leyendas 2015

Courtesy photoLong John Dunn of Taos looking over the bridge and road he built across the Río Grande. Photo by Max Evans, 1950.

Leyendas2 0 15 Tr a d i c i o n e s • T he Ta o s Ne w s

2 Leyendas

Ageless talesRemembering the Leyendas of Taos

Taos has a captivating book of unvarnished stories and animated legends.

Those of us who call this beautiful valley home have heard many fables. Some might be called myth, while others are so true they can be literally touched.

Some of the verifiable stories even exude a mythical quality.

Whether it be seemingly insurmountable bridge building, inexplicable cattle mutilations, the fire tower’s lonely watch over the forests that roll over the mountainsides, how trees can date historic structures, the calling of a significant

sanctuary or one man’s mission to simply beautify a street, Taos is a book full of allure.

In the Taos tradition, welcome to another installment of “Leyendas,” in which the real and imagined sometimes intertwine but nonetheless celebrate the legends that make this place a unique and enduring palette of colorful characters.

By retelling stories and searching for more answers — more possibilities — our community continues to breathe this valley’s mystique into the lungs of future generations.

— Scott Gerdes, special sections editor

‘After all, I believe that legends and myths are

largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be

received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and

must always reappear.’ — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

The Río Grande Gorge Bridge

3Leyendas

It started with a saw and the relentless work of Elisha Randall. We’ve grown a little since then, but our values remain the same: Family, Friendships and Taos.

Stop by for a cup of coffee and learn about the Randall difference.

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94 Years, 3 Generations,

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StaffRobin Martin, owner • Chris Baker, publisher • Joan Livingston, editor • Chris Wood, advertising manager • Scott Gerdes, special sections editor Michelle M. Gutierrez, lead editorial designer • Virginia Clark, copy editor, Karin Eberhardt, production manager • Katharine Egli, photographerCody Hooks, Andrew Oxford, J.R. Logan, staff writers

Contributing writersYvonne Pesquera, Cindy Brown, Teresa Dovalpage

Contents

Tradicioneshonrar a nuestros héroes

F I F T E E N T H A N N U A L

4

Cattle mutilations mystery by Cody Hooks

6

The cottonwoods of Burch Street by Yvonne Pesquera

10

Forest watch towers, the silent sentries by Andrew Oxford

12

Río Grande Gorge Bridge’s 50-year span by Andrew Oxford

16

San Francisco de Asis Church anniversary by Teresa Dovalpage

18

Tree-ring dating of the Ranchos Valley grist mill by J.R. Logan

8

Taos “outlaw” John Dunn by Cindy Brown

4 Leyendas

Katharine EgliCow crossing sign, complete with UFO and Hula Hoop.

Cattle mutilations Legitimate lore or cold-file mysteries

By Cody Hooks

Imagine this — it’s a July evening in Arroyo Hondo. The waning sky and moon are beginning to give way to night. A rancher latches a gate behind him after checking the livestock for the evening. It all seems fine, especially the 6-month-old bull. But in the

morning light of a new day, it becomes clear that nothing about his pasture is fine, especially the bull.

No signs of struggle mar the pasture beyond the willows where the bull lay dead. Skin was missing from around the jaw. One eye, the tongue and its penis were totally gone, nowhere in the field to be found. The animal’s rear end was cored out. The scene was absolutely bloodless.

The mutilated cows of Taos were serious business in

the mid-’90s. Ever since one of the first reported cases in 1976 near Pot Mountain came to light, the mystery of how cows ended up dead and disfigured only grew more stupefying.

The Hondo case shared the same elemental traits with cattle mutilations spread across the globe. From Mora to Brazil and Dulce to France, mutilated cows and other large mammals had organs and skin missing — removed with surgical precision — and bones exposed, as white and clean as an alabaster gravestone.

Despite the mutilations appearance across time and space, no one has come up with a definitive explanation for what happened.

Most folks who call themselves level-headed chalk it up to predators. But what an imperfect explanation, as many of the ranchers whose cows turn up dead say the eery ease of the fields look nothing like a predator kill they had ever seen. Most everyone else hypothesizes UFOs. But that, too, fails to take the story from A to Z. Perhaps it was simply a crime spree with dedicated copycats; a government coverup of mad cow disease; a secret pseudo-military base in Archuleta Mesa; santanists, or just demented pranksters.

But do ambiguous theories really satisfy curiosity? Perhaps it is the very veil of mystique that has lodged the story of cow mutilations so firmly in our local mythology.

5Leyendas

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Phaedra Greenwood, a local author and former reporter with The Taos News, started looking into the phenomenon in 1995 when one reported mutilation turned into several. The tell-tale signs of mutilations kept turning up in Sheriff’s reports and call logs. Greenwood even

joined a team of local police and investigators, recording the sites and talking to neighbors when dispatched to another weird cow death.

Of course, not all mutilations were real. Some were simply the work of coyotes and vermin. But that didn’t stop folks from being on alert. And there were official pushes to verify what it could be, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

A former district attorney investigator and judge, John Paternoster, had a client who was a rancher north of Questa. Like so many other human victims of these mutilations, the rancher lost several head of cattle to mutilations. That was serious business, especially when every lost cow meant less profit — realistically, most “profits” were just enough to get by until the next year.

Paternoster called for an official investigation into the phenomena, saying law enforcement ought to treat each mutilation as a crime scene and use an official protocol, thus legitimizing the investigations and hopefully find a way to the root of the costly mystery. Enticing theories aside, Paternoster once told Greenwood, “There are few frontiers available to curious minds, and this is one of them.”

But the insatiable desire to understand the mystery wasn’t isolated to Taos. Gabe Valdez, an FBI investigator, spent years traveling across New Mexico talking to ranchers and everyone else who might have had some piece to the puzzle. The New Mexico Livestock Board kept their own tabs on the happenings, and a Los Alamos chemist did his own analysis of dead and mutilated cattle on the side. Taos even hosted a conference for freelance investigators and the generally curious alike.

Understandably, fear and confusion were palpable. Folks got spooked. Not only were their animals dead and cut up in the strangest of ways, but the mutilations were oftentimes associated with people seeing strange lights in the sky — white, blue and red orbs, disks, things zooming past the stars hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour. Several paranormal investigators, including Chris O’Brien from the San Luis Valley in Colorado, documented story after story of black helicopters landing and taking off from the very

fields where mutilated cows had been found.

The weirdness didn’t stop there — just north of the state line, one rancher told a story of finding his herd circling methodically around a dead and mutilated cow, and giving out the most mournful mooing he’d ever heard. And throughout official probes and investigations, from the late 1970s when the FBI first got publicly involved onward, relevant files went missing while investigators got death threats in the night.

As the Los Alamos chemist told Greenwood in ’96, “The deeper you get into it, the more mysterious it gets.”

As the millennium approached, reports of mutilations stopped. Greenwood didn’t get the calls she used to, and ultimately, the phenomena of the mid-90s dried up. The legitimate financial blow of losing a cow to a mutilation — as well as the national hype at the time — was lost in the day-to-day as folks went on with their lives, planting another field and raising another herd.

The reality of cattle mutilations gave way to local lore.

Myth and mystery, though, have a way of coming back into play every now and again. Cattle mutilation investigator Christopher O’Brien wrote in “The Mysterious Valley,” his 1996 book about the phenomena, “Maybe strange events that occur through time, and subsequently become a part of the mythic tradition, are somehow sparked by a veil of unconscious cultural uncertainty.”

If everyone gets to telling these stories and asking these questions again, who knows what else they might start to see?

Phaedra GreenwoodNewspaper clipping of local cow mutilation.

As the Los Alamos chemist told Greenwood

in ’96, “The deeper you get into it, the more

mysterious it gets.

Phaedra Greenwood

Arroyo Hondo residents Sara and Alexander Levy monitor a mutilated cow for radiation on Aug. 5, 1995.

6 Leyendas

By Yvonne Pesquera

Alvin Burch and his wife Sarah came to Taos in 1912 and gave it a gift that continues to keep on giving. One hundred years ago, Burch planted the Río Grande cottonwood trees along his namesake street. Today, the towering majestic cottonwoods make Burch Street the prettiest

street in the Town of Taos.

The area from Burch to Montoya streets was once an alfalfa field. Burch surveyed the land into lots for his seven children. Over time, the extended family lived along the dirt road of Burch Street –– as well as other families, too.

Burch was an entrepreneur. He began a mercantile on Taos Plaza in a building that still bears his name on the exterior facade. Today, the Burch Building is home to Taos Mountain Outfitters on North Plaza. He started with that one store, but

eventually had stores in Arroyo Seco, Arroyo Hondo, Ranchos de Taos and Peñasco.

“Remember, in that era people didn’t have a whole lot of mechanical transportation. So they would use wagons. And if they had a store close by, they would go to that store to get their merchandise. His stores were run by the family, like my mother Pearl, who could speak Tiwa and Spanish,” says Benton Bond, Burch’s grandson and former owner of Dow Bond Plumbing.

Photogenic streetAlvin Burch’s cottonwood trees continue to enchant Taos

Michelle M. GutierrezBurch Street in the fall.

7Leyendas

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For this article, Bond and his wife, Arabella, graciously gave of their time to share family history (as well as rare photographs of Taos) –– thus shaping an understanding of how Burch quite literally planted a legacy for all of Taos to enjoy.

The junction of Kit Carson Road (U.S. Highway 64) and Burch Street is a busy three-way-stop intersection today. In Burch’s time, that portion of highway also saw a lot of activity. A notable entrepreneur, he built Burch Camp, which still stands today as the Adobe Wall Motel on Kit Carson Road.

Burch Camp was a wagon stop on the way from Taos to Eagle Nest. People would pull in with their wagons, buy supplies from the Burch Store and stay in those little Burch Camp units.

Burch planted cottonwoods throughout the motel property, and his main residence was right next to Burch Camp (where Lora Realty is now). It was there that he raised his family. Among them was Pearl –– Benton Bond’s mother and Darren Bond’s grandmother.

Darren Bond is the owner of Gearing Up Bicycle Shop (129 Paseo del Pueblo Sur). He says, “I’m 48 years old and Burch Street has always had a canopy from the trees. But they’re a lot bigger than they were 40 years ago.”

The cottonwoods flourish so well because the water table is only 15 to 20 feet deep –– and the trees have very shallow roots.

“On Burch Street, my grandfather and his son, Clyde, planted the trees because he just had this big open area and he wanted trees. It is a very fertile area from the dirt from the mountain and the stream that comes down from Río Pueblo,” Benton says.

Burch also owned a Ford dealership, which is now Cabot Plaza on Kit Carson Road off Taos Plaza intersection.

Burch Street itself was a commercial district, not the residential street it is today. It housed the Hanlon Funeral Home; and Clyde Burch and his wife, Eunice, had the first flower shop in Taos, called The Lilac Shop.

For the Taos Historical Society, Benton Bond serves as vice president and Darren Bond serves as treasurer.

“How important are trees to Taos? The trees are significant. They add shade, but they also just add to the scenery. Between the trees and the hollyhocks, there’s no place like it,” says Darren Bond.

There used to be cottonwoods along Kit Carson Road (in front of present-day La Buena Vida Condos). They were starting to fall due to age and had to be taken down a number of years ago .

“All of the cousins lived up and down the street and we used to play in the cottonwoods. There used to be a deep pile of fall leaves we used to jump in,” Benton says. “I can still visualize it in my mind. And well, the beauty, all you have to do is look up. It’s still there.”

Courtesy of Benton and Arabella BondPortrait of Alvin Burch by Irwin Myers.

The cottonwoods flourish so well because the water table is only 15 to 20 feet

deep—and the trees have very shallow roots.

8 Leyendas

By Cindy Brown

When it comes to Taos legends, they don’t get much bigger than the story of Long John Dunn. Perhaps because his actual life was so incredible or because his biography was written by a good friend

shortly after Dunn’s death, the tale doesn’t seem to need much embellishment. As his friend and biographer Max Evans says, “He lived, in his 90 or more years, one of the most incredible lives of any of the old-time Westerners ... John was one of the best gunfighters, gamblers, bronc riders, ropers, stagecoach drivers, trail-herd drivers, saloonkeepers, outlaws, and ironically, hardheaded businessman.”

Before coming to Taos, Dunn by his own admission, had killed several men and was a horse thief, smuggler and gambler. But although his life was a rough one, there was always a thread of nobility in his actions. He first killed a man when involved in a fist fight with his brother-in-law who had been abusing Dunn’s sister. One of his main purposes in making money by whatever means possible was to send it back home to his mother to support the family. Dunn’s father was a Civil War veteran and died shortly after the war due to his injuries, leaving the family constantly poor.

Dunn was born in 1857 in Victoria, Texas, to a family of farmers. “In Long John Dunn of Taos: from Texas Outlaw to New Mexico Hero,” by Max Evans, Dunn is quoted as saying “We were trying to make a living on a little rolling dry-land, slow-starvation farm.” Dunn was hired out to work on farms for others. As an inexperienced teenager, he was often low in the farm pecking order – doing the hardest work, receiving the lowest pay and sleeping in the barn. After one of his early employers kept him working day and night, and then underpaid him, Dunn stole the man’s stallion and headed west.

His travels led him to a ranch near the Río Grande in Texas and then on a trail-drive north to the N-Bar-N ranch in Montana with 2,000 steers. As Evans says, “The trail drive tested every good and bad quality in a man. During the trails of hundreds of miles across open spaces, the best or the

worst was certain to come out.” Dunn became well-known for his expert use of both his gun and rope, as well as having a keen eye for outlaws lying in wait to rob the cowboys.

This trail drive stopped in Dodge City, Kansas, where he saw his first train, which he tried successfully to lasso. Dodge City is also where he first learned to gamble. It was on his return to Texas that Dunn encountered his drunk and abusive brother-in-law in the street. Dunn got a good punch in to the jaw and the other man went down, hitting his head on a hitching rail. He died and Dunn was sentenced to life imprisonment at the state penitentiary. Using a smuggled file, Dunn cut himself free of his leg irons and made his escape by jumping into the surging river nearby.

After a period of gambling and smuggling in Mexico, a time marked by brawls, double-crossing and tequila-drinking cats and another escape from the law, Dunn was smuggled into New Mexico by a man headed to Elizabethtown to investigate a gold-mining boom. After becoming friends with the town marshal, who was also on the run from the law in Texas, Dunn won enough money gambling to open his own saloon.

In 1889, Dunn rode through Eagle Nest into Taos Valley. He noticed how isolated the town was and began to work on an idea to bring transportation to Taos. Dunn learned that there was a bridge across the Río Grande at Taos Junction owned by a Mr. Meyers. When Dunn tried to buy the bridge, the price was set at $15,000. With money won during a gambling tour across several states, Dunn eventually bought the bridge from Meyers for the reduced price of $2,000. He found out that the price was lowered because another bridge was being built farther north near Arroyo Hondo. Dunn purchased that bridge too, only to have both bridges destroyed by a flood. Undeterred, Dunn rebuilt the bridge in Arroyo Hondo and charged a toll to people and animals to cross. He established stagecoach service and mail delivery from the train station in Tres Piedras to Taos. He also built a hotel near the bridge and arranged the stagecoach schedule, so that the passengers on the last coach of the day found it most convenient to stay overnight at the hotel before continuing on to Taos. With his stagecoach, hotel and bridge tolls, Dunn was quite well-off. He also owned four saloons

and a gambling hall. As he had a virtual monopoly on travel in and out of Taos, he had the opportunity to meet the well-known artists who were coming to Taos to paint. He also brought them art supplies and took their paintings into the outside world to sell.

Dunn would later own the first car in Taos, transitioning his business from stagecoach to automobile. As time went on and more roads reached Taos, he felt that something was lost. He said the roads “changed peoples’ personalities – friendships broke up when folks no longer needed to depend on each other for company, sympathy and entertainment.” Later in his life, Dunn married a woman named Adelaide and had four daughters and a son, John Dunn Jr. The boy died when he was 11 years old, breaking Dunn’s heart.

Evans recently met with Polly Raye, the owner of the John Dunn shops to share some of the stories that were not told in his biography from 1959. Evans says that Dunn became good friends with Mabel Dodge Luhan. “Between them, they controlled the art scene in Taos. John helped her with Georgia O’Keeffe, Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, Leopold Stokowski and others,” he said. According to Evans, there was a third player in the power structure, sort of a triumvirate who was reputed to be a witch with mystical powers. “Together they controlled all of Northern

John DunnFrom outlaw to the king of Taos

Courtesy photoDunn was known to be a gambling man.

‘…if you spend the four seasons of nature in Taos, it won’t matter

whether you reside there permanently or not, its powerful

earth-forms and ethereal mountain mists will follow and enwrap you

forever. Long John Dunn is an immutable part of the magic matrix.’

—Biographer Max Evans

9Leyendas

Katharine EgliThe John Dunn Shops also hold many events like the glam Trash Fashion show .

New Mexico,” he said.

Raye has collected stories about Dunn and honors his memory by preserving his history in the John Dunn Shops between Bent Street and the Taos Plaza. The walkway that connects the two is called Juan Largo Lane, after Long John Dunn, who was 6-feet, 4-inches tall and “ladder-like straight.” She said that according to her discussion with Evans, “John Dunn was highly respected in the region. In his later years he held ‘court’ four to five days a week near or on the plaza. Everyone came up to ‘the King’ to talk and pay

their respects. He showed a lot of dignity.” Dunn died on May 21, 1953, and tributes to him covered most of the front page of El Crepusculo, the forerunner of The Taos News.

In 1982 Harvey Mudd asked Raye to buy the John Dunn House because they shared a philosophy about creating community and supporting merchants, rather than running a business only to make money. She owned the Apple Tree Restaurant, now Lambert’s, and was interested in creating a beautiful walkway to connect Bent Street with Taos Plaza.

Over the years, she has preserved John Dunn’s historic

home, expanded a second building where he stabled his horses to include 10 more shops, and built a third structure for more shops on a formerly abandoned lot. John Dunn’s porch is still visible, wrapping around three sides of his home. It houses Coffee Cats and Op Cit book shop. Mudd’s original seven stores have changed ownership over the years, but as in the early 1970s, they still sell leather, maps, fabric and books. Raye says that with a brick walkway through the shops rather than a road, friendships and connections are nurtured, bringing back some of the feeling of comaraderie that existed before there were so many roads to Taos.

State Representative Roberto “Bobby” J. Gonzales

District 42, Democrat

Roberto “Bobby” J. Gonzales

State Representative District #42 Democrat

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10 Leyendas

By Andrew Oxford

Each wildfire season for decades, a lookout on Picuris Peak kept watch over the Carson National Forest.

With views into Colorado, down to Los Alamos and beyond, the peak was a prime spot to keep an eye on much of the forest’s 1.5

million acres.

It was not idle gazing, as former lookout Eli Romero recalls.

Romero staffed the tower for approximately three decades starting in 1958, residing there most days each week between April and November, manning a radio between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., but living on the peak round-the-clock.

As more traffic flowed through the forest and more roads were created, the lookout’s job became busier, says Romero, who lives in Vadito.

And while a fire lookout may conjure thoughts of a part-hermit-part-bureaucrat residing on a far-flung mountain, Romero says his job was not lonely.

Situated as it is between Taos and Peñasco, the lookout tower drew plenty of visitors. Romero recalls a priest who liked to drive up the forest road to his lookout to view the stars.

“And my two oldest boys learned a lot from the tower,” he says.

It was a job that required not just watching the horizon, but knowing the ground — being able to pinpoint the source of smoke in some remote canyon and guide firefighters to a blaze via radio.

It was a job that entailed an intimate knowledge of the forest.

This summer, though, the Picuris lookout is empty as it has been for most fire seasons since 1990.

The Carson National Forest has two other lookouts, one on Kiowa Mountain near El Rito and another at Cedar Rock near Navajo City.

The Picuris lookout is an L-4 cabin constructed in 1932. L-4 cabins were designed in 1929 as 14-foot by 14-foot frame cabins. Romero says it had few amenities when he started working there in the late 1950s, but that it was

eventually outfitted with a propane tank and kitchen. With horizontal windows on all sides, it is certainly a room with a view at an elevation of 10,801 feet.

The Kiowa lookout is what is known as a 7x7, referring to its dimensions in feet. Constructed in 1923, the tower rises 51 feet above the 9,735-foot peak.

Neither are staffed.

But fire lookouts are not just relics of the past rendered totally useless by satellites and drones.

This summer was the 14th season Philip Connors has staffed one of the Gila National Forests’ 10 lookout towers.

“I’m confronted constantly with the technofetishists who believe a drone or satellite will be better than a fallible human being,” says Connors, who wrote about his experience as a fire lookout in the 2011 book Fire Season. “What’s lost is a deep knowledge of a piece of country. I’ve hiked every trail within 20 miles of my lookout tower. I can tell you which ones don’t exist anymore. Those are the kinds of things you learn by sitting there season after season.”

That deep knowledge of the country and human touch can prove crucial to firefighters heading into unfamiliar areas or search-and-rescue teams traversing remote terrain, Connors says.

“They have a sixth-sense,” says Keith Argow, chairman of the Forest Fire Lookout Association, which promotes restoration of lookouts around the U.S. and Canada.

In New Mexico, staffed lookout towers are most common in remote wilderness areas that are more prone to fire, such as areas of the Gila. In that sparsely populated corner of New Mexico, fires are less likely to be spotted by motorists on a highway or from a local resident’s back porch, as might be the case in more developed forests where subdivisions overlap with woodlands.

“It’s not like someone driving down the highway is going to call in the fire,” says Connors.

Lookouts have also been important in the Gila as the Forest Service has taken a “let it burn” approach to many naturally caused blazes.

While fire managers are content to let fires burn up fuels such as dense brush and immature trees to prevent a forest

from becoming overgrown, such an approach often requires keeping a close eye on a blaze’s progress.

“We’re their eyes in the sky,” Connors says. “We’re telling them about weather. We’re telling them about lightning. We’re telling them about any changes in their smoke.”

While the Carson National Forest’s lookout towers are no longer regularly staffed, the facilities have proven useful during recent busy fire seasons.

The towers on Picuris Peak and Kiowa Mountain were staffed as recently as 2011, when drought created perfect conditions for fires.

The Santa Fe National Forest still maintains four active lookouts — at Cerro Palado, Encino, Dead Man’s Peak and Barillas Peak. Lookouts at Glorieta Baldy and Dome are still maintained but not used.

This has been a quieter fire season. Even in the more fire-prone Gila, Connors says he only reported five or six fires.

But, as he points out, there is still a good argument for posting lookouts over the forests.

Silent sentriesCarson’s stand empty, but there’s still a case to be made

for staffing forest lookouts

In New Mexico, staffed lookout towers are most common in remote

wilderness areas that are more prone to fire, such as areas of the

Gila. In that sparsely populated corner of New Mexico, fires are less likely to be spotted by motorists on a highway or from a local resident’s

back porch, as might be the case in more developed forests where

subdivisions overlap with woodlands.

Courtesy U.S. Forest ServicePicuris lookout tower circa mid-'40s.

Leyendas2 0 15 Tr a d i c i o n e s • T he Ta o s Ne w s

12 Leyendas

By Andrew Oxford

It was the original bridge to nowhere.

When the Río Grande Gorge Bridge opened Sept. 10, 1965, there was little between the river’s western rim and Río Arriba County.

It was “a big-sky country of rolling hills, sagebrush, piñon and wheat grass” that had

“reverted to its ancient stillness” after a railroad west of the Río Grande ceased service more than two decades earlier and homesteaders drifted away, a local reporter wrote at the time.

But with the bridge, civic boosters envisioned a link not just to the furthest reaches of Taos County, but to all of Northern New Mexico from Farmington to Raton, opening up the region to a potential stream of tourists from America’s ascendent motoring middle class.

U.S. 64 may not have become synonymous with a road trip through the American West in the same way as Route 66, but 50 years later the bridge has become a tourist destination in its own right and given rise to new communities that are now distinctly Taos.

The visionU.S. 64 as it is today really began to take shape in 1959.

That year, a group of civic leaders formed the U.S. 64 Association to advocate for a paved road cutting across the state.

At the time, U.S. 64 stretched from North Carolina to Taos where it turned south to Santa Fe along what is now State Road 68. But an illustration in the Oct. 1, 1959, issue of The Taos News mapped a proposed route that would lead west to Chama, Aztec and Farmington. From there, the proposed route would head to Tuba City, Arizona, and St. George, Utah. Cutting through California’s central valley, the route as proposed would lead motorists all the way to Monterey, California.

The map hints at aspirations of developing a route for tourists eager to see America, leading through the Land of Enchantment to Las Vegas and the Pacific Coast.

“This will be the first highway New Mexico has with Colorado-like scenery,” then-Gov. Jack Campbell said in

1962, pointing out there were “plenty of potential ski runs.”

The road never got any farther than Teec Nos Pos, Arizona.

And while those ski runs were never built, New Mexico’s portion was constructed as planned.

But connecting Taos to Farmington via Tres Piedras posed an obvious challenge.

There was not a road leading west from the Old Blinking Light as there is today.

The quickest route at the time wound through Arroyo Hondo down into the Río Grande Gorge.

In 1960, the State Highway Commission contracted a Denver engineering firm to prepare plans for a bridge over the river, which would create a more direct route.

The contract was canceled two years later when the estimated cost increased from $1 million to $1.5 million.

“And I’ll bet it will be $2 million by the time we get ready to build,” Commissioner Wayne Collins said.

Scrapping plans for the bridge was seen by some as a blow to Northern New Mexico, however, and Campbell, who was running for governor as a Democrat, turned the bridge into a campaign issue.

On his election in 1962, Campbell said “the number one project in New Mexico is an east-west highway across the northern part of our state. And the real key to development of this highway is the building of a bridge across the Río Grande Gorge.”

With support from the new governor, plans for the bridge

went speeding ahead.

There was opposition from the south, though.

One group, which included some Taoseños, proposed building the bridge near Española.

Meanwhile, Taos Pueblo leaders initially declined to provide right-of-way for a stretch of highway approaching the proposed site of the Río Grande Gorge Bridge.

But on July 11, 1963, The Taos News reported more than 1,000 people gathered on the gorge rim to witness the groundbreaking.

The constructionConstruction began with a nylon string. Tossed from one side

to another, crew members yanked the strings tight and pulled a piano wire across. Then, a smaller cable. When they were done, three 3-inch cables crossed the gorge and up a 100-foot tower to create a tramway for ferrying materials and men across the deep divide.

Fifty-year spanThe Río Grande Gorge Bridge:

‘It was just a matter of putting the pieces together’

There was not a road leading west from the Old

Blinking Light as there is today. The quickest route at

the time wound through Arroyo Hondo down into

the Río Grande Gorge.

Bridge continues on Page 14

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Panoramic of the Río Grande Gorge Bridge.

14 Leyendas

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Century 21 of Taos would like to give thanks to all the people throughout our communities history that helped shape the legends that make Taos unique.

The construction site that sprang up around the tower and gorge were not exactly teeming scenes, however.

“We never had a whole lot of people. The bridge didn’t require a lot of people,” recalls Edmundo Lucero, a retired engineer whose first

job after New Mexico State University was to survey the site. “Once you got started, it was just a matter of putting the pieces together.”

There were plenty of pieces, though.

The three-span steel continuous deck-truss structure with a concrete-filled steel-grid deck spanning nearly one-quarter of one mile 600 feet above the Río Grande was constructed with more than 2,000 tons of steel and 60 tons of bolts.

The trusses are approximately 100 feet deep from bridge deck to the top of the piers, narrowing to 20 feet at the top of the center span.

Lucero primarily worked on the substructure — the piers, pedestals and abutments.

Two telescoping 105-foot piers, which support the bridge, were built on lava flows approximately 400 feet above the canyon floor. The piers reach roughly 15 feet below ground to bedrock.

It was Lucero’s job to ensure the piers were in the right place. As GPS had yet to be invented, he spent a lot of time ascending and descending the gorge.

“When I first started in surveying, we had crews of six. We had crews up to 15 people. The location crew was up to 15 people,” he recalls. “Now, one guy can do most of this stuff by himself.”

But for Lucero, it required “checking and checking and checking again.”

Once the substructure was in place, a team from American Bridge began assembling the steel structure, which was designed in-house by New Mexico Dept. of Transportation engineer Charles Reed.

All the while, crews paved roads from Tres Piedras and the Old Blinking Light to meet them.

The construction project was not without controversy.

Plans were changed, for example, to pave over the bridge deck rather than leave it an open grid.

There was concern visitors might be afraid to walk across the bridge if they could see through it to the river hundreds of feet below, and ranchers said they could not drive their sheep across the metal grade.

Even so, Lucero says “I can guarantee you I don’t think there has ever been a sheep that crossed that bridge.”

The project proceeded safely — more so than anyone expected.

Fatalities were expected, according to Lucero.

But no one perished in constructing the bridge.

“These guys were hellbent on safety,” Lucero says of the American Bridge crew that put together the steel structure.

Unionized and highly experienced, the American Bridge team traveled the country assembling bridges. After working on the Gorge Bridge, for example, some of the crew are said to have gone on to help construct the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York City.

There were a few injuries, which Chief Inspector Rocco Chicarilla told The Taos News in 1965 were caused by “falling objects, mainly nuts, bolts washers and drift pins.”

A bigger danger might well have been rattlesnakes.

Chicarilla was told before the project that “if the height didn’t get him the snakes would.” So he arrived equipped with a safety belt and snake-bite kit.

“When working on the west side of the bridge he saw more rattlers than elsewhere, with many killed in the traffic, and also there he met a ‘good many lost utopia-seekers,’” a profile written about the project leader reported.

The project blazed ahead without the environmental regulations that would be de rigueur today. Crews routinely bulldozed rock into the Río Grande. Lucero recalls so much waste accumulating at one point, it nearly dammed the river. There were not any qualms, either, about using lead paint on the bridge. Though the paint job appears to be holding up after 50 years, removing it would require extensive precautions to ensure lead does not fall into the Río Grande.

The openingThe bridge seemed to be moving Sept. 10, 1965, when it first

opened and a stream of pedestrians walked across.

“There for a while, a good number were thinking they celebrated a little too much the night before,” the Sept. 16, 1965, The Taos News

Bridge continues from Page 12

File photoWorkers inspect the Gorge Bridge in August 2007.

Construction began with a nylon string. Tossed from one side to

another, crew members yanked the strings tight and pulled a piano wire across. Then, a smaller cable. When they were done, three 3-inch cables

crossed the gorge and up a 100-foot tower to create a tramway for ferrying materials and men across

the deep divide.

15Leyendas

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With the strength of our non-profit partner organizations, in 2015, we are supporting programs that make a difference.

We salute the organizations that represent the traditions that play a role in bettering our community.

said, recounting a politico-studded party at The Kachina Lodge Sept. 9 and a barbecue so well-attended by state officials a reporter wondered who was minding the store in Santa Fe. “Some even hit the deck in the best earthquake style. But the bridge’s movement was natural—it’s designed to move. As a matter of fact, if it were completely rigid it would collapse with the first freeze … or the first strong wind.”

But as another article one week earlier asked, where did the bridge lead?

“You can go to Tres Piedras and take your choice, north to Denver via Antonito and Alamosa on U.S. 285,” the Sept. 9, 1965, issue of The Taos News said. “You can even go a few miles west into the rough country that is a hunting fishing paradise — but not too far.”

U.S. 64 was not yet complete. The route had not even been designated U.S. 64. A few miles between Tres Piedras and Tierra Amarilla were the only stretch in the entire length of the continent-crossing route that was not paved.

The bridge opened up the West Mesa to development, providing a crucial link between Taos and what would come to be known as Two Peaks.

The structure has become a tourist destination in its own right, too. While many never travel west of the rest area, which was not included in the design of the bridge, the view has become a must-see for any visitor to Taos.

And with the tourists, a marketplace for local artisans sprouted. Vendors have set up shop along U.S. 64 near the bridge for years, prompting an on-again-off-again battle with the New Mexico Dept. of Transportation, which maintains it is illegal for the merchants to peddle their wares in the highway right-of-way.

Lucero returned to work at the bridge just a few years ago. The New Mexico Dept. of Transportation launched a renovation project that was completed in 2012 and included painting the bridge railing, replacing bearings and gusset plates, installing a new guard rail and sidewalks and installing concrete polyester overlay on the bridge deck.

The most recent addition to the bridge are 10 telephones labeled “Crisis Hotline” up and down the span’s sidewalks.

Connected to the New Mexico Crisis and Access Line, the call boxes were installed last year as a response to suicides at the bridge.

It seems to have been a problem no one anticipated when the bridge was constructed. But the site has earned a morbid reputation as a destination for those seeking to end their own lives.

The New Mexico Dept. of Transportation undertook a study in 2009 at the behest of state lawmakers to examine options for preventing visitors from jumping off the bridge. Options included fencing along the sidewalk or a net beneath the structure. But no action was taken. Another feasibility study was completed in January but it remains unclear whether such proposals have a future.

Any changes to the Gorge Bridge that might impact the view would likely come with controversy.

After all, it may not be the world’s tallest bridge or the longest, but the scenery rivals that of the Golden Gate or the Brooklyn bridges any day.

... it may not be the world’s tallest bridge or the longest, but the scenery rivals that of the Golden Gate or the Brooklyn bridges any day.

Rick RomancitoThe confluence of the Río Grande and Río Pueblo, just above the Taos Junction Bridge.

16 Leyendas

By Teresa Dovalpage

The San Francisco de Asís Church is the heart and soul of the Ranchos community. It is also a National Historic Landmark and one of the most photographed and painted buildings in the country.

“But, above all, our church was, and still is, the hub of social and spiritual life in the Ranchos Valley,” said Ranchos resident David Maes, whose ancestors came with the Spanish settlers who settled the Ranchos Valley sometime around 1720. “She is also an icon of the Spanish colonial era and this year we are celebrating her 200th birthday.”

There aren’t precise records that indicate how long it took to build the church, but Señor Maes estimates it would have taken at least several years.

“The only thing we know for sure is that it was completed

in the fall of 1815,” he said. “But for me, the big question is how it was built, considering that there were only about 70 families living in the plaza-fort at that time. How many were able-bodied young men, physically able to cut and haul trees from nearby mountains to make the vigas, and to produce the thousands and thousands of adobes needed to build the original church? Beyond working on the construction of the church, they had to plant crops, irrigate, hunt, grow and store food for the winter … How did they manage to complete it?”

This is one of the mysteries surrounding the church, but it’s not the only one.

THE MYSTERY PAINTING

“The Shadow of the Cross” is an 8-foot painting made by a Canadian artist, Henry Ault, in 1896. It was donated to the Ranchos Church by Mrs. Herbert Sidney Griffin, a wealthy parishioner, in 1948.

The painting is known for its unexplained luminescent quality, which can only be appreciated in the dark. In regular

light, it shows a life-size image of Jesus standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. When the lights are turned off, the image becomes a luminous three-dimensional silhouette and over his left shoulder, the shadow of a cross becomes visible. There is also a small boat in the distance. Neither the cross nor the boat can be seen in daylight.

Julia Katz, from New York, is visiting the Ranchos Church.

“I find the painting mysterious, inspiring and intriguing,” she said. “I am also very curious about what materials the artist used.”

Janet Oliver, a Taos resident, came to see it for the first time.

“I have only one word,” she said. “Awesome.”

Tina Torres, who works at the gift shops, explains that scientists have confirmed that no radium or other luminescent materials are present in its composition.

San Francisco de Asís Church Faith, mystery and a labor of love

Rick RomancitoFather and son, Albert and Miguel Romo, work on the 1994 enjarre.

File photo/Taos News ArchivesAn undated image of the annual enjarre at San Francisco de Asis.

17Leyendas

“For me, the importance of the painting is the impact it has on people when they first lay eyes on the barefoot Jesus standing on the shores of Galilee.” said Señor Maes. “I believe the painting is an actual representation of Jesus, the man-

God. Notice that his skin isn’t white, but coffee colored. The Jesus in the painting looks like a God. Maybe He is trying to tell us that the painting is a true representation of the way he looked when He walked the Earth, and perhaps that is what produces such a miraculous effect.”

THE ENJARRE: A LABOR OF LOVE

Cindy Miera Jeantette is the parish secretary. Born in Ranchos de Taos, she has attended the Ranchos Church all her life. She was baptized, made her first communion and was confirmed and married there.

“All the sacraments, up to now,” she said.

She has also helped in different manners during the enjarres, the annual replastering of the exterior walls and buttresses of the building that is done every June by local parishioners and volunteers.

“In the ‘60s, the walls were coated with cement stucco, but it didn’t work because the adobe bricks need to breathe,” Miera said. “We almost lost the church! So we went back to the way of los viejitos, doing what our ancestors

did. The cement coating was removed and we started enjarrando every year after that.”

They use traditional adobe (sand, straw and clay) to replaster the building.

The enjarre has also a spiritual meaning for Miera and many other participants in the annual ritual.

“The church is alive because of the labor of love done by the enjarradores,” said Margarita Martinez-Maes, a native of the Dominican Republic who considers herself an adopted Taoseña. “When we come together we are not only repairing the church, but also renewing our faith.”

Between 40 and 60 people show up every day during the two weeks that the enjarre work lasts.

“The mayordomos make sure that everyone is fed,” Martinez-Maes said. “We all bring something to eat and it’s like a big family feast.”

The mayordomos are stewards who help prepare the liturgy of the mass and keep the church clean at all times. There are eight couples of mayordomos that take care of the Ranchos Church and four for the chapels associated with the parish: Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos (Talpa), Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Llano Quemado) and San Isidro Labrador (Los Cordovas).

THE 200-YEAR CELEBRATION: LECTURES AND MORE

The two-century celebration includes open exhibits in the Parish Hall and a variety of lectures offered by historians and experts on the church.

Presenters include Maes with “A Short History of San Francisco de Asís Church,” Rev. Msgr. Jerome J. Martinez y Alire with “The Penitente Brotherhood in Northern New Mexico” and New Mexico State Historian Dr. Rick Hendricks, who will talk about the Catholic Church in Northern New Mexico in the early 1800s. Gustavo Victor Goler, an award-winning santero who lives in Talpa, will also make a presentation about Spanish colonial folk.

“There is a lot to say about the art preserved inside the church walls,” said Señor Maes. “For example, the altar screens are painted in the style of an early santero named Molleno, whose pieces date between 1829 - 1845. He became known as the ‘chile painter’ because many of his paintings contain red space fillers that resemble chile peppers.”

On Oct. 4, the feast day of San Francisco de Asís that also marks the official 200th anniversary of the Ranchos Church, the archbishop will come from Santa Fe and celebrate a special mass.

“Our church, nuestra iglesia, holds a bond unbroken for 200 years with her faithful,” said Señor Maes. “We invite the Taos community to come and celebrate with her.”



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18 Leyendas

By J.R. Logan

The men who went searching for timber in the late summer of 1879 must have been thrilled to come upon a stout ponderosa pine that had stood sentinel over the Taos Valley for nearly 300 years.

These men, probably of the Salvador Duran clan of Los Cordovas, came to the foothills that day searching for lumber to build a grist mill — a molino — to grind wheat, corn and other crops growing in the bustling, verdant fields of the Ranchos Valley.

Young Inocencio Duran, just 14 that summer, may have been among the family crew that felled that proud pine. The trunk of this ponderosa was a foot wide — thick enough to demand plenty of braun and sweat to bring it down, one swing of the ax at a time. Inocencio and his older brother, Antonio, may have taken turns with the ax, chipping through the trunk with swift, clean strokes until the mighty beast cracked and groaned and collapsed to the earth.

Once down, the men, whoever they were, took an adze to the log’s flank, squaring off one side of the old brute, the blade leaving a splintered notch each time it bit through the vanilla bark. Then the men, salty with sweat, most likely affixed the log to a horse or mule to drag it over several miles back to the valley below.

When the molino was erected, that timber would have been one of the first to be set. It was the backbone of the

purely utilitarian structure — the primary beam that would support the grist’s upper level. Several strong backs would have been needed to lift the log — still green — into place, atop two even more massive vertical stumps where it was shimmed snug.

If they worked fast enough, the Durans may have finished the mill that same season, in time to grind grain from that fall’s harvest. For the next 50 years, generations of the same family would continue the operation until the millstones finally stopped turning in the ’30s.

Today, four centuries after first emerging as a sapling, and nearly 150 years after it was felled, that ponderosa still rests firmly in place at the molino, hidden among the cottonwoods and apple trees off Camino Abajo de la Loma, just a stone’s throw from the Acequia Madre del Río Grande del Rancho.

The structure is generally in poor shape. The roof is all but gone, and a sheet of black plastic has been strapped to the top to keep out as much water as possible. Vigas are failing. Some have rotted and snapped inwards, smashing through the floor. And there’s plenty of graffiti marring the inside and outside walls.

Yet in spite of those blemishes, much of the valley’s history can be read in those slowly decomposing logs. In fact, thanks to the sophisticated science of tree-ring dating, they reveal a surprising amount of detail.

A few years back, Thomas Windes, an archaeologist with the University of New Mexico, was approached by Corky Hawk of the Taos Historical Society about using tree-ring

dating to get a firm idea of when the molino was built. Hawk has since done extensive research of the structure on his own, and wrote a paper for the Historical Society on the molino’s history and efforts to preserve it.

Windes was already doing research on other structures in the valley, and he agreed. In 2011 he and some students drilled into dozens of logs at the molino to gather dozens of core samples — cylindrical fingerprints meant to show growth rings for the tree’s entire life. Since environmental conditions directly affect how a tree grows from year to year (especially moisture), scientists can compare the core sample from a single tree with a “master chronology” that depicts the general growth pattern of trees in a particular region. If the rings are clear enough, the sample will reveal the entire lifespan, down to the year, and sometimes even the season, it first emerged then finally died.

Windes sent samples from the molino to the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. The results were overwhelming: Nearly all of the logs used to construct the mill stopped growing in 1879. It’s a very strong indication that’s the precise year most of the timber was cut and the molino was built.

“If we give a date, it’s an exact date,” says Ronald Towner, Associate Professor of Dendrochronology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona, who analyzed the core samples from the molino. That level of precision inspires the imagination of archaeologists and historians who want to get beyond the data and understand the very human element that piece of wood represents.

Field Sample 63 and the Duran Molino Tree-ring dating offers valuable details in

history of Ranchos Valley grist mill

J.R. LoganClockwise: A wooden plug marked “63” shows where a tree ring core sample was taken from this log at the Duran Molino near Ranchos de Taos. Results from that sample show the tree dates to around 1617, and was cut

down around 1879; The ends of this beam are worn and rotten, but growth rings preserved on the inside of the log were used to date this tree back to 1617; The face of this log shows adze marks where it was squared off by the men who helped build the Duran Molino in the late 1870s.

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Consider the foot-wide ponderosa at the heart of the mill, which Windes labeled “Field Sample 63.”

According to the lab results, the innermost ring that could be read on Field Sample 63 dates to 1617. The outermost ring

in the core sample dates to 1878, the lab results suggest some rings may have been lost, meaning this wasn’t the last year the tree was alive. However, beetle galleries — the tracks left by bark beetles — were present on the outside of the sample, suggesting the outside date was pretty damn close to

the actual year the tree died.

To Windes, the ability to pin down the construction of a building to a specific year offers more than data in a spreadsheet. “I like to get at the human behavior involved in these things,” Windes says. “I’m more interested in wood as an artifact and not just a date.”

Sunday Eiselt, an archaeologist with Southern Methodist University, worked with Windes when several samples in the Ranchos area were taken. She says the results of these studies help paint a better picture of what life was like for people then.

“The manner, method and style of treating wood differs from culture to culture,” Eiselt says, noting that a lot can be gleaned by paying close attention to how wood was worked. “It’s not that people go cut this log and drag it and stick it in a building. They manipulate it, treat it in certain ways. If you have a viga or a log that has been planed with axes, then the angle of an ax cut might be consistent with a righty or lefty, or whether they were strong or weak.”

Those are the details that add another dimension to re-imagining history.

“That’s where it becomes really interesting,” Eiselt says.

Courtesy Corky Hawk • Sketch by Tom Windes, Veronica Arias and Emily CochranThis diagram shows the south section of the Duran Molina, including the numbers of core samples taken from individual timbers. Nearly all of the samples that were tested show the trees were cut down within a year of 1879.

Leyendas

“Be strong when you are weak.Be brave when you are scared

Be humble when you are victorious.” - Ancient Indian Proverb

Taos Mountain Casino is proud to honor those who both exemplify the best of the past and who help us weave it into the future.

These people are our own links in what continues to be an unbroken circle of tradition at Taos Pueblo.

leyendas 2015

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