Traveling to History: Six
SALINAS PUEBLO MISSIONS: REMNANTS OF A VANISHED CULTURE
By James F. Lee
The Spanish mission ruins at Abó, near Mountainair, New Mexico, built of red sandstone bricks. This was the first of the Spanish missions in the Estancia Basin. Photo by James F. Lee
On a sunny morning, we left our casita and set out on a three-mile hike into a persistent wind through the dry ranch country. After about an hour we saw the bell tower of the red sandstone Abó mission church ruins peaking through the juniper trees. Rounding the corner, the ruins came into full view; a roofless structure, its walls crumbling, gaping holes where windows once were. Behind the church we could clearly see the remains of a Pueblo village, long ago abandoned; foundation walls were all that was left of hundreds of interconnected rooms. A lone raven flew majestically overhead, a dark figure outlined against an incredibly blue sky. In some traditions the raven is a trickster. Was this a magical bird that had lifted a veil, transporting the two of us to a lost world? The vision was ours alone because no one else was there.
Abó is one of three Spanish mission ruins and abandoned pueblos that make up the National Park Service’s (NPS) Salinas Pueblo Mission National Monument near Mountainair, New Mexico, southeast of Albuquerque. Look on a map and you’ll be hard-pressed to find the Monument – just three dots really, at Abó, Quarai, and Gran Quivira. It is one of the smallest and least-visited National Monuments in the country.
This is the Estancia Basin, mostly cattle ranches and small towns with poetic names like Punta de Agua, Tajique, and Torreon. The hot, flat lands are dotted with pinyon pine, juniper, and yucca, and, on this day, in the distance the Manzano Mountains glitter from a recent snowfall.
In 1581, Spanish Conquistadors came to this area looking for material wealth and souls to convert. They found indigenous people living in multi-story stone towns, dry-land farmers growing corn, beans, and squash. The Spanish called the people and their towns Pueblos (Spanish for village or town) and built huge churches to awe them and lead to their conversion. It was a short-lived experiment. In less than 100 years, the Estancia Basin Pueblos and Spanish settlers had vanished; all that remains are these lonely ruins.
Map of the Salinas Pueblo Mission National Monument. NPS image.
The town of Mountainair is central to the three sites of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. Cowboy cutouts attached to the streetlights lining the main drag, Broadway, say this is an Old West town. Traffic is so light that we could stand in the middle of Broadway in mid-day taking photographs. The Monument Visitors Center is located here, where we viewed a highly informative 15-minute video explaining the history of the Estancia Basin.
Salt played a major role in the history of the area. An ancient lake in the Estancia Basin evaporated 10,000 years ago, leaving behind deposits of salt. Over the next several millennia, hunter-gatherer Indians eventually adapted to a settled lifestyle of cultivating crops and trading goods, including salt, with the nomadic Plains-dwelling Apaches to the east.
Abó, about nine miles west of Mountainair on US Route 60, was the first of the Spanish missions in the Estancia Basin. The Europeans, together with Native American builders from the pueblo, used the available red sandstone to erect a large church, the Mission San Gregorio de Abó, which was then covered with adobe, now long worn away. All that remains of the church are part of the bell tower and remnants of walls built from tablet-like stone pieces. And all that remains of the pueblo are the stone outlines of the multi-room dwellings and oval-shaped kivas, sacred underground chambers where Pueblo rituals were and are still carried out. The kiva walls, above ground level, were once covered with roofs of thatch or mud.
The ruins at Quarai. European church design incorporated Native American style and local building materials, creating this impressive structure. Photo by James F. Lee
Standing in the church nave, we were astounded by its size, considering that in the 1600s New Mexico was just a far outpost in the Spanish empire that relied on supplies, such as nails, tools, and wine, arriving in caravans from Mexico City once every three years! Yet the wooden beams supporting the roof were over 46 feet long and weighed 1,700 pounds each and were 34 feet off the ground.
All these remnants of the past lend an air of melancholy and mystery. American explorer J.H. Carleton apparently had some of the same feelings when he visited Abó in 1853: “The tall ruins standing there in solitude, had an aspect of sadness and gloom…” Carleton could have been writing about this very day, when he added, “The cold wind… appeared to roar and howl through the roofless pile like an angry demon.”
A distant view of the mission ruins at Quarai. Photo by James F. Lee.
We drove back to Mountainair and then north on State Route 55 to Quarai, Mission Nuestra Señora de Purisima Concepción de Quarai, a particularly lovely site, with a small stream running nearby framed with rows of tall cottonwoods swaying in the steady breeze. The church’s thick red sandstone walls are still largely intact, and we could easily see the remains of the twin bell towers. The Spanish missionaries used European church design but incorporated Native elements as they worked with local building material and Native builders. The result, seen in both the ruins and the artists’ renditions placed on the walking path around the church, is a synthesis, a cathedral structure with adobe features.
To the side of the church is the convento, a warren of rooms that once housed priests, friars, and Spanish officials, as well as stables, kitchens, and storerooms. Now only the walls remain, but the interpretive drawing placed by the NPS in front of the church gives a good sense of what it looked like, and the small museum at the Quarai Visitor Center includes a model of the mission and pueblo.
Returning to Mountainair, we continued south on State Route 55 for the 25 mile-drive to Gran Quivira, the furthest of the mission sites from Albuquerque. Despite the lack of a reliable water source, Gran Quivira was the largest Estancia Basin pueblo town; about 2,000 people at the time the Spanish arrived. The mission trail guide provided by the Park Service explained that the hollowed-out depressions of the sides of the mesa were water catchment basins, simple but ingenious ways of supplementing the water supply. Unlike at Abó and Quarai where red sandstone was in abundance, Spanish missionaries here quarried the nearby limestone.
The main street in Mountainair. The Visitors Center of the Salinas Pueblo Mission National Monument is located here. Photo by James F. Lee
This site gave us the best picture of what a pueblo was probably like. The stone structures the Pueblo Indians built in the Estancia Basin were really interconnecting rooms built several stories high, the outside walls covered with mud plaster. Entrance to the rooms was generally through ceiling openings in the upper floors, accessible by ladders. The dozens of excavated rooms we saw with their walls still intact served mainly as shelter from bad weather or from attacking enemies. The inhabitants largely lived outdoors in a central plaza where they ate, slept, worked, and played. Many kiva remains dot the ruins, each serving a different religious, cultural, or social purpose.
What happened to the pueblos and missions of the Estancia Basin? Park Service Guide Murt Sullivan explained that severe droughts in the 1660s led to widespread famine and starvation. Also, the relentless demands of the Spanish civil and church authorities on the Indians for labor, food, and service, and raids by neighboring Apaches caused further misery. By 1678, all three missions were abandoned by the Pueblos and the Spanish. The whole period of Spanish-Pueblo co-existence in the Estancia Basin lasted less than a century.
Only the stones of churches, pueblos, and kivas remain, as well as shards of pottery, animal bones, and other artifacts. And the solitary flight of a raven in the lonesome wind.
A kiva and wall ruins at Gran Quivira, once the largest Estancia Basin pueblo town. Note that the material is limestone. Photo by James F. Lee
