On Walkabout At: Gran Quivira Pueblo, New Mexico

A really interesting place that is way off the typical tourist path in New Mexico are the Salinas Pueblo Missions that are located in a remote section of central New Mexico about 70 miles southeast, “as the crow flies” from Albuquerque.  The missions were constructed in the Pueblo Indian villages of Gran Quivira, Abo, and Quarai:

This collection of three once thriving Pueblo Indian communities were composed of Tiwa and Tompiro speaking peoples and interestingly enough Tiwa speaking people can still be found in the El Paso area today due to their deep ties with the early Spanish colonists.  Early in the 17th-century Spanish Franciscans visited the area and found it ripe for their missionary efforts and constructed missions in each of the communities.  However, by 1677 these communities were abandoned and left to nature to reclaim.  Before nature could reclaim these villages they were designated as National Monuments and like the Gila Cliff Dwellings they are now administered by the US National Park Service (NPS).

My wife and I had for sometime been wanting to check out these ruins and a convention my wife had in Albuquerque was a perfect excuse for us to take some time and explore this little seen area of New Mexico.  From El Paso my wife, my infant daughter, and I drove up Highway 54 to just north of Carrizozo where we turned on to County Road 55 that traveled northwest towards the Salinas Pueblo Missions.  The county road was surrounded by high desert scrub perfect for ranching, but not all that great for supporting a sizable community.  Really the own town if you can even call it that, that we passed through along the way to the missions was the village of Claunch.  There really wasn’t much to Claunch except for old abandoned buildings and a post office for the local ranchers to pick up their mail at:

Claunch did have a well maintained church though that was easily the nicest building in the town:

Looking online I really couldn’t find out much about Claunch other than it has been recognized town since 1935, has a population of 125 people, and was named after a person that owned a nearby cattle company.  Claunch was also supposedly once a popular place to grow pinto beans.  There isn’t much going on in Claunch now a days though considering I didn’t see one person when driving through and stopping to take a few pictures of the town.

From Claunch we continued to drive towards the first Salinas Pueblo Mission we were going to visit which is named Gran Quivira.  As we got closer to Gran Quivira the terrain became hillier and forests of pinon pine trees began to appear to replace the high desert scrub land that surrounding most of the road on the way here.  We pulled into the parking lot and much like Claunch there was nobody to be seen in the parking lot.  My wife and I began to wonder if the place was closed?  So we got out with our daughter and proceeded to walk up the trail from the parking lot towards the visitor center:

As we approached the visitor center there was no signs of life here either:

However, the visitor center was open so we went inside, but there was nobody there either.  Like in some sci-fi movie it appeared everyone on the planet had been zapped away except for us.  Anyway we proceeded to explore the visitor center which had a pretty good display about the people that lived at Gran Quivira.  Considering that the people that lived here liked to paint their faces they must have been quite a sight to the first Spanish people to have visited here:

The first Spanish that arrived in this area in the early 1600’s called this place Las Humanas possibly because they thought the people here were part of the Humanas tribe located in the southern plains who also painted and tattooed their faces with black stripes thus earning the Spanish name of Las Humanas.  However, the people that populated this city were composed of Tiwa and Tompiro speaking peoples.  The name Gran Quivira came much later on in the 1800’s when people confused these ruins with possibly being related to the mythical lost city of gold, “Quivira” that Coronado sought in 1540.  There has been no evidence found to suggest that Gran Quivira ever held any quantities of gold and treasure.

These villagers possessed a treasure of a different sort, which was their ability to make useful every day items.        `Here in this village the residents became skilled craftsmen of useful items such as pots and tools:

From the recovered pottery it is quite clear that the Gran Quivira Indians were not only skilled craftsmen, but artists as well:

These highly sought after items made Gran Quivira a major trading center between the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and the plains and Apache Indians that roamed the grasslands of eastern New Mexico.  At its height this pueblo was home to approximately 2,000 people, which if this pueblo was still populated to this day would make them the biggest city in the region.  But the inhabitants of Gran Quivira are long gone having abandoned this Pueblo in 1671:

The combination of a small pox plaque in the 1650’s followed by a drought between 1663 to 1670 decimated the population of Gran Quivira.  The residents that did not die from sickness or hunger had to then contend with attacks from the neighboring Apaches who were suffering from drought as well and attacked the Salinas Pueblo Missions to obtain food.  By 1671 Gran Quivira was abandoned and by 1677 all three of the Salinas Pueblo Missions were abandoned.  The remaining residents of these pueblo communities moved to the El Paso and Las Cruces areas settled by the Spanish colonists that have a dependable water source from the Rio Grande River.  The spiral petroglyph seen above is a symbol seen at many of the ancient sites in the southwest that archaeologists believe means “migration” because due to the precarious nature of life in the American Southwest the native peoples did migrate a lot; perfect examples of this are the ancient people who lived at the Gila Cliff Dwellings and Bandelier National Monument.

From the visitor center my wife and I with our baby in tow began to walk up the trail towards the ancient pueblo village.  The Pueblo Indians built their village on top of a hill that provided sweeping views of the rolling hills and valleys below:

When looking at the dry rolling hills of pinon trees and cactus it was hard to believe that area was home to 2,000 people 400 years ago.  It must have been hard to continue to find water to support the community, but the people of Gran Quivira were able to do so for many centuries and probably would have been able to continue do so if the smallpox virus and the additional burden of supporting the Spanish colonists had not entered their lives.

Here is a map that shows how the Gran Quivira Pueblo community was laid out:

Anyway as we reached the top of the hill we could make out the remains of the biggest remaining structure left from the Gran Quivira community which was a large church:

Interestingly enough this largest remaining structure from this community was in fact never completed.  Construction on the church began in 1659 when a new priest Diego de Santander arrived in Gran Quivira and commissioned the construction of a larger church to replace the existing mission to service the community.  Men from the pueblo cut and placed the wooden beams that can still be seen today:

The women and children meanwhile mixed the mortar and helped the men place stones to form the church’s thick walls:

Here is the scenic view the parishioners would have had from one of the church’s windows if this structure would have been completed:

In 1670 construction of the church stopped and only the rooms adjacent to the church where the clergy would have lived were ever fully completed though they stand in ruins today:

Besides providing some great views of the surrounding high desert, the fact that this church was built on a prominent hill must of have made it appear to be quite an incredible structure when first seen by travelers to the area.  This was one of the reasons the Spanish built such impressive churches even in out of the way locations like this in order to impress the Native-Americans in regards to the power of not only the church, but the Spanish Empire as well.

For almost 30 years after the Spanish first arrived in Gran Quivira no church was constructed until a Franciscan friar was assigned to bring God to the pueblo in 1630.  The first friar was named Francisco Letrado and he commissioned the building of the first mission at Gran Quivira the first year he arrived.  It took a total of five years before the construction of this building was completed in 1635.  This mission remain active until 1670 when the Spanish clergy decided to abandon the Pueblo.  A year later the pueblo residents would abandon the village as well.  Here is an artist’s rendition of how the mission and the surrounding pueblo community would have looked in its bustling heyday:

From the remains of this first mission it is clear how smaller this structure was compared to the new larger church that was being constructed to replace it:

Here is a side view of the mission that shows that it had a large living area for the clergy behind the main hall where the parishioners would have worshiped:

However, Catholicism was not the only religion practiced in the pueblo.  Despite the Spanish’s wealth and grand buildings many of the natives still practiced their traditional religion.  This traditional religion was practiced in round shaped “kivas” which were also used as meeting place for the males.  The Indians entered the kiva through the roof where a fire pit inside the kiva kept it warm with the entrance serving as an outlet for the smoke.  It is actually a pretty cleverly made structure.  The only kiva I have seen that wasn’t built this way was at the Acoma Pueblo, which was because the kiva had to be constructed above ground due to the fact the city was built on top of a solid rock mesa that the Acomas could not dig down into.

There were a couple of kivas used in the Gran Quivira Pueblo and the one pictured below was the smaller of the two, but was the most interesting:

What made this kiva interesting was that it was a active kiva right next to the first Spanish mission in the pueblo:

This is something that I have seen at other Pueblo Indian ruins such as at Giusewa Pueblo at Jemez State Park where the Spanish clergy were allowing the natives to maintain their kivas when at the same time any Spanish conducting such activities would be denounced for demonic heresy.  So here you have basically the equivalent of what the Spanish thought was devil worshiping being conducted right next to their church.  I’m sure this must have been something that frustrated the friars, but they must have felt that they had no choice, but to allow the kivas to remain in order to prevent an uprising against them.

Adjacent to this kiva and across a open courtyard from the larger church was the main plaza:

It is here in this plaza that the pueblo’s residents would have lived and worked.  The residents of the Salinas Pueblo Missions tended to be similar in size to other tribes in the area with the males averaging 5’4 in height and the females 5′ feet in height.  The small size of the Indian residents meant that they lived in much smaller homes than what we Americans today would be comfortable living in:

In this maze of apartment like home that were entered through holes in the roof, the residents of Gran Quivira lived lives that rarely reached into their 50’s or 60’s and half their children died before the age of 4.  As high as this infant mortality rate was, it wasn’t much different than the infantry mortality rate of Spain at the time.

Here is an artist’s rendition of what life in this plaza would have looked like:

We then walked over to the back side of the plaza where the 2nd and larger kiva was constructed:

Why the Gran Quivira people had two kivas is anyone’s guess, but maybe like with with other religions they had two different branches of the same religion like Catholic & Protestants or Sunni and Shiites?  This kiva was easily twice the size of the first kiva, but built away from the Spanish mission.

After completing the circle trail around the Gran Quivira Pueblo my wife and I headed on back to the visitor, but not before enjoying one last look at this incredible pueblo that after all these centuries nature has yet to reclaim despite its best efforts:

Once back at the visitor center we actually ran into a NPS employee who manages the site as well as two women visitors who had arrived as well to visit the site.  So that confirmed to my wife and I that the rest of the people were not zapped away leaving us as the only remaining people on Earth.  Sadly if everyone was zapped away leaving us, that would still be three more people than what remains today of the residents of the once bustling Gran Quivira Pueblo.

Here is some administrative from NPS website about the park.  Gran Quivira is open daily with summer hours (Memorial Day – Labor Day): 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.  The winter has hours (rest of the year) are 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.  There is also no entrance fee for visiting the park making this yet another affordable outing for anyone look for a cheap, but interesting day out with your family.