Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

Chapter 7: La Luz

La Luz

Life in La Luz

Ten years after Gavilan Canyon, I came back to New Mexico, a Ph.D. in hand and, all the more surprising, a tenure-track job nt at Arizona State University. I intended to spend a summer month on on the other side of the Sacramento range. In contrast to the slow decay of the eastern piedmont, and the rivers and valleys that gentle slope fosters, the western side falls away abruptly, shedding spare water into the austere Tularosa Basin. That great bowl, sere brown and red earth in the main, blackened here and there by the malpaíses of recent volcanic flows, shines brilliantly in the gypsum of White Sands. Stretching 150 miles from Carrizozo on the north to near El Paso on the south, the Basin spans 50 miles east and west. On the east, it butts against the steep slopes of the Sacramentos; on the west it runs aground against a series of desiccated ranges. So blasted hot, devilishly dry and desolate are these peaks that they welcomed Trinity Site as a worthy neighbor. The western ranges separate the Basin's arid expanse from the fertile fields of the well-watered Rio Grande valley. When we drove through the ochre Basin in childhood car trips toward the great river, we would suddenly come upon the shimmering white dunes. My mother would sing "Don't you listen to him, Dan, he's the devil not a man and he spreads the sands with water, cold, clear water."

I took up the privilege of living in this place. I rented an old adobe next to the plaza in the village of La Luz. The little settlement nestles into a canyon at the base of the Sacramentos; a rare, permanent stream feeds the rich fields of farming folk. La Luz lies between the pale sheets of the Sands and the blanket of snow on summits exceeding 10,000 feet. I arrived in July; a touch of white still lingered on the north face of Sierra Blanca, the peak I had climbed from Gavilan. La Luz and the town of Tularosa, a few miles north, had been founded by Mexican Americans, but not during the original, 17th century colonization. No Hispanic--nor any Anglo for that matter—wanted to be found in this zone before the Mexican American War. The Mescalero Apache reigned there. Hunters, gatherers, and raiders, they preyed on the Hispanic settlements along the Rio Grande to the west and allowed no intruders into the Basin or near their mountains.

Their raiding was a conventional if perilous enterprise. The Provincia de Nuevo México had been ensnared in a cycle of reciprocal violence and enslavement for centuries, one cruel to indigenous as well as to Hispanic populations. By the mid-19th century, despite two hundred and fifty years of colonization, Spanish settlement in what became New Mexico remained exceedingly thin, certainly fewer than 60,000 persons. Lacking gold and indigenous labor, the colony had never been at the top of the list of what the Empire spent resources to protect. Settlers were few, mines inferior, indigenous groups--even the pueblo peoples in settled agricultural communities--remained hostile, as the Pueblo Revolt proved. The wars for independence in Mexico in the 1820s, and the subsequent factional struggle in central Mexico for primacy, only made matters worse. No military attention was given to the northern reaches of what the new Mexican state claimed to be its own but did not defend.

The Comanches ruled the Llano Estacado to the east and they directed their lances at indigenous peoples as well as Hispanics. Comanche cavalry drove the Mescaleros, once buffalo hunters, west into the Sacramento mountains and the Basin. They set their sights on the Hispanic villages lying west on the Rio Grande. The Mexican-American War and subsequent occupation of the Southwest by the United States, for all its evils, had one effect New Mexican Hispanics found righteous. After the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, the United States Army eventually proved itself superior to Comanche cavalry, often in pitched battles on open ground. Dealing with the Mescaleros, as with all Apaches, was a different, nettlesome enterprise. Since they moved in small groups in mountainous and barren territory, conventional military strategies fared poorly. Still, Army campaigns in the 1850s pushed the Mescalero back into their mountain refuges, establishing a punitive, if porous barrier to Apache raids. In 1855, the establishment of Fort Stanton in the heart of the Sacramento range promised an end to hostilities, though that peace remained fragile for two decades.