Page 27 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

southern end of the Manzano Mountains, crossed the Rio Grande, and continued to the Continental Divide near Mount Taylor, following the same route as the Santa Fe Railroad and the famous Highway 66 of many years later. Here the migration again split into two parts. One group proceeded north along the west side of the J emez Mountains to become the Navajo, and the other drifted south, pushed to the Upper Gila River country, and became the White Mountain, Chiricahua, and Mimbres Apaches.43
The totally unprepared Mimbres and other seden- tary people to the west and north were called on to meet the thrust of the southern contingent of the Athapascan migration. Actually it made no difference whether the Apaches came down from the north, leav- ing the Navajo behind to subjugate the farmers on the Plateau, or from the east, leaving the Lipan to clean up western Texas. To the peaceful Mimbres and Cibola people, the Apaches must have seemed to come
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straight from Hell.
The Mimbres evidently were unable to seek refuge in
the Cibola villages immediately to the west, so it was probable that the Apaches had raided them from base camps in the Upper Gila, thereby cutting off any
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chance of escape in that direction.
of the villages to the south and east held out the longest, but by about A.D. 1150 or so, it would have been difficult to find a single inhabited site between theSanFranciscoRiverandtheRioGrande.
The Mimbres people are gone, seemingly to have vanished, but traces of their culture have survived in the ruins of their homes and artifacts, most notably in their beautiful and unique pottery. Much that we could have learned from their village sites, however, has since been lost to us — torn up, bulldozed, smashed, and looted — by those whose only concern has been to steal the pots and sell them to collectors
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who asked no
It has been unclear exactly where the Mimbres came
from, where they went, and how such simple villagers became such sophisticated artists. However, as for the Apaches, they now moved about freely, wintering on the Rio Grande, or far down into the interior of Mexico, pursuing buffalo on the plains in the summer, always following the sun and the food supply. They owned nothing and everything. They did as they pleased and bowed to no man — at least not yet.
The Iberian Influence
Despite the fact that Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (Figure 8) did not cross New Mexico in the vicinity of Cooke’s Peak in 1536, he nevertheless had a profound influence on the later activities within the Southwest. His tales, and they were just that, of the golden cities inspired several Spanish expeditions to confirm the existenceofsuchfabulouswealth. Themissionaries
Apparently some
Chapter 1
Figure8. AlvarNunezCabezadeVacacrossingtheGreatAmericanDesert. PhotocourtesyoftheMuseumof New Mexico, #71390.
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questions.