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More Than a Scenic Mountain Landscape: Valles Caldera National Preserve Land Use History

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More Than a Scenic Mountain Landscape: Valles Caldera National Preserve Land Use History CHAPTER 9. The Valles Caldera National Preserve as a Multi-Layered Ethnographic Landscape Kurt F. Anschuetz Introduction variously exercised their rights to permit, deny, or tolerate these activities by others. The land use history of the Valles Caldera National The second consequence was that the land grant’s owners Preserve (VCNP), as represented in the documentary record possessed the right to sever particular access and use rights maintained in various archives and libraries, focuses primarily from the land. The legislative actions of the U.S. Congress on the Hispanic and Anglo-American occupation of the locale rendered obsolete the traditional aboriginal view that the subsequent to 1860. In an act of June 21, 1860, the U.S. Valles Caldera was a place imbued with certain inseparable Congress authorized the Baca Land Grant heirs to choose as qualities whereby resources, including the land, water, plants, many as five square tracts of “vacant land” (i.e., places where animals, and minerals, obtained meaning in relationship to one there was neither permanent residence nor formally claimed another (see below). The definition of the Baca Location, built ownership) to replace the 496,447-acre (200,901-ha) grant to upon the Western idea that the land and its resources were which they had agreed to extinguish their rights in favor of the discrete, quantifiable commodities, occurred just as the United town of Las Vegas (U.S. Congress, House 1860; U.S. Public States was incorporating the Territory of New Mexico into its Law 167 1860). Luis María Cabeza de Baca’s heirs selected national economy and society. By the late nineteenth century, 5 substitute tracts, each measuring 99,289 acres (40,180 ha). new business opportunities, created by a combination of local Each tract appears as a distinctive square on land grant maps. growth and increased access to major markets in the Midwest The first of their selections encompassed the Valle Grande, and East, were on the horizon. Many of New Mexico’s natural Valle San Antonio, Valle Santa Rosa, and Redondo Creek resources became more attractive although historically they (chapter 4). had been of little commercial value because of the lack of This sequence of legislative actions changed the Valles demand and the inaccessibility of their locations, including Caldera from an unspecified tract of “vacant land” to a legally those in the Valles Caldera area. Commodity trading increased defined entity known today as the Baca Location No. 1 (Baca in existing markets and was fueled by speculation on future Location). With the conveyance of formal rights to Luis María market conditions. During the second decade of the twentieth Cabeza de Baca’s heirs as the tract’s lawful owners, execu- century, the Redondo Development Company, then the owner tive, legislative, and judicial authorities immediately viewed of the Baca Location, severed the timber and mineral rights the Baca Location as consisting of occupied land, even from the ranch land (chapters 4, 6, 7, and 8). though for decades the property would not support sustained The land use history of the Baca Location between 1860 year-round habitation. Moreover, the land and its individual and 2000 saw the owners of the land grant’s various rights resources, including pasturage, timber, minerals, and game enter into contracts whereby one or more rights to the land and animals, gained formal status (through the issuance of legal its other resources were recognized, leased, mortgaged, sold, title to the land grant) as properties over which the land grant’s and bitterly contested in court. With a few notable excep- authorized owners alone controlled rights to access, use, and tions, these actions offered the promise of benefit only for disposition. the individuals who already possessed a sanctioned interest The legal definition of the Baca Location as a land grant in the land grant. For example, chapter 4 provides discus- whose owners held exclusive property rights has had signifi- sion of the history of the partition suit brought by Joel Parker cant and lasting consequences. The first consequence concerns Whitney against Maríano Sabine Otero and others (Whitney v. access and use rights. Specifically, it was no longer legal (as in Otero 1893). chapter 7 similarly reviews the contest between earlier decades; chapter 5), for entrepreneurs such as trappers James Patrick Dunigan and T. P. Gallagher, Jr., over the Baca or hay cutters, to enter the Baca Location without consid- Location’s timber rights (Baca Co. v. NM Timber, Inc., 1967, eration. Also, as is illustrated throughout the discussions of box 110A). subsistence plant gathering, hunting, mineral collecting, and The emphasis on rights and benefits for individuals agricultural practices (chapter 5) and ranching (chapter 6) following the legal designation of the Baca Location in 1860 after 1860, it is clear that the Baca Location’s owners have represents a transformation in ideas about the occupation USDA Forest Service RMRS-GTR-196. 2007 129 and use of this land. For countless generations, the region’s with which communities record the memory of their culture aboriginal populations had recognized that the Valles Caldera and history (appendix II). constituted common lands that offered benefits to multiple This chapter’s thesis also derives from the examination of communities. While it is conceivable that various groups might how landscapes represent dynamic cultural process presented have claimed preferential use rights to particular resources in appendix III. This appendix considers how the people at certain times, there were no economic, social, or political construct and sustain continuity in their landscape affilia- institutions that sanctioned assertions of outright ownership of tions despite substantive changes in their natural, economic, the land until the U.S. Congress allowed Luis María Cabeza social, and political environments and explores the role that de Baca’s heirs to claim alternate grant lands in compensa- community traditions play in shaping this course of action. tion for the extinguishment of all rights to their contested Las As recognized by archaeologist Stewart Peckham (1990:2), Vegas property. traditions generally relate to people’s valued understandings The legal determination by the U.S. Congress in 1860 that of “how they became who they are.” For our present purposes, the Valles Caldera was “vacant land” overlooked traditions I hasten to add that traditions unify how a community creates of land use and occupation dating back to the beginning of and occupies its landscapes across the dimensions of space human history in the region (chapter 2). As discussed in chap- and time (appendix III, after Anschuetz 1998b:47). ters 2 and 5, Native American populations have visited the VCNP for innumerable centuries. Since about the seventeenth century, aboriginal people have been joined by Hispanics who Distinguishing Land Use Traditions: settled the river valleys surrounding the Jémez Mountains. Landscapes as Memory and Together, Native Americans and Hispanics cut wood for shel- ters and fuel, gathered native plants for food and medicine, Landscapes of Memory hunted game animals, harvested birds for food and feathers, and collected various other resources, such as obsidian, clay, All humans remember and celebrate cultural-historical and stone slabs for making piki (paper bread) griddles. Some memories through the traditions sustained by their cultural groups even practiced agriculture in and around the high alti- communities. As I observe in appendix II, every commu- tude Valles Caldera during times of drought, for example, nity imbues its landscape with intrinsic meaning based on during late pre-Columbian times and again in the eighteenth its cultural patterns of perception and interpretation (after century. Anschuetz 1998b:44–58). These perceptions include not only As documented through archaeology, history, ethnohistory, the community understandings of its physical environment and ethnography, these many pursuits were undertaken on a and resources, but time and how people interact with their relatively small scale and entailed only brief stays between cultural-historical memories to create and sustain their tradi- the early spring and late fall. Although the few existing docu- tions (e.g., see Ortiz 1991). Other customs, including many of mentary records emphasize the economic aspects of these the vernacular (qua common, indigeneous) land use activities activities, among Native American and Hispanic populations pursued by Native American and Hispanic groups within the alike, these doings frequently had important social and ritual Valles Caldera (chapter 5), may simultaneously be informed purposes as well. While chapter 5 focuses discussion mainly by, and serve to establish, the veracity of oral traditions. For on subsistence, the present essay provides a framework for this reason, it is useful to examine the substantive differences a fuller understanding of the social and ideational contexts in the ways in which Anglo-American and traditional Native underlying the traditional land use activities in the VCNP that American and Hispanic land-based communities generally predominated before 1860, but persisted afterward in obscu- organize and interact with their cultural-historical memo- rity. ries in constructing their landscapes (following Ferguson The thesis of this chapter is that Valles Caldera represents 2002:4.5–4.7). a multi-layered ethnographic landscape with which people of Landscape
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