Our Travel Journal: Santa Fe, NM

I took a walk around the hotel this morning. One wing is still being renovated and I found some evidence of that sitting on the lawn ready to be installed (old fashioned bathtubs). This is already a beautifully restored building and it is just getting better. The hotel is only a few steps from the rail line designed to service the rail passengers of old. Amtrak stops here again.

Sandy and I traveled from Las Vegas, NM to Santa Fe today. Looks like a short drive, but it still took us all day.

Taking one last look around Las Vegas we visited their historic square, also under renovation. At the turn of the century, if someone knew of Las Vegas it would have been Las Vegas, New Mexico, not Nevada. Las Vegas, NM was the center of a lot of history. Doc Holiday had a dentist office on the second floor of the Plaza Drug building. It is said that Butch Cassidy, the Mormon Outlaw, tended bar here. The Santa Fe Trail came right through town and during the Mexican War Las Vegas was the first city to be occupied by U.S troops. Note the last picture, the plaque. I can't imagine what it was like to wake up one morning and have a completely new government, set of laws, and language as the backdrop of life. Must of been like England after the Battle of Hastings.

The pass between present day Santa Fe and the great plains to the east has been an important piece of real estate. First the Paleo Indians, then pit house dwellers, then pueblo builders, then the Spanish-come-Mexicans, then the United States all coveted this land and fought to take it from its predecessor and then fought to keep it. Even the North and South fought for this pass in the American Civil War. Pecos Pueblo, was a substantial community of at least 2,000 people. After the Spanish came they were a part of the successful Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The pueblo was finally abandoned in 1838. Today a national historical site, the ruins are being cared for and protected by the national park service. I can only imagine the organization it took for the inhabitants of this pueblo to support a population of 2,000. Food, water, waste, division of labor, protection, dispute resolution; all the things we have to deal with today, so did they.

The kivas, pictured below, were used by the Pueblo Indians as places of spiritual self actualization. They believed that they as a people emerged from the earth. I can't help but speculate that this could have been because the culture they replaced, either by force or just evolving from, were the pit dwellers, whose stand alone one room structures appear to have been a little kiva like. Understand this is just Carl speculation, there is nothing in the museum or in the park that advocates this.