Category: New Mexico

Elizabeth Garrett: Songbird of the Southwest

7/11/2021

Elizabeth Garrett may not have the name recognition of her famous father, but she deserves to be well known among New Mexicans for her personal bravery and her contributions to her state.

Elizabeth’s father was Pat Garret, a bartender, customs agent, and lawman who was sheriff of both Lincoln and Doña Ana Counties in New Mexico. He is most known for killing Billy the Kid, then coauthoring a book titled The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, which for decades was considered the most authoritative biography of the famous outlaw.

Pat Garret and his second wife, Apolinaria Gutierrez Garrett had eight children. Elizabeth, the third child, was born on October 9, 1885 in their home in Eagle Creek, outside the small community of Alto, in New Mexico’s Sierra Blanca Mountains. In the same year, the nearby town of Ruidoso was established.

Mrs. Elizabeth Garrett and Teene, her seeing-eye dog, at her 'La Carita' home in Roswell, New Mexico. Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 057207.

Elizabeth’s life was never easy but she had an independent spirit and a can-do attitude. It is unsure whether she was born blind or lost her sight at an early age. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Roswell, where she led an active outdoor life, riding horses, playing in her family’s apple orchard, and doing all the things the other children did. When she was six, she was sent to the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, where her education included the musical instruction that would guide her future. When she graduated, she rejoined her family, who had moved to El Paso when her father began working as a Customs Officer. When the family moved to Las Cruces, Elizabeth stayed alone in El Paso for three more years so she could continue to teach music there. After that, she moved to Roswell and supervised the building of her dream home, a five-room adobe.

Elizabeth composed and sang her own songs at performances around the state and the country. She once performed for the prisoners at New York’s infamous Sing Sing Prison. Her most memorable song is "O, Fair New Mexico," which she wrote in 1915. Two years later, New Mexico Governor Washington E. Lindsey asked her to sing it to the state legislature, who unanimously voted to make it the official state song the very next day.

Elizabeth Garrett died in Roswell on October 16, 1947 after falling while out on a walk.

O fair New Mexico

Under a sky of azure,
Where balmy breezes blow,
Kissed by the golden sunshine,
Is Nuevo Mejico.
Land of the Montezuma,
With fiery hearts aglow,
Land of the deeds historic,
Is Nuevo Mejico.

O, Fair New Mexico,
We love, we love you so,
Our hearts with pride o’reflow,
No matter where we go.
O, Fair New Mexico,
We love, we love you so,
The grandest state to know
New Mexico.

Rugged and high sierras,
With deep canyons below,
Dotted with fertile valleys,
Is Nuevo Mejico.
Fields full of sweet alfalfa,
Richest perfumes bestow,
State of apple blossoms,
Is Nuevo Mejico.

O, Fair New Mexico,
We love, we love you so,
Our hearts with pride o’reflow,
No matter where we go.
O, Fair New Mexico,
We love, we love you so,
The grandest state to know
New Mexico.

Days that are full of heart-dreams,
Nights when the moon hangs low;
Beaming its benedictions,
O’er Nuevo Mejico.
Land with its bright manana,
Coming through weal and woe;
State of esperanza,
Is Nuevo Mejico.

O, Fair New Mexico,
We love, we love you so,
Our hearts with pride o’reflow,
No matter where we go.
O, Fair New Mexico,
We love, we love you so,
The grandest state to know
New Mexico.

"O, Fair New Mexico" is a tango in 2/4 time. I believe New Mexico is the only state that has a tango as its state song. It is in the key of A flat major. Its three stanzas, with refrain, describe the climate, geography, agriculture, and overall beauty of the state of New Mexico. In order to show the two cultures that Ms. Garrett had running in her own veins, each stanza uses the Spanish words "Nuevo México," while the refrain uses "New Mexico."

New Mexicans really like their music, and its legislators like to acknowledge that face. While "O, Fair New Mexico" remains the official state song, the state also has an official Spanish-language state song, a state bilingual song, a state ballad, and an official cowboy song.

In February 1937, Elizabeth Garrett gave an interview given to Works Progress Administration writer Georgia Redfield, where she said this about her famous father: “Quite frequently,” said Elizabeth Garrett, “my father had to bring harmony with a gun. I try to do so by carrying a tune.” You can read the transcript of the interview here.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a native New Mexican and a former New Mexico history teacher. She lives in the mountains of central New Mexico, where she is presently writing the third in a trilogy of historical novels set in New Mexico during the Civil War. The first in the series, Where Duty Calls," will be published by Kinkajou Press in May 2022.
To read more about her and her writing, click here.

0 Comments

Starvation Peak

3/1/2021

5 Comments

A few weeks ago I got an email from a woman whose father had read my Civil War Novels Valverde and Glorieta and was anxious to know when Peralta, the third and final book in the series, would be out.

I had to admit to her that teaching was taking up far too much of my time these days, and that my work on Peralta has stalled. I have written through Chapter 8, and outlined the rest of the novel, but it’s not going to be finished until the end of summer at the earliest.

She then asked me if I knew of any other stories set in the Starvation Peak area, or near Bernal. I was flummoxed. Although I knew where Bernal was, I’d never heard of Starvation Peak. The name intrigued me, and I began digging for answers.

Juan Bautista de Anza, Governor of New Mexico 1777-1787

The village of Bernal is one of many created after Governor Juan Bautista Anza forced marauding Comanches to sign the Comanche Peace Treaty in 1786. Prior to this, the area around Pecos Pueblo had been too vulnerable, a reason the inhabitants of Pecos Pueblo abandoned their home in the 1830s to live with their cousins in Jemez.

In November 1794, Lorenzo Marquez asked Spanish Governor Fernando Chacón to make a land grant for him and 51 other families from Santa Fe. Marquez said in the petition that the families were large, but had only small parcels of land in Santa Fe, and not enough water.

He noted that thirteen of the fifty-two petitioners were Indians, probably from the Pecos Pueblo. Since most of the outlying grants were given, according to Fray Angélico Chávez, to “Spanish military personnel and the genízaro colony of Santa Fe [1] , it is likely that most of the other families in the group were either Genízaros or mestizos. Historians speculate that Marquez had been a presidio soldier stationed around Pecos Pueblo and was therefore familiar with the area.

Genízaros are Indigenous people who had assimilated into Spanish culture. They included Puebloans from Pecos, San José and San Miguel, plus converts from the Comanche and other Plains tribes. More than fourteen percent of the population of Santa Fe was made up of Genízaros.

The 315,000-acre grant, which became known as San Miguel del Vado Land Grant, was approved. Soon a number of new communities, including Bernal, were established in the Pecos River Valley.

Towering over the village of Bernal is a 7,031-foot flat-topped butte that is named Starvation Peak. The legend is that, during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, 36 Spanish colonists took shelter at the top of this mesa. Some accounts say they eventually tried to leave and were slaughtered and buried at the foot of the mesa. Other accounts say the colonists died of thirst and starvation while still atop. The story is documented in an 1884 edition of the Detroit Free Press, but has grown. the years. When writers from the Works Progress Administration were documenting the region in 1939, they recorded 120 colonists had died.

Starvation Peak became a way-finder point along the Santa Fe Trail when it opened in 1821. It was distinctive enough to help guide travelers. Major William Anderson Thornton, a member of an 1855 military expedition that passed through reposted that General Kearny had wanted to place a flag atop the peak when he marched through the area during the Mexican American war, but after walking around its base, declared the task impossible.

At the base of the peak lies Bernal Springs, which became a campsite and stage stop along the trail. There is little doubt that Bernal profited from trading with travelers. When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad laid its tracks through the Pecos Valley in the early 1880s, it bypassed the town, which has become a sleepy little village set in a spectacularly beautiful land.

[1] Fray Angelico Chavez, Archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, 1678-1900 (Academy of American Franciscan History: Washington D.C., 1951), 205.

https://www.legendsofahttps://newmexicohistory.org/2012/06/29/san-miguel-del-bado-grant/merica.com/bernal-new-mexico/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/8213241/pretty-good-starvation-peak/

Jennifer Bohnhoff teaches New Mexico History in a rural New Mexico Middle School. She is the author of Valverde and Glorieta, novels about the Civil War battles in New Mexico. The third in the series, Peralta, will come out when she finds the time to write it. You can read more about Mrs. Bohnhoff and her books at her website, where you can also sign up to receive emails about her work and upcoming sales and giveaways.

5 Comments

A Walk Through History

3/25/2019

1 Comment

All pictures (with the exception of the live crinoid) by Heather Patrick.

Last week I got a chance to hike with my sister Heather in the Sacramento Mountains, east of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Alamogordo is 200 miles south of my home, and its season is weeks ahead; while it is still cold and snowy in my Sandias, the Sacramentos were balmy. The sky was blue, the birds sang, the sweeping vistas spectacular, but what really made the hike memorable is that it was a walk through time that stretched way, way back.

It's hard to envision now, but this arid land was once very different. Between 358 and 323 million years ago, it was part of a vast ocean. Much of the

limestone in the Sacramentos is studded with fossils that prove that the area was underwater. I saw lots of shells and shell imprints, but especially prevalent were the fossilized stems of crinoids, which look like stacked rock coins. Although they look like little palm trees, crinoids are animals, not plants. They are still alive today, but they are hard to see since they live at great depths.

Looking west, we could see straight across the Tularosa Basin to the San Andreas mountains, about 60 miles away. Once, these two mountain ranges were contiguous. The land in between has dropped.

Can you see the white line that seems to extend from the bill of my cap? That's the gypsum sands at White Sands National Monument.

Moving up the trail brought us forward in time. While walking along an arroyo, we saw these pock marked rocks. Although these were the only ones I saw on the hike, my sister tells me there are many of these in the area, and they are not naturally formed. Because water tends to collect in them, these depressions are called Indian wells. (The parking lot at the trail head is at the end of Indian Wells Road.)

A sign at Oliver Lee State Park, which is not far south of this trail, explains that these depressions weren't originally used for collecting water. Instead, they mark places where Indians ground up nuts and grains ground up. They are more like mortars than wells.

Farther up the trail, in a narrow side canyon, we came upon something that I've never seen in a mountainous desert setting before: cattails. The cattails were in front of a cave that my sister tells me is a spring visited by Indians since time immemorial. There was about a foot of standing water in the cave, which seemed to stretch far into the mountain. This water source, so valuable in the arid southwest, has obviously been used by more modern man; on our way down the canyon we saw several lengths of rusted pipe and the derelict remains of an old water tower.

It was a lovely hike on a lovely day, and it was a reminder that there is interesting things to looks at wherever you go. History and geology, archaeology and botany are right under your feet, and beneath them, if you use your imagination, are story prompts enough to last a long, long while.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer and hiker who lives in central New Mexico.

Click here if you want to learn more about the geology of the Sacramento Mountains.

Click here if you want to learn more about Jennifer and her books.

1 Comment

Chocolate in New Mexico

1/28/2019

0 Comments

Jicaras, or chocolate cups from Abo and Quarai New Mexico, 17th C.

Chocolate made its way up to New Mexico through the same trade routes that brought scarlet macaw feathers to Chaco Canyon. The same residue found in ancient Olmec bowls has been found in the pottery of the Four Corners region, and it dates perhaps a thousand years back. The Spanish reintroduced cacao into New Mexico when they began exploring the region. In 1692, Diego de Vargas, the Spanish Governor of New Mexico, met with a Pueblo leader names Luis Picuri in his tent. The meeting included drinking chocolate.

The Palace of the Governors, New Mexico’s History Museum, has on display some artifacts that are associated with chocolate. This storage jar was used to keep cocoa powder. New Mexico was quite isolated and life was rough here. People had few luxuries. The fact that cocoa was stored in such an ornate jar, with a metal lid indicated just how highly prized it was.

This is a molinillo, or chocolate whisk, from about 1830. The large end would be placed in the pot of hot chocolate and the thin handle was held between the palms of the hands and spun to make the beverage frothy.

Want your own molinillo? Jennifer Bohnhoff will be giving one away, along with a package of Mexican chocolate, and a cookbook that contains a recipe for a traditional New Mexican chocolate drink. Join her Friends, Fan, and Family email list by February 1 to be entered in the drawing. Sign up here.

0 Comments

Bent's Fort: Important Historical Landmark

2/6/2018

0 Comments

My husband and friend approach the fort.

One of the historical places of interest I visited this summer was Bent's Old Fort. Located outside of La Junta, Colorado, the fort, originally built by Bent, St. Vrain & Company in 1833, was rebuilt by the National Park Service in 1975, faithfully following sketches made by James W. Abert, an Army officer who stayed at the fort while recovering from an illness.

The fort was built just north of the Arkansas River, which at the time was the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Spain had lost control of Mexico in 1821, and Mexico had opened trade with America.

Charles and William Bent, sons of a St. Louis judge, had come west to earn their fortunes in the fur trade. Together with Ceran St. Vrain, the son of French aristocrats who had come to America to escape the French Revolution, they formed a trading company and built the fort to be its base of operations. The fort traded for beaver pelts and buffalo hides brought in by the Indians, for hardware, glass, silver, blankets, axes, firearms, horses, and mules. The company dominated the Indian trade on the southern plains and was an important stop on the newly opened Santa Fe Trail.

A beaver hat sitting on a pile of beaver pelts.

Looking into the interior.

The fort's trading post.

In 1835, the fort was the site of a peace council between the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and their old enemies, the Pawnee. The fort was also instrumental in getting much of Mexican territory into American hands. In 1848, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny used the fort as an advance base for his invasion of New Mexico.

Going to the fort now is like stepping back in time. Visitors are greeted by a guide in 19th century clothes. The smell of a cottonwood campfire decreases the heady smell that comes from the stables at the back of the fort. Blacksmiths and others go about their day to day duties.

It is open year round and has special events scheduled seasonally.

Bent's Fort is a great place to experience what it was like to live on the plains in the middle 1800s.

0 Comments

New Mexico Nicho

2/16/2017

3 Comments

There's a small nicho in the entryway of my house. It's filled with things that remind me of the great state of New Mexico, its people and its history and distant past.

I made the quilt that hangs on the nicho's back wall. The fabrics have pictures of chili peppers and cacti, and the colors remind me of a New Mexico sunset.

My youngest son made the ladder when he was learning how to lash sticks together with the Boy Scouts. It is similar to the ladders used in Pueblos and cliff houses. If you want to climb one, a great place to visit is Bandalier.

Nestled at the feet of the ladder is a decorated gourd bowl and two small pots that my husband and I received as wedding presents. I think they are from the Jemez Pueblo. There is also a rug that my husband's secretary gave him long ago. Many people assume that a rug made in New Mexico would be made by an Indian, and they'd be wrong. The Spanish brought sheep and weaving to the Southwest. Some Hispanic shops, such as Ortegas, have been weaving for hundreds of years.

My greatest treasures are older than the pots and gourds. My oldest son made the display case that holds an operculum that I found a few miles away from the site of the Robledo trackway, in the southern part of the state near Las Cruces. The operculum came from an ammonite that swam in the ocean that covered New Mexico during the Cretaceous era. Look back at the small pots in the picture above and you'll see a fossilized ammonite from that same sea. I didn't find that fossil, but know if was found in Texas.

I also have a large chunk of petrified wood in my nicho to remind me that this desert was once forested. This chunk is from Arizona's Petrified Forest, but I have picked up smaller pieces in many arroyos in New Mexico and in the dry bed of the Rio Puerco west of Rio Rancho. Probably the most spectacular place to see petrified forest is in the Bisti Badlands near Farmington.

New Mexico hasn't always been the desert that it is today, but it's always been an interesting place. I've got the mementos to prove it.

Do you have any New Mexico momentos?

3 Comments

Christmas in New Mexico

12/5/2016

5 Comments

By John Phelan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Bizcochitos have been part of New Mexico traditions since Spanish colonists brought them here centuries ago. They are such a holiday favorite here that the legislature made them the official cookie of New Mexico in 1988.

Bizcochitos
Makes 4 dozen

1 1/2 cups lard (you may substitute butter, but the cookies will not be as crisp and moist)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp anise seeds
4 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
About 3 TBS brandy (may substitute apple juice)

Topping: combine 3 TBS sugar and 2 tsp ground cinnamon

Beat lard and sugar until fluffy.
Add eggs and anise seeds and beat until light.
Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
Add to the creamed mixture along with enough brandy to make a stiff dough.
Spread dough out of a piece of waxed paper. Put another piece of waxed paper on top and chill in the refrigerator. When stiff, roll out between the two sheets of waxed paper until 1/2” thick.
Cut out with a round cookie cutter, dipping cutters in flour to prevent the cookies from sticking.

Dip one side of the cookies in the topping mixture.

Place cookies on ungreased baking sheets.
Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes until tops of cookies are firm but cookies are not browned.
Cool cookies on a wire rack.

5 Comments

Forward>>

Elizabeth Garrett: Songbird of the Southwest

O fair New Mexico

Starvation Peak

A Walk Through History

Chocolate in New Mexico

Bent's Fort: Important Historical Landmark

New Mexico Nicho

Christmas in New Mexico

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

Categories

Archives