Albuquerque Tricentennial
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Albuquerque Tricentennial Fourth Grade Teachers Resource Guide September 2005 I certify to the king, our lord, and to the most excellent señor viceroy: That I founded a villa on the banks and in the valley of the Rio del Norte in a good place as regards land, water, pasture, and firewood. I gave it as patron saint the glorious apostle of the Indies, San Francisco Xavier, and called and named it the villa of Alburquerque. -- Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdes, April 23, 1706 Resource Guide is available from www.albuquerque300.org Table of Contents 1. Albuquerque Geology 1 Lesson Plans 4 2. First People 22 Lesson Plan 26 3. Founding of Albuquerque 36 Lesson Plans 41 4. Hispanic Life 47 Lesson Plans 54 5. Trade Routes 66 Lesson Plan 69 6. Land Grants 74 Lesson Plans 79 7. Civil War in Albuquerque 92 Lesson Plan 96 8. Coming of the Railroad 101 Lesson Plan 107 9. Education History 111 Lesson Plan 118 10. Legacy of Tuberculosis 121 Lesson Plan 124 11. Place Names in Albuquerque 128 Lesson Plan 134 12. Neighborhoods 139 Lesson Plan 1 145 13. Tapestry of Cultures 156 Lesson Plans 173 14. Architecture 194 Lesson Plans 201 15. History of Sports 211 Lesson Plan 216 16. Route 66 219 Lesson Plans 222 17. Kirtland Air Force Base 238 Lesson Plans 244 18. Sandia National Laboratories 256 Lesson Plan 260 19. Ballooning 269 Lesson Plans 275 My City of Mountains, River and Volcanoes Albuquerque Geology In the dawn of geologic history, about 150 million years ago, violent forces wrenched the earth’s unstable crust. In some places heat melted underlying rock, which burst to the surface as volcanoes. In other places, mountains rose, but thousands of years of erosion by wind, rain and snow would wear them down. Sandia Mountains Here, in Precambrian time, the underlying rock didn’t break to the surface but instead cooled and solidified to form granite. Later, stresses moved and lifted the granite up, breaking it into blocks. This formed the core of the Sandia Mountains. About 300 million years ago, great inland seas began to cover the area and then retreat. The waters carried suspended sediments as well as marine life. When they retreated, they left behind layers of limestone, sandstone and shale, which capped the Precambrian rock. This is why you can see marine fossils in the limestone caprock of the Sandias. At times exposed land would be subject again to erosion before dropping again beneath the water, which then continued to add deposits. This process went on for hundreds of millions of years. Around 70 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous Period, there was an upheaval of the earth’s crust, which pushed up the Rocky Mountains, including the Sangre de Cristos, which are the southernmost extension of the Rockies. About seven to ten million years ago, heat and compression broke the earth’s shell, causing a crack, or fault. On one side of the fault, the earth rose sharply, creating a sheer bluff that faced west. This exposed layers of rock deposited in previous ages, along with the Precambrian granite. (Imagine breaking a birthday cake in half, and tilting one side up to reveal the layers.) Geologists estimate that the total vertical rise of the fault is about five miles. The same rocks we see on top of Sandia Crest are also miles below the surface. Erosion began wearing away the layers and rock, creating the Sandias and the Manzanos as we know them. The Sandias and Manzanos are not part of the Rocky Mountains because they formed much later and by a different process. Today the Sandias have two distinct peaks – North Sandia Peak, 10,678 feet, and South Sandia Peak, 9,782 feet. In between is a saddle known as Sandia Crest. The knobs, columns and pinnacles you can see on the western side were created by erosion, which also created canyons. Runoff from these canyons feeds arroyos that have cut through the East Mesa. The Sandias are about 20 miles long and end in the south at Tijeras Canyon. “Tijeras” means “scissors” in Spanish. Here, various companies have made cement from the limestone, dolomite, shale and gypsum since 1957. 1 How did the Sandia Mountains get their name? The usual story is that early Spanish settlers named the mountains “sandia,” for “watermelon.” However, the range actually got its name from Sandia Pueblo, according to historian Joseph Sanchez. As early as 1611 Spanish frontiersmen and missionaries referred to it as “La Sierra de Sandia,” or Sandia’s mountain. Rio Grande Rift As granite blocks rose to create the Sandias, the land west of the fault dropped, leaving a depression called a rift. Similar movements created a string of depressions from southern Colorado to northern Mexico called the Rio Grande Rift. In the Albuquerque area, the Rio Grande Rift Valley is about 30 miles wide, with one fault at the base of the Sandia Mountains and the other fault to the west near the Rio Puerco. It’s one of the few young continental rift valleys on the planet. A rift is a place in the Earth’s crust, where the crust is thinning and pulling apart. This rising and falling took place slowly, and continues to this day. The Sandias and Manzanos continue to rise, and the valley continues to drop. Albuquerque’s Aquifer Over time the rift filled with sand, gravel, silt, clay and rocks carried by water, gravity and wind from nearby mountains. This porous material reached 10,000 feet deep, and it has collected water for thousands of years. That means that when you drink Albuquerque water, you’re drinking water that may be thousands of years old. The City of Albuquerque has relied on this store of water, called an aquifer, for over a century. For some time the city has been pumping this groundwater from the aquifer faster than it can be recharged through precipitation. This is called “mining” the water. For that reason, the City is building facilities to use the Rio Grande for drinking water. Rio Grande During the Ice Age, sheets of ice extended south from the North Pole. They didn’t reach this area, but mountain glaciers formed in the high mountains. As the climate warmed, these glaciers moved and melted, expanding valleys and carving channels for rivers as they progressed. High in the Colorado Rockies, melting glaciers fed a powerful stream, which pushed south toward the sea, carrying rock and earth with it. At present-day Albuquerque the river filled in the Rio Grande Rift with sediment and then began to erode the river bed it had just created, carrying debris downstream. The river’s cycle of deposits and erosion has continued now for thousands of years and is still in progress. Until recent years, the river meandered over a wide floodplain, depositing silt. As the riverbed rose, the Rio Grande would break out of its channel and take a new path. Pueblo people learned to live with the meandering river, but as Spanish settlers established farms along the river after 1598, flooding became a problem. In addition, the river created mud flats, marshes and ponds, and quicksand was a danger when crossing the river in certain places. But anyone wanting water had only to dig a few feet. The untamed Rio Grande vexed the city until organized efforts at flood control began in 1925 with the creation of the Rio Grande Conservancy District. In time a 2 network of dams, drains and diversion channels confined the Rio Grande and stopped its meandering. Drought and increasing use of wells lowered the water table and eliminated the swamps. Volcanoes About 150,000 years ago – just yesterday in geologic time – a north-south fracture opened west (in the middle of the rift) and nearly parallel with the river. Lava exploded from multiple places along the faults because the Earth’s crust was thinner and the magma was closer to the surface. At six of these places, lava and ash would form volcanic cones. From these, lava bubbled and spread towards the river, hardening into a cap of basalt. Within the last 100,000 years, the softer alluvial soils began to erode from underneath the basalt, and the layer of basalt tumbled down in boulders along an edge, or escarpment. Today we can see five volcanic cones. They are, from south to north, the J A, Black, Vulcan, Bond and Butte. J A probably stands for John Adams School, whose students first painted letters on the volcano. Later students from St. Joseph’s College continued painting a solitary J on Vulcan. Black and Bond are named for the Black family and Frank Bond, who owned land nearby. A sixth volcano disappeared because it was mined for scoria, small pieces of reddish lava rock. (The other type of volcanic rock is basalt, which is black.) Resources: www.aps.edu/aps/wilson/AlbuquerqueGeology/ www.NMnaturalhistory.org Albuquerque’s Environmental Story: http://www.cabq.gov/aes/ Bauer, Paul and others. Albuquerque: A guide to its Geology and Culture. Friends of the Rio Grande Nature Center. The Bosque Education Guide. Julyan, Robert and Stuever, Mary. Field Guide to the Sandia Mountains. Simmons, Marc. Albuquerque: A Narrative History. 3 Lesson Plan: Albuquerque Geology Albuquerque in 3D By Jachalyn Esra New Mexico Standards Social Studies: II-A1-3, II-B1-2 Mathematics: II-C3, II-D1-4, IV-A2 Language Arts: I-A3, I-B2, I-D5, II-A1-4, II-B9, II-C1 Objective: Students will identify and illustrate basic physical features and landforms of the region.