What began as an 1843 Spanish land grant of 4 million acres to Cornelio Vigil and Ceran Saint Vrain would become contested terrain as the land grant shrank to fewer than 98,000 acres after an 1860 court ruling. Private property for over 150 years, the shallow caprock canyon system, now known as the Picket Wire Canyonlands, became property of the U.S. Army, which later transferred it to the U.S. Forest Service to join the Comanche National Grasslands that now encompasses 440,000 acres.
Almost all of that grassland is flat, dry shortgrass prairie and cholla cactus about 2.5 feet tall. Sources of water are rare to non-existent. Though the Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged farmers and settlement, the droughts of the 1920s, collapse of agricultural prices after World War I and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced farms to fail. Under the Secretary of Agriculture, the U.S. government bought marginal land back for an average of $4.40 an acre to create what would become national grasslands.
The landscape is dull, monotonous, with no trees or shrubs of any kind, and only the occasional windmill and metal water tank to break a horizon line where sky meets dusty soil. It is uninteresting country. I know because I graduated from high school in Lamar, 20 miles from Kansas. Out on those high plains, every cottonwood tree was a cherished treasure, and only cottonwood groves or bosques offered shade from the relentless sun.
“The boundaries of boyhood, as I knew them for a time, were that thin, distant line of horizon; and even that did not bound the dreams and the imagination,” wrote Hal Borland in his classic high plains memoir “High, Wide and Lonesome.” “Those who live with a far horizon in their boyhood are never again bound to a narrow area of life. They may bind themselves, but that is a different matter.”
As a boy I got used to the high plains, but I longed for a different landscape. Once I could drive, I’m sure I crossed the Comanche National Grasslands south of Lamar and La Junta. Established by President John F. Kennedy in 1960, the grasslands did not look any different from anything else in such a flat, billiard table landscape. That’s changed now because of the U.S. Army and Fort Carson in Colorado Springs.
In the 1980s, the Army sought to expand its training ground for soldiers and for heavy equipment like tanks. Southern Colorado ranches were so large that the Army purchased 236,000 acres from only a dozen families in a V-shaped swath of land northeast of Trinidad known as the Pinon Canon Maneuver Site with the Purgatoire River as its eastern boundary. Because of intense resistance to the Army’s land expansion and because tanks do not do well sliding off canyon walls, the U.S. Army transferred the Purgatoire River Canyonlands to be added to the failed farms of the Comanche National Grasslands in 1991.
Here was the topographical and ecological diversity I never knew growing up, because in my time in Lamar those canyons were private ranches. How amazing that in the southeastern corner of Colorado, private property with diverse geographical features, including one of the longest dinosaur track pathways in North America, has reverted to publicly accessible federal land. As part of adhering to federal laws such as the National Historic Preservation Act, the U.S. Forest Service, administrator of the Comanche National Grasslands, contracted for major archaeological studies. Researchers enjoyed examining sites with thousands of years of prehistory, and a vivid two and a half centuries of Hispano and Anglo pioneer settlement history.
Those researchers included Alan D. Reed and Jonathon C. Horn of Alpine Archaeological Consultants in Montrose. What they found, and what they wrote about in their cultural resource inventory, encapsulated a slice of little known Colorado history. Bonnie J. Clark began archaeological research in 2000 for her dissertation. She wrote an insightful book, “On the Edge of Purgatory: An Archaeology of Place in Hispanic Colorado.” She defines despoblado or “a vast area surrounding the core of Hispanic settlement that was unpopulated, but nevertheless considered Spanish, then Mexican, territory.”
Clark and others investigated Hispanic home sites, some of which were never patented as private land. Instead, small groups of Hispano families moved north from Trinidad in the early 1860s and gradually settled tiny communities around plazas or shared spaces – just as in the San Luis Valley when brave family members ventured north from New Mexico looking for fresh grass for sheep, and river or creek bottoms for farming.
Extended families settled at confluences where canyon creeks met the Purgatoire River. Centuries later, archaeology students tried to identify these unique Hispano cultural landscapes imbued with houses, sheds, corrals and gardens.
“One of the tools I most enjoy teaching my students is the concept of the cultural landscape,” Clark writes. “When recast as cultural landscape, the world around them is an artifact, a document written and rewritten by generations who came before. … The landscape reveals a fascinating story about hope, power, and survival.”
But those Hispano families lasted on the land less than a generation. As Texas cattlemen moved north because free range beckoned, hundreds of thousands of longhorn steers would push and pull and squeeze the small ranchers who, if they had title to their land, sold out to become sojourning laborers. Traditional Hispano family and communal land ownership did not mesh with individual property claims mandated by terms of the Homestead Act in 1862. If that cultural conflict was not enough, the blatant disregard of private property rights by huge cattle companies like Jones Cattle Co. and later the Prairie Cattle Co. ended opportunities for small family-based ranches.
Dominance by Anglos even included place names. The original Spanish name for the slow-moving stream Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, or River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory, became shortened to Rio Purgatorio. Anglos could not or would not pronounce it correctly, so it devolved to the sharper sounding Picket Wire River and hence Picket Wire Canyons. I had to go visit. With my pup Fiona, who is half Lab and a quarter Great Pyrenees and the perfect hiking dog, off we went in record-breaking March heat.
We camped at the trailhead to Picket Wire Canyonlands and Withers Canyon, named after a foreman of the dominant Prairie Cattle Co. I’m not sure why he got a canyon named after him. He never got along with either his Hispano or Anglo neighbors, including the Irishman Eugene Rourke who had begun his own ranching empire. In early morning with only foot, bicycle and horse traffic allowed, I took one trail and then decided to simply route-find off the canyon rim. That’s when I discovered the cacti.
The cholla I could see. Wearing hiking boots, slip sliding on loose rock and making strategic use of trekking poles, I began to realize that six or seven species of stubby barrel cacti, some no larger than a measuring cup, covered all the ground that wasn’t sharp rock. The southeast Colorado landscape did not resemble Utah’s beloved slickrock canyonlands. The terrain became complicated to navigate. As Fiona tried to step gingerly with few safe options in front of her, I realized we had to stay on trails.
We returned to the two-track and followed the Purgatoire River south. Because of high temperatures, we left early. This was wild country with historic ruins scattered about and coyotes singing up the sun. My dog and I will have to go back and spend more time in that deceptively hidden canyon system now federal public land.
Andrew Gulliford, an award-winning author and editor, is professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at [email protected].