailors!

We spent the first 3 weeks of October in Ruidoso, New Mexico. We didn't know too much about the place before we went there, but we did know a few things. It's up in the mountains, so it's much cooler than the desert regions of New Mexico, and it's on the way to Tucson, where we would be spending the winter. We needed a place where Jane could work (yes, you heard right...) and where there would be enough to do to keep me (Steve) interested (and out of the house) and not too much to tempt Jane away from her writing assignment.

From Ruidoso, I was able to make a day trip to the Trinity Site, place of the first nuclear bomb test. You can read that post here. Today's post is about another day trip, this one to Lincoln, NM, dubbed the "most dangerous street in America" by president Rutherford B Hayes. This street in this tiny town doesn't look dangerous now, but at one time there was open warfare here.

Old Lincoln, as it's called now, sat in the middle of Lincoln county. which at the time covered the entire southeast quarter of the state of New Mexico.  Lincoln county had one law enforcement officer, which meant that getting caught for a crime was not too likely. A corrupt local government was controlled by the group that ran the only store in the county and enjoyed their monopoly on selling supplies to the nearby army fort, as well as buying cattle cheaply from rustlers and then selling at inflated prices. When a stranger came to town to establish a competing store, the war for control of Lincoln began.

I don't intend to retell the whole Lincoln County War, but it's a fascinating bit of history that I never knew about, and I'm sure you'll find it interesting. Read the full details here. You probably won't recognize the names of most of the characters in this story except for one, Billy the Kid.

By Steve

Earlier this year, we wrote a piece called "It all started here," which highlighted the various competing versions of when and where European immigrants began to colonize the part of North America that eventually became the United States. Whether it be Plymouth, Jamestown, Roanoke, or St. Augustine, every place has its own logic and interest in claiming to be the first site of European settlement. We thought that we had it all figured out . . . and then we visited Santa Fe.

We spent a week in Santa Fe in September. After spending most of the summer in Colorado, we had begun working out way southwest to Tucson, our winter home this year. Neither of us had ever been to Santa Fe, and we were both looking forward to it. We had to fit our visit in before the craziness of the Albuquerque Balloon Festival began (and prices went up), so we had only seven days there. But we found that we really liked the place, although we can't figure out exactly why. It certainly wasn't due to the weather, which gave us rain on five of our seven days. It might be partly due to the Santa Fe style of architecture, seen clearly in the Museum of Art.

Santa Fe was established in 1607, making it the second oldest city in the US, after St. Augustine, which was founded in 1565. But the Spanish were exploring in the New Mexico area, including Santa Fe, much earlier, as early at 1528. That puts them 37 years ahead of St. Augustine and a full 80 years ahead of Jamestown. Typical of a Spanish city of that era, the center of Santa Fe has an open square (plaza). Along one side is the Palace of the Governors, which was the seat of government during the early 17th century, when Spain ruled the place. It wasn't much of a palace, with dirt floors and livestock roaming in and out. But it still stands, and this is what it looks like today.

The people sitting under the long porch are street vendors, each with wares for sale spread out on a blanket. It may be coincidence, or possibly by convention, but it seems that the shady area under the porch was reserved for street vendors with Native American ancestry, while street vendors who are more recent immigrants were selling elsewhere around the square.

Santa Fe is the capitol of New Mexico. The government is not housed in the old Palace of the Governors, but rather has more modern and spacious digs a few blocks away.

It is now home to a gift shop, with an odd layout and low ceilings. But it is 371 years old, and housing styles have changed a bit since then. This house was built and standing for 10 years before the Spanish began to lay out the street plan for St. Augustine. So maybe it all really started here.