Moments in Time: Stories of New Mexico’s History; The Last Hurdle: El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro

The Camino Real de la Tierra de Entro was 1 ,600 miles from capital to capital. La Ojala was that last big hurdle for many of those traveling along the trail. Those are the little critters that you find along the Camino Real. I wonder how many people who come into Santa Fe got snakebite before they made it. This is where the Camino Real came up from Santa Domingo on its way to Santa Fe, crossing through this Mesa Sculptment of La Bajada. This is the major canyon pass to Santa Fe, which was known as the Camino Real de la Tierra de Entro. It was the main principal avenue for loaded wagons. It was the most expedient route directly from

Mexico City to Okawingen eventually to Santa Fe. People's identities over these many hundreds of years traveling along the trail changed. History is not static. The road was not static, and neither were the people who were traveling along this trail. They were a mixture of cultures themselves, and once we traced that through hundreds of years, we can talk about the convergence, not just of people in cultures, but ideas and creativity. New possibilities began to flow from that convergence. Every time there's a major flood, these boulders move around and they take out the road, so they had to come back in and clean boulders out and open up a space, maybe lay down a few stones as paving, and open the road again. They brought all

sorts of commodities and products, some carrying them in their pockets, some carrying them in vessels, in wagons on top of pack horses. They were carrying rose trees. They were carrying seeds for fruit trees. Everything that they were carrying really symbolized their hopes, their dreams, promise for a whole new life. It was a difficult passage, but it was possible, and the option was to try to scale this high mace over here. Whether they would travel down around Laahala and into Santa Fe, there was a sense of relief. Now we have to imagine that many of these caravans ran about three miles in length, and so it was a progressive sense of relief as they were nearing the place which they would eventually call home. One of the things is the, along the Camino Real, of course, are the scattered, artifactual debris

of all those travelers. And in the last century of its use, that involved ten cans, over -smile ten cans. This is called the whole and top type can, and it's a really heavy duty can, much more substantial than the cans of today. That's one of the ways we're able to date campsites and different sections and alternate routes of the trail is by the associated artifacts that give us an approximate time period. Everything changed at that moment in 1598, and all the way forward. So those pueblo communities, their entire worlds, would change at that moment. In terms of European history and the large global history from that angle, it also connected them to those indigenous communities. Everyone would be changed. One progenitor may have entered a Spanish ten generations later. That person's inheritance and legacy connects them to the indigenous cultures

of this land and many different cultures across the sea as well. The trail is very much still important to us today because it's part of our legacy. It connects us to the past and to the present. The convergence of cultures that happened as a consequence of people traveling along this trail brought new creative ideas. It created whole new peoples who were a convergence of all of the cultures around them. Rived at La Vajala, they were not on the verge of finding a new world, but on the edge of creating a new world.