San Luis Valley - The pioneering Trujillo family ranch near the Great Sand Dunes

Ranching and mining put food on the table for many diverse groups. Over the span of time, rich grass, abundant water and accessible passes have drawn herds and hunters to the northern San Luis Valley (SLV). Smithsonian archeologists Pegi Jodry and Dennis Stanford uncovered the remains of mammoth bison and a kill site where humans processed the animals 11,000 or so years ago northeast of the Great Sand Dunes. The Ute and other native groups in the region ventured to the rich SLV to hunt on an annual cycle. Some early settlers mistook the American Plains Buffalo for water buffalo and tried to domesticate them. Around 1600 early Spanish explorers and settlers reached the SLV. Searching for gold, meat and religious converts, a group of these vaqueros, impressed by a Ute display of bison hunting, set out to round up a herd of buffalo. They managed to stampede a herd of some 500 of the angry bison. Many men and horses were killed in this debacle and the idea of domestication was given up. Winter hardship broke down precarious good relations with the Ute and other natives. The need for food and shelter led to the commandeering of corn and enslavement of native people. For nearly a century the citizens of Spanish Mexico enslaved native people and some native groups enslaved Spanish people. The native slaves in the SLV decided they had enough and rebelled, driving the settlers down from the mountains and across the sand dunes to board make-shift rafts to escape south on the Rio Grande. Francis Torres, a Catholic Jesuit missionary, was

mortally wounded in the uprising. As he expired trying to make it to the relative safety of a raft, his dying vision was of the mountains to the east tinged a blood-like red in the light of the setting sun. In great pain he cried out, “Sangre de Cristo” (Blood of Christ) and the steep range was named. In the early 1800s New Mexicans began herding flocks of sheep up the Rio Grande for summer grazing. If you go for a soak at Stagecoach Hot Springs north of Taos and southwest of Arroyo Hondo you can see some of the steep and precarious trails up the Rio Grande Gorge these early ranchers took with their dogs and flocks. Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 and encouragement from the government led to the settlement of the SLV in the then-northern reaches of Mexico. Mexican sheep rancher, Teofilo Trujillo was born in Rio Arriba County in northern New Mexico around 1842. He moved north and began running cattle and sheep in the area of the Great Sand Dunes and Blanca Peak. Seeing the way the political tides were turning, Trujillo became an American citizen in 1848, right after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made the SLV part of the USA. The Trujillos broke from the traditional agricultural practices of their forbearers: the majority of settlers from NM in the SLV lived and worked the land communally. They lived in adobe brick homes built around a central plaza, cultivated common land, and shared water resources. The Trujillo family founded an independent ranch away from other settlers...more