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Front Page
Miracle in the Wilderness
Adaptive architecture
Miracle under fire
Exodus
venue travel
June 1, 1997
By James Abarr
Of the Journal
Near sundown on a December day in 1853, Maj. James Carlton, leading a patrol of the U.S. 1st Dragoons through a pass in the southern edge of the Manzano Mountains, reined his horse atop a wooded ridge.
Below him, in a narrow valley cut by a small stream, the partially collapsed, red sandstone walls of a long-abandoned structure rose from the piñon-and-juniper-covered terrain.
"The tall ruins, standing there in solitude, had an aspect of sadness and gloom," he later wrote in his report. "The cold wind seemed to roar and howl through the roofless pile like an angry demon."
Carlton identified the ruins as those of a church, but he had no way of knowing that he and his troopers had stumbled across the weathered remains of San Gregorio de Abo, a Spanish colonial church built more than 200 years earlier.
Abo mission and its surrounding pueblo, which remains covered by the debris of centuries, are now one of three units of New Mexico's Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, based in Mountainair 60 miles southeast of Albuquerque. Abo is nine miles west of Mountainair.
Other units are the mission and unexcavated pueblo of Quarai, eight miles north of Mountainair, and Gran Quivira and its partially excavated pueblo, 26 miles south.
These units are administered and protected by the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which has carried out extensive restoration and preservation work. At each site, visitors centers, small museums and well-constructed trails provide a comprehensive view of a New Mexico cultural treasure.
From their beginnings perhaps 800 years ago — no one knows for certain — Abo, Quarai and Gran Quivira evolved into major centers of Indian culture. Their strategic location in the Salinas Valley, named for the extensive salt marshes to the east near present-day Willard, lay astride the dividing line between two great Indian civilizations — the Anasazi to the north and the Mogollon to the south.
To the west, across the pine-covered escarpment of the Manzano Mountains, lay the Rio Grande pueblos. Eastward, where broad grassy plains reach out to the horizon, were nomadic Kiowa, Comanche and Apache tribes.
This crossroads of Indian nations made Salinas an important trading and agricultural center and one of the most populous regions of the pueblo world. Some archaeologists believe the area, at its zenith, may have been home to as many as 10,000 people.
Then, after centuries of building a high level of society, people of the Salinas towns faced a new march of events.
In the late 16th century, invaders encased in armor and leather, riding strange four-legged beasts and carrying sticks that spat smoke and fire, came from the south. It was the dawn of the Spanish entrada, and these newcomers with their horses, firearms and strange customs would forever change the idyllic life of Salinas.
A Spanish expedition led by Fray Augustin Rodriguez, a Franciscan priest, and Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado, who commanded a small band of escorting soldiers, were probably the first Europeans to see the valley, in 1581. Their visit, however, was brief, and it would be nearly another 50 years before Spanish friars would come to establish the first of the great Salinas missions and begin what they envisioned as a mighty harvest of souls for Catholic Spain.
These brown-robed priests, members of the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscan), were men of fervid belief whose faith proclaimed the possibility of the miraculous. They fell somewhat short of a miracle, but the vision of the brothers of St. Francis resulted in impressive outposts of the cross that predate the more-famous Spanish missions of California by more than a century.
In 1629, Fray Francisco de Acevedo, assigned to the Salinas district by church officials in Santa Fe, directed the construction of Abo mission using Indian labor and the abundant rust-red sandstone in the area. In later years, Abo would become the Salinas district's headquarters church.
In 1630, Fray Estevan de Perea, one of the most influential figures in the colonial New Mexican church, directed the building of Mission La Purísima Concepción at Quarai in a grassy meadow in the shadow of 10,000-foot-high Manzano Peak.
Fray Estevan would serve two terms as custodian of New Mexico, the church's chief administrator in what Spain designated as the Custody of the Conversion of St. Paul. He also was director of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, based at Quarai from 1630 to 1639.
Two missions were constructed at Gran Quivira atop a bleak hill rising from the lonely, wind-swept plains.
One, a small church called San Isidro, was built by Fray Juan Letrado in 1629. Thirty years later, in 1659, a much larger and imposing mission of blue-gray limestone was built under the direction of Fray Diego de Santander. He called his church, which was never completed, San Buenaventura.
Today, these fortress-like places of worship, constructed of thousands of pieces of carefully-fitted stone bound together with adobe mortar, are imposing even in ruins. Their naves, or central worship halls, are more than 100 feet long and 50 feet wide.
At Abo, one wall still stands 30 feet high. Bell towers at Quarai are nearly 40 feet high and appear as solid as that time long ago when they first were raised toward the sky.
Accompanying conventos, built around a central plaza, cover thousands of square feet. These provided living quarters for the priests as well as kitchens, storage areas and corrals for livestock.
Floor plans of Quarai and Gran Quivira missions are in the form of the traditional Latin cross, but the church at Abo reflects an unusual design. While its floor plan also is in the outline of a cross, the massive style of its walls and buttresses has led scholars to trace the architecture to the European basilicas of earliest Christian times.
Collectively, the Salinas missions are a remarkable tribute to a remarkable band of men whose powerful faith and courage enabled them to persevere on the frontier of Imperial Spain's most distant colony.
Charles Loomis, a Los Angeles newspaper reporter and author who visited the Salinas missions in the 1880s, may have put it best when he wrote:
"On the Rhine, they would have been a superlative; in the wilderness of the Manzanos, they were a miracle."
For all their splendor, however, the missions enjoyed a relatively short reign.
By the 1670s, the people of the Salinas pueblos had been overwhelmed by a blend of cultural conflict and natural disasters. Among them:
Religious clashes: Pueblo religion was based on the earth as the giver of all life, coupled with the dominating forces of nature. The result was a variety of rituals and symbols to influence a pantheon of dieties.
To the Franciscans, with their focus on one God, this was idolatry. Indian ceremonies in the sacred and secretive kivas (underground ceremonial chambers) were condemned as the work of Satan.
The result was never-ending conflict as the Spanish friars and civil authorities continually pushed to stamp out the native religion in a struggle that created severe rifts in the Indian social fabric.
Famine: For a decade, beginning in about 1660, a series of droughts devastated crops and brought widespead hunger and starvation. In one year alone, more than 400 people died at Gran Quivira.
As one priest lamented: "There was not a fanega of corn in the entire region."
Disease: Smallpox and other ailments introduced by the Spaniards triggered epidemics among the Salinas people, who had no natural resistance to these new diseases.
"Red Death": Roving Apache bands mounted devastating and repeated raids against the Salinas towns throughout the 1660s. The attackers, branded by historians as "The Red Death," stripped the pueblos of food and livestock, killed the men, took women and children as slaves and made life in the region a perilous thing.
A priest at Quarai was alarmed that "the whole land is at war with the heathen nations of Apaches. No road is safe; everyone travels at the risk of their lives."
Against these privations, the Salinas pueblos could not survive, and by about 1672, the people had abandoned the valley to join their brethren in the Rio Grande villages of central New Mexico and pueblos farther south near El Paso.
As Paul Horgan wrote in "Great River," his classic overview of New Mexico's long and dramatic story:
"By the early 1670s, the people had crept away forever, leaving their magnificent churches, their clustered homes and their lyric fields. ... The winds took them and the earth rose slowly about them. The ceilings of the great naves fell. The walls, in a shudder that took centuries, crumbled from the top. ... Above the common, mounded grave of each town loomed, like a sepulchre, the great fragment of its church."
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