Fajada Butte
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
2019

El Morro
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
2019

It occurred to me that I’d been showing all these close-up shots of El Morro without ever setting the stage by showing the big picture of the area. So here it is. The area with all the inscriptions I’ve been showing is along the base of the wall directly in the center of the photo.

The Odd Couple
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
2019

Today we are on our way to Ireland for a month. Once we get settled over there I will start posting POTDs from the Emerald Isle. Until then, I will continue to post photos from our New Mexico trip even though it always feels strange to me to be posting photos from someplace that I don’t live while I’m in yet another place that I don’t live. Too confusing!

Given the time difference between Montana and Ireland and that my usual routine will be disrupted, who knows what time of day the POTDs will actually appear, but they will show up sooner or later.

Social Media #26
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
2019

Given what graffiti looks like today, I’m having a hard time imagining P. Gilmer painstakingly carving his name in block letters 160 years ago. In addition to his carving, there were others on the rocks done in carefully carved elegant calligraphy. Penmanship was obviously a much bigger deal back then, at least for some.

Besides his penmanship, Breckinridge’s other claim to fame was that he was part of an army expedition testing the usefulness of camels in crossing the deserts in the Southwest. While the expedition’s leader, Lt. Edward Beale wrote of success with the camels, the Army canceled the program when the Civil War started a few years later.

Social Media #25
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
2019

This inscription, in Spanish, translates as:

“On the 25th day of the month of June of this year 1709, Ramón Garcia Jurado passed through here on the way to Zuni.”

Ramón Garcia Jurado was a Spanish settler in New Mexico. The Spanish ran a long costly fight with Navajo over these new settlements. It is likely that Jurado was on a campaign the Navajo when he carved this inscription.

It is interesting that the Puebloan Indians of the area (e.g. the folks at Zuni) were to a degree much more welcoming of the Spanish than were the Navajo. This is because the Spanish took some of the brunt of the treatment that the Navajo had previously lavished entirely on the Puebloans; i.e. it was an “enemy of my enemy” kind of relationship.

POTD: Social Media #24
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
2019

As much historical significance the carvings on El Morro have today, they are still essentially an early form of social media (they might even be considered graffiti if carved today), so I’m including them in my series of examples of non-electronic social media.

This is one of the oldest inscriptions on El Morro, put there by the first Governor of New Mexico, Don Juan de Oñate. It was inscribed in 1605, which (as pointed out by the literature at the monument) was fifteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Because It’s Mother’s Day
Silver City, New Mexico
2019

Everyone–good, bad, or somewhere in between–has a mother worth remembering.

Not So Ancient Steps
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
2019

While not nearly as old as the steps in yesterday’s POTD, these still certainly qualify as historical features. They were built by the CCC in the 1930s and are part of a trail leading up to the top of El Morro (The Headland), a.k.a A’ts’ina (Place of writings on the rock) to the Zuni, a.k.a. Inscription Rock to early Anglo-Americans. As the later names imply, there are many historical inscriptions around the base of the large sandstone mesa put there by early Anglo explorers and travelers as well as petroglyphs by the much earlier Ancestral Puebloan people who lived in a 875 room pueblo on top of the mesa, the ruins of which are still there.

Ancient Steps
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
2019

This is the Jackson Staircase, named after photographer William Henry Jackson who did not build them but rather “discovered” them in 1877. (Discovered in quotes here because it was a discovery of sorts for Anglos. Other local people obviously knew about them.)

The stairs were built by the Chaco Puebloan culture about 1,000 years ago. There were dozens of great houses (large, multiple story pueblo buildings) in Chaco Canyon and they were connected by an impressive network of roads to more than 150 other great houses in the region. The Jackson Staircase is part of one of those roads. Least you should think the entire road system was as primitive as this staircase looks, that was not really the case. There were at least eight major roads as much as 30 feet wide covering more than 180 miles. Much of the road system was flat or ramped and otherwise improved to a amazing degree. There were way stations of various sorts built along the way as well as low masonry walls that some say may have functioned as a type of curbing.

Guaranteed
Mountainair, New Mexico
2019