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Reports from the Knowledge Labs about our recent findings, research topics, and interviews with lifestyle leaders who are creating their own futures.

How to stimulate your own powers of foresight. Consider the following thought provokers. Ask yourself, in these categories what are the brand new trends and forces? Which are the ones growing in importance? Which current forces are loosing their steam? Which have peaked or are reversing themselves? Which are the "wildcards" about to disrupt us in the future? POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL thought for food: Electronics, Materials, Energy, Fossil, Nuclear, Alternative, Other, Manufacturing (techniques), Agriculture, Machinery and Equipment, Distribution, Transportation (Urban, Mass, Personal, Surface, Sea, Subsurface, Space), Communication (Printed, Spoken, Interactive, Media), Computers (Information, Knowledge, Storage & Retrieval, Design, Network Resources), Post-Cold War, Third World, Conflict (Local, Regional, Global), Arms Limitation, Undeclared Wars, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Governments (More/Less Power and Larger or Smaller Scale), Taxes, Isms: Nationalism, Regionalism, Protectionism, Populism, Cartels, Multinational Corporations, Balance of Trade, Third Party Payments, Regulations (OSHA, etc.) Environmental Impact, U.S. Prestige Abroad. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC Food for thought: Labor Movements, Unemployment / Employment Cycles, Recession, Employment Patterns, Work Hours / Schedules, Fringe Benefits, Management Approaches, Accounting Policies, Productivity, Energy Costs, Balance of Payments, Inflation, Taxes, Rates of Real Growth, Distribution of Wealth, Capital Availability and Costs, Reliability of Forecasts, Raw Materials, Availability and Costs, Global versus National Economy, Market versus Planned Economies, Generations: Y, X, Boomers, Elderly, Urban vs. Rural Lifestyles, Affluent vs. Poor, Neighborhoods and Communities, Planned or Organic Growth. Got Knowledge?

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Monday, May 30, 2005

Journeys of the Heart, Mesa Verde Collapse and New Mexico Expeditions

Chapter Three: The Outpost

By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs

Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories

“More chilling is a note from Billy's (William Clark's) father, a few months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, serving as a safe-conduct pass to permit a house slave called Cupid to attend church services. Clark himself was a slave owner, as Jones points out. One of Clark's journal entries recorded the deaths of "Nan[c]y's Child, and Bens horse," thus "pairing the loss of a slave child and a domestic animal in a single sentence." And he boasted that his cook had become "a very good wench since she had about fifty" - 50 lashes of the whip, that is. "Indeed, I have been obliged [to] whip almost all my people. And they are now beginning to think that it best to do better and not Cry hard when I am compelled to use the whip." This is a very different figure from the man we met in Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage."

Jonathan Kirsch

CORTEZ, Colorado. While in the area we took a little side trip looking for Grey Owl's second geo-cache-- N 36° 59.614 W 109° 02.460. Turns out, it took us to a pretty desolate area, complete with rattle snake warnings along a dirt road nearShiprock, New Mexico. On the map we found ourselves in a triangle in the northeast corner of the state, but still on Navajo Reservation land.

J2020F: Are we there yet? Is that it? What did you find?

Trailblazer: It's very similar to the contents in Grey Owl's first geo-cache. A note, but this time it's a list of locations taken from the New Mexico Expedition. It listed:

Three innovation towns in New Mexico. The first is Silver City -- 88022, 36, 53, 61,62 (in Grant County, promoted as the Gateway to Gila National Forest & Wilderness, with news from both the Silver City Daily Press and the Silver City Sun-News

The second is Angel Fire - 87710 (and a link to itsChamber of Commerce, and Sangre de Cristo Chronicle).

And, the third: Red River - 87558 and you can read all about it in the same Sangre de Cristo Chronicle like Angel Fire - both resort towns make up part of the “Enchanted Circle of Northern New Mexico” - a 90-mile route in Southern Rockies including Taos, Angel Fire and Eagle Nest - Cimarron.

The first of two early growth resorts isRuidoso -- 88345, 55 (Ruidoso News)

The second is Las Cruces --88001, 02, 03, 05, 11, 12 (in Dona Ana County, as covered by the Las Cruces Sun-News, including their homefinder).

Next on the list is only one mid-growth: Taos - 87571 (with up to the minute stories found in The Taos News)

And, finally one late growth - early maturity community: Famous Santa Fe -- 87501,02, 04, 05, 06, 40, 94 (with three sources for news articles: Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe Reporter, and the Santa Fe Times).

Eagle: As much as I want to visit all of them, I don't see how we can. I say we continue through Colorado, as originally planned.

Explorer: I'm with you. We've already made plans to hook up with Finnmark at Grey Owl's suggestion. It's just a matter of how much we want to cover between now and then.

J2020F: Stopping briefly at the Colorado Welcome Centerin the Cortez City Park, we realize that we're at another major crossroads. Northwest on 555 takes us past the Crow Canyon Archeological Center to Dove Creek and the DoloresRiver Overlook. West is the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. South is where we've been on 160. Northeast on 145 takes us to Telluride through the San Juan National Forest. East takes us past Mesa Verde National Park, on 160 towards Durango. We decide to stick to U.S. 160 headed east.

Explorer: Bummer. We're twenty minutes away from the first set of Mesa Verde ruins and the ranger told us they close in an hour. We lost an hour during the time change - something we hadn't counted on. And, that put us into the park entrance later than we wanted.

Pathfinder: That means that the Balcony House and the Cliff Palacetours would be closed.

Trailblazer: Where did we mess up? We plotted our route taking us near Mexican Hat to the 666 and towards Cortez,

Explorer: I didn't even consider a time change for Mesa Verde and Durango.

Eagle: This has been one trip with a lot of driving. All I had thought about is next stop the Mesa Verde and than 45 minute drive to Durango, our outpost for three nights and two days before pressing on to Denver.

J2020F: The ranger said to visit the museum and the Spruce House since we could visit without tickets or a guide.

Pathfinder: Not until we hiked down to the Spruce House, did I begin to appreciate the severely shortened stopover. We climbed down into a Kiva and then I forgot about our time constraint.

Explorer: Me, too. It was like I was transported into a different world, a different time. I could begin to use my imagination.

Trailblazer: For me it happened while driving around the scenic loop. There evidence of earlier communities out in the open on the top of the mesa that once flourished wasn't anything that I had expected.

Eagle: I know what you mean. It's as if as warring tribes or other threats challenged their existence, they moved to the cliffs for protection.

J2020F: At least we had enough time to take in cliff dwellings that appeared in the shadows across the canyons from a turnout.

Explorer: We stopped and photographed like so many other tourists before and after us -- until the rain moved in.

Pathfinder: The centuries of inhabiting this area begins to sink in when you stand here next to our SUV with digital cameras in hand and gaze out across the canyon to the complex of early Anasazi cliff homes - what, some 1400 years before the first European explorers laid eyes on the territory - or even stepped on North American shores!

Eagle: Anasazi people -- Ancestral Pueblo-ans -- lived for roughly 700 years in Mesa Verde, having migrated from the Four Corners region.

J2020F: That's three or four times longer than the United States has been in existence.

Explorer: The heart of the Anasazi region spanned northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado-a land of forested mountain ranges, stream-dissected mesas, arid grasslands and occasional river bottoms.

Trailblazer: However, in the 12th or 13th century over a period of one or two generations the Anasazi vanished from this mesa. Because they left no written records, their story is incomplete.

Pathfinder: But it is the pueblos of Arizona and western New Mexico and those of the upper Rio Grande drainage that greeted the Spanish expeditions into the Southwest in the 16th century.

Eagle: What began as a small trickle grew into a flood as several million Europeans and their descendents forced their ways upon the indigenous people of the New World over the centuries to come.

Pathfinder: For four centuries, from 1492 - 1890, Europeans convinced the “heathens” they found to adopt their ways.

Explorer: In 1539, for instance, Franciscan Friar, Marcos de Niza, followed by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's Spanish expedition first came looking for trade routes to the orient and Seven Cities of Gold, as well as to colonize the New World.

J2020F: Disappointment over the lack of physical riches soon was replaced by Spain's legendary missionary zeal.

Eagle: And the Spaniards were sorely tempted by the wealth of the American Indian souls ripe for conversion.

Pathfinder: So, by the end of the 16th century Juan de Onate officially had claimed this area for Spain.

J2020F: It certainly seems clear, that while the Anasazi had abandoned this mesa before the Spaniards came, they had mastered community living -- taking advantage of nature by building their homes under the protection of overhanging cliffs.

Pathfinder: Apparently, analysis of the ruins and excavated artifacts point to a civilization using rectangular shaped sandstone blocks held together with cement made from mud and water.

Explorer: It says here in the official park brochure that their rooms averaged about 42 square feet and housed two or three people. They stored crops in isolated rooms and in the upper levels.

J2020F: Ironically, garbage heaps, from years of tossing over food and broken tools -- knives, axes, awls, stone and bone scrapers, and pottery -- have yielded the most knowledge about the Anasazi.

Explorer: I'd hate to think what story a lifetime of garbage would tell future archeologists about me!

Eagle: Right, we know they farmed beans, corn, and squash crops. They hunted deer, rabbits and squirrels and domesticated turkeys and dogs.

Trailblazer: Before they learned how to make pottery, they had mastered the art of basket making using a spiral twilled technique for hauling water, storing grain and perhaps even for cooking.

Pathfinder: And a thousand years before the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries arrived, around 550 A.D. pottery obsolesced basket weaving. They created pots, bowls, canteens, ladles, jars and mugs.

Eagle: They stored and cooked in them. Rituals and ceremonies incorporated them.

Trailblazer: They managed to produce a surplus of goods that gave them an advantage in a trading economy -- stretching all the way to the Pacific coast, as evidenced by seashells.

Pathfinder: It also says about five hundred years after the first pots appeared -- by 1100 to 1300 - the Anasazi entered the Mesa's classic period.

J2020F: What do you mean by the Mesa's classic period?

Eagle: That is when about several thousand tribal members concentrated in compact villages with many rooms, kivas, and round towers we see today.

Explorer: Most of the cliff swelling were build from 1190 to 1270, ranging in size from one-room house to 200-room villages -- Cliff Palace.

J2020F: Kiva? What is a kiva?

Eagle: The kiva -- a Hopi term -- means ceremonial room.

Pathfinder: These underground chambers were used in much the same way churches were used much later in our country's history. Here they performed healing rites, prayed for rain, luck in hunting or for good crops in the upcoming seasonal harvest.

Trailblazer: They may have been the community center where weavers and potters gathered to practice their craft. A small hole in the floor, called a sipapu, is the symbolic entrance to the underworld.

J2020F: But, they lived in the cliff dwellings for less than 100 years. By 1300 Mesa Verde had become a ghost town. Why?

Trailblazer: Probably due to a draught, scientists theorize. Crops may have failed. Or after literally hundreds of years of intensive land use the soils, the forest and their animals may have become depleted resources.

Eagle: Or maybe the political and social climate made it intolerable for the tribe to remain.

Pathfinder: What remains today are three major cave dwellings on Chapin Mesa. The Spruce Tree House. Cliff Palace. Balcony House. Driving the loops of Ruins Road from canyon rim vantage points can see other dwellings.

J2020F: But whatever the reasons, they traveled south into what is now Arizona and New Mexico becoming reacquainted with relatives already settled there, right?

Eagle: As we already found out in Arizona, some of the Pueblo people and other tribes in the region are direct descendants of the cliff dwelling Anasazi.

Explorer: And we already know that those Pueblo tribes chafed under Spanish occupation, especially in New Mexico - culminating in the 1680 Pueblo Rebellion.

Trailblazer: The reason? Increasing cultural and religious oppression sparked the rebellion. But, the victory over Spanish rule reversed when a force led by Don Diego de Vargas reclaimed the area in 1692.

Pathfinder: But, after a century of isolated occupation, the Spanish Empire in the New World collapses by the1800s.

Explorer: In 1821 the Santa Fe Trail opens to hoards of American settlers.

J2020F: If we made a side trip to Taos, New Mexico we'd find Kit Carson State Park that includes the cemetery where he died, and the Kit Carson Home and Museum where he lived from 1843 to 1868.

Pathfinder: That's right. Carson has shown up in Nevada, Arizona and now New Mexico. In 1846 Stephen Kearney captures Santa Fe during the Mexican War.

J2020F: I recently discovered another coincidence. Twenty years earlier Kearny became the first commander of the new (1826) Jefferson Barracks, in Missouri where my great, great grandfather Nathan died in the Civil War.

Explorer: After protecting emigrants traveling the Oregon Trail from Native American attacks, Kearney moves a force of 1700 to Santa Fe where he becomes military governor. Kit Carson guides Stephen W. Kearny's party from New Mexico to California to fight during the Mexican War.

Pathfinder: Mexico ceded the land at the war's end in 1848, and it officially became a U.S. territory in 1850. On the strength of his war record, General Zachary Taylor became the twelfth U.S. President, serving only form 1849 to 1850.

Trailblazer: Near what is today the Southern Methodist University's research center at Fort Burgwin, the 1st Dragoons of the Calvary lived from 1852 to 1860.

J2020F: Remember, it was the 1853 Gadsden Purchase that brought the rest of the area that is currently Arizona and New Mexico under U.S. control.

Pathfinder: In 1853 Kit Carson was appointed as Indian agent for Taos, New Mexico. But, peace remained elusive, however. In 1862 two key Civil War battles were fought in the fledgling territory. They resulted in southern victories but when the Confederates lost their supply chain they were more easily defeated.

Eagle: The Union Army turned its attention to defeating the Apaches, beginning with the Battle of Apache Pass, for two decades between 1865 and 1886 in Arizona and New Mexico Territories.

Explorer: Eventually as more settlers arrived with the Indians becoming more of a nuisance than a real threat, the violence shifted to the range wars.

Pathfinder: The 1870s brought national peace but local conflict, and in 1878 ranchers, landowners and homesteaders squared off in a vicious fight for economic control of the territory.

J2020F: Wasn't that when the Billy the Kid earned his reputation?

Pathfinder: Little is really known about him - his real name, where he was born, for instance.

J2020F: Didn't I read somewhere that in 1873 his mother married William Antrim and the family moved to Silver City, New Mexico. I believe his stepfather was a bartender and carpenter but soon became more interested in prospecting than his family.

Pathfinder: Yup. Known as the Lincoln County War, the 5-day gunfight is notable mainly for the participation of Billy the Kid.

Explorer: The Kid's exploits -- most of them illegal -- epitomize the Wild West era.

J2020F: How so?

Explorer: Until the early 1900s, so many groups each with their own vested interest squared off against one and another.

Eagle: Taking advantage of the turmoil, various American Indian tribes intensified their own costly but unsuccessful war for freedom, which ended in 1886 with the surrender of Apache chief Geronimo and his followers.

Explorer: The railroad reached the area in the 1880s, bringing with it greater numbers of settlers.

Pathfinder: Mining towns profited as silver, gold, copper, coal and uranium were discovered. The boom was short-lived, however, and many of these cities became ghost towns as the mines closed.

Explorer. Finally, New Mexico was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912.

J2020F: Before I forget, you said in addition to the New Mexico Learning Expedition's list there was a note?

Trailblazer: Oh yeah, right!

“A personal relationship to the Creator, the Great Spirit, is in Native American cultures not something that must be created. It is something that must be remembered.... Many roads lead to the heart.... Like a roadmap that helps you see the destination, if only from a distance. If you know how to read the roadmap, you can follow the roads into the land that you seek."

The East -- The start of life's journey, the new day, is in the East. Just as it is the place on this continent where the European world first came into contact with the Native people of North America, it is the place of beginnings, first light -- and the possibility of starting again.

The South -- The South holds the warmth of summer. It is a time of innocence, of learning and growth.

The West -- The West reminds us of the wisdom of maturity with the approach of the sunset. It is the time of parenthood, responsibility, and good sense -- the time to teach, acknowledge, and give thanks.

The North -- The North holds that hard, cleansing wisdom of the time of winter and white hair, the elder's breath through the sacred pipe, the grandparents who, on life's great circle, are closest to the little children.

The Sky Above -- "A man may be able to do things in a mysterious way, but none has ever been found who could command the sun and moon or change the seasons. The most wonderful things which a man can do are different from the works of nature. When the seasons changed, we regarded it as a gift from the sun, which is the strongest of all the mysterious Wakan powers ...."

Anonymous Teton Sioux, circa 1918.

Oh, and the next set of coordinates: N 37° 37.697 W 107° 49.435 on 550.

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